ELOY, Ariz. — Levi Jones' path from this poor desert town to the first round of the NFL draft and Cincinnati is anything but typical. His only state title, for example, came as a member of the high school math team.

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Levi Jones stands beside the symbol of Arizona, a Saguaro Cactus, at Picaho Peak State Park near his boyhood home of Eloy. (Glenn Hartong photos) 600 | 800 | 1024

        Yes, he started for two years on his high school football team. And at 6feet5, 220 pounds, he was one of the biggest kids around as a senior and certainly showed some talent. But there are people in this town of 10,000 who say young Levi was a better trumpet player than football player.

        He won a full academic scholarship to Arizona State University, an hour up the road in Tempe, after graduating seventh in a class of 125. He was a walk-on to the football team in college.

        “If you would have asked me when he was a senior if he would be a rocket scientist or a football player, I would have said rocket scientist,” says Bill Askew, chairman of the math department and junior-varsity football coach at Santa Cruz Valley Union High School. “I'm serious.”

        It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize Jones is different. He is leaving Eloy but wants to create a legacy far beyond what he already has accomplished.

        He wants to give back to the people — relatives, teachers and coaches — who gave to him.

        “It was a long road,” Jones says, “and I probably wouldn't have made it without them.”

Joyce Robinson, Jones's mother, worked two jobs to support her family and pushed him to get an education. ZOOM |

        The riches that will come with being the 10th overall pick will enable the Bengals' new left tackle to be generous. He will finance an entire youth sports league, for instance, in a town where Census figures show that 40 percent of school-aged children live in poverty.

        And he will set up an incentive program that rewards Eloy schoolchildren for good grades. He knows that idea works. An aunt, Erma Smith, promised Levi that if he made the honor role every quarter in elementary and high school, she would buy him a car before he went to college. He drove a Dodge Neon to Tempe in August 1997.

        Jones embraces the role of role model in Eloy. He has come back since he became a football star at Arizona State to give motivational speeches at schools. He had to decline an invitation from the senior class to speak at commencement this year. He will be in Cincinnati.

        But the biggest thank-you will go to his mother.

"You can't take education away'

        Joyce Robinson is 60 years old, and Levi is the youngest of her three children. Each has a different father, none of whom stuck around. LeRoy Jones skipped town to Phoenix not long after he named the baby after his own father.

        Robinson was left to raise the children on her own. She worked two jobs, in a factory by day and selling cosmetics door-to-door by night. She pushed Levi to be a top student.

Jones looks at the weights he and his brother used in the backyard of his boyhood home. | ZOOM |

        “You can't take education away from a person,” Robinson is saying in the living room of her three-bedroom bungalow. Iron bars line the windows and doors. A chain-link fence surrounds the property.

        “There's a lot of crime, a lot of addicts,” Jones says. “I want to get her out of here.”

        If Levi brought home a “B” on his report card or a test, Mom would call the teacher to find out if he was paying attention in class.

        The proudest day of her life was not April 20, when her youngest child completed his improbable journey to the NFL. No, it came in December, when Levi participated in the graduation ceremony at Arizona State. He is completing an independent-study course that will make official a bachelor's degree in exercise science and a minor in business administration. He is the family's first college graduate.

        Still, Levi says, all his mother's work and her worrying eventually got to her. Robinson has not been able to work since Levi was in high school. She had what Levi and his sister, Bolivia Carter, call a “nervous breakdown.”

        “All those years of doing for everybody else finally caught up with her,” says Carter, 35, who lives with her mother and has a state job.

        “Some people call it depression; I take medication,” Robinson says. “I did my best with my kids. I worked hard to make sure they had what they needed. I couldn't really afford the $120 Nikes that Levi wanted. But I got them. I got my other son (Fred Robinson, 28) a television. I wanted to give them the things they wanted.”

        Joyce Robinson had help bringing up Levi — from her neighbors in Eloy's tight-knit black community, from Hispanic friends who lived on the other side of the tracks, and from her father, who bought the house next door so he could be a consistent presence in Levi's life.

Jones drives past his grandfather's house. | ZOOM |

        The Rev. Votie Smith, a Pentecostal preacher, had brought his family from Texas to the Eloy area in the black migration of the 1940s. There was work in the irrigated cotton fields of southeast Arizona.

        Levi, as a high school student, worked as a janitor at the West Side Church of God in Christ, the second of two church buildings the pastor built. Levi was at the church every Saturday, battling the dust that coated the floor and pews and making sure the restrooms were clean.

        His pay: $30 a month.

        “Now I see that it was a good thing. I didn't then,” Jones saysof the discipline doled out by his grandfather, who died last year. “He taught me hard work. He was the foundation. He made sure, from a moral standpoint, that I was correct. He basically taught me everything that my father should have taught me.”

Jones stops at his grandfather's church. | ZOOM |

        As a boy, Levi rarely heard from his father.

        “I would run into him if I was visiting his mother,” Jones says.“He never was really a part of my life. It's nothing I'm mad or upset about. My mother and grandfather did a good job raising me. So there was no lacking there. It was just his choice. I just say he made the wrong decision.”

        LeRoy Jones watched his son's athletic career blossom at Arizona State. And as it grew more apparent that Levi would be a first- or second-round draft pick, his father contacted him more frequently. Levi finally had to speak bluntly.

        “He has tried to contact me and try to work things out, 22 years later,” Jones is saying while driving his new Cadillac Escalade south on Interstate 10 from Tempe, through the Gila River Indian Reservation, to Eloy.

