Jennings inducted into New Mexico Hall of Fame

It all started with a coffee can.

Brooks Jennings Sr. took a metal Folgers can, cut out the bottom, taped it to the wall and handed his 3-year-old son Brooks “Bubba” Jennings a tennis ball. That was how Bubba attempted his first basketball shots.

And his life would never be the same.

The sport carried Bubba through a historic Clovis High career that ended with him as the program’s all-time leading scorer, a decorated playing career at Texas Tech, inclusion in the 1985 NBA Draft, a stint playing overseas, a chance to coach with Bobby Knight at Tech, and opportunities to run his own high school programs.

Bubba’s journey recently landed him in the New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame, an honor that seems to fit the career, hand to glove.

“Initially when I heard about it I was shocked. I was really honored and excited about it,” Bubba said. “It wasn’t something I thought I’d be selected for, and I was shocked I was selected for it.”

Bubba now works eight miles north of Weatherford, Texas, teaching world history at Peaster High School and coaching the boys basketball team. It’s been more than half a century since Brooks turned that coffee can into a basketball net.

“When he was very young he would go to basketball games and he’d want to shoot the basketball, just like the big boys did,” Brooks remembered. “Of course, he couldn’t shoot a basketball or even a volleyball. So I just put a coffee can up in the hallway and gave him a tennis ball. He liked to shoot and he’d get a kick out of it when he’d make it.”

“I spent hours and hours and hours doing that,” Bubba recalled.

Brooks was then head coach for the Clovis High boys basketball team, a position he held from 1964-70. The family had initially lived in Farmington, where Brooks Jr. was born, while Brooks Sr. coached at nearby Aztec High School. They moved to Clovis when the younger Brooks was two, and the elder Brooks soon saw the potential in his young son.

“He showed an interest,” Brooks said. “He was a pretty competitive person anyway. When he was still very young he liked to shoot as best as he could, shoot a basketball as good as he could, so I knew he had a pretty good attitude toward becoming a decent player. He just got hooked on the game.”

Brooks Jr. became known as Bubba accidently. When other kids came over to play, his sister Diane would pronounce ‘brother’ as ‘Bubba’.

“Everybody thinks that’s his name,” Brooks Sr. said. “Nobody every called him Brooks or Junior. ... That (nickname) kind of stuck with the neighborhood kids. That kind of stayed with him through his school years.”

And so Bubba grew, along with his interest in athletics. He was a multi-sport kid until seventh grade, when a broken collarbone ended his football career.

“And I decided I’d dedicate myself to basketball,” he said.

By high school, much of Bubba’s life revolved around basketball, thanks in large part to coach Jimmy Joe Robinson, who had his players immersed in the sport.

“He developed us in the offseason,” Bubba said. “We had a great summer league program, junior high and high school. You’d play 100 basketball games in the summer in his program.

“We loved it. We couldn’t wait for the season to start.”

Bubba remembered Robinson as a real player’s coach, the kind of man who respected those players, nurtured them only as much as he needed to, trusted them to do what was necessary.

“He was a great coach,” Bubba said. “He had a lot of talent on the team and he let us play. He didn’t try to hold us back, didn’t try to outcoach the other coach. He knew he had good players and he just let us play.”

Bubba’s fondest memory of his high school career was a district game late in his junior season of 1978-79. The Wildcats were facing Hobbs in yet another installment of the intense rivalry. It was at the Hobbs gym, sardine-like as always when Clovis was in town.

“Back in those days at a Hobbs-Clovis game, if you didn’t get there extremely early, you didn’t get to watch,” Bubba recalled.

And this one was certainly going to be no different. “We were ranked No. 1 in the state,” Bubba said, “and they were ranked No. 2.”

Despite missing three starters due to suspension, Clovis was in position to win the game, leading in the fourth quarter. But with four minutes to go, Bubba was knocked to the ground and hit his head. He was bloody as he walked to the bench for a towel to wrap his injury.

“The doctor from Hobbs said I couldn’t play,” Bubba remembered. “My dad was there and he said I could play if I wanted. That was back in the day when blood on the uniform didn’t mean you couldn’t play; now you can’t play. Back in those days you could do whatever you wanted.”

Bubba would need 15 stitches on the top of his head. But in that moment, in that game, an injury was far from his thoughts. He didn’t want his teammates to be down another starter, without its point guard, not on a night like that with so much at stake.

