Jackson’s mom influential
Heisman favorite says she’s private
Iraida Lopez learned her neighbors were the family of a prominent athlete when someone mistakenly came to her door to deliver a poster of Lamar Jackson’s Sports
Illustrated cover. But outside that, she said she would never have known the family of the most high-profile player in college football lived next door. Jackson’s family has always been friendly, she says, and their young children have played together sometimes but that they are very private.
When a reporter asked Lopez’s young son what he thought of having the best college football player in the country as a neighbor, Lopez’s daughter interjected.
“My neighbor is the best player in the country, and I haven’t met him?” she said.
Their surprise shows how low of a profile Jackson’s family has preferred to keep as the Louisville quarterback has risen to superstar status.
Jackson’s dynamic play has catapulted him into position as the favorite to win the Heisman Trophy, but his mother has wanted to keep the spotlight exclusively on her son’s football career and not on his family or personal life, making the most-watched man in college football also one of its most private.
“I have the type of mother that sits back and lets everything happen for you, lets you have the spotlight, is not willing to join out there and just go talking about anything that don’t have nothing to do with her,” Jackson said. “It’s about football, not about other things.”
Lamar Thomas and Felicia Jones laugh about it now when they recall their first conversation — a meeting that would ultimately change the course of Louisville football history. The mother of then-high school junior quarterback Jackson was sizing up Thomas, then a Louisville assistant, as he expressed interest in recruiting her son.
“I would look at her, and she was kind of looking straight through me,” said Thomas, who now coaches wide receivers at Kentucky. “I was like, ‘ OK, she’s trying to look me off. She’s trying to see if I’m in it for the long haul.’ ”
Thomas was gradually able to persuade Jones, the most influential person in Jackson’s life, to include him in what appears to be a relatively small circle of trust around Jackson as he has moved determinedly down a path to football stardom.
“My immediate family is my mom,” Jackson recently told The (Louisville) Courier-Journal. “Everything goes around her. I’m a mama’s boy. That’s my baby. That’s my mama. … She’s the one who keeps me motivated, no matter what. She’s driving me.”
Thomas, who played under and coached with Jackson’s ex-coach at Boynton Beach High School, was one of the first college coaches to recognize Jackson’s star po- tential and build a relationship with him and his mom.
It has paid off in a big way for the No. 15 Cardinals (9-3), as Jackson later committed to Thomas and signed with Louisville. Seen as the nation’s premier dual-threat quarterback, Jackson is favored to win the Heisman Trophy on Saturday in New York.
Though Jones has by all accounts played an enormous role in her son’s development, including getting him started in football, being actively involved in his physical training and helping manage his recruitment, she has shown zero interest in publicly sharing her story.
Jones has declined every media interview request.
“She is a lady who is extremely proud of her son, extremely proud of how she’s helped him develop, and not only physically but mentally, and she wants to have her privacy throughout this entire issue,” Louisville coach Bobby Petrino said. “She’s been consistent with that, with anybody that’s reached out and talked to her, that she just wants to watch her son play and have everyone respect that for her.”
Said Thomas, “She’s a very private lady. She wants the glory to be on him. She’s done everything she can to put him in this position. She doesn’t like to do interviews. She just wants him to be successful, whether it’s academically or on the field.
“When I talk to her, and we laugh about it, I say, ‘ Everything that we talked about is coming true.’ I said, ‘ You could win the Heisman. I’m serious.’ He said, ‘Coach, that’s what I want to do. I want to be the best player in college football.’ That’s where we are. He’s the most dynamic player in college football.”
Jackson says he appreciates and respects his mom’s approach.
“She’s always been like that,” Jackson said. “She doesn’t really feel like she needs to be out here talking. It’s me, it’s about me playing football. So she doesn’t feel like she needs to be a part of that right now.”
Jones also prefers that some of the adults close to her son from his high school days limit their public comments about Jackson.
Lyndon Clemons, a former assistant principal at Jackson’s high school who is close with Jackson’s family, recently declined an interview request for both him and a former Boynton Beach assistant coach, citing a request for privacy from Jackson’s family.
