Jack Breedlove came into this world with another name and from a faraway place. Arriving without the usual compliment of fingers and toes, he was a child marked as different before the deeper defining differences revealed themselves. Born to a family that didn’t, couldn’t instinctively wrap its arms around him, he went years before being plugged into that basic human connection.
Today, here is Jack Breedlove: Eagle Scout. Fine student. Something of a cut-up, his coach says. The adopted son who provides as much anchorage as he has been given.
“When we first adopted Jack, people would say you guys are so good and blah, blah, blah. I’d just say, stop it,” said his mother, Kathryn. “Jack rescued us in a sense, coming into our lives. Maybe rescue isn’t the right term – but it has been an incredible life these last 12 years, living it with him and through his eyes.”
Jack also plays football for Maynard Jackson High. He’s a senior kicker – one of the best in Georgia, maybe even in the South and beyond, according to those who would rank high school place-kickers. He’s No. 2 in his recruiting class according to the website Prokicker.com.
It’s long been difficult to exactly cast the specialist kicker in the larger overall role of “football player.” As most of his kickoffs sail unreturnable into the end zone, Breedlove is just about never in position to hit anything. As for the one time he was, the 5-foot-8, 170-pounder jokes: “I wouldn’t say it was a tackle, more of a trip. ... I did it kind of sneakily, grabbed the horse collar and kind of stuck my leg out a little bit so (the kick returner) would trip over my leg and fall. He stumbled, and by that time the other people coming behind got to him. It was an assist trip.”
It is the kicker’s lot to start from a place just outside the nucleus of a football team – practicing off to one side, avoiding the bloodier aspects of a hard game – then gradually win his way into this “brotherhood,” to borrow a Dan Quinn-ism. Then who could possibly be better suited to the task than young Breedlove? Who among any collection of teenagers could have more experience fitting himself into every opening on life’s pegboard, no matter the shape, than someone who has been practicing that forever?
To be adopted is to be adaptive. If there is any doubt about the Jack’s ability to adapt and move on, think about this recent exchange between an 18-year-old and his mother, unlike most any you’re likely to hear:
Jack: “I really don’t have any recollection of me as a little kid. I don’t know my birth name, to be honest. All I know is my name is Lawrence. Lawrence Foster. And add another name, Jack (his preferred nickname borrowed from both his adoptive parents’ grandfathers).
“Wait, what is my birth name?”
Kathryn: “It is, I don’t know how you pronounce it, it’s Y-i-l-o-n-g.
“The way Chinese do their names, that could be a surname, I don’t know.”
Jack: “Wait, Y-
(His mother spells it out again)
Jack, sounding it out: “EE-long. What’s my last name?”
Kathryn: “I have no idea, baby.”
The child born in Lanzhou in the northwest of China is now the young man who is taking Mandarin as a second language in high school and sorting through small U.S. colleges – again looking for a fit – where he might broaden his experience even more and kick a football.
Just call him Jack. That’s enough, he said.
There is almost no aspect of his coming-to-America story, or, for that matter, his coming-to-that-distinctly-American-game-of-football story, that is in any way commonplace.
Jack arrived in America at the age of 6, having already lived in at least two different orphanages in China. It wasn’t the Breedloves, though, who originally adopted him, rather a couple in Michigan. But they had second thoughts and Jack became what’s known as a “disruption adoption.” Within three days of being notified of the situation in 2006, the Breedloves, who had been trying to adopt for four years, were in Michigan beginning the process of making Jack their son.
As his father Jeff is fond of saying, “Jack is our proof that God is real.”
Credit: Bob Andres
Credit: Bob Andres
Some 7,600 miles from where he was born, Jack Breedlove began anew. Everything was unfamiliar, the language, the customs, the swirl of life around their Atlanta neighborhood. His first Halloween, he couldn’t believe you’d knock on strangers’ doors and they’d just hand a costumed kid candy. And why, in December, would anyone sit in the lap of a white-bearded fat man and petition him for toys?
The discovery of kicking a football was the purest kind of serendipity. The discoveries weren’t over for Jack, even at 15. For no other reason than the fact the Breedloves had some coupons, they went as a family to the College Football Hall of Fame downtown. Inside is a replica football field in miniature with a big yellow goalpost. A soccer player by this time, Jack never had really kicked a ball that wasn’t perfectly round. Go head, try kicking this oblong one, his grandfather Jimmy Breedlove challenged him.
“Jack is very shy. I was stunned when he said yes, he’d kick. So, he kicked, once or twice,” Jeff said.
