Wali Jones, still a wonder, now on a West Philly mural too

Court awareness was always a thing for Wali Jones. The man dubbed Wali Wonder still has that awareness apparently, age 81. A mural was being unveiled in West Philadelphia, overdue maybe for a 6-foot-2 Overbrook High basketball giant, two-time Big 5 player of the year at Villanova, the final starting piece that resulted in the 1966-67 76ers taking over a sport.

The mural unveiling on Mount Vernon Street, just off 38th Street, was at a hot time of a hot day.

Wali Jones saw all that … he wanted to give one man a chance to speak first.

“My father is 106,” Jones told the gathered crowd. “I’m very humble because my father taught me to be humble. I want to bring him up because I’m not going to have him out here in this heat and the air quality.”

Jones explained that separate from basketball, his father taught him independent thinking, and a trade at a young age, interior and exterior decorating, “taught me how to earn money.”

“Is there a mic I can give him?” Jones asked, and a microphone was passed over to Earnest Jones, sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a City of Brotherly Love hat.

“Pop, you have anything to say?”

“You know, it’s nice to be out,” Wali’s dad said. “I have the biggest question for all of you – Anybody got any money?”

So it is confirmed, Wali Jones inherited a sense of humor, too.

“I don’t need any money,” his dad deadpanned. “But I wish you’d give me some.”

Then Earnest Jones got serious about his son and how well he’d done in life, how Wali’s own debits were all paid off by his credits.

For older Philadelphians, this day was beyond overdue. Among the speakers, Ken Hamilton, the retired Ben Franklin High coach.

“You know, I’ve been around Wali forever,” Hamilton told the gathering. “I’m going to tell you some things about the great Wali Jones. They told me I had two minutes. I was wondering, what the heck am I going to say that covers 40-50 years in two minutes? But this is it.”

Hamilton explained that Jones is a friend “and boy, is he good at that. … he has more friends than anybody I know.”

Having Wali Jones as your friend, Hamilton said, provides experiences and memories for a lifetime.

“We used to go to Los Angeles because Walt Hazzard was out there …”

Jones and Hazzard together at Overbrook made their own case for the top high school team in Philadelphia history, before Jones went to Villanova and Hazzard went to UCLA, achieving liftoff for the John Wooden Bruins dynasty.

“He started a program out there called the Sports Academy,” Hamilton said of Hazzard. “Every time we went to Los Angeles, we had to go to the Forum for something. This one particular day, there’s hardly anybody there, just a few cars. We go in, whatever Walt had for us to do, we did. We come out to an empty parking lot. We’re standing there getting ready to get in the car. A limousine goes by. It’s the Forum, right?”

The limousine, he said, went about 100 yards up the parking lot, then it stopped, and it backed up. A man jumped out of the back seat.

“Magic Johnson,” Hamilton said. “Started screaming. WALI JONES … WALI JONES.”

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This was at a time when Magic Johnson was everything in Los Angeles and in the NBA.

“My idol,” Hamilton said Johnson told them about Jones, standing in the parking lot. “When I was growing up, I had a basket in my backyard. I used to pretend that I was Wali Jones.”

It’s good to remember those ‘67 Sixers were NBA champions, with a serious case for best NBA team ever. Of course they would make an impression, even on a young kid in Michigan.

Hamilton explained how their own organization, Shoot for the Stars, started out as Concerned Athletes in Action. Jones began talking to the crowd … how the purpose of the mural was about the work of human and skills development, including in that neighborhood and also in Miami, Milwaukee, Virginia, Denver. He began this work as a pro ballplayer himself.

His own memories.

“When I was 15, I would run from 52nd Street down to 38th Street,” Jones said. “They used to chase me home because I was from ‘the Top,’ so when you’re from the ‘Black Bottom,’ they’re chasing you home.”

Jones stopped for a moment, recognizing a face.

“Ricky Tucker,” Jones said of the former Overbrook High and Providence star. “Mr. Tucker. There are a lot of people here who have carried on the torch.”

This mural, to Jones …

“It’s not me up there,” Jones said. “That’s my mother up there. Dorothea Jones did not play. You never disgraced the name of the Jones in the neighborhood. … My father was here, my mentor, my coach. Taking us everywhere to play ball.”

His father told Wali stories of the days before Wali was born – “where you couldn’t go across Market Street. Where you couldn’t play basketball or play baseball at Overbrook High School. … If you see the hat he wore …”

The City of Brotherly Love.

“That image is not me,” Jones said to the crowd, returning to his theme about the mural behind him. “It’s you. … I’m not talking about reinventing the wheel. There were guys doing this for us when we grew up. Sol Murphy. Sonny Hill. John Chaney. … "

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He kept going.

“We got a passport,” Jones said of being a ballplayer, passing through neighborhood lines.

How can they use the power of their own resources, Jones said, to reach back and “save our most important natural resource.”

He meant the minds of young people.

“I found out my purpose early in my life,” Jones said. “My ministry is youth.”

He wasn’t saying the work is easy or ever finished. If not here, he said, where?

Jones related how the Sixers traded him to Milwaukee – “they told me I was too militant when I was here. They told me to cut off my crown. The general manager didn’t have enough heart to come up and tell me to cut my hair. He sent some chump to tell Wali Wonder to cut his hair. They didn’t like me wearing dashikis to the game. I’m telling you, you have to be yourself. That’s what my dad taught me.”

Wali Jones hasn’t forgotten much about his own historic journey. This man stayed comfortable even on a hot day.

Must be inherited. The presentation was over, a little over an hour after it had begun, and there was a 106-year-old man under a tent over by the street, talking to Wilt Chamberlain’s niece and Billy Cunningham’s daughter.