SMU head coach June Jones is back where came from. Jones and the Mustangs arrived Saturday in Honolulu, and even before the SMU plane arrived, the reaction to Jones’ return has shown how much Hawaiians miss their former coach. “Give him back to us” … “We knew he would turn SMU around” … “How is our coach doing in Dallas?”

Hawaiians were disappointed when head coach June Jones left for SMU last year, but appear ready to embrace the Ponies' coach in his return to the islands (photo by Webmaster).

When he was a freshman at the University of Hawaii in 2007, Andrew Le became a fan of the Warrior football team and its coach, Jones, who guided his team to a 12-0 record and a bid in the Sugar Bowl.

After two years at UH, Le transferred to the University of California-Irvine, where he now is a junior business economics major. But he said the disappointment still lingers in Hawaii from the events leading up to Jones’ decision to leave the islands for Dallas to become SMU’s new head coach.

“I don’t think people were really mad at him — more disappointed that it got to that point,” Le said. “What he did at Hawaii had never been done before, I think. It was really big news on the island, during the year and when he left. It was covered in the news, and it was debated a lot. Radio stations would bring people in to debate (whether Jones would leave UH) between music. It was important to the people of Hawaii, and it made people talk about ‘would Hawaii do it again?’”

Since his arrival in Dallas, Jones has talked often about his fondness for the islands, and the people who supported him so loyally while he built the Hawaii team from a middle-of-the-night afterthought into a fixture on SportsCenter and in the national rankings.

“A lot of it has to do with Hawaii’s culture,” Le said. “You can be someone big like him, or you can be the old lady who runs the market down the street, and you’re both sort of the same. You can kind of see it — they both have something they have done. There’s a sense of family, a bond between neighbors. It’s something I think is totally unique to Hawaii. To be honest, I haven’t seen anything like it in California. It’s like with road rage — if you accidentally cut someone off in Hawaii, you throw a shaka in the air, and it’s kind of alright. (A shaka is the hand signal used as a regional gesture of goodwill and/or Hawaiian pride.) You just can’t find it anywhere else. Anywhere else in the world, most likely when you meet a stranger, you view them as a neighbor, at most, maybe an acquaintance.

“In Hawaii, you don’t even need to have talked to anyone — the word is ohana . It kind of means “family,” like an understood sense of community). That’s very real here, and it sounds like Coach Jones still really feels that.

“In Hawaii, there are two kinds of people. One is the locals, the true-on locals, who are living the dream lifestyle of Hawaii — very carefree, very loving and caring, they talk in “pigeon” (pidgin?)— our slang. They might fish, or surf and follow the UH football team very closely, and know all the best places to eat on the island. I don’t consider myself a “local,” but I still feel that sense of ohana.

Le said that he expects Jones and his staff, which includes former Hawaii assistants Dan Morrison, Wes Suan, Dennis McKnight and Jeff Reinebold, should expect a warm welcome upon their return to the islands — not so much because of the number of games they helped Hawaii win, but because of the way they treated their jobs, the islands and the Hawaiian people. Le said he doesn’t think the people of Hawaii harbor any resentment toward Jones for leaving, instead feeling the pangs of disappointment that someone who affected so many Hawaiians — on and off the field — moved on to the next step of his life elsewhere.

Jones will be embraced this week “because of what he’s done, and how passionate he was about his job,” Le said. “It’s not as if he was given that (reputation) without merit — he earned it. I think it’s more disappointment, not animosity. They look forward to greeting him.

“It’s not like he has been exiled from the community. He’ll be welcomed back, because part of the ohana bond is that. You can’t take that back from him.”