She spotted a tumbleweed in the wild, the shaggy plant floating, rotating and lingering over a cracked road in the middle of the desert. Ebbony Jackson was mesmerized, certainly, but also mildly concerned.
Her family had already driven three hours east from San Diego to a town 30 miles north of the Mexican border. They had curved around mountains, navigated one-lane highways and seen plenty of cacti. Arriving at Arizona Western College in Yuma and noticing a tumbleweed only heightened her anxiety.
Am I really about to leave my son here?
She was not even sure Khyree was ready to live on his own. He was 17 years old and fixated on a football dream. He had played wide receiver at Wise High School (Upper Marlboro, Md.) and caught 12 touchdowns as a senior. Bad grades limited his college options, which is how he ended up so far away. Ebbony cried once the family left him. On the car ride to the airport, she almost pleaded: “I hope he can adjust. I hope.”
Khyree called in the ensuing weeks. Typically confident, even brash, her child sounded reserved, removed, disengaged. Ebbony sensed it would only be a matter of time until he called and told her he was finished. She tried to delay the inevitable, mailing him a Kevin Hart autobiography for inspiration on his birthday, Aug. 11, but it didn’t take. He called a few weeks later and told her it was over.
Once they returned to Maryland with his belongings, Ebbony left him alone for a while. Football, in her mind, was a vestige of the past. Something they could look back on fondly years later.
“I thought he was done with it,” Ebbony says now. “And I think that’s why my heart, right now, is filled with so much excitement.”
Arizona Western was the first stop on a football road windier than most. Khyree attended five different schools: three junior colleges, Alabama and Oregon. He worked three jobs and was once named employee of the month. He went about a year and a half without playing football. He considered a professional gaming career.
And most recently, he became a fourth-round pick of the Minnesota Vikings in the 2024 NFL Draft.
Just another chapter… 📕 pic.twitter.com/c4P3cNK6Wx
— REESKI (@Real_Khyree) May 1, 2024
“If you were designing a team in ‘Madden,’ this is what you’d want your corner to look like,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning says of Jackson, now 24. Alabama associate head coach Freddie Roach thinks Jackson is similar to former first-rounder Dre Kirkpatrick, “but probably faster.” Longtime NFL cornerback Joey Thomas adds: “Khyree has Pro Bowl talent.”
How, then, did he fall to the fourth round? And why, if he is such a special player, was his route so atypical? The answers lie in a mother’s retelling of a story she almost cannot believe herself.
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She heard him playing video games constantly. The buttons on the controller click-clacked. Khyree talked trash. The voice of commentator Kevin Harlan carried throughout the house.
“There are other things you can do with your time, Khyree,” Ebbony would tell him over dinner.
“Actually, Mom, I want to be a professional NBA 2K player,” he once responded.
“What is that?” she asked. “Did you just make that up?”
He showed her there are leagues, tournaments and prize money.
“That’s fine,” Ebbony said, “but what about community college? How about getting a job?”
He began applying, and Six Flags hired him as a custodian. He walked around with a broom and dustpan, sweeping up garbage left all over the germy ground of the park.
Khyree did not like it, so he applied elsewhere and got a job at Chipotle. He liked serving customers sizable portions of chicken and told his mother the manager chastised him for spooning out too much per bowl.
“When I go to Chipotle,” Ebbony says, “they don’t (add) enough chicken. Now you know why. If you put too much chicken, you can get fired.”
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Then Khyree landed a role behind the deli counter at a local supermarket, Harris Teeter. He sliced ham. He funneled rotisserie chickens into ovens.
One afternoon, Ebbony entered the store to pick him up from work and noticed her son’s picture on the wall. He’d been named employee of the month.
“‘Khyree!” she said, as they exited the supermarket. “You got employee of the month!’”
“Yeah,” he responded.
“This is so good!” she said. “They’ve got great benefits here!”
Ebbony envisioned the future: Harris Teeter store manager, then regional manager, then corporate. Her mind wandered happily.
Then, after a few months, he told her a football coach at Fort Scott Community College offered him a scholarship.
She did not know he had been contacting coaches in his downtime. She did not think Khyree cared about football at all anymore. But he told her, “I want this,” and daily workouts cemented his interest.
In a matter of months, the family departed with his belongings once again, traversing 18 hours west in a snowstorm toward Fort Scott, Kan., a city that advertises itself as “a wonderful place where a rich history meets an exciting tomorrow.”
“We pulled up,” Ebbony says, “and I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’”
Don’t judge a book by its cover, they’ll tell you. Well, Ebbony could not help herself.
They were looking at what she describes as a “run-down brick building.” Faded colors. Chipped bricks. A decrepit place. Then the family walked inside and found Khyree’s room. Two twin beds were situated side by side. White cement blocks were graying from the dust. The closet, where Khyree was supposed to hang his clothes, was stained and disgusting.
Khyree’s room at Arizona Western College at least had a bathroom. At Fort Scott, the entire floor of about 25 young men shared one bathroom with four showers.
“It was not ideal conditions,” Ebbony says. “Not at all.”
Thomas coached defensive backs at the school at the time. His description of the living quarters:
“Awful,” he says. “Awful, awful, terrible, terrible, terrible.”
