by Will Stafford
LSU Sports Information
During the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, no team dominated the landscape of college football like the Alabama Crimson Tide. Under the guidance of legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Tide captured six national championships and won a total of 232 games during his 25-year tenure with the school.
Bryant finished his 38-year coaching career in 1982 with 323 victories and will forever be revered as one of the greatest coaches to ever walk the sidelines. His mere presence on the field was enough to strike fear in the heart and crush the will of an opponent.
Growing up in the heart of Dixie in a state where the blood flows crimson and white, Greg Jones learned at an early age to respect the man who was able to dominate his profession for the better part of four decades.
“Coach Bryant was all about getting the most out of his players,” Jones says. “Even if he didn’t have the most talented team, he won a lot of games because of the pride and dedication that he and his team had. He was all about never quitting and never giving up, and that’s why he was so successful.
“There are many Bryant quotes that I have memorized, but one that really sticks out is, ‘If you believe in yourself and have dedication, pride and never quit, you’ll be a winner. The price of victory is high but so are the rewards.'”
As he began his career as a college golf coach at South Alabama in 1993, Jones made sure to apply many of the same philosophies taught by “the Bear” in running his own program. Jones brought many of these philosophies to Baton Rouge when he became head coach of the LSU men’s golf program in 1999.
With the influence of men like Bryant and through his own experiences as a player and coach, Jones has created a philosophy of his own that consists of three parts: preparation, simplification and commitment.
“Preparation is everything in our philosophy,” Jones says. “In preparing for golf, we have season preparation, tournament preparation, round preparation and shot preparation. It involves setting goals. It’s important for our players to prepare themselves as best they can to reach those goals.”
Jones also tries to make the game of golf as simple and understandable for his players as possible. The process of simplification enables his players to focus on what is important at all times. He tries to simplify each player’s swing so the player can understand what his swing produces and what type of game he has.
“Golf can be overwhelmingly complicated from the technical, mental and equipment areas of the game,” Jones says. “We try not to overdo it with mechanics. We try to keep it simple. Every player has a better swing, and in order to simplify it in that player’s head, we have to teach him how his swing works and what system of shots his swing produces. It’s my job to keep the swing simple for each player and also to keep the mind clear and focused.”
Jones believes that his players must also be committed to do whatever it takes to establish themselves among golf’s elite.
“The commitment must be there as a group and as individuals at all times in order to reach new levels of achievement,” Jones says. “Our players must be committed to being the best team they can possibly be. Our players must stay committed for excellence as a student, an athlete and as a citizen.”
Although Jones has used this philosophy throughout his coaching career in relating one-on-one with his players, he believes it is essential to live each day under the same philosophy in order to simplify his own life and to live each day as efficiently as possible.
“I like to operate under the same philosophy,” Jones says. “It gives me a guideline and something to go by — gives me a plan. It gives me a plan and helps me keep things simple for me and helps me direct this team the best way I know how.”
Learning the Game
A strong relationship between a father and his son is quite unique, and many of these relationships are cultivated through a shared love of athletics. For Greg Jones and his father, George, a bond was formed at an early age through the game of golf.
The two would spend hours together in the backyard of their home in Mobile hitting balls toward small, makeshift holes as the soft glow of the evening twilight would fade into the darkness of night.
“I can remember being four or five years old and my dad giving me some little clubs to hit balls with him in the backyard,” Jones says. “He learned how to play in the army, and he introduced it to me at an early age. I was about eight years old when I actually started going out to the golf course with him.”
This is about the age when Jones began to compete in junior tournaments in and around the Mobile area. Despite winning several tournaments in his age group, his heart was leading him toward the more team-oriented sports of baseball and swimming.
“Golf was just something I did between swim practice and baseball practice,” Jones says. “I was probably a better baseball player than I was a golfer, but at the time there were a lot of good baseball players and there weren’t many good golfers. It was when I was about 13 that I made a commitment to focus all of my attention on golf.”
Much of Jones’ golfing education was centered around two courses near his home — Skyline Country Club and Azalea City Golf Club.
He can still remember days arriving at the course as the light of the early morning sun would cut through a blanket of fog and light the dew-covered fairways. He would spend an entire day polishing his game and leave as evening approached.