        “I'm like: "Look, I'm not mad. But the situation is this: My mother did all the work, and she deserves all the credit. There's nothing else that can go on here. I'm not upset. I'm not mad. You lived your life. Now it's time for me to live mine.'”

Town built character

        Family alone didn't shape Levi Jones' character.

        Eloy helped.

        It is a city of 10,375 — 75 percent Hispanic, 10 percent African-American — whose Main Street turned into a ghost town a few years ago when factory-outlet shops went up a few miles north at Casa Grande. Eloy hadn't exactly thrived before then, either, because the interstate was built too far from town.

        Growing up poor in rural Arizona affected Jones every bit as much as growing up poor in urban Los Angeles or Denver af fected some of his college teammates. He hungered for success.

        “I let them know I came from a ghetto, too, that their ghetto was just a little bigger than mine,” Jones says. “But the biggest thing growing up in Eloy did is make me appreciate what I do have and what my blessings are.”

Jones (left) works out with his heir apparent, Regis Crawford, at the Arizona State training complex in Tempe. | ZOOM |

        Jones would take several teammates back to Eloy for church services, for dinner with his family, for a glimpse of his past. Regis Crawford was one of them.

        “A lot of people have helped him from way back, and he won't forget where he comes from,” Crawford is saying on an Arizona State practice field. “So if he sees someone who needs help and is trying to help himself, he won't mind coming out there to help him.”

        When Crawford was struggling last month in spring practice to move from guard and learn Jones' old position of left tackle, Jones pulled him aside and started working with him on technique.

        That, Crawford knew, was the Eloy in Jones.

        To drive around Eloy is to see a town fighting its demise. Amid vacant store fronts on Main Street on Tuesday afternoon, the Western Auto store and the Rexall pharmacy are the lone businesses that can claim even a handful of customers. The marquee of a boarded-up movie house reads, “Lord, bless the city of Eloy.”

        Thanks to taxes paid by a power plant that complements state funding, the schools are good. The city's only high school, Santa Cruz Valley Union, boasts the largest and greenest swaths of grass in town — the football, baseball and softball fields.

Visiting his high school, Jones hugs librarian Laurie Player. | ZOOM |

        Top students get financial aid to attend ASU or the University of Arizona, about an hour south of Eloy in Tucson.

        For a small town, Eloy, surprisingly, has produced four other NFL players. Brothers Benny Malone (a running back for the Dolphins in the mid-1970s) and Art Malone (a running back for the Falcons in the early '70s) graduated from Santa Cruz Valley Union and played at Arizona State. Their mother, the late Izola Malone, was a founding member of the West Side Church of God in Christ, and her name is engraved in the cornerstone.

        The Cade brothers also are from Eloy. Mossy Cade played cornerback for the Packers for two seasons in the mid-'80s, and Eddie Cade was a safety for the Patriots in 1995.

        But Levi Jones is the name everyone knows now in Eloy.

        Ruby James, principal of Eloy Intermediate School, is an African-American who uses Jones as an example for her students. James, who grew up around the corner from Joyce Robinson's house, watched the draft on ESPN, and the moment the Bengals selected Jones, her phone started ringing. The whole town was abuzz.

Jones hands out Bengals hats and T-shirts to his high school coach, Jay Denton. | ZOOM |

        “Levi represents all of us,” she says. “For the young black men in our community, his life says, "Dreams can come true. You can get out of Eloy.' But it's twofold. He got out of Eloy, but he's still part of Eloy.

        “He comes down and visits his mom. And you see him walking down to Lucky Star (grocery store). He's real, and it probably will mean even more once he starts playing in Cincinnati.”

        Dressed in matching Bengals cap, T-shirt and shorts, Jones makes a stop Tuesday at the high school to visit his coach, Jay Denton, the first person to suggest to Levi he could be something special as a football player.

        “It's the greatest thing in the world,” says Denton, who has to pause a couple of times to prevent himself from crying.

Motto: Work before fun

        Levi Jones' focus is the reason he earned an academic scholarship. Long before the NFL became a possibility, he figured he would be a physical therapist.

        “I thought I was going to be the one working on the athletes, not one of the athletes being worked on,” he says.

        Jones' seriousness also accounts for his rise from walk-on to first-round NFL draft pick. Applying the same motto — work before fun — he got into the weight room at Arizona State as a true freshman. Within a few months, he had put on some 40 pounds of muscle and lost his last bit of baby fat. A move to offensive line, where he succeeded while playing alongside Marvel Smith, now with the Steelers, showed Jones he was good enough for a shot at the NFL.

        He's just as intent on giving back to the people of Eloy.

        Walking through Picacho Peak State Park, a few miles south of Eloy on I-10, Jones is careful not to get too close to any brush. He stays in open spaces.

        “Rattlesnakes, Gila monsters,” says Jones, grinning slightly. “I know a lot about stuff I'm afraid of.”

        Does he fear defensive ends? “Nah. It helps being a former defensive lineman,” he says. “I know everything they were going to try — at least I did in college.”

        He turns serious when the talk turns to his future with the Bengals.

        “I know, eventually, they are expecting me to play left tackle and start at left tackle,” says Jones, measuring each word, so as not to offend an elder. “But, for now, they have a good one, a Pro Bowl guy in Richmond Webb.

        “I just hope I can learn from him and get all his insight and hope it's not an awkward situation. I'm not trying to step on any toes and say, "I'm going to be the starter.' He's a tremendous player. He's earned it. And when he's ready to give it up, I'll be ready to take it over.”

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