Chris Jones has emerged as a Chiefs star. But there’s tension back home in Mississippi

On the property of a half-million dollar home, a 54-year-old man sits in the pool house, a nearby billiards table the coaster for his Budweiser tall boy. He directs attention to the two gold chains wrapped around his neck, appraising their approximate value, and then to the 3,800-square foot house and the Cadillac truck parked in its garage.

His way of life — the home, the jewelry, even some spending money — is a gift from his son, all of it purchased through the account of Chiefs Pro Bowl defensive tackle Chris Jones.

“I told my son, if you give me no money, what the (bleep) I need you for?” the father says. “But I’m no Joe Jackson — so don’t call me that in your (story).”

Welcoming a visitor in November, the man speaks loudly and assertively, progressing the conversation at his pace and to his desired topics. He boasts about the celebrities with whom he says he’s shared a glass of whiskey — actors Wesley Snipes and Denzel Washington, late rap artists Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.

He cites his jail inmate number as a badge of honor. Lifts his shirt to reveal tattoos depicting friendships with gang members. Brags about the cars he’s owned.

Before an interruption.

Who slashed the tires on your truck?

Inside the three-car garage of the Mooreville, Mississippi, residence furnished with big-screen TVs, leather sofas and marble countertops, a white Escalade EXT has sat stationary for more than six months. Its tires have been flattened, leaving the rims grating against the pavement.

But, really, the tires. What’s the story there?

“Chris sat my truck down, OK?” the man says. “My son, he took the key, too. Didn’t leave nothing.”

‘Tough little fellow’

Chris Jones was born two months early. He weighed 3 pounds at birth and spent the first six weeks of his life hooked up to machines in the hospital that were monitoring his heart.

“You could hold him with one hand,” his mother, Mary Woodhouse, said.

Jones has grown into a 6-foot-6, 310-pound frame, a beast of a man who has led the Chiefs in sacks for two years running and will demand, and could be given, a large raise this offseason.

He grew up in Houston, Mississippi, a 45-minute drive from Mooreville yet a world away from the luxury he has recently provided his parents. As a child, he shared his grandmother’s two-bedroom house with a dozen people. His father shifted in and out of his life. Alcohol robbed them of weekends together before prison stole nine months.

Jones’ mother worked 12-hour shifts as a nurse, her daily commute 45 minutes each way. On some days, she didn’t cross paths with her three kids.

With his mom and sisters, Jones settled in Houston, population 3,700, where the median family income is less than half the national average. There are three stoplights in town and more than a dozen churches.

A red brick house sits on the aptly named Church Street, an air conditioning unit hanging from the front window and the interior panels dotted with holes the size of a fist. Jones spent most of his childhood here at his maternal grandmother’s home, where his Houston High poster still hangs in a hallway. By his junior year, his grandma, Flora Evans, was providing housing for 12 people.

“Anybody who didn’t have anywhere to go, she’d bring them in,” said Shenia Kirby Jones, a lifelong Houston resident and family friend.

Evans’ home has just two bedrooms, so Jones slept on the living room couch. His feet hung over the arm rest.

He laughed about it then. Still laughs about it now.

“We used to call him Big Goofy,” Woodhouse said. “You’d always catch him smiling, always catch him laughing. He was just a big joker.”

In Kansas City, Jones comes out of his shell when the cameras click on. Smiles. Cracks jokes. Talks about wanting to play quarterback.

Coty Cox, his high school defensive coordinator, said that all started in Houston. But his personality can transform so drastically on the field that Jones has self-labeled his football persona “Stone Cold Jones” — even if his mother will always think of him as “Sweet Chris,” a nickname she gave the kid who volunteered to get a job in sixth grade to help feed his family.

Stone Cold Jones saved newspaper clippings with quotes from opposing high school coaches, taped them to his locker and handed them to those coaches after wreaking havoc on their offensive line.

Sweet Chris took candy from the nearby general store as a 6-year-old, but then fessed up to his grandma because, as she put it, “he couldn’t tell a lie.”

Stone Cold played one of his best high school football games on a night in which Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen flew to Houston on a helicopter and landed it near the field.

