Pac Man Jones’ latest bodyguard is a sweet, white-haired man named Paul. He mans the door at Jones’ high-rise in Cincinnati, grinning at visitors and pointing out Jones’ 12th floor apartment buzzer. The label next to the button says, “Mr. and Mrs. Jones.” The elevator requires no code or key. The door to Jones’ apartment is unlocked. There is no music playing. There is no smell of anything other than baby powder. There is no one around except Pac Man’s fiancée, Tishana, his newborn daughter, Triniti, and the Bengals defensive back himself, in a white shirt and a black neck brace. The three of them are sitting on the couch, drinking water and watching TV.
It’s Saturday night at Pac Man’s place.
Pac Man Jones sitting around on a weekend night with his fiancée and his daughter is the NFL’s equivalent of Lindsay Lohan insisting she loves pancakes and appreciates the hard work done by traffic cops. Since he was drafted by the Tennessee Titans in 2005, Jones has been charged with everything from assault to felony vandalism to marijuana possession to public intoxication to disorderly conduct. Pac Man is by far the NFL’s most notorious miscreant –- the very definition of an athlete-gone-wild. Now he’s a happy homebody? Seems fishy.
But even an act would be a big step for Pac Man. Recall this is a guy so brazen and unconcerned with image that he went to a strip club the night before a meeting with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. In the NFL, where a four-game suspension is heavy, Jones was banned for the entire 2007 season -– at a personal cost of more than $1.2 million in salary. Even his mom, Deborah Jones, says Pac Man was “out of control” and “hotheaded.”
Sounds about right –- last week he was ordered to take anger management classes in addition to serving 200 hours of community service for his role in a nightclub shooting in Las Vegas four years ago that left a man paralyzed. Jones is supremely talented and insanely fast — less than a year ago, after several months out of football, he ran a 4.42 40 in a tryout for his current team –- but his list of transgressions (both real and alleged) is far longer than his list of accomplishments. In his NFL career, he has a whopping five interceptions and one sack. If this is an act, it’s an act with a tiny audience; not many will buy it.
But Jones is trying anyway. “What am I sorry for?” he says. “There are a million things.”
“I’m sorry for everything.”
