Luke Jackson plays like a freshman.
But the Creswell native embodies only the good qualities that word entails, without the sloppy play and bad attitude that many college players his age display.
After all, Jackson exudes a confidence not warped by years of basketball frustration and he plays with a reckless abandon akin to Bugs Bunny in “Space Jam.” That’s exactly why head coach Ernie Kent has started Jackson twice in the last three games.
“My hope for the rest of the season is to win out the rest of our games,” Jackson said. “I think we can do that.”
Sure, Luke. Don’t worry about Pacific-10 Conference games against No. 7 Arizona tonight and top-ranked Stanford next Thursday.
“I want to win a Pac-10 Championship [while at Oregon],” he said. “I want to win a national championship.”
Uh-huh.
Despite the long-shot statements, don’t underestimate the power of Luke. The two-time Oregon 3A high school player of the year is “one of the team’s smartest players,” according to big man Chris Christoffersen, and has “a high basketball I.Q.,” says fellow freshman starter Luke Ridnour.
Jackson’s smarts, along with a heaping tablespoon of hustle, earned him the starting role and Kent’s respect two weeks ago.
“He has come a long way since the start of the season,” Kent said after he started Jackson for the first time against Washington State. “He’s a much better player, a much more composed player, and a much more confident player.”
But after two solid performances as a starter, Jackson suffered a blow to his growing confidence last Saturday against UCLA. The freshman came off the bench and played 22 minutes, but only scored three points. With 10 minutes left in the contest, Jackson hacked a UCLA player on the arm for his fifth foul and watched from the bench as the Ducks’ lead slowly turned into a 10-point deficit and eventually a loss.
“My heart was in it, and I really felt like we were going to win that game,” Jackson said. “To watch the lead slide there at the end … that was tough.”
Jackson is used to staying on the court. Before coming to Oregon, he was the star of Creswell High’s basketball and baseball teams, and some of his statistics from Creswell are simply pop-your-eyes-out-of-their-sockets amazing.
The forward once scored 46 points in a game. He led Creswell to the Oregon state championship last year, and notched 13 boards and 13 assists in the title game. He is the fourth-best scorer in Oregon prep history, with 2,095 total points. Oh, and he struck out 16 batters in a baseball game. He was primarily a center fielder.
With all that attention focused on him for four years, Jackson must have had a tough time adjusting to the fact that at Oregon there were other players — even other classmates — getting more attention than himself.
Nope.

“We’re building for a team that can be really, really good,” Jackson insists. “I’m excited for that.”
Another one of those building blocks — and one of the players stealing Jackson’s glory — is top recruit Ridnour, who handles the ball almost as well as he handles his team.
“We play pretty good together,” Ridnour says of his classmate. “He’s easy to play with because I already know he’s looking, making his cuts.”
Ridnour and Jackson met for the first time this summer, when they played for a high school all-star team at the Global Games in Dallas, Texas.
“It helped me a lot just to play with him, to get a feel for how he plays in games,” Ridnour said. “We played really well down there together. I knew from that tournament this was going to be fun.”
The two Lukes have come almost full circle since that tournament. The difference is that now, they’re playing on a Pac-10 team, not a high school all-star team.
Another difference is that now they’re playing in Oregon, not Texas, and both are happier in this state than anywhere else.
Jackson used to be one of those kids you see at Duck games, laughing and playing as a toddler, then having feigning interest as a middle-schooler and then cheering on the Ducks as a high-schooler.
“I’ve been a part of a lot of great games here, now getting the chance to play in those big games is really exciting,” Jackson said.
Jackson could have gone elsewhere. Arizona wanted him. So did Gonzaga and Utah. But his ties to his hometown kept him in Eugene.
Kent and the Ducks are ecstatic Jackson picked Oregon because of his play on the basketball court and his confidence off of it.
Maybe the rest of the Ducks will start to believe in Jackson’s ideas. He is just a freshman, after all.