Jewelry Expert Leo Khusro Critiques NFL Jewelry | Game Points | GQ Sports

There's a clip of Justin Jefferson's chain falling off

in an NFL match.

He picks it up, and he chunks it off the screen.

I've never seen something like that. It was just wild.

Somebody just threw $70,000 across the field.

Don't worry, I fixed it.

[upbeat music]

What's up, GQ? I'm Leo Khusro.

I'm your favorite athlete's favorite jeweler.

Get ready to step into my world as we break down chains

and pendants worn by the biggest NFL stars.

[upbeat music continues]

Joe Burrow.

I have good memories and bad memories of this chain.

I reached out to Nike originally to make this piece,

and they never hit me back.

And then I made this piece of jewelry for Joe Burrow.

It blew up on the internet, and I got a lawsuit from Nike.

Nike was like,

Yo, you didn't use our permission to use this piece.

I'm like, Yo, I DMed you right here.

Y'all never hit me back.

That DM saved my whole lawsuit

and actually got me a partnership with them,

and we partnered on making this chain

into an actual T-shirt.

We had a contract where we made 5,000 shirts,

sold them in Cincinnati.

And this piece is just iconic

because your average quarterback

doesn't wear jewelry like us.

There was a famous interview

where they were like, Hey, are your diamond's real?

And he's like, Of course they're real.

I love this piece,

but the only bad memory I have of this piece

is if Joe Burrow had won that Super Bowl,

we were gonna make 2 million shirts.

I think you can do the math.

[upbeat music] Will Anderson.

This is one of my favorite pieces I've ever made.

Will hit me up, and it's a crazy story behind this.

He wanted it to be the Terminator at first.

Originally, we were gonna take this piece right here.

Half of his face that I'm covering

was going to be the Terminator,

and the other half was his face.

So we took screenshots and headshots of his face.

We built around, like, this whole portfolio,

and we sent it to him,

and it looked so lifelike that it actually freaked him out.

He was like, I don't want my face to look like this.

And I was like, Okay, no worries.

So we sat back to the drawing board,

and I was like, Hmm, how do we amplify this?

If people are not gonna see your face all the time

'cause you got a helmet on, what are they gonna see?

Either your number or your last name.

So the number, obviously, we couldn't pick

because you don't know

what number you're gonna get in the league.

You're a rookie.

So we went with Anderson, which is his last name.

And when his family saw this piece,

they were in love with it.

His dad actually cried because he put his name on the piece

and his dad hadn't even seen it.

It's one of the most interesting pieces I've worked on

after the PS2 controller,

'cause the PS2 controller

was where I was able to actually engineer lights

inside of a piece.

I created a whole new opportunity,

a whole new world for jewelry pieces.

So it was cool to do this again.

[upbeat music] Sauce Gardner.

Here we've got Sauce Gardner,

and he's wearing a two-tone widened-rows

sauce bottle pendant.

He's got two Cubans on there.

You see there's a 20-millimeter Cuban

on the bottom flower set.

And then at the top, he's got a two-row prong set,

14-millimeter Cuban.

He's got a signature sauce piece that he wears.

This piece is a little outdated.

Today he has an emerald-cut version of this.

Still looks sick as fuck.

I think the jeweler here kind of just made it simple.

Didn't do too much.

Kind of just wanted the sauce effect to drip

but didn't really, like, go outta his way

to make it look like a painting that's just dripping.

So I think it came out really clean,

and it goes really well with the sauce bottle.

I actually made that piece.

The way I designed it was I didn't want a bale

on the top of the piece.

I wanted the bale, it's called a hidden bale,

so you put the bale behind the piece,

and what happens is when you loop it through the chain,

it just looks like the piece is standing alone.

So if you look at the sauce piece he's wearing underneath,

it's the exact same font.

He's big on this font in particular,

and we took the same font and we put it on the bottle.

He wears number one,

so in rose gold we put a number one on there,

and then the top is actually twistable on and off

so you can put real sauce in there.

And if you go to the Buffalo Wild Wings commercial,

he's like pouring it out.

It's actually really cool.

[upbeat music] Jordan Addison.

Jordan Addison's piece is super cool writing.

Free three. What does that mean?

The guy who's open, he's always open, so he's free,

you could throw the ball to him.

He's number three, so free three.

He's got this ninja on top

because he likes to consider his game, like, ninja-like.

It's just something that he's big on.

There are black diamonds on the ninja

and enamel on the eyes and the face

just to give it more, like, of a pop.

If you put the diamonds there,

it's gonna look too close to the other diamonds.

And then what we did at the bottom

is this is a yellow gold 14-karat piece.

But if you look at the top, it's double layer,

so it's baguettes all the way on top,

and then on the bottom, you're surrounded by round diamonds,

and it creates for a layer.