In fact, Jones would often feel guilty if he left the course before sundown or went an entire weekend without getting in a few rounds.
“Golf was my drug. When other guys were out doing things that weren’t necessarily constructive, I went to the golf course,” Jones says. “A lot of times I was out at the golf course until I couldn’t see. I felt guilty if I left before dark or if a Saturday went by and I didn’t go to the course.”
Jones knew that his commitment to the game would yield positive results.
As he matured physically and started participating in more tournaments on the junior circuit, his confidence soared. Despite competing against 17 and 18-year-olds, he was motivated by the words of a local golf pro when playing for the junior state championship in Alabama as a 15-year-old.
“Somebody interviewed the head pro about who might win the tournament,” Jones says. “He mentioned one of the 17-year-olds, but then he said, ‘young Greg Jones might contend too.’ It was cool that somebody else thought I was good and that was in the paper. That motivated me to do well.”
Although he didn’t win the championship as a 15-year-old, Jones accomplished that feat one year later in 1981. Using the words of his father as guidance, Jones began to realize that he had the ability to compete and elevate his game to the next level.
“I clearly remember coming down the stretch and being so nervous because I knew I had a chance to win,” Jones says. “My dad had been an instructor for me, and he taught me to stay with what you do, believe in yourself and just make the club go.
“I had enough belief in what I was doing, enough confidence in what I had done and I knew that I had prepared myself well enough that I literally felt the nerves run right out of my arms. That’s when I felt that I could win and could compete with anybody.”
The Next Level
After graduating from Davidson High School in 1983, Jones packed his bags and traveled north to the Bluegrass State to play collegiate golf for the University of Kentucky. He had finally graduated from the junior ranks and earned the right to compete at the highest level of college golf.
“I went to Kentucky out of high school because they had a bigger deal and bigger scholarship offer for me,” Jones says. “One of my best buddies who is a year older than me, T.J. Jackson, was already there. That made it appealing.”
However, his time in Lexington was short-lived. Jones transferred after playing one season at Kentucky and enrolled at Brevard Community College in Cocoa, Fla., in 1984.
“It was too cold up there in Kentucky,” Jones says with a grin stretching across his face.
He found immediate success at Brevard and played for a coach who would influence him as a player and as a coach as much as any other person in his life.
Playing for head coach Floyd Horgen as a sophomore, Jones was part of a team that won the national championship at the junior college level by an astounding 52 strokes. He even won three tournaments as an individual.
“The interesting thing was that every player on that team that year got a scholarship to a Division I program and played as the No. 1 or No. 2 player for that program,” Jones says.
He believes much of that success was due to the coaching of Horgen.
“Floyd Horgen was a lot like the Bobby Knight of college golf,” Jones says. “He was a very successful coach and a very successful swing coach. He was good about getting his players better.
“I run my day-to-day deal a lot like coach Horgen — the way we qualify, the way we work on swings, the way we mix playing and practicing together. He’s influenced me a lot in that way.”
For his efforts on the course, Jones began to receive scholarship offers from a number of Division I schools at the conclusion of his sophomore season at Brevard. After meeting head coach Bob Hubbard at South Alabama and seeing his vision of the direction of the program, Jones knew his heart was calling him back home to Mobile.
“He said he was revamping the program, and he actually brought one of my teammates from Brevard (Rick Othmer) with me,” Jones says. “T.J. Jackson ultimately transferred from Kentucky to South Alabama, and the three of us went back together and kind of started the program up.”
South Alabama was a program that had long been used to finishing each season at the bottom of the Sun Belt Conference.
That immediately changed with the arrival of Jones, Jackson and Othmer. The trio led the Jaguars to a fifth place finish in 1985 and to the brink of earning a spot in the NCAA Tournament the following season.
“They had either finished last or next to last in the conference tournament for years before we got there,” Jones says. “One year we almost won the conference championship, finishing second my senior year. Had we played good and won that tournament, we would have gone to nationals.”
Gareth Clary is a sports reporter for the Mobile Register who has covered much of Jones’ career as a player and coach. He witnessed the turnaround of the South Alabama program firsthand.
“Greg and T.J. were the local stars who went away but ultimately came back to South Alabama,” Clary says. “They came home and both seemed to find their games again. They really turned that program around and things started clicking for them.”
