JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The only time they’ve seen each other face-to-face in recent months was over burrito bowls.
This feels entirely wrong for Travis and Trevor Etienne, brothers separated by only about an hour’s drive, but also by careers that demand nearly all of their time. Usually, when they are in close proximity, it is within orbit of their mother’s kitchen, where there’s always a real, home-cooked, authentically Cajun meal waiting — smothered pork chops with corn and rice for Travis or turkey necks with mustard greens with ham hock for Trevor. There’s no place the Etienne brothers would rather be than crowded around Donnetta Etienne’s table. But this meetup wasn’t about the food. It was business: a commercial shoot for Chipotle, starring big brother Travis, an emerging NFL star for the Jacksonville Jaguars, and little brother Trevor, an emerging SEC star for the Florida Gators.
The script goes like this: Trevor is running through football drills. Travis is nearby, shouting advice, critiquing each move, timing each step. Trevor responds, again and again, with an exasperated, “Bro?” Then the pair retires to Chipotle, where Trevor places his order — a bowl with chicken, white rice, cheese and lettuce — which Travis immediately compliments as the perfect selection.
It is marketing. It is also a genuine window into their relationship.
Flash back to Trevor’s senior season at Jennings High in 2021. He was coming off a leg injury that required surgery and upended his sophomore campaign. He was tentative, worried about aggravating the injury. Travis was on the sideline for the game.
“Bro?” Travis yelled. “You going to stop playing soft or what?”
Flash back to 2022, Travis’ second season with the Jags. He was having fumble issues, putting the ball on the ground twice in three games. In the locker room before his next contest, Travis picked up his phone and saw a text from his little brother.
This is how it’s been their whole lives. Travis as mentor, Trevor as protégé; Travis as prospect, Trevor as critic. They did it on the playground; on the basketball courts down the road from the house where they grew up; through hundreds of miles of distance between Jennings, Louisiana, and Clemson, South Carolina; and now, in front of the cameras for a burrito company.
They never dreamed they’d be here, Travis said — famous and cameras rolling. But this was part of the plan, a plan to stay true to their roots, to stick together at all costs, and to always look out for each other.
“It’s crazy to see people interested in us, and we’re just being ourselves,” Travis said. “It’s just cool to see where football has taken us.”
HOW FAR HAS football taken the Etienne brothers?
They started out in Jennings, Louisiana — population 9,837 — as big fish in a small pond. It’s the type of place where roots run deep and few roads lead to someplace better.
Sports were Donnetta’s way of keeping her boys away from the seedier elements of town.
“We kind of sheltered them from the drugs and alcohol and gangs,” Donnetta said. “You finish practice and school, you’re tired. So we did a three-sport household for each kid, and that kept them off the streets, kept them rooted and grounded in their books. It was a good formula.”
Travis was a superstar from the first time he touched a football, running for five touchdowns in his first Pee Wee game.
Trevor was the chubby kid who followed in Travis’ footsteps — “the annoying little brother he was always trying to get rid of,” Trevor said.
Trevor is six years younger than Travis. He’s the more outgoing of the two and is eager to speak his mind. Travis is a cutup in small groups of close friends or around Donnetta’s house with family, but in public, he mostly keeps quiet. Trevor, on the other hand, has a ready-made line for all occasions. James Estes, who served as offensive coordinator at Jennings High during both brothers’ time there, remembers Trevor showing up late for practice one day. He watched as Trevor made his way across the practice field, Estes waiting to dress him down.
“Where have you been?” Estes yelled.
Trevor shook his head.
“Coach,” he said, “you won’t believe it. Bigfoot grabbed me, and he stole my car.”
The whole team burst out laughing. How could Estes be mad now?
“You knew he’d been thinking about that for the 20 minutes it had taken him to get to practice,” Estes said.
When he was young, Travis hated having his little brother always in tow. He’d leave the house to play with friends, and Trevor would sneak out behind him, popping out of the shadows at the opportune time to join the older kids.
Eventually, though, Travis saw the advantage of having a teammate with him everywhere he went. Travis was tall and lean and lightning quick and a playground legend around Jennings. Trevor, on the other hand, was small and unassuming, easy to overlook. He was Travis’ secret weapon.
“Everyone always underestimated him, but he was always the best one,” Travis said. “I’d always pick him first, and we’d always win.”
Still, the narrative persisted: There was Travis, and there was Travis’ little brother.
This isn’t a matter of conflict, both men insist. They never cared. But the dynamic had a way of carving out roles for each.
Travis was the trailblazer, the kid who was destined to find his way to someplace beyond Jennings. He had so much natural ability as a runner, he couldn’t fail, but much of his evolution into a well-rounded player came by trial and error. Former Clemson teammate Darien Rencher remembers practices when the Tigers’ staff tried to use Travis as a slot receiver, and he didn’t even know how to get into a stance at the line of scrimmage. It took him years to refine that skill set before he blossomed into one of the better receivers out of the backfield.
Trevor witnessed his share of those practices on visits to Clemson. He got the message loud and clear that, to be a running back in the NFL, he’d need to do more than run.
“Trevor showed up for [a recruiting] camp at Clemson, maybe his sophomore year,” Rencher said, “and he’s out there running legit routes. We joked with Travis, like, dang your little brother learned this way before you did.”
Trevor wasn’t as naturally gifted as his older brother, but the lessons imparted by Travis gave him a road map that allowed him to flourish, too, and, in many ways, blossom into a better all-around player at an earlier age than Travis.
Travis’ success was predestined. Trevor’s success was calculated.
“Trevor had a cheat code,” Rencher said. “He had a front-row seat to just absorb everything Travis might not have even known he was given — all that experience and wisdom and expertise.”
But the rewards flowed in both directions. Knowing his younger brother was watching was always the push Travis needed to keep refining his game and, perhaps more importantly, to take each step away from the field carefully, intentionally. Even his surprising decision to return to Clemson for his senior season, he said, was made in part to show Trevor the value of a degree, of finishing a job once it’s started.
“I feel like it put pressure on him,” Trevor said. “Everything he does is magnified because I’m watching. He had to be his best at every moment to make sure I’m doing the right things.”
Trevor watched, so Travis worked.
Travis succeeded, so Trevor followed.
“They would always compete with each other,” Estes said. “They pushed each other harder than any of us could ever push them.”
It wasn’t by design exactly, but it proved to be the perfect blueprint.
TRAVIS DOMINATED DURING his time at Jennings. He went to college at Clemson, where he won a national title and carved his name into the ACC record books, setting the conference mark for rushing yards and touchdowns, and an NCAA record by scoring a touchdown in 46 career games. Then he was selected in the first round of the 2021 NFL draft by the Jacksonville Jaguars. This year, he’s one of just two running backs in the NFL with 500 yards and seven touchdowns through seven games.
Trevor, too, was a star runner at Jennings, where he was arguably a more versatile back than his older brother, even filling in at QB as a senior after the team’s starter was injured. Trevor finished his high school career with nearly 2,500 rushing yards and 34 touchdowns, earning scholarship offers from across the country.
When Travis was at Clemson, Trevor would make the trip from Louisiana every chance he got. He desperately wanted to stay close to his older brother, and the distance back then, he said, actually brought them closer together. It forced them to cherish the time they spent with each other. But Trevor chose Florida not because it was close to his brother’s NFL home, but because it was separate from Travis’ own path. It was a chance for Trevor to strike out on his own, to create a story that was less epilogue to the Travis Etienne story and more an early chapter of the Trevor Etienne journey.
“I told my brother to go wherever you want to go,” Travis said. “But I told him no Clemson. I wanted him to carve out being his own man, and I felt like he was an SEC running back.”
Trevor never chafed at his brother’s long shadow, he said. At home, he was always his own man, Donnetta said. He got “Trevor criticism, not Travis criticism.” But truth is, Trevor liked being compared to Travis. After games at Jennings, he’d text Travis with his stat line, a challenge to big brother to match those numbers on Saturday.
“No matter what I do, I’ll still be his little brother,” Trevor said. “But I looked at it as someone to look up to. Him setting all those records was just pushing me, showing me what could be done.”
For his part, Travis was happy to defer praise. He doesn’t like talking about himself, but get him on the subject of Trevor’s football exploits and he can’t help but gush.
“He’d always make comments that Trevor was actually better than he was,” former Clemson running backs coach Tony Elliott said.
Ultimately, Trevor landed in the SEC, at Florida. Earlier this season, he ran for 173 yards and a touchdown in an upset win over Tennessee. On Saturday, he’ll play against Georgia (3:30 p.m. ET, CBS) in his big brother’s home turf in Jacksonville. In the Gators’ loss there last year, Trevor scored a touchdown.
