Father pushes Virginia Tech star Kevin Jones toward NFL draft
MIKE JENSEN
Associated Press
CHESTER, Pa. - It wasn't hard for Tom Jones to figure out. His son, Kevin, was young, too young for organized sports, just a little guy running around. But the father sensed that this child was going to end up playing under some very bright lights.
Kevin was just "circling around other kids," Tom Jones said. "He was a lot more aggressive than other kids coming up his age. A lot of schoolteachers didn't understand it. It's like, 'We have a problem with it.' Well, no, he's an aggressive-type kid. We want to cultivate that, put it in a good direction. That's what I saw."
The father has never changed his approach, not through his son's years as a youngster growing up in Chester; as a dominating running back at Cardinal O'Hara High School in Springfield, Delaware County; and as an all-American tailback at Virginia Tech.
Even now, as Kevin Jones gets ready for this year's NFL draft - he is expected to be either the first or second running back chosen, sometime in the first round - the approach never changes: The father decides how much work the son must do. The son does the work.
"As soon as you put a smile on my face, it will be the last one," Tom Jones told Kevin on a February morning at Widener University's indoor track, as the son finished a workout that had gone nearly 90 minutes.
"You're smiling now," Kevin Jones pointed out, but then he ripped off his black Nike T-shirt and ran one more 20-yard sprint, faster than the five previous ones, quicker than most NFL running backs could do perfectly fresh.
"I know when you run fast," his father said. "I don't even have to look at this watch."
Kevin Jones ran for 1,647 yards last season, and has scouts and draft experts gushing about his explosiveness. He was scheduled to leave Feb. 18 for the NFL combine, in Indianapolis, but would not do any workouts there. Like a lot of top prospects these days, he would meet team executives and get himself measured. But he would not be officially timed until scouts headed to Blacksburg, Va., to put stopwatches on all of Virginia Tech's prospects on March 18.
"He's a very productive guy," said Tom Hepler of Ourlads' Scouting Services, which has Jones going 15th in the first round in its latest mock draft. "What he does when he explodes through the line, he can get outside. He's a pretty dynamic runner."
Jones had a chance to size up a lot of his competition when he worked with speed coach Tom Shaw in January in New Orleans.
"I think a lot are one-dimensional," Jones, a 6-foot, 220-pound junior, said of the other running backs in the draft. "Some only have good footwork. Some only have power. Some have speed. I think I have all of that. I think I'm the best one. But it's not up to me."
He has put in the work. He has made sacrifices.
Last year at this time, a Virginia Tech teammate, cornerback DeAngelo Hall, ran a 40-yard dash in 4.15 seconds on the school's fast test track during timing day for NFL scouts. When Jones ran a mere 4.3, his father decided he had to act.
"It's crazy to say that's unacceptable," Tom Jones said of the 40 time. "But at the end of his high school workouts, he would run 4.1, 4.2. At the end."
So for last fall's season, Kevin Jones had another roommate in his four-bedroom apartment in Blacksburg. Tom Jones, taking a leave from his construction job at Philadelphia International Airport, spent two and three weeks at a time there. He brought dumbbells and a souped-up treadmill with him. He figured that since big-time college football programs don't spend a lot of time on in-season conditioning, he was going to add some extras.
"Considering what's at stake here, I knew what needed to be done," Tom Jones said.
It could get intense. Another of Kevin's roommates would roll out of bed and already see him on the treadmill once or twice a week before classes. The treadmill could go 12 miles an hour, and would be set on a 12 percent incline. Kevin would run for 30 seconds, take about a three-minute rest, then run again, three or four times.
Of his father's presence, Kevin Jones said: "It was good for me, but it was annoying at the same time. You finally get away on your own at college - not on your own, but you have your own freedom, your own place. He didn't really take over. He didn't stop me from doing what I was doing before he got there, but as far as space ..."
"Well, I don't know," Tom Jones said when he was asked if Kevin got sick of it. "He didn't tell me. I kept driving the point home: If you want to be the best, this is what it takes. If you want to be a top-five, top-10 pick in the NFL draft, let's do something the other guys aren't doing. Let's give you that edge.
"He bought it."
They watched game films after practice, breaking them down play by play, just as they used to in high school or over the phone during Kevin's first two years at Virginia Tech.
"I never stepped on anybody's toes," said Tom Jones, a former basketball star at the old St. James High School in Chester who worked as the strength coach for O'Hara's football team when Kevin was at the school, heading straight there after working at the airport. "I stayed out of the way. We did our thing when he came home. They never heard a peep out of me. I wasn't a coach there. I just wanted to do a couple of little things I thought he needed.
"A lot of people thought it was like torture. It wasn't like that. I'm not a monster. I'm so far from that, it's not funny."
When Kevin finished a tough workout in high school and wanted to go to a party or to the mall with friends, his father said, he would tend to say OK, feeling his son had earned it. But then Kevin's mother, Tracey, would step in.
"She was the enforcer," Tom Jones said. "She made sure he was dating the right people, hanging around with the right crowd."
Tom Jones' own mother, Tommie Lee Jones, was a founder of a local chapter of Youth in Action, which sponsored trips to amusement parks and started a basketball team for teenagers who didn't play for Chester High School, trying to help them get to college. She also was involved in starting anti-drug marches in Chester.
"It's easy to go on the wrong path," Tom Jones said. "A lot of kids have mentors. Kevin had me and my wife. We always protected him and made sure he was on the right path. He basically had two people on him."
While Kevin was growing up, Tom Jones taught himself the best training and conditioning methods, becoming a believer in the training techniques developed by a Romanian coach, Tudor Bompa. Bompa is known in the track world as the father of periodization, through which athletes vary the intensity of their workouts as an event approaches. Jones plans to get into the conditioning business full time - he'll call his place Speed Tech, he said.
"The father's not guessing out there," vouched Widener's veteran track coach, Vince Touey, who taught Tom Algebra II at St. James High and has watched him show up with his son for workouts at the college's 160-meter track for almost a decade. "Tom did a good job finding out who the best people to read were. He did the research."
Kevin Jones, of course, would be Speed Tech's best advertisement. He always aced the look test, even early in high school. He moves around a track with the ease of an Olympic sprinter. But, he said, there's nothing easy about it.
"It hurts pretty bad, all over," Kevin Jones said right after the main portion of the workout, when he sprinted 40 meters and then jogged 30 meters six times. Then he rested five minutes and did it again, and repeated the sequence a third time.
"I feel like throwing up right now," he said as he sat before finishing the workout with six 20-yard dashes and then heading for a local gym to do quick squats, leg extensions and hamstring curls. He will likely sign a multimillion-dollar contract before he ever gets hit again.
"Right now, you've got the MTV type of kid," Tom Jones said. "You've got Cribs. They get to see the homes of these athletes. We were watching when they had Terrell Owens' house. Kevin, he wants it now. I told him, 'No, you need to wait. Get a condo, then you work your tail off and get that second contract, and then you can get that house.'"
But, Tom Jones said, he has no plans to move anywhere with his son.
"He's got to go places that I can't go now," Tom Jones said. "He's going to be on an NFL team, doing NFL things, and I can't be there."
Of course, Dad's cell phone will always be charged.
"He said he's not going to be all over me, but he will, as far as critiquing me, because that's all he knows, that's what he does," Kevin Jones said. "I don't have a problem with it. It's the truth."
If i were him i probably wouldn't run again. Kinda like not taking the stand as the defendant on trial. Your credibilty, or in this case his stock, has already been rocked, so why take the chance of making it worse?
