DenverChief
08-19-2023, 05:18 PM
In the spring of 1988, Major League Baseball scouts descended on East Texas to see a late bloomer with a golden arm. They passed a sign on the way to their destination. “Welcome to Lindale, Good Country Livin’.”
Pat Mahomes lived with his parents just inside the Lindale city limits. With a population of 2,500 at the time, it was one of many suburbs outside Tyler, the largest city in East Texas, a pine-tree-shrouded region that felt more southern — and more isolated — than the rest of the state. Dallas was one hundred miles to the west, Houston was two hundred miles to the south, and Austin and San Antonio were even farther. The author Asher Price once described East Texas as having its own time zone: fifty years behind everyone else.
The Mahomes family had been in East Texas long before Pat ever picked up a baseball. Sometime after the Civil War, an Alabama-born man whose name appeared in records as Q Mahomes and Que Mahomes married Nellie Adkins, who was born in Texas in 1855, and they settled in Smith County, where Tyler and Lindale are located. Their son Wilber Mahomes grew up in Lindale, and so did William Mahomes, who was born in 1910 as one of Wilber and wife Ida’s nine children. East Texas was a hostile place for them and other Black families. In Smith County, white residents voted by a 25‑to‑1 margin to secede on the eve of the Civil War, and many of them refused to accept that Black people could live freely in East Texas. In the first few decades after the Civil War, at least five African Americans were lynched in the Tyler area.
The Mahomes family navigated the constraints of the Jim Crow South. Wilber was a laborer, and William worked at the Tyler Pipe refinery. William’s wife, Lucy, was mostly a homemaker, as well as a church volunteer. William had an eighth-grade education but a natural knack for math, recalled Johnny Mahomes, William’s son. “Math kind of ran in my family,” he said. Johnny was one of Lucy and William’s three children, who came of age when Texas, after stiff resistance to court-ordered desegregation, was on the verge of change. William Mahomes Jr. graduated in 1965 from Bragg Morris High School, Lindale’s Black school, and went to Texas A&M (becoming the first Black student to spend four years in the school’s Corps of Cadets program) and the University of Texas Law School before embarking on a career as a corporate lawyer in Dallas. At Bragg Morris High, Johnny played baseball and basketball and served as the president of the Future Farmers of America Club and the Dramatic Club. He and William Jr. had started working in their early teens, canning peas, hauling watermelons, and picking blackberries. In 1966, Johnny graduated as valedictorian. Unlike his brother and sister, Marsha, who moved to California, he stayed in Lindale, marrying Cindy Norman. He liked it there. “It’s pretty and people get along, for the most part,” Johnny once said.
When he wasn’t working for an oil company, Johnny played on a semipro baseball club and taught Pat the game at an early age. The expectation, set by Pat’s father, his mother, and his uncle, was to stand out—and not just at baseball. At nearly everything, Pat drew inspiration from Cindy. When he was seven, she had been paralyzed from the neck down in a car accident, but gradually regained some of the movement she had lost and finished a psychology degree. To Pat, everything else seemed easy. By his senior year of high school, Pat was enrolled in college-level English, psychology, and sociology and was a member of the National Honor Society. He occasionally babysat for a cousin and her friend, the future country superstar Miranda Lambert. (The “Good Country Livin’ ” sign has since been replaced by a sign that says, “Lindale, Hometown of Miranda Lambert.”) He was a popular student, too, rarely experiencing racial animosity despite being one of about a dozen Black students in the predominantly white school. “He gets along with everybody. He doesn’t try to be better than anybody else or think he’s somebody special. He just tries to be himself,” a close friend said at the time. As Pat recalled, “A lot of it stemmed from me being so good in sports that I never had anything to worry about.”