The whole set, including the Cuban, went for around 75,000.

There are certain colors of natural diamonds.

There's canary yellows.

You got your white diamonds, you got your black diamonds.

These are natural diamonds from the earth.

But then you can tint diamonds as well.

There's a process of tinting.

It's heating the diamonds, so they're artificially heated,

and they can actually change the color

and make 'em more translucent.

So if you want all the black diamonds to be the same color,

you would tint them.

Here, they're not all the same color 'cause they're natural.

So if you hold the piece together,

there's different shades of black on the piece.

But if this was synthetic

or done through, like, an artificial process,

you would see that they're all the exact same color.

[upbeat music]

Patrick Mahomes.

Mahomes doesn't wear a lot of jewelry.

Mahomes wears, like, your simple pieces,

like pieces that you could wear,

and then if you don't like 'em in, like, five years,

you could sell 'em back and get your money back.

I love jewelry like this

'cause this is what jewelry's supposed to be.

You should invest into a high-quality jewelry

that can give you investment return, like an asset.

So here he's wearing two assets, which are tennis chains.

They look like they're about 15, 20 pointer tennis chains.

They look to me like they're layered.

So I think one is smaller,

one is 20 inches, one is 22 inches.

That's the style.

You don't wanna wear tennis chains,

and they're all the same length.

It just looks really ugly.

And then he is got his white gold prong set

two-row Cuban on here.

Just average regular fit.

This right here is like a fuck you piece

because he is got two Madden 99 pieces on here,

which means he's been in Madden 99 twice.

He's just flexing on everybody.

He's got a third one this year

that he doesn't even have on this photo.

So when you see that photo, that's like a huge fuck you.

And then he's got this black diamond tennis chain on here.

We went over this earlier.

The black diamonds are more, like,

if they're all the same color, they're synthetic,

but here they don't look all the same.

I think these are official.

And then he's got this black diamond cross piece on there.

Looks really clean.

Travis Kelce. [upbeat music continues]

Travis Kelce is obviously the most famous NFL man

on the planet right now because of Taylor Swift.

Yeah, I said that.

Here he's just rocking some simple chains.

These are your, like,

I'm not too flashy, I'm more hip, more style.

I got the Dior lock chain on. That one's smooth.

It's just your everyday, like, kind of vibe.

He looks really good in it.

He can definitely rock it.

And you see him wearing it multiple times.

It goes with every outfit.

Travis Kelce knows how to put on limited accent pieces

but make 'em look flashy.

But Travis, if you need anything custom, call me.

Your custom jewelry game is not there yet, my brother.

[mellow music]

Odell Beckham Jr.

Odell is one of the flyest dudes when it comes to jewelry.

Always trying something new.

And here he's got a Celtic cross at the bottom

that's got a little ruby in there.

The ruby actually matches the red ruby lips

that's connected to the Gucci links.

And then on the Gucci links,

there's prong set round diamond crosses, all connected.

It's a fun piece.

It's not something you wear every day.

People will see this multiple times,

and it's an eye-catcher,

so you want to pull it out every now and then.

I think it goes perfect with the whole black T-shirt outfit.

This is again Jason of Beverly Hill's work.

You can tell right away.

It's elegant, classy,

straight to the point on the LA, California, rich vibes.

These are synthetic pearls put all throughout the chain,

and they're actually different colors.

With synthetic pearls, they're actually really cool

because they're cut in half first.

What you can do is you can actually make one color

different than the other.

And then, because they're already cut in half,

they're set into the piece.

It makes it really cool, makes it really colorful.

I definitely have a chain I've made similar to this.

Bryce Young wore a piece similar to this.

It just didn't have as many abstract colors on there.

But I really like what he did,

and I really like how he went and pulled it together.

[upbeat music]

Justin Jet Jefferson.

This is the flyest man in the league. Straight up.

Justin Jefferson is killing it.

And always, when he walks out, he's shining.

On the left side, he's wearing two Cubans,

he's got two 20-millimeter Cubans.

It kind of looks for like a layered look.

We've talked about this multiple times.

When you're wearing the bigger Cubans,

you don't have to have, like, four or five chains

to make it look like you're wearing a bunch.

Just two big chains on each other.

When you're walking into cameras

or anyone's looking at you from afar,

it looks like you've got four or five chains layered on you.

And then he threw on this third chain,

which is his jet piece.

It's the iconic piece we made

for the first year in the league.

I think this kind of set his whole tone

and vibe of the jewelry,

and ever since we put this piece on his neck,

it's just been iconic piece after iconic piece.

And the next one we're working on,

GQ has an exclusive special to that,

that's gonna be crazy.

In the middle, he's got this bead chain.

Now there's a lot of names for it.

You call it a ball chain, a sphere chain, a rosary chain.