”It was like, ‘I got a touchdown in big bro’s house,'” Donnetta said. “So I’m hoping we get two touchdowns in big bro’s house [this year]. It means everything to him to touch big bro’s end zone.”
IT’S 74 MILES from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville to EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville — “The Swamp to the Bank,” as Donnetta calls her weekly journey — but it’s funny how far that can seem amid the buzz of daily life. Usually, the brothers bridge the distance via the family group text or a home-cooked meal delivered by Donnetta in a cooler.
Donnetta is in Florida now, too. She likes to cook on Wednesdays, knowing it suits Travis’ practice schedule to come by for a meal that night. Travis once noted during a media session at Clemson that he’d added nearly eight pounds in eight days by bingeing on Popeye’s chicken during a visit home for spring break. He loves to eat, and so when Donnetta cooks, he stakes his claim. Travis cleans his plate, then insists on another helping because he knows any leftovers get packed up in the ice box for a trip to Gainesville.
Then Friday, Donnetta arrives at Florida with a meal for Trevor, which always feels a bit light.
“And I tell him it’s because your crybaby brother acts like I give you everything,” Donnetta said. “They’ll be fighting for the meat right out the pot.”
There’s only so much catfish or ribs or chicken-fried steak to go around. That’s worth the fight. But the Etiennes have never viewed success or fame or legacy as a zero-sum game. Living the dream was possible only if both brothers were a part of it.
This is the whole point. Success for the Etiennes isn’t some distant point when their careers are established and their bank accounts flush and their family secured for generations. It’s the journey they’re on, a journey that would be utterly exhausting alone but is instead a genuine adventure together.
There’s a bit of advice Travis once imparted to Trevor that’s always stuck with the younger Etienne: “He told me not to worry about leaving a legacy,” Trevor said, “but to live a legacy.”
But lately, Travis has been giving some thought to getting older. He’ll be 25 in January, a number that puts him in the prime of his life but somehow seems preposterous to him. Last year, he hosted Christmas for the whole family at his house. Donnetta cooked, and they all wore matching pajamas and watched Christmas movies. It was like old times, except that Travis was now the centerpiece — a grown man with a job, a house and a life that his whole family has invested in, too. His friends say he can still act like a kid in the right context, but in that moment, it became clear to him: He’s grown up.
Where did the time go? It’s actually watching Trevor play that makes him feel — not old, per se, but matured. Back at Jennings and at Clemson, he lived in the moment. The journey was one foot in front of the other, with daily calls or texts to Trevor, who mapped each step for later use. Now, Travis sees his brother following that path at Florida, and it’s a bit like a time capsule. It’s only when Trevor does it that Travis’ own journey feels real, that the details sink in and he can remember just how grueling and exhausting and exhilarating it all was.
After they’d finished shooting the commercial, their agent, Sam Leaf Ireifej, called Donnetta at home. On the set, Travis had shed his usually reserved demeanor and was instead cracking jokes and laughing loudly.
“I saw a different side of Travis,” Ireifej said.
Donnetta smiled. She’s heard this before.
“Well, of course,” she told him. “He was with Trevor.”
Thoroughbred racing suffered its most ignominious, industry-deflating moment 50 years ago today with the breakdown of Ruffian, an undefeated filly running against Foolish Pleasure in a highly promoted match race at Belmont Park. Her tragic end on July 6, 1975, was a catastrophe for the sport, and observers say racing has never truly recovered.
Two years earlier, during the rise of second-wave feminism, the nation had been mesmerized by a “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King’s win became a rallying cry for women everywhere. The New York Racing Association, eager to boost daily racing crowds in the mid-1970s, proposed a competition similar to that of King and Riggs. They created a match race between Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure and Ruffian, the undefeated filly who had dominated all 10 of her starts, leading gate to wire.
“In any sport, human or equine, it’s really impossible to say who was the greatest,” said outgoing Jockey Club chairman Stuart Janney III, whose parents, Stuart and Barbara, owned Ruffian. “But I’m always comfortable thinking of Ruffian as being among the four to five greatest horses of all time.”
Ruffian, nearly jet black in color and massive, was the equine version of a Greek goddess. At the age of 2, her girth — the measurement of the strap that secures the saddle — was just over 75 inches. Comparatively, racing legend Secretariat, a male, had a 76-inch girth when he was fully developed at the age of 4.