Jones won three more tournaments in his two years at South Alabama and was named an All-American his senior season in 1986. He was invited to compete in the Sun Bowl All-American Tournament and played alongside many future stars on the PGA Tour.
“I played poorly at the tournament, but Billy Mayfair was my roommate,” Jones says. “John Daly was at the event, and Nolan Henke was there. There were seven or eight guys that went on to play on the PGA Tour.
“It was pretty cool to be recognized as a good player — to see your name on a leaderboard or whatever. We won some tournaments while I was there (at South Alabama), I won some tournaments and I’ll always remember my time there.”
Opportunity Knocks
Despite having success at the collegiate level, finding success at the professional level proved elusive for Greg Jones. He lived his life one tournament at a time in one professional mini tour or another out of the comfort of his own suitcase. With frustration mounting, Jones’ life was filled with uncertainty and few career options to turn to.
Jones’ game was deteriorating and he found himself caught in a tangled web he could not escape. He refers to this period of his life as the “search mode.”
“I was in the search mode searching for the perfect mechanic, technique and swing,” Jones says. “I probably played pro golf with about six different golf swings. It was my own fault that I couldn’t filter through that and come down to one golf swing that made the game simple.”
Clary agrees with Jones’ assessment. He believes that Jones could have had a successful professional career if he would have stuck with what made him an All-American at South Alabama and kept his game simple.
“He was going to turn pro, but somebody told him that he needed to tweak his swing,” Clary says. “He was told that if he wanted to be successful as a pro, he needed to find a better swing. He tweaked his swing, and I don’t know if he’s played as well since.”
Golf was no longer fun for Jones. Gone were the days when he would spend hours with his father in their backyard hitting balls until dusk. Gone was the thrill he experienced competing in tournaments as a junior growing up in Mobile. Gone were the joyful times spent on the road with teammates throughout his years as an All-American in college.
Jones knew he had to make a change.
“It got to such a point where it became such a job and there was so much pressure that I didn’t enjoy the game anymore,” Jones says. “It wasn’t fun. I loved the game too much to not like it, so I quit (playing professionally).”
Jones decided to return to South Alabama to work on a master’s degree in community counseling. However, a chance meeting with the school’s athletic director in 1993 would change the course of his life forever.
“The very fact that I am here today is an accident,” Jones says. “I asked the athletic director if there was something I could do to help out the golf team in exchange for some books or tuition. He said I could be an assistant to the new head coach who was coming in from Houston to coach both teams (men’s and women’s).
“I agreed to do that, but two weeks later he decided he wasn’t coming. They made me the interim coach for the men’s team. After one year, I became the head coach for both men and women and did that for two years. It took off from there and we had some success.”
In fact, Jones found much success as the head coach of the men’s team at South Alabama. The Jaguars won five Sun Belt Conference Championships in his six seasons as coach, and Jones was named SBC Coach of the Year four times.
He inherited a program that needed direction and quickly reestablished South Alabama as the premier program in the conference.
Clary believes that Jones’ ability to teach the game he loves and keep the game simple for his players was a key component in sustaining the success the program had discovered when he teed it up for the Jaguars in the mid-1980s.
“Greg’s a really good teacher of the game, and he was really able to work well with that team,” Clary says. “He did a good job recruiting and bringing in the parts he needed and immediately turned that program back around. I know Greg had a lot to do with that.”
Winning became a way of life for members of the South Alabama men’s golf program. Because of the team’s success, there was an expectation to win like never before in the program’s history. However, Jones was up to the challenge. He knew that his players were prepared and had the commitment and confidence to meet any challenge they had to face.
“Success seems to follow Greg wherever he goes,” Clary says. “What he was able to do at South Alabama with the resources he had was no different.”
Moving to Baton Rouge
Just as the players he coaches, Jones loves the thrill of competition. Facing new challenges is just part of that competition. He realized that his development as a coach was being limited by staying at the mid-major level in the Sun Belt Conference.
“When I was at South Alabama, we knew we were not in the best league. If you weren’t in the SEC, the ACC or the Big 12, you were the little guy,” Jones says. “I always wondered what it would be like to recruit in the SEC in a real major college atmosphere.”