As Ebbony wiped away stains in Khyree’s room, he seemed calm. Leaving, she thought: He must really want this.
Fort Scott started him as a receiver. The head coach, Kale Pick, joked that Khyree’s 6-foot-4 frame, paired with his movement ability, reminded him of Randy Moss. Then one day, while walking out to the practice fields, Khyree approached Pick and said: “You know, Coach, my real position is cornerback.”
This wasn’t totally true. Hearing this story now, DaLawn Parrish, Khyree’s high school coach at Wise, says: “I like to call Khyree ‘the Crowd Pleaser.’ It’s like he thrives on attention. Khyree is Khyree. Khyree be Khyreeing. Khyree be dominating at wide receiver. Khyree don’t get no love. Khyree will say, ‘Let me go play DB.’”
“Khyree,” Pick said, “I think you can play this game a long time at receiver.”
“No, just give me a chance at DB,” Khyree said. “That’s where my passion is.”
They negotiated. Pick and Thomas, the cornerbacks coach, agreed. They’d give Khyree two days to show them what he was capable of. Thomas watched Khyree’s feet and hips and was convinced — Khyree could and should be a defensive back.
“The coach called me mad,” Parrish says. “He goes, ‘I don’t understand. He’s my No. 1 receiver.’ I said, ‘Did you let him?’ ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Ha ha, now you just put him in the right. Khyree Khyreed you, buddy.’”
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Thomas challenged Khyree daily. He would line him up against seven receivers in a row and see if Khyree could hold his own. The relationship cultivated a bond that still remains, and the coaching points also enhanced Khyree’s technique to the point that Division I schools began to call.
After the 2019 season, Fort Scott’s coaches resigned. Khyree still needed credits to solidify a Division I opportunity, so he transferred to East Mississippi Community College (a junior college powerhouse and the site of Netflix’s “Last Chance U”). The school’s coach, Buddy Stephens, thought so highly of Khyree’s movement ability and instincts at his size (“he could bait a wide receiver and quarterback better than anybody I’ve ever had,” Stephens says) that he called Roach, who scouted Khyree and put him on Nick Saban’s radar.
That’s how Ebbony and Khyree found themselves on a Zoom call with Saban during COVID-19. Ebbony did not know who Saban was, but the entire conversation felt different than others in that the coach seemed to be interviewing them as opposed to the other way around.
“It was intimidating,” Ebbony says.
The prestige of Alabama attracted Khyree, though, and he ultimately committed.
“That put Khyree’s confidence on a whole different level,” Parrish says. “It was, ‘I can go down here and do stuff. I know who I am.’”
Khyree Jackson spent two seasons at Alabama and started in the national championship game against Georgia. (Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)
In the fall of 2021, Roach found Kirkpatrick, a former Alabama star cornerback, on the sideline during a camp at Bryant-Denny Stadium. Roach pointed to Jackson, who was wearing a No. 6 crimson jersey out on the field.
“You’re the reason I recruited this kid,” Roach said.
Khyree played in 12 games that fall and started in the national championship game against Georgia. The following season, he played in nine games, but Alabama suspended him for two for violating a team rule. From afar, Thomas, Jackson’s coach at Fort Scott, felt the fit wasn’t optimal in that Khyree preferred personalized coaching and more of a relational environment.
Saban operated Alabama more like a corporation. Come to work, do your job, don’t expect two-way communication.
“I coached him hard,” Thomas says, “but I was honest. People don’t want you to talk at them. Talk with them. Have dialogue. Give them the honest truth, but do it in a way they can receive it.”
Oregon offered this type of environment. Coach Lanning told Ebbony he would personally find a way to transfer Khyree’s credits so he would graduate without having to duplicate classes. Khyree committed, started 12 games for the Ducks and led the team in interceptions and passes defensed.
Jackson spent his senior season at Oregon, where he started 12 games and totaled three interceptions. (Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)
The production did not surprise any of the Alabama coaches.
“He’s got a s— ton of ability now,” Roach says.
Another Alabama staffer, Drew Svoboda, says: “If he can get it all going, I mean, this guy … I’m talking about, like, an unbelievable talent.”
The Vikings recognized the potential at the Senior Bowl, and defensive backs coach Daronte Jones, who is a Maryland native, spent about 30 minutes one afternoon with Jackson one-on-one. Minnesota then prioritized him with its fourth-round pick.
Khyree was snaking his way through Tysons Corner Center, a mall about a half-hour from home, when he received the call he had been drafted. He immediately FaceTimed his mother, who screamed when she saw Khyree’s name on the screen: “It’s Minnesota!”
In the days since his dream came true, those who have shared this path have a lot to say.
Parrish, the high school coach, said Khyree’s “got nine lives, boy.”
Thomas said this of Jackson: “If he trusts you, he’ll run through a wall for you. If he doesn’t trust you, he’ll go the other way. That’s Minnesota’s job from here on out, to build that trust the right way.”
“Khyree and I always have this line,” Ebbony said, “of, ‘Just another chapter for my story.’”
It’s a crowd-pleaser to this point. Just the way Khyree likes it.
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(Top photo: Jackson Fisk / Eric Evans Photography)
2024-05-06 10:03:13
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