I like to call it a bead chain.

In particular, on this one,

all the gold links on the piece

that are spheres are all just gold.

There's no diamonds on them.

In between those links, there are smaller spheres.

Those spheres have diamonds on them.

This look is meant to look, like, not too flashy,

but also Justin gets hit a lot in the games,

and more often than not, he's been hit a lot more recently

'cause he's the best receiver in the league.

So we try to put things on him

that are not as heavily flooded with diamonds.

But then again, it's all down to his vibe.

If he wakes up in the morning and he says,

I'm looking like $5 million on the field,

then that's what it is.

But this is like a calm day.

The baguette chain underneath, the bead chain on top.

Over here, on the right is...

There's a guy who started a brand,

I believe it's Polly World.

He's getting into a lot of baseball guys,

trying to put this, like, Van Cleef style of piece together.

I really like it. It's very fascinating.

He's got the beads on there.

He is got sphere-shaped pieces on there.

It's more of a fashion statement piece,

like, goes with all the jewelry.

I could definitely see this popping off more.

And I like the vibe, and Justin put it,

he put it on the perfect person,

'cause the whole world's gonna see that.

[upbeat music]

Anthony Richardson.

My dog AR.

So Anthony Richardson's wearing something really cool here.

Y'all see tennis chains all the time,

they got pointers on 'em.

Now this is a unique piece because we did pointers,

but we did 'em on an infinity chain.

So you have 30 pointers

all throughout this infinity chain,

and they smack.

I designed this logo for him. It's an AR.

Today, he loved it so much, he uses it as his actual logo.

Now it's part of him for life,

so him and I share that piece forever.

Woody Johnson.

This chain is inspired by Sauce Gardner.

If Sauce Gardner was not on this team,

this team would not be as fly.

The owner of the Jets liked Sauce Gardner's piece so much

that he actually ended up ordering

one of the pieces for himself.

Now he doesn't wear this every day,

I think this is more for fun.

When you're the owner of a NFL team,

you have a boatload of money.

This set right here, looks very expensive.

It looks like it's about 200, 200,000.

A fully emeralds on the bales.

This looks like it has over,

like, 100 karats all the way.

[upbeat music]

Jaxon Smith-Njiba.

Jaxon Smith's going crazy here.

He told me, it was the night before the draft, he was like,

Leo, I just wanna go dummy.

I got all these ideas. What do you think?

So if you look right here, it's similar to the same design.

I got this emerald-cut cross bracelet right here.

It's based off the chrome heart design.

But basically, if you can see on his right wrist

where he is holding his hat,

he's wearing a similar piece to that.

And then underneath, he's got an evil eye bracelet.

The evil eye bracelet is two-tone widened rows.

He's got 70 pointers on every single eye.

If you're walking around in the sunlight,

those eyes start winking at you.

It's actually crazy.

The JSN is his logo, Jaxon Smith-Njiba.

It's a very easy breakdown, JSN.

And he's wearing it with two Cuban chains.

Simple look to go with the suit,

and now he can wear 'em every day

'cause those are just everyday chains.

I drew all these up.

I drew actually 16 drawings for Jaxon Smith

on one piece of paper.

And this is the one he chose.

That JSN went for 52,000.

[upbeat music]

Isaiah Pacheco.

My dog, Isaiah Pacheco right here.

His nickname is Pop.

He got the Tasmanian Devil on top

because, growing up, he loved this character.

It's actually really cool that he likes this character

'cause the running back is elusive,

they're usually spinning around people,

and the Tasmanian Devil is spinning around all day.

So it's a really cool vibe for him.

If you look at this piece,

it's 14 karat white gold two-tone.

The background is yellow.

At the Pop on the top, there's another layer on top,

it's in white diamonds.

And then the tongue, there's rubies on there.

Red fancy diamonds are actually really expensive

and very hard to find.

Putting that together

would take this piece over a million dollars.

So we had to get rubies, and they look really clean.

Putting the black enamel on the rubies

makes the rubies shine harder

and gives it more of a contrast

to make it look like it's his mouth.

But if you look at the top of the piece where the Pop is,

there's actually 0.3 millimeter diamonds all across that.

So they're a little bigger.

And then, when you get down to the tornado, there's 0.01.

And what that means is just a size difference.

But it emphasizes for more of like a pave look

to make it look more like a tornado.

If we put bigger stones on the bottom,

it's not gonna be as thin,

and it's not gonna look as clean

'cause there's prongs holding the diamonds.

So when you make the diamonds that small,

the prongs are also small, and they're not visible.

[upbeat music]

I would say today I have a client

on every team in the league.

I never pictured it to happen this way.

It's kind of a blessing,

I fell into the right lane, met the right people.

Be genuine with genuine people

and they'll open up doors for you

that you'll never have imagined.