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Everybody has a story. The story of Green Bay wide receiver James Jones’ early years is hard to wrap your brain around.
Homelessness started from birth and didn’t end permanently until he was 15 years old. The awful state of having no place to call his own was interrupted here and there with help from family, friends and people who would later greatly influence Jones’ life, a life filled with struggle, strides and now, true happiness.
“You never know what’s going to happen. I didn’t know I was going to make it to the NFL. But I just kept on fighting, kept pursing my dream,’’ Jones said.
James and Tamika Jones’ new baby, James Martell Lightning Jones, is eight days old when our FOX crew invades their modest Green Bay home. I have a cold so I keep my distance. I’m unable to take in all of the baby’s features, but I do see little James has a head full of beautiful, black curly hair. After some back and forth in my head I know exactly how to start the interview: fatherhood.
“Just the way I grew up, I was like when I’m a dad, the position I’m in to know this little dude doesn’t have to worry about anything for the rest of his life, it’s truly a blessing.”
Jones speaks a lot about blessings. He knows how fortunate he is to have overcome the heartbreaking childhood he lived. He talks casually, calmly about growing up in homeless shelters which almost always have a three-month-stay rule. I’m stunned to learn, that after 90 days, you have to get out and a young Jones and his mother Janet Jones were asked to leave a lot. She had trouble finding or keeping jobs.
During those times they would scrape together money for cheap hotels around San Jose when shelters weren’t available.
“The hardest times was leaving the shelter and going from hotel to hotel because some nights you’d kind of ride (buses) all night or be up all night,’’ he said.
Jones often joined his mother out on the streets begging for money, sometimes begging for food.
“There was one time we were staying in a hotel and we didn’t have food and there was this pizza spot. I don’t know what got into me. I just went into the pizza spot and just cried and pleaded that we needed some food! And the dude gave me two large pizzas for free.”
At the Homeless Shelter in San Jose for our Thanksgiving Day story, we were shown a sparse, freshly scented room that included bunk beds and a baby crib, which we were told the new occupant moving in the next day would need. Jones stayed at that very same shelter at least three times as he recalled. His old room is now an office.
“He was a runner,” 16-year shelter worker Judy Vargas remembers. She’s short so we have to stand her on a box to fit her in the camera frame with me.
“I was forever running after him, saying ‘James, you need to be by your mother. You’re supposed to be supervised.’ He was always just a little antsy,” Vargas said.
Jones never complained about his life openly, but he did wonder about it, he somewhat reluctantly admitted to me.
“There were times when you don’t want to ask why, but you do ask why,” Jones said. “You look at yourself like, I’m a good kid. Why does this kid have that? Or why does this have that?”
I ask Jones what’s the one possession he treasured as a little boy, thinking it was a toy, a pair of shoes maybe, an article of clothing. The answer leaves me with a large lump in my throat and I have to look away.
“It had to be my mother,’’ he said. “I had opportunities to stay with my grandma at a young age, go stay with my dad. He was living in Fresno at the time. Whatever mama went through, whatever was gonna happen, I was gonna be with her. No matter where we were, under a bridge or something, I felt I was safe.”
Jones found safety in football, too. One day he was playing with some boys. Their dad, Marion Larrea, a Pop Warner coach, saw something special in this strongly built kid. Soon Jones was a part of the family, with Larrea in role of father figure and mentor. Jones was asked along on family vacations and spent weeks at a time at the Larrea home.
“I may have been his angel, but he brought a lot of happiness to my life, too,” said Larrea, who bought Jones his first pair of cleats. “I think of him as a son still to this day. He’s done a lot for me.”
“I was eight years old. He saw me playing, and he was ‘you need to be playing football,’ ” said Jones. “I told him that I would love to. But my mother didn’t have the money for me to play football.”
Larrea made sure Jones’ fees were paid and a bond was formed that had nothing to do with money. Two decades later Jones would give Larrea the valuable jersey he played in when the Packers won the 2010 Super Bowl.
“He said it since he was five years old, that he was going to go to the NFL and he did it,” she said.