He got that chance in 1999 when he was named head coach of the LSU Tigers. Jones knew the success he achieved as a player and coach at South Alabama had prepared him to meet the challenges he would face while coaching at the pinnacle of college golf.
LSU was a program that had captured 15 SEC titles and four national titles in its history, but had not won the SEC Championship since 1987. Jones needed to know if his philosophy of being prepared, keeping things simple and staying committed to the task at hand could lead LSU back to the top of the SEC.
“I knew it would be tougher going from the mid-major level in the Sun Belt Conference to a place like the SEC,” Jones says. “I wanted to see if I could take what I did there and bring it here and have the same amount of success.”
While Jones says it was extremely difficult for him to leave his alma mater and the players he had recruited to play there, there was an allure to moving 200 miles west to Baton Rouge. Part of that allure was coaching at an institution that did not recruit him out of high school.
“When I was in high school I also had kind of a chip on my shoulder because I wasn’t recruited by LSU or some of these other schools from out of state,” Jones says. “That made me want to check it out. When I got here I realized what kind of special place it is.”
Jones suddenly found himself able to recruit at a higher level and take advantage of resources he had never seen before.
Recruits were able to witness the excitement of a Saturday night in Tiger Stadium. Seeing thousands of fans painted in purple and gold losing themselves in the sounds of the famous Golden Band from Tigerland and the action of a football game was the college atmosphere he was missing in Mobile.
Jones also witnessed the completion of one of the finest practice facilities in the nation — the LSU Golf House at the University Club completed in 2002. The Golf House features a lavish meeting room, an indoor driving range and a learning center which can utilize video analysis to benefit each player in a classroom setting. This helps Jones prepare his players to compete at the highest level possible.
“I have a great appreciation for what we have here. We’ve got a bigger budget, better equipment, more resources, an academic center for athletes with 15 full-time staff people. We’ve got all these sports that are having great success.
“I thank LSU for opening up the doors to a program that needed a little boost,” Jones says. “As long as I’m coaching golf, this is the best place for me to be.”
Unfinished Business
In his five years at LSU, Jones has captured 10 tournament titles and led the Tigers to three NCAA Regional appearances. But as with any challenge he has faced in his life, Jones knows that taking LSU to the top of the SEC requires hard work and determination.
He came to LSU with a goal and clear vision for the program — gain national respect as a team and coach his players to be the best people they can be on and off the course. The program is certainly on a path to fulfill both of those goals.
“Everything was already here for us, we just needed to put things going in the right direction,” Jones says. “I don’t think you can do that in two or three years. We’re on solid ground, we’re recruiting better players, our schedule continues to get stronger and it’s important for our program to produce sound people.”
Jones believes that his success as a coach ultimately rests with his the success of his players as people rather than the number of tournament victories or NCAA Regional appearances the team earns.
“Tournament wins always start with good people, and good people want to work,” Jones says. “I’ll always have a record in a media guide somewhere, but my record rests with the players at the end of the day. That’s the important thing.”
LSU assistant coach Mark McEntire has witnessed Jones’ ability to relate to his players as well as anyone he has seen at the collegiate level.
“He does a great job with these guys,” McEntire says. “He befriends them, which I think is important. He cares about them on a one-to-one basis, and he cares about them as individuals. He wants them to succeed. You can tell they’re not just a number to him.
“But ultimately he’s an intense competitor and wants to win,” McEntire says. “He wants to win in whatever he does, and that’s something that drives him.”
Jones has been driven to succeed his entire life. Whether hitting balls with his father as a 4-year-old, winning numerous championships as a college player and coach or returning LSU to the top of the SEC, Jones has seen success at every stage of his career.
With the lessons he learned from his father and coach Floyd Horgen and the words of Bear Bryant forever etched into his mind, Jones continues to believe in his philosophy of preparation, simplification and commitment.
This is a philosophy born from much adversity and many valuable life experiences, and it will certainly guide Jones wherever the rest of his life may lead.
“If there were any reason that I would ever leave LSU and go somewhere else, I’m a better person and I’m a better coach in the office and at the course than I was when I got here,” Jones says. “I’ve definitely grown professionally and learned how to deal with adversity, and that’s something I can take with me no matter what direction my life may take.”
If history is any indication of a man’s success, there is only one direction Jones’ life can go. That direction is up.