Mark Jones hire is a move toward friendship, family and the future for the Kings
Mark Jones is the new play-by-play voice of the Sacramento Kings. He has 30 years of experience with ESPN and ABC Sports. He has interviewed presidents, anchored SportsCenter and called NBA Finals games.
Broadcasting is what he does, and he is great at it. But what is more important is who Jones is as a person.
In my conversation with Jones, he discussed a duty to be truthful. He spoke of hard work, faith and responsibility. He explained why equality and diversity mean so much to him and his family. These are the values he carries with him in every facet of life.
Those values, Jones says, align completely with the Sacramento Kings organization.
When I spoke with Jones about his new position, he didn’t seem too interested in commenting on the man he is replacing on the TV broadcasts. Frankly, I wasn’t too interested in bringing up the name myself. I’m still not. He speaks plenty for himself and readers have seen enough. That’s the past. Jones is the future.
OWNERSHIP WITH A CONSCIENCE
That alignment starts at the top. Sacramento Kings Owner Vivek Ranadivé attended a Black Lives Matter protest in June and spoke passionately about the change he wanted to see in the world. He committed to using his platform to bring about that change.
“Vivek didn’t stick his finger up in the air to see which way the wind was blowing,” Jones said. “He was decisive and went out and said, ‘This is who we are and this is who we are going to be. We believe that Black lives matter.’”
On the other side of the country, Jones was protesting too. He, his wife and his daughters attended two marches near their home in Miami over the summer. The protests were peaceful. They were diverse. They were important. He’s also been critical of police on social media this year.
For Jones, seeing Ranadivé speak up was no surprise. He watched Ranadivé address the crowd of Golden 1 Center after Stephon Clark was killed by Sacramento police officers in March 2018. Protests surrounded the arena that night and Ranadivé took center court to show his support for the Clark family and the Sacramento community as a whole.
Jones says he saw the best of NBA ownership that night. He saw the best of the Kings. Ranadivé’s speech moved him to tears.
“I thought, if there is ever an opportunity to work with Sacramento, that I would look into it,” Jones said.
A PARTNER AND A FRIEND
Jones’ partner in the booth will be another man who attended the same Black Lives Matter protest in Sacramento. Doug Christie will combine with Jones to be the first Black broadcasting team in Sacramento Kings history. It’s a milestone that is still rare across the league.
But Christie and Jones are no strangers. In fact, they have known each other for 25 years. The two got to know each other from 1994 to 1996, when they both lived in Stamford, Connecticut. Christie was playing for the New York Knicks at the time.
Jones once played the sport too, but only at the college level. He was all-conference at York University, but he was quick to acknowledge that he doesn’t have the experience that Christie does. He says Christie always stood out in the NBA as an extremely hard worker and a tremendous teammate.
“I see all those qualities transferring over to the broadcast booth,” Jones said. “He’s the guy that made shots and had the assists. I’m going to try and do my best to get him to take me inside the head of De’Aaron Fox when there’s five seconds to go on the shot clock.”
Jones says he and Christie are honored to be breaking barriers in Sacramento, but they want to be more than a footnote in Kings history. They sense the importance and the responsibility of the moment, but they plan on making it something much bigger than that.
“When you’re African-American, from the jump you’re taught that you need to be twice as good,” Jones said. “And we plan on being three times as good. Because we want to be good enough so that, a few years from now, there are other opportunities for other African-American broadcasters.”
MORE SACRAMENTO TIES
It wasn’t just ownership and broadcasters who protested this summer. Many Kings players were out among the citizens of Sacramento, including Fox, Bogdan Bogdanovic, Harrison Barnes, Kyle Guy, Justin James and coach Luke Walton.
Guy tweeted an impromptu video from his car just a few days after George Floyd was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. He discussed the privilege he feels he was born into and said he would always stand against institutional racism. He asked that anyone who hears his message do the same.
Barnes took the microphone on the day of the protest and spoke eloquently about how citizens can enact change. He urged everyone to vote and to put pressure on elected officials to be accountable to the people they represent.
Jones is excited to work alongside leaders like Barnes, who was recently awarded a 2020 NBA Cares Community Assist Award. Jones believes Barnes is one of many excellent ambassadors of the sport in Sacramento.
There is one other special moment for Jones that came from Sacramento – far before the social movements of the past few years. He met his wife when covering the 1994 World Track and Field Championships at Sacramento State. Now the two of them are making a home in the city where it all began.
“Seeing how diverse the organization is from top to bottom, the amount of women they have in critical decision making positions, that’s heartening to me,” Jones said. “I have three daughters . . . Now they look and they don’t see glass ceilings. They look at people like that and it’s inspiring.”
LEAVING THE PAST BEHIND
It should not be lost on anyone that Jones’ twitter profile photo proudly boasts the exact statement that his predecessor refused to say, on the exact platform on which he refused to say it:
BLACK LIVES MATTER.
“I don’t think as a broadcaster you can afford to be tone deaf to what makes players tick, because players are the game,” Jones said. “If you’re tone deaf to what the players are thinking and what their ‘why’ is, then you’re not doing a good job.”
Any broadcasters can tell the story of a game. They can give you the final score. But it takes something special to tell the story of the players – the story of a team.
Jones, perhaps more than anyone that came before him, is equipped to tell the story of who the Sacramento Kings are today, and who they will be in the future.
This story was originally published November 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM.