From sneaking onto the football team to signing with the Vikings, Jacky Chen has been a hit.

The words “cunning little boy” don’t come to mind when you stand opposite Jacky Chen.

Chen is 6-4. He weighs 302 pounds. He’s a boulder with tattoos.

But ask Jacky or his mom or anyone else who knows him, and they’ll tell you that Jacky’s unlikely football journey would never have started, let alone made it to the NFL as an undrafted Vikings rookie, if Jacky hadn’t been very ” sneaky little boy” with mom. Football was played against him seven years ago.

“He tricked me into playing football,” says his mother, June. “I still haven’t gotten over it.”

He sounds like he’s joking. But not completely.

June and her husband Tony were born in Beijing. They are June and Tony, but their first names are Jia and Tao. Neither had heard of American football until long after they moved to New York as newlyweds so Tony could open a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan in 1994.

They had their children in the United States. First came Rita, then Jacky. Rita swam so well that the University of Maine awarded her a scholarship. Jackie loved soccer, played Madden every day, and still spent seven years in the pool doing breaststroke because it was safer than soccer and easier for June to drop both kids off at the same place after school.

One day Jacky told June that he was “retired” from swimming. He asked how she was going to spend after school. His response? You guessed it. Football.

“I said, ‘Oh no. No no. It’s not good,” June said. “‘It’s collisions. It’s too much impact on your body. You get concussions. You’re going to be out of your mind when you get old.’ All I heard about football was reports of retired NFL players and all the dangers of them bumping into each other and what it did to them.”

Jacky wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was a sophomore at Port Jefferson High School on Long Island.

“I wanted to play football so bad I had to do something,” he said. “Whatever it takes.”

Jacky had a Port Jefferson football license in hand. He waited a moment while June was distracted. He gave her the ticket. Literally and figuratively.

“I said, ‘Mom, you have to sign this,'” Jacky said. “I said, ‘It’s for field trips.'”

Two weeks later, June asked Jacky where he had been after school.

Jacky got angry. He said he was at soccer practice. He said his father “was cool with it.” June softened because Jacky, “that sneaky little boy, loves football so, so much.” He even went to one of her high school games.

“I grew up in China; it’s not our culture, so when I watched the game, I didn’t understand,” June said. “This sport is crazy.”

Jacky played the offense. He was 6-4 but “240 pounds, wet” his senior year. No colleges were interested except Pace University, a Division II school where Chen played on the Westchester County campus in upstate New York.

“At our level, we have to promote long-armed kids who are skinny and pray we can develop them,” said Conor Gilmartin-Donohue, Pace’s offensive coordinator.

“Also, he was a 6-5 kid named Jacky Chen, so he kind of got everybody’s attention,” added Stephen Gruber, Pace’s defensive coordinator and scout of Jacky.

Not on anyone’s list

Chen planned to sit out his freshman year in 2018 because he was not ready to play. Then Pace lost four offensive linemen in one week. Chen was forced to start at left tackle against Long Island University-Post’s Jake Carlock, who was turning heads in the NFL.

“Let’s just say Jacky had a blast. To say the least,” Gilmartin-Donohue said.

“But the cool thing about Jacky is that he never flinched,” Gruber said. “Jacky has a unique ability to always be positive.”

Chen didn’t turn heads in 2019, but the pandemic wiped out the 2020 season.

“As you can imagine, Westchester County’s restrictions were probably the toughest anywhere,” Gilmartin-Donohue said. “There wasn’t much we could do. Jacky and some other O-linemen snuck into the weight room to lift. People were upset. Jacky just wanted to get better.”

Chen doesn’t. Not that year. Pace finished 2-8.

“Things just weren’t clicking for Jacky,” Pace head coach Andy Rondeau said. “Her junior year was rough, man. Rough.”

Chen’s senior year, Pace opened with East Stroudsburg and its NFL draftee Deshawn McCarthy, who had three sacks against Pace the year before.

NFL agent Joe Linta, who lives an hour away in New Haven, Conn., came to see McCarthy and ended up putting Jacky on the NFL map.

“By the end of the first quarter, I wasn’t interested in McCarthy,” Linta said. “I’m about to leave and Jacky caught my attention.”

Linta went home and called a bunch of his NFL contacts in scouting, asking about the man who dominated Deshawn McCarthy.

“Every single one of them said, ‘No, not anywhere on our list,'” Linta said. “He wasn’t on nobody list.”

Linta has been doing this for a while. He once represented three-fifths of the Vikings offensive line of Matt Birk, Mike Rosenthal and Adam Goldberg. Last year, Linta got eight clients to make the NFL team when she didn’t get an invite to the scout association.

Linta got word of Chen, who played well during the 6-4 season. Twenty NFL teams showed up on Pace’s campus. The 49ers did an individual workout. The East-West Shrine Bowl gave him an invitation, and he held his own.

“It was mental against Di and Power Five guys,” Chen said. “If I can do here [pointing to his head] I can do it because I’m as big and strong as them.”

Linta has a special relationship with Jamaal Stephenson, the Vikings’ senior director of personnel. Stephenson went to Brown University. Linta’s son played quarterback at Brown. Ten minutes after the end of the draft, when the Vikings didn’t select any offensive linemen, Chen was on the team.

“It wasn’t a difficult negotiation,” Linta said. “I could have gotten Jacky for a couple of spots. The Vikings liked him. Jacky is a perfect practice squad player who can develop into a guy who can definitely play in this league if they’re patient with him.”

Asian Americans in the NFL

June, meanwhile, is coming to the side of football. Slightly. Thinking 2022 would be her son’s last year of football, June and Tony attended every one of Jacky’s games.

Now Jacky Chen, 22, is one of eight Asian-Americans in this year’s NFL rookie class. June is proud of the achievement and probably knows deep down that Jacky’s independent streak can be traced back to her parents and the American dream that comes true every morning when they open their restaurant, Tao’s Bao, in Stony Brook, Long Island.

“We were young, shipwrecked, coming here,” June said. “Just get away from home. Just get away from your parents. Be free.”

Jacky’s girlfriend Kayla is pregnant. June was not happy at first.

“I wanted to kill him,” he said it. “In my culture, if you don’t get married, you don’t have children.”

But

“I’m in love with the baby that’s coming here soon,” she said.

It’s a boy. And he might have the perfect birthday for the next generation of free-spirited Chens.

“The due date,” Jacky says with a proud fatherly smile, “is the 4th of July.”