When Pat blossomed from a scrawny 5-feet-6 sophomore into a 6-feet-1 senior star at Lindale High School, his athletic career took off. He passed for 1,600 yards as a quarterback, averaged thirty points a game on the hardwood (earning runner‑up for Texas’s “Mr. Basketball” honor), leaped six feet six inches in the high jump, and batted over .600 in baseball. The only question was what he would do next. Per National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules, Pat had five official college visits to use across every sport, so he knew he had to be selective. And at first he pursued football.
There was a dalliance with Louisiana Tech University and interest from Kansas State University, but the University of Southern Mississippi proved to be a serious suitor. The coaching staff asked Pat to come down for an official visit. On campus, he sat among a group of recruits who each shared their height, weight, and time in the 40‑yard dash. He felt pretty good announcing that he was six- one and 175 pounds and could run a 4.6. But then the guy sitting next to him, a hulking defensive tackle, said that he was 6-8 and 296 pounds— and he could run a 4.5. The Southern Miss coaches told Pat they still wanted him, insisting he could start the next year. But Pat was rightfully suspicious that they were engaging in the typical recruiting sweet talk. Southern Miss, after all, had a rising sophomore who had started ten games as a true freshman, a gunslinger named Brett Favre.
So, by the spring of 1988, Pat, who hated getting hit on the gridiron, believed his most likely destination would be the University of Arkansas. The baseball team and the basketball team, reaching the heights of the “Forty Minutes of Hell” defense under coach Nolan Richardson, both wanted him. But the professional scouts kept on coming to the East Texas piney woods. Although the opportunity to play college basketball tantalized Pat, baseball had been his first love. And, perhaps as important, Johnny’s mind was made up. He was sure that baseball was his son’s best bet for success. In the 1988 MLB draft, the Minnesota Twins selected Pat in the sixth round. He signed five days later and reported to play for the team’s rookie-league affiliate in Tennessee.
Pat Mahomes had made it: Over the next fifteen years he played for the Twins, the Boston Red Sox, the New York Mets, the Texas Rangers, the Chicago Cubs, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. East Texas remained a part of him. He kissed the ground when he came home from an early stint in the minors. After his first major- league victory, in 1992, he mailed the lineup card and game ball back to his parents. And Pat started a relationship with Randi Martin, who’d grown up in Troup, another small town outside Tyler. Martin, who had been a basketball player and honor roll student in high school, came from a family whose roots in East Texas also went back several generations.
When Pat and Randi got married in 1998, at Tyler’s Colonial Hills Baptist Church, their first son hustled down the church aisle. Patrick Mahomes II, not quite three years old, was the ring bearer and the junior best man.
The first few years of Patrick’s life were every young boy’s dream. Pat gave him his own locker, dressed him in a baby Twins jersey, and took him on the turf of the Metrodome in Minneapolis. Patrick swung baseball bats with Alex Rodriguez and learned infield techniques from Derek Jeter. When his father’s New York Mets made the World Series in 2000, he shagged balls in the Shea Stadium outfield during batting practice, battling with veteran pitcher Mike Hampton.
Mahomes was still very much a kid. The first time he met Mark McGwire, “he almost peed his pants,” Pat Sr. recalled. But Pat noticed his son’s baseball skills and the way he studied the practice habits of his major-league teammates, especially Rodriguez, and had the same revelation as Richard Williams and Earl Woods: He knew his child was going to be a professional athlete.
Pat spent his last season in the majors in 2003, then embarked on a long stint as a journeyman minor leaguer. Patrick settled in with his mother in East Texas. The parents split while Patrick was in elementary school, and Randi Martin raised Patrick and younger brother, Jackson, as a single mother, taking extra shifts and working weekends as an event planner at Hollytree Country Club to support their athletic pursuits. “Sometimes everybody focuses on my dad because he played sports,” Patrick Mahomes later recalled, “but she was one of the main staples of my life.”
There was no stopping a young Mahomes from playing sports. One time, a teammate of Pat’s asked Randi how she got Patrick to do it, to run around the outfield and catch fly balls She was more concerned with another question about her hyperactive son: How did she get him not to do it?
