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Revealing New Profile Of Chip Kelly
By Tim McManus | July 24, 2015 at 12:15 pm
Babb spoke with his ex-wife, Jennifer Jenkins, who met Kelly when she was a senior at New Hampshire. She remains in contact with the Eagles head coach.
In 2011, Jenkins read an article in the New York Times that described bachelor coaches and how, even in the image-conscious and political world of college football, Kelly had never been married.
“Why does everything say that you weren’t married?” Jenkins said a friend recently asked her. “I just roll my eyes.”
It used to hurt, she says, as if seven years of her life had been washed away. But now she finds the humor in it. Jenkins’s former coworkers knew the real story, and a friend joked about calling a sports radio show to reveal that the friend had been in Kelly’s wedding party. After enough strangers told Jenkins they didn’t believe her, she began carrying a wedding photograph on her iPhone. “Nobody talks about it,” she said. “But everybody knows.”
Why, Jenkins sometimes asked herself, was this considered a secret? It didn’t seem like one to her, and if it was, the artificial intrigue was either the most NFL thing ever or the most boring secret of all time. The truth was no more scandalous than Kelly’s middle name (Edward) or how he spent those six years between playing at New Hampshire and graduating (coaching junior varsity football, Jenkins said, and working as a gym teacher as he slowly completed his degree requirements).
As for the marriage, the years had simply come and gone in New Hampshire, Kelly an assistant on his mentor Bill Bowes’s staff and Jenkins working at the university. They lived in Durham for a while, and then Kelly took a coaching job at Johns Hopkins, moving to Baltimore for one year while Jenkins remained in New Hampshire.
Kelly rejoined Bowes’s staff yet again in 1994, and four years later he and Jenkins had begun to drift apart. They were no longer living together, and in 1999 they divorced.
By Tim McManus | July 24, 2015 at 12:15 pm
Babb spoke with his ex-wife, Jennifer Jenkins, who met Kelly when she was a senior at New Hampshire. She remains in contact with the Eagles head coach.
In 2011, Jenkins read an article in the New York Times that described bachelor coaches and how, even in the image-conscious and political world of college football, Kelly had never been married.
“Why does everything say that you weren’t married?” Jenkins said a friend recently asked her. “I just roll my eyes.”
It used to hurt, she says, as if seven years of her life had been washed away. But now she finds the humor in it. Jenkins’s former coworkers knew the real story, and a friend joked about calling a sports radio show to reveal that the friend had been in Kelly’s wedding party. After enough strangers told Jenkins they didn’t believe her, she began carrying a wedding photograph on her iPhone. “Nobody talks about it,” she said. “But everybody knows.”
Why, Jenkins sometimes asked herself, was this considered a secret? It didn’t seem like one to her, and if it was, the artificial intrigue was either the most NFL thing ever or the most boring secret of all time. The truth was no more scandalous than Kelly’s middle name (Edward) or how he spent those six years between playing at New Hampshire and graduating (coaching junior varsity football, Jenkins said, and working as a gym teacher as he slowly completed his degree requirements).
As for the marriage, the years had simply come and gone in New Hampshire, Kelly an assistant on his mentor Bill Bowes’s staff and Jenkins working at the university. They lived in Durham for a while, and then Kelly took a coaching job at Johns Hopkins, moving to Baltimore for one year while Jenkins remained in New Hampshire.
Kelly rejoined Bowes’s staff yet again in 1994, and four years later he and Jenkins had begun to drift apart. They were no longer living together, and in 1999 they divorced.
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