“He loves his parents. He does not look to them or blame them for anything that happened,’’ his wife Tamika said. “He looks at his journey and everything that happened for a reason.”
After a move to Sacramento, a miserable 15-year-old James Jones had been through enough. Craving normalcy, he did something he didn’t think he’d ever do. He left his mother’s side and the transient lifestyle they’d been living for the bulk of his life. After a call to his grandmother Bernice, he was on a bus back to San Jose to live under the rules of her strictly run home.
“I was able to go to the same high school for all four years, be stable over there,’’ Jones said. “I knew that when I left school, I’d be going home. I’d have some food there.”
Janet Jones came back, too. She found a job and got an apartment.
“My mom was at every game — basketball, football game,’’ he said. “It was just good to be stable”
After four years of college football at San Jose State, Jones got a dream-come-true phone call from the Green Bay Packers in the third round of the 2007 NFL Draft.
“Man, that almost brings tears to my eyes just to be able to provide for her, bless her with anything she needs,” he said. “She doesn’t have to worry about nothing. She has a roof over her head, she doesn’t have to worry about moving, or to worry about three-month notice. That’s the best feeling in the world.”
Jones and his wife steer us to the Milwaukee Rescue Mission to meet the people who run it and some of the spirited students who attend the school. It’s a place near and dear to them, as the Jones family are frequent visitors and generous to the kids of the facility, a place that relies on fund-raising to keep its doors open and is in constant need of money and various supplies.
We’re introduced to a young girl named Destiny Battle, who was one of the recipients of James and Tamika’s “lovejones4kids” foundation that grants wishes to kids. Ten-year-old Destiny didn’t want anything for herself, but a gift for her disabled mother instead.
“Her birthday passed and she only got four presents and I wanted to get her something,” said the 5th grader. “I wanted to get her a necklace.”
Wish fulfilled.
Sometimes we can all take things for granted. Jones is very sensitive sometimes about a perceived lack of gratitude in whatever form it takes.
“You walk into Lambeau Field and you got omelets, you got pancakes, you got all you can eat, everything,’’ Jones said. “And every once in a while you’ll hear somebody say, ‘damn, we got the same stuff every day.’ I just thought back to the kids at the homeless shelter, they wished they could wake up to some pancakes. I truly believe that if I didn’t go through what I went through, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here today because it made me a strong person.”
He’s also a kind person. A half-smile doesn’t leave his face, even when he tells the worst of his life story. I ask him why he even wants to dredge this up, relive the worst days of his life or recount days when he watched his mom swallow her pride to ask a stranger for money, or beg an estranged family member to take them in for a week.
What does he want people to know about homelessness, especially where children are concerned?
“When you’re in there you’re lonely,” he said. “I just like telling my story because there’s kids in the homeless shelter and it’s going to be hard to make it out, but you can do it. I would fight to get out because of the circumstances I was in. And I knew I got to fight because I want to get my mom out of there.”
He’s done that and so much more.
Mainly, James Jones with that story, has opened our eyes to the horrors and joys of life — from having no place to live as a baby to now looking down at his own newborn sleeping peacefully, safe and sound.
Trymaine Lee of HuffPost Blackvoices is reporting that between 1971 and 1991, Donald Fitzpatrick, a long-time Red Sox clubhouse manager, systematically molested and abused nearly a dozen African-American boys in their hometown of Winter Haven, Florida, where the baseball team held their Spring training. Lee highlights the story of Leeronnie Ogletree, who was molested by Fitzpatrick at age 10. Ogletree vividly recounts the sexual acts in which he was made to participate by Fitzpatrick to a number of publications.
Lee writes:
It took decades for the truth to come out about Fitzpatrick, who is white, and his criminal desire for young black boys. In 2003 the Boston Red Sox settled a $3.15 million federal lawsuit brought against them by Ogletree and seven other men from Winter Haven who said Fitzpatrick repeatedly molested them as boys.
Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who handled Ogletree’s case against Fitzpatrick and the Boston Red Sox, said the similarities between the Penn State and Red Sox scandals are startlingly similar. There were cover-ups, denials and the enabling of pedophiles to use the power of their institutions to prey on the weak, in the Red Sox case, “poor black boys,” he said. The kinds of youth often considered society’s “throwaways.”
Kudos to Lee for reminding the public that this sort of crime happens more often than we would like to imagine. Some men prey on boys of all sports. Have we already forgotten that boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard was molested during his Olympic days by a trainer? The silence about molestation in sports is deafening because in sports culture, everything is privileged — the school’s reputation, the obsession with maintaining a winning coaching staff –except the safety of the child. These children were vulnerable for a number of reasons and yet those who knew, chose to look the other way. That is probably one of the most sickening and pitiful aspects of these sports scandals.
If you have even a passing interest in the legal world, David Boies is a name you should already know. He’s possibly the most famous litigator alive. So when he walked in with the union on Monday, you knew the news was bad enough to jeopardize the season.
The union has abandoned its right to negotiate on behalf of the players in order to sue the NBA in antitrust court for massive damages within the next 48 hours, according to its revamped legal team. The players in attendance said the decision was unanimous — that the league had backed them into a corner with ultimatum after ultimatum, even after the players gave back the equivalent of nearly $3 billion over a 10-year deal by lowering their locked-in share of the league’s revenue.
“Collective bargaining has totally failed the players,” said Jeffrey Kessler, the union’s outside counsel and commissioner David Stern’s designated villain.
“We put all our proposals out there, and they were rejected,” union vice president Maurice Evans told SI.com. “There was nothing else to evaluate.”
The move will shift the process from the bargaining room to the court system, jeopardizing the season and infuriating Stern, who said on ESPN minutes after the union’s announcement that players had “been badly misled.” Stern dismissed the union’s move as a negotiating ploy that had been in the works since at least February 2010, when Kessler, in Stern’s telling, informed the commissioner the union would go this route if talks broke down. “We were very, very close,” Stern said, “and the players decided to blow it up.”
So Stern has his public relations victory — the players did it! — and a league on the verge of suffering the most disastrous labor relations outcome (apologies to the NHL) in major professional sports history. Let’s be clear about one thing: Nobody knows what happens now. The season is not lost, despite the doomsday rhetoric, some of which agents on Monday characterized as part of Stern’s plot to scare the players into taking the deal on the table. The union and the league could settle their lawsuit in days, and that settlement would include the guts of the next collective bargaining agreement.
And the court process itself is uncertain, despite the common refrain that the NFL players failed in going down this exact path. Labor experts say the appellate ruling that reinstated the NFL’s lockout, after a lower court halted it, is a tricky opinion that did not provide the complete victory the NFL sought. Legal precedent for this kind of case is thin; the NBA believes it gave itself an advantage by filing a pre-emptive lawsuit over the summer declaring any future dissolution of the union would be a sham, but nothing is certain now.
Is Terrell Owens crying out for help? The former football star is running out of money, no NFL teams want him and he can’t afford his child support payments. He recently asked a judge to lower his payments because he has no income. At 37, it looks like his NFL career is over. Last month, he reportedly tried to commit suicide. This isn’t the first time this has happened. Back in 2006, he overdosed on pills. Is he crying out for help? What will he do with his life? During his heyday, Owens was a locker room terror always causing controversy with the various teams he played on Eagles, 49ers, Cowboys). Now that no one wants him, he realizes he wasted good years clowning when he should have been working and making money so he could have a life outside of football.
What is going on with Pro Football Player Terrell Owens? The former Philadelphia Eagle, Dallas Cowboy and current Cincinnati Bengal had to be hospitalized last week because of a possible prescription drug overdose. The free agent NFL receiver is 37, and his NFL career looks like it’s over. Owens’ career is not doing well and he has made bad choices with his money. Did he try to commit suicide? Back in 2006, he was hospitalized and claimed it was a bad reaction to painkillers. Close friends said he tried to commit suicide by taking 35 vicodin pills.