Her name also added to the aura. “‘Ruffian’ was a little bit of a stretch because it tended to be what you’d name a colt, but it turned out to be an appropriate name,” Janney said.
On May 22, 1974, Ruffian equaled a Belmont Park track record, set by a male, in her debut at age 2, winning by 15 lengths. She set a stakes record later that summer at Saratoga in the Spinaway, the most prestigious race of the year for 2-year-old fillies. The next spring, she blew through races at longer distances, including the three races that made up the so-called Filly Triple Crown.
Some in the media speculated that she had run out of female competition.
Foolish Pleasure had meanwhile ripped through an undefeated 2-year-old season with championship year-end honors. However, after starting his sophomore campaign with a win, he finished third in the Florida Derby. He also had recovered from injuries to his front feet to win the Wood Memorial and then the Kentucky Derby.
Second-place finishes in the Preakness and Belmont Stakes left most observers with the idea that Foolish Pleasure was the best 3-year-old male in the business.
Following the Belmont Stakes, New York officials wanted to test the best filly against the best colt.
The original thought was to include the Preakness winner, Master Derby, in the Great Match Race, but the team of Foolish Pleasure’s owner, trainer and rider didn’t want a three-horse race. Since New York racing had guaranteed $50,000 to the last-place horse, they paid Master Derby’s connections $50,000 not to race. Thus, the stage was set for an equine morality play.
“[Ruffian’s] abilities gave her the advantage in the match race,” Janney said. “If she could do what she did in full fields [by getting the early lead], then it was probably going to be even more effective in a match.”
Several ballyhooed match races in sports history had captured the world’s attention without incident — Seabiscuit vs. Triple Crown winner War Admiral in 1938, Alsab vs. Triple Crown winner Whirlaway in 1942, and Nashua vs. Swaps in 1955. None of those races, though, had the gender divide “it” factor.
The Great Match Race attracted 50,000 live attendees and more than 18 million TV viewers on CBS, comparable to the Grammy Awards and a pair of NFL “Sunday Night Football” games in 2024.
Prominent New York sportswriter Dick Young wrote at the time that, for women, “Ruffian was a way of getting even.”
“I can remember driving up the New Jersey Turnpike, and the lady that took the toll in one of those booths was wearing a button that said, ‘I’m for her,’ meaning Ruffian,” Janney said.
As the day approached, Ruffian’s rider, Jacinto Vasquez, who also was the regular rider of Foolish Pleasure including at the Kentucky Derby, had to choose whom to ride for the match race.
“I had ridden Foolish Pleasure, and I knew what he could do,” Vasquez told ESPN. “But I didn’t think he could beat the filly. He didn’t have the speed or stamina.”
Braulio Baeza, who had ridden Foolish Pleasure to victory in the previous year’s premier 2-year-old race, Hopeful Stakes, was chosen to ride Foolish Pleasure.
“I had ridden Foolish Pleasure and ridden against Ruffian,” Baeza said, with language assistance from his wife, Janice Blake. “I thought Foolish Pleasure was better than Ruffian. She just needed [early race] pressure because no one had ever pressured her.”
The 1⅛ mile race began at the start of the Belmont Park backstretch in the chute. In an ESPN documentary from 2000, Jack Whitaker, who hosted the race telecast for CBS, noted that the atmosphere turned eerie with dark thunderclouds approaching before the race.
Ruffian hit the side of the gate when the doors opened but straightened herself out quickly and assumed the lead. “The whole world, including me, thought that Ruffian was going to run off the screen and add to her legacy,” said longtime New York trainer Gary Contessa, who was a teenager when Ruffian ruled the racing world.
However, about ⅛ of a mile into the race, the force of Ruffian’s mighty strides snapped two bones in her front right leg.
“When she broke her leg, it sounded like a broken stick,” Vasquez said. “She broke her leg between her foot and her ankle. When I pulled up, the bone was shattered above the ankle. She couldn’t use that leg at all.”
It took Ruffian a few moments to realize what had happened to her, so she continued to run. Vasquez eventually hopped off and kept his shoulder leaning against her for support.
“You see it, but you don’t want to believe it,” Janney said.
