At foot of mountain
Pitt DL is step closer to dream of playing in NFL … with start from … Japan
To the left of the fireplace in Patrick Jones’ family home sits a bundle of international collectibles. A woodwind instrument from Australia stands to the top of the mantel. A Chinese wedding basket is settled on the carpet, a koto, a Japanese string instrument, hangs on the wall nearby. And in between are 5-foot walking sticks. Black stamps decorate the plain wood with blue flags on top that read: “MT. FUJI.”
As in Mount Fuji, the tallest mountain in Japan — where Jones took some of his earliest steps on the climb to All-ACC honors and eventual NFL draft pick.
On a clear day, the peak of Mount Fuji, which tops out at 12,389 feet, can be seen 87 miles away at the United States’ naval base in Yokosuka, Japan. The base, about an hour’s drive south of Tokyo, is a strategically important outpost in the western Pacific. It’s also where Jones was born and raised, and where he first learned how to play tackle football, at Nile C. Kinnick High School.
Today, Jones is a preseason candidate for just about every award a defensive player could covet. His 12 tackles for loss, 8.5 sacks and 4 forced fumbles in 2019 were integral contributions to Pitt’s menacing defensive line, one that will return dangerous potential in 2020. Jones, who spurned the most recent NFL draft and a mid-round grade, was Mel Kiper Jr.’s No. 3 defensive end prospect in the 2021 class as of early May.
Should that dream come to fruition, Jones will carry a torch for football in the western Pacific: He’s set to become the first player in recent memory to take up the sport at a Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA) high school in Japan and make the NFL.
In terms of game time, Jones’ experience was limited. He played less than half a season with Yokosuka’s junior varsity team, and colleges didn’t take notice of him until his 11th-grade year at Grassfield High School in Chesapeake, Va.
But Jones, whenever he’s asked where he hails from, acknowledges that he’s “not really” from Virginia. The son of a naval IT chief, Jones spent most of his life overseas. And it was in Japan, 6,500 miles from Pitt’s campus, where the pass-rusher found the game he loves.
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Jones’ father, Patrick Sr., swears his son was destined to be a baseball star.
When he was a kid, Jones had a “serious arm” as a pitcher and center fielder, and he got it done at the plate, too. Jones hit his first home run at the age of 9, when his coach bet him $5 he couldn’t. In his next at-bat, he put one over the center-field wall … and then did it again the following game.
“I still have those balls in my room,” Jones said. And hey, who could blame him? Hitting a home run in Little League is rare. Hitting one in Italy, well, that’s più raro.
Jones was born Sept. 29, 1998, in Yokosuka. He doesn’t remember much, living there until he was 3, when his father and family were relocated to a base in
Jacksonville, Fla. After a couple of years in Florida, the Joneses moved to Naples, Italy, for three years, then back to Japan. In 2007, they took temporary roots in Misawa, an eight-hour car ride north of Tokyo, on the northern tip of the island. A few years later, the family went back to Yokosuka, where they stayed until December 2012.
Jones’ official Pitt bio says Chesapeake is his hometown, where he and his family relocated and remained in 2013. But everyone who really knows him understands that the around-the-world childhood he experienced shaped him into something more than a normal stateside kid.
In Italy, when Jones was ages 79, the family immersed itself in the culture and surrounding cities. They climbed Mount Vesuvius. They traveled to Rome, Venice, Pisa, Florence and the Amalfi Coast. Jones learned how to ski in the German Alps and skated at an Olympic rink in Munich. He even tried raw octopus, on a dare by his father, from a pop-up market stand in Naples.
“It was disgusting,” Jones’ older sister, Myia, said with a laugh. “But it made us more diverse. I’ve always been appreciative of the opportunities that we had because when we got to the states and told people where we lived, they were amazed. We grew up in that environment, so we didn’t realize this is a big deal.”
“Patrick and all of our children, they’re not afraid of change,” Jones’ mother, Angela, added. “They’re not afraid to venture out and do new things.”
So, when the family moved to Misawa, Jones kept his eyes (and options) open.
At Sollars Elementary School, he continued with baseball. He also wrestled, played basketball and dabbled in flag football. He stayed after school to play the taiko drums. And academically, aside from being a straight-A student, Jones won a local soroban (Japanese abacus) competition in the sixth grade.
The competing students — using only the five-rowed, beaded calculator, a sheet of paper and a pencil — calculated math problems, something that had been popularized and done in Japan for over 3,000 years. Jones, who qualified for the event after excelling at it in school, said he looked around the convention center that day thinking, “I’m going to get destroyed.”
“When I turned the paper in, I was like, ‘I got every single one of these wrong because I got these done way too fast,’ ” Jones said over Zoom, shaking his head. “I was sitting there not even paying attention when they were calling out the awards because I knew I didn’t win anything. But then I heard my name called.”
When asked what’s harder, solving math equations using a soroban or getting past an offensive tackle, Jones picked the former. Three years after the competition, he had find that out for himself.