When Patrick Mahomes was in junior high, Reno Moore invited him to participate in a quarterback training program. To Moore, an assistant coach at Whitehouse High School, Mahomes was an average Texas boy, a close friend of a neighbor who often ended up at Moore’s house, waiting on the curb with a towel with a bunch of other kids who were eager to swim in Moore’s pool. But when Mahomes was out of the water, Moore saw him run around and play in the occasional backyard football game, and he was impressed. (You could say he liked the kid’s “arm talent.”) Like most everyone around Tyler, Moore was aware of Mahomes’s athletic lineage and prodigious talents. The first conversation he had with Mahomes, he told him a story about playing against his father in high school baseball.
The days of hanging around major-league clubhouses were over for Mahomes. He was now in East Texas with his mother. Tyler and its suburbs were still isolated; they hadn’t gotten any closer to Dallas since the ’90s. But they were bigger and more modern, more flush with Whataburgers and more congested with afternoon traffic on Broadway Avenue.
To get to Whitehouse from Tyler, you drive south on Main Street and follow the rolling hills past one-story houses and look for a water tower emblazoned with a half-blue, half-red “W.” On Friday nights in the fall, the lights from the high school football stadium glimmer for several blocks. Even on a bad night the stadium is three-quarters full, but by the time Mahomes settled in Whitehouse there weren’t many bad nights. The area was undergoing an athletic renaissance. A.J. Minter, now a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, worked out alongside Mahomes at athletic trainer Bobby Stroupe’s Athlete Performance Enhancement Center facility. Tyus Bowser, who played for a high school in Tyler before getting drafted by the Baltimore Ravens, damn near looked like a bodybuilder as a teenager — and that’s according to Dylan Cantrell, a high school teammate of Mahomes who made it to the NFL, too.
Among this übertalented group, Mahomes stood out. In his first T‑ball game, he fired a throw from shortstop to first base and smashed the first baseman’s glasses, leading to Mahomes playing first base for the rest of the year. By middle school he was around 6 feet tall and weighed 165 pounds, making him roughly the size of Allen Iverson in his prime. Athleticism, however, was not his defining characteristic. People who knew him back then were drawn to his mature personality. He smiled all the time, and his favorite movie was a throwback, “Remember the Titans.” When he showed up at a Whitehouse High School summer camp as a fifth grader, he wore a backward baseball cap. Adam Cook, a Whitehouse coach, saw the fashion choice as a test. Was the son of a professional athlete cocky? Would he listen to the adults? He would. When Cook asked him to turn around the cap, Mahomes obliged. Just a few years after T‑ball, Mahomes devised strategies alongside coach Chad Parker for a baseball team, Rose Capital East, which finished runner‑up in the Junior League World Series in Michigan. He was also laid-back enough to go along with Parker’s decision to bring the entire team to Arby’s for a meal of two roast beef sandwiches and a large caffeinated soda before every game, the last time Mahomes can remember eating at an Arby’s. And while Randi and Pat were convinced their son could be a professional athlete someday, sometimes Mahomes would half-seriously mention a backup plan to be a lawyer, perhaps after attending Duke, home to one of his favorite college teams. “People treated Patrick like he was a treasure, in a way,” said Parker. “Not because they thought they were going to get anything— just because they were drawn to him.”
One of the few activities he wasn’t involved in was football. Aside from pickup games and a short Pop Warner stint as a linebacker (Mahomes disliked tackling), he didn’t play in any organized fashion until middle school. At the start of the second semester of Mahomes’s seventh-grade year, Moore took him, a close friend from the Little League team named Ryan Cheatham, and a few other prospective quarterbacks out of the school’s athletic period — yes, there are sports during the school day in Texas — to give them a crash course on how to be a Whitehouse High School quarterback.
