Toreros' Jones Won't Run From The Truth

TAMPA - Rob Jones, the University of San Diego's freshman forward, heard it again, just the other day.

One teenager to another:

You believe that? Man, you're drinking the Kool-Aid.

"I wonder if they even know where that saying came from," Jones remembers thinking.

Jones has achieved a lifelong goal, reaching the NCAA Tournament with his No. 13-seeded Toreros for today's West Region first-round game against No. 4 Connecticut at the St. Pete Times Forum.

Eventually, reporters ask him about basketball. But first, they want to know about the Kool-Aid. "I don't run from it," Jones said. "I approach it the same way I do anything."

Head-on.

When Jones was a high school junior, his Life Issues class had a unit on cults. The subject turned to the Rev. Jim Jones, leader of a church called the Peoples Temple, and one of history's most gruesome episodes.

In 1978, a California congressman and news reporters went to Jonestown, a Peoples Temple outpost in the South American jungle, described as a self-sufficient paradise for all races and backgrounds. There was talk about the flock being held against its will.

When defectors tried to leave with the American visitors, they were met at the airstrip by guards, who shot them dead.

With the walls closing in, with outsiders knowing something was terribly wrong, the paranoid Reverend ordered his followers to drink from a vat of grape-flavored Flavor Aid, which was laced with cyanide. He called it "revolutionary suicide."

Children went first, followed by their mothers and fathers, and families laid down together. If anyone tried to escape, they were killed. When the mass suicide was done, more than 900 people were dead - the followers and the leader.

At San Francisco's Archbishop Riordan High School, Jones' classmates absorbed that horrific tale.

Jones raised his hand - without hesitation. That's how he was taught. You don't run from the truth.

"The Reverend Jim Jones," he said, "was my grandfather."

Learning From History

The massacre happened nearly 11 years before the birth of Jones, a 6-foot-6, 230-pound forward who has become a Toreros starter and is a former tight end whom everyone expected to play football in college.

"You can't change history," Jones said. "You can only learn from it."

Jones was in a book store last year and noticed "100 Most Infamous Criminals."

There was Hitler, Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson ... and his grandfather.

"There's no way to prepare for that, yet it's still just a story to me," said Jones, who has endured "Kool-Aid" chants from opposing fans. "I don't think it's about how I've dealt with it. It's about my father."

Jim Jones Jr., Rob's father, is a sales representative in San Francisco. He lost most of his family at Jonestown, including his first wife and their unborn child. Then 18, he had left Jonestown to play in a basketball tournament 250 miles away, and he was spared by ignoring his father's ham-radio orders to return.

"Basketball, quite literally, saved my life," said Jim Jones Jr. "And in turn, that would give life to Rob. I have now realized that basketball has blessed us.

"Rob is putting the family name in a positive light. What happened in Jonestown will not continue to follow him. Rob has become his own man."

From Tragedy, There Is Hope

Rob Jones has known the story of Jonestown his whole life. As a third-grader, he visited the area with his father. He saw the basketball court - and the vat.

His father told the story - the whole story.

In 1960, the Rev. Jim Jones became the first white person in Indiana to adopt an African-American baby. He passed on his name, and the child was raised in a multi-racial home, drawing attention as the "Rainbow Family."

"My father was chairman of the civil rights commission; he had an appendix attack but wouldn't be treated at a segregated hospital; he took me to the Nation of Islam so I could understand what being black was," said Jim Jones Jr. "That was my father.

"You cannot excuse what he did. I never will. The real tragedy is losing people who had those ideals, willing to sacrifice everything and go build a new country, then to have it end in unspeakable horror. I lived with so much guilt - had I been there, had I not been playing basketball, could I have stopped it? - but I found a way to move on."

To a new life, with a new wife and three children, including the oldest son Rob, who is thriving as a student and basketball player.

"That person, my grandfather, will be correlated with me my whole life," Rob Jones said. "The truth is, I never knew that man. I would just ask him, 'Why?' But there might not be an answer.

"My father has struggled with that. But as a father to me, he could not have been better. He has given me confidence. He makes me think I can do anything."

Once, there was tragedy and heartbreak. Now there is hope.

The stain on the family name may never be removed. But the years provide distance. And now, in a family straddling infamy and glory, there's a light shining upon Rob Jones.

Reporter Joey Johnston can be

reached at (813) 259-7353