So he came back out, re-entered the game with seconds remaining and Clovis up by one. He got the ball, took a pass, drew a foul. Calmly, he went to the line and sank both attempts, making it a three-point game. In those days, a three-point difference with that little time left meant the game was out of reach, because there was no three-point shot.

Clovis escaped with the victory and eventually captured a 4A state title. As his individual reward, Bubba was named to the 4A all-state team.

By the end of his senior season in 1980, Bubba had finished as Clovis’ all-time leading scorer. For college ball, he headed 90 minutes east to Lubbock, where he would star at Texas Tech. Because he red-shirted during his true sophomore season of 1981-82, Bubba was a fifth-year senior for the 1984-85 campaign, which was a memorable one thanks partly to him. That season, Bubba averaged 19.5 points per game, helping the Red Raiders win the now-defunct Southwest Conference with a 12-4 conference record (23-8 overall), while qualifying for their first NCAA tournament in nine years.

Bubba was named Southwest Conference Player of the Year, just one of his accolades, that also included SWC Defensive Player of the Year, first-team All-SWC, the Francis Pomeroy Naismith Award and an All-American honorable mention.

He wound up his Texas Tech career with 1,727 points, 378 assists and 149 steals.

The Dallas Mavericks took notice. In the 1985 NBA Draft that began with Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing being selected No. 1 overall by the New York Knicks, Dallas took Bubba in the fourth round, 86th overall, back when the draft had more than just the two rounds it has today. That selection put Bubba in the company of Ewing, Chris Mullin, Karl Malone and Charles Oakley as far as overall draftees, and in with Maverick draft picks Detlef Schrempf (eighth overall), Bill Wennington (16th) and Uwe Blab (17th).

Bubba took part in Mavericks training camp and played in a few exhibition games, but was ultimately released. He did get to experience something few players do — getting to play for any stretch with an NBA team. In his case, he played with Derek Harper, Rolando Blackman, Mark Aguirre and Brad Davis.

“They were the second best team in the Western Conference back in those days, next to the Lakers with Magic, Kareem and all those guys,” Bubba said. “I really wanted to make it; I didn’t just want to be there, I wanted to make it. But it was a great experience to be around those guys, just to see how good those guys were, how big they were, how strong they were, how fast they were.”

Bubba, though, wasn’t done as a pro. He crossed the Atlantic to play for a London team called Crystal Palace. He put up a lot of threes, which he and the team loved.

“I was a perimeter shooter,” Bubba said, “and I averaged 40 a game over there, so it was really good for me. It was fun.”

After returning from London, Bubba served as an assistant varsity coach and junior varsity coach at Clovis. He was head coach at Artesia from 1990-99, a span that included state titles in 1995 and ’97.

Bubba then coached at Coronado High in Lubbock for two seasons before taking an assistant coaching job at Texas Tech, where he worked under the legendary and controversial Bobby Knight.

“It was great. I really enjoyed it,” Bubba recalled. “I had a chance to learn a lot about basketball, a lot about player development and a lot about the strategy of the game. (Knight) was very intense. He’s kind of like a lot of people should be. If you do what you’re supposed to do, than everything is fine. I think a lot of people who crossed him weren’t doing what they were supposed to.”

Knight retired in 2008, but Bubba remained in Lubbock for five more years. During that time, he was able to coach Jaye Crockett, a fellow Clovis alum who had come a point shy of Bubba’s Wildcat scoring record.

“Just like coaching any other good player, Jaye was really fun to coach,” Bubba said. “He listened, got better as time went on. I really enjoyed coaching him. He had a lot of ability and I think there toward the end he started getting the most out of his ability.”

A 2013 coaching purge at Texas Tech had Bubba looking for the next challenge. He worked in a bank for five years, played lots of golf, spent time with his family, before the position at Peaster became available this past year.

“Peaster’s got a long basketball tradition,” Bubba said, “and when the job opened up, I was interested in coaching in the metroplex.”

And so Bubba’s journey continues. The Peaster Greyhounds are 11-7 as they head into their Christmas break.

Bubba’s Hall of Fame selection is not an end-of-career coronation, but rather another achievement in a body of work that keeps growing. And there is perhaps no one beaming with pride more than the man who help start it all with a Folgers can.

“Yeah,” Brooks said, “that’s quite an honor.”