The lessons lasted several weeks. Moore had gotten the idea from Todd Dodge, a godfather figure among Texas high school football coaches who built a dynasty at Southlake Carroll. When most high school teams used the power-running game, Dodge introduced the spread—a high-flying, no‑huddle, video-game offense in which as many as five wide receivers lined up on the field at a time. High school quarterbacks, previously game managers, were throwing the ball up to seventy times a game, which meant they had to memorize more plays and more formations and improvise on the fly. This is exactly what Mahomes was figuring out. The first two weeks of the program were in the classroom, where he studied a dizzying number of formations and pored over a manual filled with leadership tips from sources as varied as the Bible and Warren Buffett.
And then the football started. Moore placed a collection of five-foot-tall adjustable nets, each with three pockets big enough to catch a football, in a gymnasium. Mahomes faced a net, pretending his feet were planted in concrete, and threw. He faced away from a net, turning around when Moore said so, and threw. He lay flat on the gym floor, hurrying to his feet at the command of Moore, and threw.
Moore couldn’t believe how quickly Mahomes released the ball. It was as though the leather were burning hot. And the kid could throw from every angle into the correct pocket of the nets. “Did I see better athletes through my years in junior high? Yes, I definitely saw better athletes,” Moore said. “But I didn’t ever see an athlete that could be . . . a quarterback [and] make decisions and do the things he was doing.”
As Moore saw it, there was only one problem. Even within the flexible confines of the spread, in which coaches encourage experimentation, Mahomes’s throwing mechanics were unorthodox. As Moore watched Mahomes, he’d tell the other coaches, “We’ve got to get his arm up.”
Generations of quarterbacks had heard this command, mostly for good reasons. Funky throwing motions were fine if you were starting out, but quarterbacks who released the ball in any fashion besides the textbook L shape — technique that supposedly harnesses maximum power and acceleration — were destined to find fewer college and professional coaches willing to give them a chance. NFL quarterbacks, at the time, were a bunch of L‑shaped throwers. Some of the best were Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. Some of the worst played in Kansas City: Tyler Thigpen, Brodie Croyle, and Damon Huard rotated as starters in the 2008 season, when Mahomes began middle school, and only Thigpen threw more touchdowns than interceptions. L‑shaped throwers were fairly robotic, but the good ones were consistent. And the NFL loves consistent.
Mahomes was anything but robotic. He had a three-quarter motion, something between the classic L and a sidearm. But that designation didn’t quite suffice. His motion was fluid, adjusting slightly based on where the ball needed to go, not unlike a baseball infielder.
In fall 2009, Moore watched as Mahomes played for the Whitehouse eighth-grade team and was still bothered by his throwing motion. He kept telling the middle school coaches to work with him. To get that arm up. Then, during one game, Moore saw something he has a hard time believing to this day. Mahomes—who, just to remind you, was in the eighth grade—flung the ball sidearm into the air, and it spiraled and spiraled, and it seemed like it would never fall. Inevitably, it did, into the hands of a wide receiver. Moore is not sure of the distance, just that it should have been impossible for any young teenager, perhaps other than Patrick Mahomes.
Moore suddenly lost interest in changing Mahomes’s throwing style. He told every coach not to screw this up. To let Mahomes be Mahomes. All of Mahomes’s coaches—from his athletic trainer, Stroupe, to Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury—learned the same lesson. Sure, they would hone something here or there. But they recognized the best thing they could do was unleash an unfiltered Mahomes into the world, and let the world enjoy the results.
Whitehouse High School sure did. In 2013, near the end of a high school senior year in which Mahomes threw for fifty touchdowns and rushed for fifteen touchdowns, he threw for 597 yards in a playoff game against Mesquite Poteet High School. Whitehouse lost a heartbreaker 65–60, and Mahomes’s high school career was over. But it also provided the most ridiculous of ridiculous high school highlights. With the score tied at 7–7, Mahomes spun out of a tackle by Malik Jefferson, a future third-round NFL draft pick, and, before setting his feet, launched the ball some 50 yards down the field to wide receiver Jake Parker, who ran another 20 yards into the end zone.
The arm was, most definitely, not up.
There ya go
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