Jack liked it.
“I kicked the first one and it went through. It wasn’t pretty, but it went through,” Jack said. “There wasn’t a lot of running – just three steps, kick the ball and get off the field. So, I decided to do that.”
Feeding his son’s interest, Jeff started taking Jack to the nearest high school, Maynard Jackson, to practice. “I’m a glorified ball boy,” said dad, explaining his purpose in the process.
Jackson coach Eric Williams picks up the story from there: “One day my guys were headed out to practice and they saw him kicking. They said, ‘Coach, there’s a little Chinese-looking kid out here, that joker can kick.’
“I said, ‘What?’
“‘No, that joker can kick, coach. We got to get him.’”
And, thus, a high school kicker was born.
Williams had little enough experience dealing with kickers – for a few years he even went without one, it being easier to go for it on fourth down than to find someone in his metro neighborhood capable of kicking a ball high and straight. Let alone one who, as he stands on the Jackson sideline awaiting a summons to kick, habitually will hang his helmet over his right hand, obscuring the fact that’s the one missing four fingers.
That may have been an obstacle to overcome when Jack was tying knots and doing chin-ups on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout. But certainly not kicking a football. Turns out that having just three toes on your kicking foot is just as much a non-issue.
“You would never notice, especially soccer style, when you kick off to the side and top of the foot,” said former Georgia kicker Marshall Morgan, who occasionally tutors Jack.
“He gets the ball up quick, and to a lot of college coaches, that’s a big difference maker. A lot of high school kickers can make a 40-yarder but how quick does the ball get up? That’s everything,” Morgan said.
“And he’s very disciplined.”
Because the sequence of snap-hold-kick has been a particularly erratic one at Jackson, Jack’s results have been spotty. His highlights: A 47-yarder as a freshman in a playoff game at Dodge County and a 36-yarder against Grady his junior year inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the first field goal by a high schooler inside the new building. When all is in sync, the strength and accuracy of his leg is obvious.
As his senior season has wound down, his weekends have been spent on the road with his father, unofficially visiting mostly smaller, Division III or FCS schools around the South. He has a couple of offers in hand, but hasn’t yet committed.
On the road with dad can be a sometimes tedious exercise, but Jeff tries to break up the drive with offbeat stops along the way – like Graceland or the Patton Museum at Fort Knox or any state capitol building they pass. If there’s a barbeque joint of any renown on the route, they’ll hit it. And the two make a point to stop at some strange high school on each trip and, if a gate to the field is open, kick a few field goals there just to say they did.
These are just a few of the moments recorded on the mound of photographs that ate the Breedlove’s kitchen table. Jeff insists he’s going to get around to organizing them in albums. “And we’ve got thousands more,” Jack said.
These are the memories that bind. There are others, too, that no father presses between the pages of an album. But when you are fully family, you’re part of all it’s history, good and painful.
That Jeff has so much time to spend with his son now is partially the product of his 2016 arrest for a bizarre drug-fueled episode that resulted in him being charged with filing a false report of a crime to police. The event made the news because he was at the time the chief of staff for DeKalb County Commissioner Nancy Jester. The hidden addiction of a long-time local political operative had become all too public.
Fired from his post, going through three months of rehab, still performing his community-service obligations while re-plotting the course of his work life, Jeff’s connection to his son and his football has been a welcome, therapeutic constant.
Asked how he reacted to the news of his father’s great stumble, especially given the insecurities that understandably could live within an adopted child, Jack only said, “Life goes on. You can’t worry about that.”
“Jack has been strong. He has been my inspiration. I’ve heard Jack answer more than one person this way, that you can’t really let it get you down, that you just keep going,” Jeff said. “If you look back at all Jack has been through literally from birth – all children are special and wonderful, I get that – but he’s one of the strongest people I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t just survive. He excels.”
Add it up. Orphaned child from western China who spotted everyone else his age in his new country a big head-start in language and local culture. The physical differences that further distanced him from his new peers. The drive not only to play catch-up, but to get out in front – and sometimes that means kicking a football through some uprights with everyone in the place watching him. The revelation that the family that wanted him also needed him.
The sum:
“The reality is I don’t think we’re that different from most families,” Jack’s father said. “We’ve had moments of great happiness and great blessings and we’ve had some low points. And I certainly caused most of those low points.
“I think Jack has laughed and cried in this family; he has been happy and sad; he has been bored and excited. I think we have given him an American life.
“And I think Jack has given us a life.”
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