Sweet Chris saw a high school classmate devastated that he didn’t have any basketball shoes and offered up his own, ignoring the fact that they were about five sizes too big and his only pair.

Chris Jones is the baby who had to fight like hell just to survive those first six weeks. As he was finally released from the hospital, a doctor gathered the attention of his mom on her way out the door.

“With what he’s been through,” the doctor said, “I’m thinking this is going to be a tough little fellow.”

Family caretaker

Last summer, Jones flew home to Mississippi to visit his parents. Late one night, he walked out to their garage, crouched on his hands and knees and unscrewed the air caps off two tires.

He watched them slowly deflate, the vehicle slumping to its right side.

The next morning, he told his father he had slashed the tires.

“Just his safety, you know what I mean?” Jones said. “I don’t want him to harm himself or others.”

In May, as the Chiefs met for organized team activities at their practice facility in Kansas City, Jones was 1,500 miles away in Miami Beach. His absence made clear his desire for a new contract, a negotiation that will come to a head this offseason as his $6.23 million rookie deal expires. He spent his summer working out in Miami Beach, staying in shape with the help of a trainer, hanging out with friends.

And keeping his father out of jail.

Seven months ago, police officers pulled Chris Jones Sr. over for speeding. They detected alcohol. He failed field sobriety tests. If he fought the charge, he learned, a conviction would include jail time.

Jones hired lawyers to prevent that from happening. Their fees totaled more than $10,000, Jones said.

“He’s always been loyal to me,” Jones Sr. said. “That’s what I appreciated about him. Even though I went to jail all the time. Even though his daddy’s a drunk.”

Jones Sr. spent Chris’ childhood in and out of trouble with the law. Fights. Inebriated in public.

Eventually, those incidents became more serious. In 2005, Jones Sr. was arrested for driving under the influence and placed on probation. Weeks later, he was caught drinking in violation of that probation. He received a nine-month prison sentence in Marshall County, Mississippi.

Jones was in fifth grade. Didn’t see his dad for nearly a year. He wanted to visit him in jail, but his mom wouldn’t allow it. So every week, he would sit down and write his father a letter.

More than a decade later, Jones Sr. is back on probation and without a driver’s license. He said he takes a court-ordered drug test every Tuesday, so, in what he has diagnosed to a science, he drinks only on Wednesdays and Thursdays — that gives him enough time to flush the alcohol out of his system before the next test, he said.

When Jones zapped the air from the Cadillac’s tires last summer, he took the keys with him. The vehicle’s title, too. He wanted to ensure his dad couldn’t sell it.

“I look at it as, it’s his life,” Jones said. “He can choose the decisions he wants to make.

“But when the decisions harm himself and I have to pay for it, then it’s a problem.”

The house that Chris built

The sprawling $450,000 lot in Mooreville is tucked deep into the woods of a neighborhood comprised of diverse plots of land. At the edge of the road on which the home resides, three families live in trailers. Out front, one of them hangs a confederate flag stretching nearly half the length of the mobile home.

A driveway bends for a quarter-mile before reaching the house Chris Jones purchased, where Chris Jones Sr. stood one evening earlier this winter. As a visitor pulled in, before exchanging pleasantries, he offered his version of Southern hospitality.

“What kind of beer you drinking?” he asked.

Woodhouse, Chris’ mom, sat inside in the kitchen. For more than an hour, she would dig through mementos from her son’s life, scrapbooks detailing some of his most notable accomplishments. All of this almost never came together, you know — she couldn’t afford the registration and equipment costs of pee wee football.

“It wasn’t easy, but we ... ” she started, before a loud voice barged into the room.

“You know colleges are paying students, right?” the voice echoed as Jones Sr. appeared in the kitchen’s doorway.

“Chris, really, I’m doing my interview,” Woodhouse playfully snapped back. “Come on now. I’m not going to interrupt yours.”

She spoke calmly and cheerfully. Stated her case that her son was a mama’s boy. Half joking. Half serious. And then she said goodbye.

