James Jones Gives Back to His Community

Heartwarming little story — he’s a 28-year-old local guy who has knocked around Indiana, Phoenix and Portland, and now he’s playing for his hometown Miami Heat. Dan Le Betard’s story from the Miami Herald starts like this:

The temptations are all right outside for this basketball millionaire on a day off amid the sun and surf. Women in bikinis. Noon drink specials. Shopping and luxury cars and rich-people toys. You already can hear the weekend starting too early on a Friday on Ocean Drive, but the Miami Heat”s James Jones isn”t as interested in South Florida”s vanities as he is in bringing out her inner beauty.

“I want to show you something,” he says, flipping through the files on his phone.

You”ve asked one question. Why do you give so much, James? And now his black beans and rice have gone cold over lunch as he spends his 10th uninterrupted minute going over “talking points” and “life-skills curriculum” and “community enrichment.” He talks about “educational and environmental strategies” and “changing social norms” and “destructive coping behaviors” and his dream of building his own school near where he grew up in Miami Gardens. He is, in more ways than one, just getting started here.

You hear a lot about the bad in sports. Too much, probably. But there are more athletes who don”t get in trouble than those who do. And while Antoine Walker is getting arrested for $800,000 in gambling debt, there are plenty of untold financial stories like this one: Alonzo Mourning once saw a newspaper photo of a mother who had just lost her home in a hurricane. He went around his locker room asking teammates for thousands of dollars. Then he got team owner Micky Arison to match what they raised. And that”s how the Heat, very quietly, bought her a new house.

Jones is just 28. On Thursday, he was swimming with autistic kids in Weston. Last week, he was announcing an initiative in which he will pay the closing costs on foreclosed homes to help struggling families become credit-worthy. Just before that, he was hosting an outdoor party for migrant workers in Naranja and was humbled as 40, 75 and then more than 100 children and adults rushed from the bounce house and snow-cone stands to play with him on a basketball court, touched as they were that a member of a big sports team would make time to go way out there for little people like them. Humbled, too, he can admit through a smile, because the kids kept asking why the heck he didn”t bring Dwyane Wade.

“One hour of my time,” James says. “You can do a lot in an hour.”