Baeza had no choice but to have Foolish Pleasure finish the race in what became a macabre paid workout. The TV cameras followed him, but the eyes of everyone at the track were on the filly, who looked frightened as she was taken back to the barn area.
“When Ruffian broke down, time stood still that day,” Contessa said. Yet time was of the essence in an attempt to save her life.
Janney said that Dr. Frank Stinchfield — who was the doctor for the New York Yankees then and was “ahead of his time in fixing people’s bones” — called racing officials to see whether there was anything he could do to help with Ruffian.
New York veterinarian Dr. Manny Gilman managed to sedate Ruffian, performed surgery on her leg and, with Stinchfield’s help, secured her leg in an inflatable cast. When Ruffian woke up in the middle of the night, though, she started fighting and shattered her bones irreparably. Her team had no choice but to euthanize her at approximately 2:20 a.m. on July 7.
“She was going full bore trying to get in front of [Foolish Pleasure] out of the gate,” Baeza said. “She gave everything there. She gave her life.”
Contessa described the time after as a “stilled hush over the world.”
“When we got the word that she had rebroken her leg, the whole world was crying,” Contessa said. “I can’t reproduce the feeling that I had the day after.”
The Janneys soon flew to Maine for the summer, and they received a round of applause when the pilot announced their presence. At the cottage, they were met by thousands of well-wishing letters.
“We all sat there, after dinner every night, and we wrote every one of them back,” Janney said. “It was pretty overwhelming, and that didn’t stop for a long time. I still get letters.”
Equine fatalities have been part of the business since its inception, like the Triple Crown races and Breeders’ Cup. Some have generated headlines by coming in clusters, such as Santa Anita in 2019 and Churchill Downs in 2023. However, breakdowns are not the only factor, and likely not the most influential one, in the gradual decline of horse racing’s popularity in this country.
But the impact from the day of Ruffian’s death, and that moment, has been ongoing for horse racing.
“There are people who witnessed the breakdown and never came back,” Contessa said.
Said Janney: “At about that time, racing started to disappear from the national consciousness. The average person knows about the Kentucky Derby, and that’s about it.”
Equine racing today is a safer sport now than it was 50 years ago. The Equine Injury Database, launched by the Jockey Club in 2008, says the fatality rate nationally in 2024 was just over half of what it was at its launch.
“We finally have protocols that probably should have been in effect far sooner than this,” Contessa said. “But the protocols have made this a safer game.”
Said Vasquez: “There are a lot of nice horses today, but to have a horse like Ruffian, it’s unbelievable. Nobody could compare to Ruffian.”
ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
NEW YORK — A blunder that typifies the current state of the New York Yankees, who find themselves in the midst of their second six-game losing streak in three weeks, happened in front of 41,401 fans at Citi Field on Saturday, and almost nobody noticed.
The Yankees were jogging off the field after securing the third out of the fourth inning of their 12-6 loss to the Mets when shortstop Anthony Volpe, as is standard for teams across baseball at the end of innings, threw the ball to right fielder Aaron Judge as he crossed into the infield from right field.
Only Judge wasn’t looking, and the ball nailed him in the head, knocking his sunglasses off and leaving a small cut near his right eye. The wound required a bandage to stop the bleeding, but Judge stayed in the game.
“Confusion,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “I didn’t know what happened initially. [It just] felt like something happened. Of course I was a little concerned.”
Avoiding an injury to the best player in baseball was on the Yankees’ very short list of positives in another sloppy, draining defeat to their crosstown rivals. With the loss, the Yankees, who held a three-game lead over the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League East standings entering June 30, find themselves tied with the Tampa Bay Rays for second place three games behind the Blue Jays heading into Sunday’s Subway Series finale.
The nosedive has been fueled by messy defense and a depleted pitching staff that has encountered a wall.
“It’s been a terrible week,” said Boone, who before the game announced starter Clarke Schmidt will likely undergo season-ending Tommy John surgery.
For the second straight day, the Mets capitalized on mistakes and cracked timely home runs. After slugging three homers in Friday’s series opener, the Mets hit three more Saturday — a grand slam in the first inning from Brandon Nimmo to take a 4-0 lead and two home runs from Pete Alonso to widen the gap.