The video feed was blurry, and the sound lagged a bit. But on the Yokosuka Naval Base, the booming voice of Andrew Kevin Warford reverberated over Facebook video chat. Warford, an assistant football coach at Kinnick High School, smiled from sunny Japan, recalling the day Angela Jones dropped off her ninth-grade son for his first round of football conditioning in July 2012.
“First thing I notice is shaking a young man’s hand. I’m about 6foot, 240 pounds. And I think he had just turned 13. But his hands were bigger than mine,” Warford explained. “Then I look down. I wear size 12½ shoes. And his feet were bigger than mine. … His feet were too big for him, and his eyes were wide open.”
That first session at Kinnick’s turf football field ran an hour long. It was a typically humid day — after a tropical June, humidity tends to rise to uncomfortable levels on the island. Jones spent most of the time figuring out the drills, as they were totally new to him. But something had clicked in the newbie.
Since returning to Japan, Jones knew he wanted to test football. His cousins played stateside, and he grew bored of standing in the outfield, waiting for something to happen. He attended high school football games in Misawa when he was in elementary school — yes, Friday night lights are a thing over in Japan, too. Seeing the action up close, he craved it. “I wanted to go hit people,” Jones said frankly.
Warford viewed football as a possible outlet for Jones and all the Navy kids “who sometimes struggle with an identity crisis” with their mothers or fathers out at sea. Jones’ dad was deployed on aircraft carriers for 3-6 months at a time while in Japan. Myia said their father’s periodic absence was a part of military family life and became routine, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Warford was glad Jones found football. Jones was, too.
After that first conditioning test, he showed up four weeks in a row, five days a week. Sometimes on Saturdays. He hit sleds. He flipped tires. He whipped the ropes Warford obtained from naval engineers to a perfect roll. “The ropes never lie. They can’t lie,” Warford added. “The kid never quit. He wanted it.”
Jones was more than catching on. He was showing glimpses of athletic potential that intrigued Warford, the junior varsity head coach at the time.
Warford didn’t get too far ahead of himself. Jones was 5--9 and really skinny at 150 pounds. Kinnick varsity head coach Dan Joley said he was like a stallion learning how to gallop. “He was one of those kids that when you see them as freshmen, they’re pups,” Joley added. “He had a frame that you knew, once he grew into it …”
Jones, now 6-5, was a couple of years and a growth spurt away from that. Still, those early memories of football — learning how to put on shoulder pads, locking up a 220-pound teammate in Oklahoma drills on the first day of full contact — had him hooked.
The only thing left before Jones’ first season was traversing Japan’s tallest peak.
Every August, at least since Joley started coaching Kinnick in 2010, the Red Devils have made it a tradition to spend four days at Camp Fuji, a Marines training facility at the base of the mountain. All the players, JV and varsity, and the coaches sleep in the barracks and experience a regimented schedule meant to not only test the body, but also serve as a teambuilding exercise.
Jones and his teammates woke up at 5 a.m., had breakfast an hour later, then practiced from 8-10 a.m. A two-hour afternoon practice, normally a walk-through, started just after noon, followed by another two-hour training session beginning at 5 p.m. Not all the workouts were football-related, either. Marines led a few of them, guiding players through obstacle courses and over climbing walls.
The four-day trip was capped with a climb of Mount Fuji. On Aug. 10, 2012, Kinnick’s entire team bused an hour from Camp Fuji to the mountain’s Subaru Line 5th Station, a popular starting point already 7,000 feet above sea level. At 4 a.m., the team — split up into smaller groups — obtained their walking sticks from a nearby shop and started their 5-6-hour ascent up Fuji’s difficult, rocky terrain.
Now, this wasn’t totally new for Jones. A year earlier, Jones tried climbing the mountain with his father and sister. He kept running ahead and then running back down to mess with and meet his family members. “I thought I was Superman,” Jones said.
But, of course, he wasn’t. Refusing to wear a jacket, Jones still was very much susceptible to hypothermia, which he caught before reaching the mountain’s peak.
He didn’t make the same mistake twice, though. Dressed properly and collecting walking stick stamps at every checkpoint, Jones’ group reached the summit first on the team, something he looks back fondly on to this day.
Warford does as well, but for a different reason.
“That mountain made him sociable,” the coach said of Jones. “You could see him talking to teammates, and he wore a smile when he would sometimes be within himself. He was happy. That was the cool thing about it. It changed a lot of those kids.”
In the sixth grade, Jones and his classmates at Sollars Elementary in Misawa were assigned the classic middle-school paper that everyone’s penned before: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Jones, like many sixth-graders before him, wrote that he wanted to earn a football scholarship and play in the NFL. Statistically, is it the most likely career path? No. But hey, neither is president or astronaut. Might as well shoot your shot, right?
Jones’ teacher sent back the paper, demanding a rewrite because the 10-year-old’s dream “wasn’t possible.” His mom took the teacher’s remarks, framed the letter and hung it on the wall in her son’s bedroom.