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Real Housewives of Atlanta Star Kim Zolciak is engaged to be married to NFL Player Kroy Biermann. They had a baby last month, and now they are getting married and getting their own reality show. The new season of Real Housewives Of Atlanta debuts November 6th on the Bravo network.
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Royce Reed is out as part of The Basketball Wives. Reed was one of the stars of the Miami version, and is also the babymomma to Basketball Star Dwight Howard of the Orlando Magic. She was the pot stirrer. Reed was always getting into it with the other ladies, who only saw her as a dancer. Reed felt like it was time to go, and she has already started a career as an author.
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Hank Williams Jr. and his iconic theme song “All My Rowdy Friends” will no longer be used to open ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” the network announced today.
The parting of ways follows an analogy Williams used involving Adolf Hitler and President Barack Obama to make a political point on the Fox News Channel.
“We have decided to part ways with Hank Williams, Jr,” ESPN said in a statement. “We appreciate his contributions over the past years. The success of Monday Night Football has always been about the games and that will continue.”
On his own website, Williams said he was the one who made the decision.
“After reading hundreds of e-mails, I have made MY decision,” he wrote. “By pulling my opening Oct 3rd, You (ESPN) stepped on the Toes of The First Amendment Freedom of Speech, so therefore Me, My Song, and All My Rowdy Friends are OUT OF HERE. It’s been a great run.”
In an interview Monday on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” Williams, unprompted, said of Obama’s outing on the links with House Speaker John Boehner: “It’d be like Hitler playing golf with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu.”
Asked to clarify, Williams said, “They’re the enemy,” adding that by “they” he meant Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
ESPN pulled Williams’ opening to Monday night’s Indianapolis-Tampa Bay game and issued a statement saying: “While Hank Williams, Jr. is not an ESPN employee, we recognize that he is closely linked to our company through the open to Monday Night Football. We are extremely disappointed with his comments, and as a result we have decided to pull the open from tonight’s telecast.”
Williams, through his publicist, said on Monday: “Some of us have strong opinions and are often misunderstood. My analogy was extreme — but it was to make a point. I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me — how ludicrous that pairing was. They’re polar opposites and it made no sense. They don’t see eye-to-eye and never will. I have always respected the office of the president.”
Hall of Famer, Deion Sanders denied claims of divorceon his Twitter account after reports began to circulate that he was getting rid of his wife after 11 years of marriage.
He says he never filed divorce papers, however several sources are sticking to the story saying that it’s already been set to motion because he didn’t want his wife Pilar to become a reality TV star.
“Ladies and gentlemen I never address Ignorance but I must at this point. I’ve never filed 4 divorce and hadn’t made a statement to Any media,” he tweeted.
The two have actually had a reality show “Deion and Pilar: Prime Time Love” since 2008. And his wife has made appearances on several shows and other televised productions.
On the couple’s show, fans and viewers take part in the every day activities of the family of seven, which lives in the small town of Prosper, Tx.
The former NFL star is also a football analyst.
Ben Wallace nearly fell under the radar after being arrested last weekend for DUI.
He was arraigned in Bloomfield Township, MI on charges of driving drunk and carrying a concealed weapon.
The Detroit Pistons basketball player was pulled over for reckless driving. He admitted to authorities he just left the club and consumed four beers two hours prior.
After administering a breathalyzer test, police discovered he was over the Michigan legal limit of 0.08 percent at 0.14 percent.
After being scooped up, police searched the vehicle and found an unloaded gun in a backpack not registered to him, but to a family member.
He claimed it was his wife’s.
On Monday the NBA player will stand before Judge Kimberly Small, who previously sentenced former college and professional basketball player Jalen Rose to jail for drunk driving.
Wallace signed a four-year, $60 million deal with the Chicago Bulls in 2006.
From there, Wallace was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers before re-signing with the Pistons as a free agent for a 1-year deal.
Chad Ochocinco is going back to being Chad Johnson. Chad is changing his name back for his soon to be wife. The wide receiver for the New England Patriots is getting married to Basketball Wives Reality Star Evelyn Lozada. The wedding is supposed to happen in July. There is no word on whether VH1 will pick up their proposed reality show.
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