Nimmo’s blast — his second grand slam in four days — came after Yankees left fielder Jasson Dominguez misplayed a ball hit by the Mets’ leadoff hitter in the first inning. On Friday, he misread Nimmo’s line drive and watched it sail over his head for a double. On Saturday, he was slow to react to Starling Marte’s flyball in the left-center field gap and braked without catching or stopping it, allowing Marte to advance to second for a double. Yankees starter Carlos Rodon then walked two batters to load the bases for Nimmo, who yanked a mistake, a 1-2 slider over the wall.
“That slider probably needs to be down,” said Rodon, who allowed seven runs (six earned) over five innings. “A lot of misses today and they punished them.”
Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s throwing woes at third base — a position the Yankees have asked him to play to accommodate DJ LeMahieu at second base — continued in the second inning when he fielded Tyrone Taylor’s groundball and sailed a toss over first baseman Cody Bellinger’s head. Taylor was given second base and scored moments later on Marte’s RBI single.
The Yankees were charged with their second error in the Mets’ four-run seventh inning when center fielder Trent Grisham charged Francisco Lindor’s single up the middle and had it bounce off the heel of his glove.
The mistake allowed a run to score from second base without a throw, extending the Mets lead back to three runs after the Yankees had chipped their deficit, and allowed a heads-up Lindor to advance to second base. Lindor later scored on Alonso’s second home run, a three-run blast off left-hander Jayvien Sandridge in the pitcher’s major league debut.
“Just got to play better,” Judge said. “That’s what it comes down to. It’s fundamentals. Making a routine play, routine. It’s just the little things. That’s what it kind of comes down to. But every good team goes through a couple bumps in the road.”
This six-game losing skid has looked very different from the Yankees’ first. That rough patch, consisting of losses to the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Angels, was propelled by offensive troubles. The Yankees scored six runs in the six games and gave up just 16. This time, run prevention is the issue; the Yankees have scored 34 runs and surrendered 54 in four games against the Blue Jays in Toronto and two in Queens.
“The offense is starting to swing the bat, put some runs on the board,” Boone said. “The pitching, which has kind of carried us a lot this season, has really, really struggled this week. We haven’t caught the ball as well as I think we should.
“So, look, when you live it and you’re going through it, it sucks, it hurts. But you got to be able to handle it. You got to be able to deal with it. You got to be able to weather it and come out of this and grow.”
Bobby Jenks, a two-time All-Star pitcher for the Chicago White Sox who was on the roster when the franchise won the 2005 World Series, died Friday in Sintra, Portugal, the team announced.
Jenks, 44, who had been diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, a form of stomach cancer, this year, spent six seasons with the White Sox from 2005 to 2010 and also played for the Boston Red Sox in 2011. The reliever finished his major league career with a 16-20 record, 3.53 ERA and 173 saves.
“We have lost an iconic member of the White Sox family today,” White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said in a statement. “None of us will ever forget that ninth inning of Game 4 in Houston, all that Bobby did for the 2005 World Series champions and for the entire Sox organization during his time in Chicago. He and his family knew cancer would be his toughest battle, and he will be missed as a husband, father, friend and teammate. He will forever hold a special place in all our hearts.”
After Jenks moved to Portugal last year, he was diagnosed with a deep vein thrombosis in his right calf. That eventually spread into blood clots in his lungs, prompting further testing. He was later diagnosed with adenocarcinoma and began undergoing radiation.
In February, as Jenks was being treated for the illness, the White Sox posted “We stand with you, Bobby” on Instagram, adding in the post that the club was “thinking of Bobby as he is being treated.”
In 2005, as the White Sox ended an 88-year drought en route to the World Series title, Jenks appeared in six postseason games. Chicago went 11-1 in the playoffs, and he earned saves in series-clinching wins in Game 3 of the ALDS at Boston, and Game 4 of the World Series against the Houston Astros.
In 2006, Jenks saved 41 games, and the following year, he posted 40 saves. He also retired 41 consecutive batters in 2007, matching a record for a reliever.
“You play for the love of the game, the joy of it,” Jenks said in his last interview with SoxTV last year. “It’s what I love to do. I [was] playing to be a world champion, and that’s what I wanted to do from the time I picked up a baseball.”
A native of Mission Hills, California, Jenks appeared in 19 games for the Red Sox and was originally drafted by the then-Anaheim Angels in the fifth round of the 2000 draft.
Jenks is survived by his wife, Eleni Tzitzivacos, their two children, Zeno and Kate, and his four children from a prior marriage, Cuma, Nolan, Rylan and Jackson.