How family life played a central role as D.J….

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — For D.J. Jones, football has not been the family business central to most of his life. Barbecue has.

For as long as the new Broncos’ defensive tackle can remember, his father, David, has made his living from making barbecue and barbecue sauces. It started small in 1990, when the family lived in Dallas and David opened his first restaurant, a little shop with seating for maybe 15 people, and it continues strong today.

“Selling barbecue is how I raised my family,” David said Thursday after his son’s introductory press conference. “… It was just a dream come true. I had made the sauces first, and then I aspired to try my hand at a restaurant — which, we tried, and we’ve been doing it ever since.”

Barbecue as business blossomed for David, and for some time, he catered meals for the Dallas Cowboys, which turned into a point of pride and motivation for D.J. as he looked at his own future in the league.

“Emmitt Smith held me, Troy Aikman held me as a toddler — it drove me,” D.J. said. “I always wanted to reach my full potential.”

He would start his way on that path before long, after the Jones family moved to Greenville, South Carolina, bringing with them the barbecue business, of course. And as with most, if not every, family raising a child with NFL dreams, the Joneses had to make tough decisions to enable him to best find opportunity to continue on that path.

“Wow, where do you start?” David said. “I mean, you do what you have to do. We made a lot of sacrifices early on. The first high school he went to, the program fell apart and we took him to another high school, which was in the suburbs. And so instead of doing it the wrong way, we actually tried to find a house in that area. It wasn’t the house we wanted, it was an old trailer, but we sacrificed for him and we dealt with that old trailer for a little while until we could move to something better. We sacrificed a lot.”