Jackson’s former youth coach, Van Warren, hasn’t responded to recent messages, and his former high school head coach, Rick Swain, also declined an interview request.
Jackson’s father, also named Lamar Jackson, died at the age of 31 when his son was 8. That’s also about the time little Lamar started playing youth football in his hometown of Pompano Beach, Fla. The quarterback told The Cou
rier-Journal last month that his father died of a heart attack. Previous media reports have stated he died in a car accident, but there is no case for him in the Broward County (Fla.) Medical Examiner’s office.
Jackson said he doesn’t have much memory of his father’s death and doesn’t dwell on it much now that he is grown. He said that when his dad was living, he was a “father’s boy.”
“But he passed away, and I just got close to my mom,” Jackson said.
Jackson, who has a younger brother and two younger sisters, says his mom has always been a good athlete with good stamina. She played basketball at a small college in Miami, he said. Jackson wrote in The Players’
Tribune how his mother actively coached him, wearing pads and running contact drills in the backyard of their former home in Pompano Beach. He told The
Courier-Journal his mom would take him running on the beach and have him practice his dropbacks in the shallows of the Atlantic Ocean.
She took him running on a bridge near their house, and some of his former youth teammates joined in their intense workouts.
“She had them vomiting,” Jackson said. “She never had me vomit. I always tried to work hard, and I took it serious, trying to better myself.”
Now that her son is in college, Jones helps motivate Jackson from afar, and he considers her not just a parent but also a friend.
“Whenever you need someone to lean back on, to talk to, she’s there,” he said. “She motivates me to go out there and compete. Every day I wake up, I thank the Lord first, and my mom sends me something like a scripture, something from the Bible just to get my day started.”
Jackson’s friend and former Boynton Beach teammate Chauncey Mason, a sophomore receiver at Arkansas State, said Jackson wanted to be the best, whether it was at football or video games. Jackson pushed Mason and their other teammates to put in extra time practicing and working out.
“When there were times I didn’t want to, he’d pick me up and be like, ‘Let’s go,’ ” Mason said.
Though Jackson has never mentioned it publicly, Mason, whose brother Tre Mason was a running back and Heisman finalist at Auburn, said winning the Heisman was always a goal that motivated Jackson and his high school teammates.
“(Tre) would always make sure that we didn’t think it was too much or think that we could never get to it,” Chauncey Mason said. “So we always would look at each other and say, ‘ Meet me in New York,’ or in a phone conversation, we’d say, ‘Man, we’re going to get the Heisman. Let’s go get it. One of us has to bring one back.’ That was it. We’d say that to each other in high school. We’d say that to each other when we first touched college.”
Jackson is not known to have had any off-the-field trouble, and Mason says Jones and the other parents of their close circle of best friends deserve credit.
Jackson said he hardly ever went out when he was in high school, and if he left the house it was usually for something football-related. Boynton Beach Principal Fred Barch said every trip Jackson ever made to his office was for a positive reason, and he called Jackson “an all-around great athlete and student.”
Petrino and Thomas fought off Florida, Mississippi State, Miami (Fla.) and others to sign Jackson, with Thomas believing the key to keeping him would be to convince him he’d definitely get to play quarterback and have a chance to compete for the starting job as a freshman. In a final visit to Jackson’s home before signing day, Thomas encouraged Jones to look Petrino in the eye and ask the coach if her son would have a chance to compete to be the starter.
“And if he says, ‘Yes,’ he’s a man of his word, and I really believe he’s going to do that,” Thomas told her.
“When we sat down,” Thomas recalled, “she said, ‘I just want to know one thing, Coach. Is my son going to have an opportunity to play quarterback and compete for the starting job?’ And Coach Petrino said yes. Coach Petrino didn’t flinch.
“Felicia is a hard woman, and it took her a long time to warm up to me, but I was able to do it. ... She’s done a lot for that young man to get him to that point, and here she was, she was trusting me and the University of Louisville. When Coach Petrino said yes, it was a done deal at that point.”