On mound and in air, Jax family reunites in special 9/11 ceremony

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The United States Air Force is big on what it calls ACE, which stands for Agile Combat Employment -- the ability to deploy jets, pilots, a maintenance team and all of their equipment to a remote location and execute different kinds of training and missions.

That’s what a stadium flyover constitutes for most fighter pilots. For the Jax brothers, it’s a family reunion.

As the Twins joined Major League Baseball in paying tribute to fallen service members and first responders in commemoration of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they also recognized the service and family bonds of Minnesota reliever Griffin Jax, a Captain in the Air Force Reserve, who is the first graduate of the Air Force Academy to pitch in the Majors.

That’s because Jax’s twin younger brothers -- Capt. Parker “Mad” Jax and Capt. Carson Jax -- and his sister-in-law, Capt. Chandler “Goldie” Jax, are all active duty pilots. They all played a role in the ceremony, with Parker and Chandler flying F-35 Lightning II jets from the 421st “Black Widows” Fighter Squadron for the pregame flyover, and Carson, a C-5M Super Galaxy pilot, throwing the ceremonial first pitch to Griffin Jax.

“It means so much,” Carson Jax said. “This is the first time that we’ve -- I think all the three boys, at least -- have been together in probably three years. With us serving, sometimes we don’t get Christmas off or New Year’s or Thanksgiving, and then Griffin obviously is playing all season. He doesn’t get that much time off. It’s just wonderful for all three of us and the wives and parents to all be out here.”

Indeed, as Griffin Jax noted after the game -- in which he pitched two scoreless innings in front of his roaring family -- the life of a fighter pilot is much more chaotic than that of a big league reliever.

Parker and Chandler Jax are stationed at Hill AFB north of Salt Lake City, and they headed to Florida with their squadron recently for further training. Carson Jax is based out of Travis AFB between San Francisco and Sacramento, Calif., and he is typically dropping off cargo worldwide using the largest plane in operation by the U.S. Department of Defense.

“I really appreciate the Air Force and our Fighter Wing back home, the 388th, to allow us the opportunity, provide the funding and the manpower to get us out here,” Parker Jax said. “It’s definitely non-standard, but definitely something pretty cool that we get to execute, too.”

Parker, Carson, Griffin and Chandler Jax all attended the Air Force Academy together -- as did Capt. Ben “Funk” Hawkins, the event's flight lead, and Capt. Mandy “Fire” Cannon, who flew in the F-35 flyover.

Griffin Jax has said that many of his teammates are surprised to learn that he never piloted a mission himself, but he did fly in an F-16 as part of a “familiarization flight” -- though he jumped out of plenty of planes during his Academy days.

The day before the flyover, Griffin grilled Parker and Chandler Jax about the flight path, and when the family caught up after the game, Griffin had to ask what it looked like from up there. The answer: They couldn’t really see much because they flew over so quickly, but could see all the individual players very well using “pretty intense technology,” Griffin said.

They weren’t necessarily a military family -- a grandfather deployed to Vietnam for a few weeks, Griffin Jax said -- but once Griffin got recruited to the Academy, which is 45 miles south of home in the Denver area, his brothers followed.

“It was just easy for them to open up their eyes and see what was available,” he said.

“They’re a lot smarter than I am, so they took it a lot more seriously and they knew baseball probably wasn’t going to be in their cards for any career, so they knew going there that it was going to be a real possibility to fly, and they took advantage of it.”

Griffin Jax said he’d first brought up the idea in passing to Twins vice president of communications and content Dustin Morse during Spring Training, just to see if it would be possible, after Parker had mentioned that the squadron had done a flyover for a Denver Broncos game against the Kansas City Chiefs.

Morse connected with Parker Jax, who ran it up the chain of command to his Wing Commander, who gave final approval and made sure the mission had proper funding and manpower.

This isn’t just cosmetic or ceremonial, by the way: These flyovers are meaningful training missions in which squadrons and the associated infrastructure rehearse the precision and coordination for potential wartime missions. This flyover, Griffin Jax noted, was a full simulation of a bombing run, with Target Field as the mission target.

“Any type of war, we’re going to have to move all this equipment, get everything done and be able to execute efficiently and timely, and so it was definitely pretty cool to be able to see that,” Parker Jax said. “Obviously, it’s very cool for me, being Griffin’s brother, to do the flyover. Selfishly, that was a big priority for me, but at the same time, this was great training for all of us.”

The only issue was the date: Because the Air Force needed a firm date to make those delegations, a playoff game -- the original idea -- was out of the question, and Opening Day, at that point, was coming up too quickly for such planning.

Given all that, Sept. 11 felt to both the organization and the three brothers like a suitable date -- and it made for a memorable scene.

“It just makes so much sense,” Griffin Jax said. “MLB does a pretty good job of setting up a whole day for it. For this, [it’s a] special meaning for not only me, but for other pilots out there. It’s just a really cool opportunity to kind of fuse the two together.”