It’s tough to be Mr. Mom when you want to be Mr. Football.
That used to be Johnathan Jackson’s dilemma. As a grammar-school kid with a single mom and three younger siblings, he frequently had to play man of the house instead of sports.
It meant everything from babysitting to cooking while his mother, Angela Bradley, worked. That made him angry.
“It was frustrating,” the Dunbar senior running back/safety said Wednesday. “I felt I didn’t get as much freedom as I should have as a kid.”
Frustration produced anger, which in turn produced shaky grades and a shakier attitude. Jackson was a natural leader, but he was leading in the wrong direction; and a fed-up Bradley finally told him she was sending him straight into the Army after high school . . . if he got that far.
“When he was in 8th grade, I was praying for him to finish high school,” she said. “I never thought college would have been an option.”
That’s why when the National Football Foundation announced Monday it had selected Jackson as the Play It Smart program’s national Student-Athlete of the Month, it was less an award than a measure of progress.
His grades now are A’s and B’s. His attitude has changed so radically that Tom Kowalski, Dunbar’s Play It Smart “academic coach” and someone who has counseled athletes about schoolwork and life skills for years, called Jackson “the best leader I have seen at the high school or college level.”
Escaping some of his old chores and joining Dunbar’s football team helped Jackson change, but it took much more than that. As a freshman, his grades were still marginal, and so were his leadership skills.
The first factor in the turnaround may have been his mother’s threat to move him to a school that didn’t have football if he didn’t get his act together.
Another part of the transformation was Play It Smart, a mentoring program in 136 urban high schools that uses kids’ passion for football as a hook to help them develop as students and people.
Academic coaches run study halls, teach life skills, check with teachers, help with college selection and ACT preparation and set up field trips and community service projects.
“Johnathan bought into the whole theory of Play It Smart rather than just trying to be a great athlete,” Kowalski said.
Jackson also has gained from his two-year participation in “Know Your Heritage” a weekly television game show for Chicago-area high school students developed by Central City Productions and which airs on WPWR-Ch. 50. Each school’s four-student team answers questions about a variety of cultures and ethnic groups.
“I used to think he maybe was more popular for that than for football,” Dunbar coach Glen Johnson said.
Johnson himself has been a key to Jackson’s development. The coach quickly spotted leadership potential in him and gave the player as much responsibility as he could handle to nurture it.
Soon Jackson was working to avoid letting down his coach, and the result has been a younger version of the old-school Johnson. If players are goofing off in practice or the weight room or are slacking off in class, Jackson, a captain, will get on their cases.
If Johnson isn’t around, Jackson may even echo one of the coach’s typical lines: “There’s three sure things in life: death, taxes and us practicing until we get it right.”
“The thing with `J.J.’ is he does what you tell him to do,” Johnson said. “You can count on that.”
It’s no surprise then that when a Dunbar administrator asked Johnson to find a student to escort her goddaughter to a dance, he chose Jackson.
Jackson’s teammates seem to follow his lead, probably because he’s already doing what he wants them to do.
“I see he’s the first one on the field, and I want to be right behind him,” junior kicker Marcus George said. “He’s a leader to follow.
“Next year I want to be a leader like him.”
Jackson is comfortable being a role model, perhaps because others have failed him. His father has ignored him much of his life. An older cousin he admired dropped out of school.
“I want to be a role model because I want my two little sisters and my brother to do better than me,” Jackson said. “I want to be the first one in my immediate family to graduate from college.”
Jackson plans to major in business and perhaps become a restaurant executive. He has taken several culinary courses at Dunbar and has become a skilled cook, specializing in Italian and Mexican food and smothered pork chops.
He often cooks at the West Side church where his grandfather, John Jackson, is the pastor.
Johnathan currently hopes to attend Illinois and try out for the football team as a walk-on, but he’s considering other schools as well. In grammar school, he didn’t think about college. His goal then was simply fitting in.
“I used to pray for a D,” he said. “I just wanted to have fun.”
He’s all business now, which may be some restaurant chain’s gain and the Army’s loss.
“His grammar-school teachers don’t believe he’s the same person,” his mother said. “I never would have believed this could happen.”
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btemkin@tribune.com