“Look at what someone said you couldn’t do, and now look at where you are right now,” Angela Jones said. “That’s why I framed it. I wanted it to be his motivation.”
Now, to be fair, consider the teacher’s position. Sure, it’s a little rude to tell a sixth-grader his dream is unattainable. But Jones was suggesting something that rarely had been attained before in the western Pacific.
In the past 20 years, only Seoul American High School standout Wesly Mallard, who shined at Oregon and landed with the New York Giants in 2002, was selected in the NFL draft. Sidney Malau’ulu, also a Seoul American product, signed an undrafted free-agent contract with the San Francisco 49ers in 2019. But no one from a DODEA school in Japan — other than an unidentified player from the 1960s or 1970s — has made it to the league.
“In my 21 years with an average roster size of 40 kids, I’ve seen seven of my players go on to college football,” said Tim Pujol, the longtime coach of Yokota High School, another DODEA program. “And only two of them played at the Division I level.”
Frankly, the level of competition — DODEA school playing DODEA school — isn’t typically up to par with what happens on Friday nights in Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio and the rest of mainland United States. And college recruiters know that.
Coaches in Japan and Korea complete a roster with however many players they can get. In Jones’ time, Kinnick’s varsity and JV teams combined for 75 players, but that number has dropped somewhat significantly in recent years. Plus, it’s hard to develop a freshman when he likely won’t be around for his senior season. Stationed naval personnel are largely on a 2-3-year rotation, which filters players in and out and makes it difficult for programs to maintain any level of consistency.
“A lot of times kids come in and maybe they’ve played football around the neighborhood. But they certainly have never played a single down in a real tackle football game,” Pujol added. “When I was in Dallas [coaching in the early 1990s], we were watching 7-year-old YMCA games saying, ‘I can’t wait for that kid to turn 12 because when he’s a seventh-grader at our junior high feeder he’ll be a stud.’”
That just doesn’t happen in Japan, making those dreams Jones wrote about darn near impossible to achieve. Especially when you have an inaugural season like he did.
Before the 2012 campaign even started, Jones’ growth plate in his foot was fractured. He was growing so fast his body was out of whack. The eager defensive end who showed desire and promise throughout the summer — who Warford was convinced would be contributing at the varsity level that season — was out for all but three or four JV games.
“I remember thinking to myself that I’m never going to be able to play college football,” Jones said of his injury. “I’m not going to know how to play and when I move back to the states, I’m going to be too far behind. I won’t be able to catch up. … But I knew when I came back, I’d give it my all. That’s the one thing I wanted to do my whole life.”
When he returned from injury, Jones made the few opportunities he had count, logging a couple of sacks. His first was a blinding speed rush in which the tackle never touched him, something he has done a handful of times at Pitt. Warford also remembers Jones meeting quarterbacks at the point of contact and, instead of collapsing with them, driving through them — something DODEA and ACC signalcallers have in common.
Unfortunately for Warford, Jones never got the chance to really hone those skills at Kinnick. His family was relocated to Virginia that December, and he enrolled at Grassfield High School. There, he starred as a discus thrower and, after claiming he was a quarterback in his early days, grew into a forceful passrusher.
Three years after leaving Yokosuka, Jones, a two-star prospect, committed to Pitt, where he has blossomed into a pervasive passrusher — one who could have left early for the NFL after the 2019 season.
Jones was considering it, too. A second-to-fourth-round grade was nothing to ignore, and he was confident that if he trained for the combine, he would’ve tested well. Jones had to think “real heavy” and consult his family members, all of whom believe he ultimately made the right choice.
Jones’ life so far has been go, go, go. Moving from Jacksonville to Italy to Japan to Virginia in an eight-year span is a lot. So is skipping kindergarten and then graduating high school and enrolling early at Pitt. In 2011, Jones attended school in three locations: Misawa, Yokosuka and North Carolina. The Great Sendai Earthquake, the most powerful in Japanese history, initiated an evacuation of military families from the island, pushing Angela Jones and her children to her parents’ home for a few months stateside.
Jones always has gone with the flow, his mother said. That’s never been a problem. But given the opportunity to take a step back and make sure he left Pitt with his degree, it just made sense. “He wanted to slow down,” Patrick’s dad added.
In an unfortunate way, things have slowed down more than Jones and the Panthers expected. The spread of COVID-19 canceled the remainder of their spring practice, and while the team has returned to campus for involuntary activities, the possibility remains that the novel coronavirus will nix the 2020 college football season.
If the vaunted Pitt defense has a season to prove itself, Jones said, “There’s no telling what we can do.”
He gets chills thinking about another year with the Panthers. He looks forward to another chance to improve his draft stock. And, with a school in Japan behind him, he awaits another opportunity to prove how far he has come.
“It would be really cool to say that he came from here, but Patrick’s the one that’s made all this happen,” Joley said. “It makes me happy to see him successful. To see him reach his dreams is something everyone should take a little piece of pride in.”
“I’m not surprised at where he is and where he’s going,” Jones’ sister added. “He deserves every bit of it.”