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Jack Stockton didn't match my image of him. The real-life version was even better.

Somehow, even knowing his son was a 6-foot-1 guard for the Utah Jazz with a modest demeanor, I pictured tavern owner Jack Stockton as a burly Irishman with a boisterous personality. He instead was a short, unpretentious man who built a neighborhood business near the Gonzaga University campus and stayed there forever.

John Stockton's father died Saturday in Spokane, Wash., at age 89. In multiple ways, his passing marks the end of an era for me, after I covered the Jazz in the early years of Stockton and Karl Malone and their parents became characters in the franchise's developing story.

Shirley Turner, Malone's mother, died in August 2003 — two months before her son would join the Los Angeles Lakers for his his final NBA season. I once visited her in northern Louisiana, where she told stories of working in a sawmill for $50 a day, picking 174 pounds of cotton one day and delivering a child that evening and buying her son's first basketball for $2.98 with a 75-cent down payment. If she was exaggerating any of it, I didn't care. It was good stuff.

So was the homemade chili Jack Stockton served me in 1988, demonstrating that assists ran in the family. That was the season when John Stockton suddenly emerged as the NBA leader in assists and became a big story, attracting Sports Illustrated to Jack and Dan's Tavern in Spokane. Anyone looking for a Jazz/Stockton shrine in the bar was disappointed, though.

Even when I returned in 2002, stopping in town during vacation, the only basketball artifacts were a small drawing of Stockton and Malone above the bar and a hanging rug with a Jazz logo. Anything more would have violated the Stocktonesque code of not bringing attention to yourself, even if the owners welcomed the fans who liked to watch Jazz telecasts at Jack & Dan's.

That summer, there was some question whether Stockton would return for a 19th NBA season at age 40, especially with Malone having left for the Lakers. I joked with Jack Stockton that if he told me the answer, I could put the entire trip on my expense account. "Honest to God, I don't know," he said. "My gut feeling is, one more year."

Sure enough, John Stockton decided a couple of days later that he would play in 2002-03. His father would keep working a few more years then sell his stake of the tavern while continuing to live in Spokane. In a 2013 interview with the Spokesman-Review, he observed how he managed to move only "four blocks in 80-some years of life."

Jack Stockton's influence extends far beyond that range, to anyone who knew him.

Twitter: @tribkurt