An open side door led to the pool house, where Jones Sr. sat alone, an episode of The Simpsons blaring through the TV as he waited.

“My turn?” he said.

He had undergone a wardrobe change, ditching his T-shirt for a sweater, a collection of gold jewelry and a hat accessorized with two feathers.

“I’m a real dude,” he said. “I don’t want none of this off the record.”

The drinking began at age 8, he said, when his own father propped him up on a bar stool, asked the bartender for two beers and passed one to him. His mom ditched the family to chase another man, he said, “but I ain’t going to blame my problems on someone else.”

With his son’s trophies and college pictures hanging in the background, Jones Sr. shared stories of a distinguished 54 years, a life in which prominence seems to have been propped up with time. The Cadillac resurfaced often during the conversation. Chris paid $45,000 for it, a figure his father wanted to underscore. The celebrities came up, too, a list of them a mile long. Even that nine-month prison sentence wasn’t all bad in his re-telling 15 years later — he became the king of his block, running a shop from his cell, he said.

His dialogue moved quickly if not abruptly and without order. He acknowledged an addiction to alcohol. It used to be worse, he said, back when whiskey was his drink of choice. Now, he said, he drinks only beer. No drugs. His son has paid to enroll him in a treatment program, he said, but he’s been unable to stop.

“I’m going to drink as long as I can,” he said. “Until I get prostate cancer or liver disease.”

A beaming light cast over his face as he spoke. He turned to see headlights barreling down the twists and turns of his driveway.

As a four-door sedan moved toward the pool house, he stood up and approached the door.

“I got a pistol on me,” he said. “Sit your ass down. Don’t move.”

Finally, the big-time

Chris Jones’ name rang over the speakers at Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, cementing the Chiefs’ second-round choice in the 2016 NFL Draft. By the time he walked across the stage, Jones was trying not to cry. Unsuccessfully, he would later admit.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell stuck out his arm for a handshake, but in a soon-to-be viral clip, Jones went for it all. He bear-hugged Goodell for a full nine seconds to a roaring ovation from the crowd, slamming into him so forcefully that he would apologize before leaving the stage.

“Everybody’s path is different,” Jones would say, only vaguely explaining his emotions.

He’d made it.

From that two-bedroom, one-story house in Houston, without a car to drive to practice, without being able to afford cleats to play football until high school, without even having a bed to sleep on, he’d made it.

The city of Houston threw him a parade. He bought his parents the new house a year after signing his pro contract, a gift they’d never been able to afford him. He donated money to his church, built in the 1800s one block from his grandmother’s home. Some in Houston tug at him for more cash. When he returned over Thanksgiving, they were planning to ask him to sink more into the town.

A teacher had laughed when 15-year-old Jones wrote on a dry-erase board that he would be a professional football player one day. Some friends, coaches and family members assumed he would follow the route of many Houston kids: graduate from high school and go to work at the furniture factory, the town’s largest employer. Jones already had a connection with an employee there to get him on board.

His father.

They remain close, Jones said. “We have a very good relationship. He’s always been around.” That’s why he purchased the house, why he filled his dad’s closet with new clothes, why he initially gifted him the truck.

And why, even now, he has a hard time saying anything negative about the man for whom he’s named.

“Chris has spent an (extensive) amount of money to keep his daddy out of jail, and he bought his dad a $45,000 truck, but this is what it look like,” Jones Sr. said, gesturing and moving toward the Escalade. “It lets you know right then where Chris’ heart is at.”

Jones Sr. stepped back from the vehicle to make his point more emphatically as the November visit concluded. A hand reached toward his, but he ignored it. Went for the hug instead.

Just as his son had done.

“That’s a story,” he said. “Put dirt on me. But you keep Chris and his mama as stars. They’re gonna know Chris is very sensitive — he loves his daddy. Even though his daddy is (messed) up.”

This story was originally published January 10, 2020 at 5:00 AM.

Sam McDowell

The Kansas City Star

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Sam McDowell is a columnist for The Star who has covered Kansas City sports for more than a decade. He has won national awards for columns, features and enterprise work. The Headliner Awards named him the 2024 national sports columnist of the year.