Tyrann Mathieu's Got Nothing But Love

Tyrann Mathieu can still remember the first time he ever returned a kickoff. He was just a youngster—six, maybe seven. With the ball headed his way, in the split second before he caught it, he had a simple thought. “I told myself, If you just run left as fast as you can, and then cut back right as fast as you can, nobody's going to touch you,” he says, recalling the moment more than two decades later. He returned it for a touchdown. Easy as that.

Now 28 and entering his eighth season as a safety in the NFL—on the defensive side of the ball, his return days behind him—those football instincts remain sharp. Last year, after signing with the Kansas City Chiefs in the offseason, Mathieu had an all-pro season, catapulting the Chiefs’ defense from one of the league’s worst to one of its best and helping them win their first Super Bowl in a half-century. If you feel like that’s overstating Mathieu’s importance, consider that in early February, two days after they won the Super Bowl, it was announced that the Chiefs voted Mathieu team MVP for the 2019 season, over even Patrick Mahomes.

“That was pretty cool, ‘cause If you do a poll—you ask America, you ask Twitter—who’s the best player on the Chiefs, I probably won't be in the top three,” he says laughing.

Throughout two Zoom interviews in August, his signature honey-dipped dreads tied up in a knot, Mathieu is quick to smile. He says that, even though football came naturally even early on, people told him he was going to make it not because he was the fastest, biggest, or the strongest, but because he had “a good heart.” It has helped buoy him through a life and a career that, he says, featured “a lot of brokenness.” 

He grew up in New Orleans, first under the care of his grandparents, and then an aunt and uncle. His biological mother was absent, and his biological father has been serving a life sentence for almost all of Mathieu’s life. “I play the game because, deep down, I always wanted to be a part of a family, and not just any family—a family that was worth it, a family that was deserving,” he says. ”And that’s why I go so fucking hard.”

Even in a sport built on machismo, Mathieu’s version of “so fucking hard” is harder than most. That he plays that way at an undersized 5’9”, 190 pounds is what makes him beloved. That he does it so effectively—intercepting or deflecting passes from much larger dudes, a Mini Cooper delivering downhill hits with Mack truck force—is what makes him great. It’s what landed him at football powerhouse LSU in 2010, where his tenacity made him a national superstar. He became “The Honey Badger,” named after a viral video that emerged around the same time, showcasing a small but relentless animal whose aggressive behavior against larger foes mirrored Mathieu's ability to rip the football from bigger opponents. (As the narrator of that video describes the undersized mammal's laissez-faire attitude towards danger: “Honey Badger don’t give a shit—it just takes what it wants.”)

Despite playing himself into college football’s Pantheon of great defensive players, Mathieu struggled with substance abuse. During his sophomore season—in which he’d eventually finish 5th in Heisman Trophy voting—he was suspended one game for violating the school's drug policy. Before his junior year, he was dismissed from the team entirely. At the 2013 NFL Draft, a year removed from playing, he was taken early in the third round by the Arizona Cardinals. Though it turned out to be a wise choice, Mathieu’s all-pro talent was checked by nagging injuries. But while he’s spent the last three seasons at three different stops—after Arizona, he spent one year with the Houston Texans before landing at KC—he hasn’t missed a game. With two years remaining on his contract with a Chiefs team primed to build a dynasty, it seems like maybe Mathieu’s found, finally, some stability.

But what stability looks like now heading into the season is not at all what it looked like back in February when the confetti rained down in Miami. We are, of course, several months into a pandemic and renewed social unrest over police violence (two days before Mathieu and I speak for the second time, Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by police in Kenosha). Mathieu is thoughtful, deeply engaged, and vocal about what’s happening—he appeared in a powerful video made by Black NFL players in the wake of George Floyd’s death, calling for the NFL to condemn racism—just as he is about what’s happened in his own life. So even though the NFL is scheduled to start as planned on Thursday (with Mathieu’s Chiefs taking on the Texans in the season’s marquee opener), Mathieu knows, through both his own journey and the seven months since the Chiefs stepped off the field as champions, uncertainty always looms large.

GQ: How do you maintain your center amidst all the uncertainty going on?
Tyrann Mathieu: I've just tried my best to make time for myself, whether that be in the morning, throughout the day, or late at night. Sometimes I sit in silence. Sometimes I play music. Sometimes I meditate. Maybe I’ll go through a couple of different yoga poses. I may call my high school mentor, or one of my close friends and I'll talk through my emotions. The last three years, I've been really dialed into listening to myself.

And what are you hearing?
For me, it's just genuine clarity: understanding that I am putting my all into things—whether I get injured or not, whether I finish the season or not. I think for a lot of people around you, success is finishing a season or going to the Pro Bowl, when, in actuality, success is me having clarity on what it is I'm doing and really who I'm doing it for. Whereas before, you just want to make your coaches happy. You want to make the GMs happy. You wanna make the owner happy cause he picked you and gave you a contract.

Once you made that change, did you notice it affecting how you play?
Yeah, I started to love football again. That’s why I started to play football to begin with: going out there, playing as hard as I can, and really celebrating that with my teammates and with my coaches. I'm in love with the game today the same way I was when I was playing for free. You don't always feel like that in this league.

When did you fall out of love with football?
I'd probably say towards the end of my time in Arizona. I wasn't able to put together a healthy season until my very last season. This black cloud was continuing to follow me. Even though Arizona cut me, I feel like they gave me the opportunity to fall in love with myself again, to drop all expectations of who they wanted me to be and to become who Tyrann wanted to be. If I never make the Hall of Fame, that’ll be completely fine with me because I know deep down that every teammate I have ever played with feels that I’m a Hall of Fame-caliber teammate. I have that clarity. The expectation that people put on me, or the other player that people may want me to be? I'm past that stage in my life.

At LSU, you became a celebrity. I could see how you might get lost in living up to the expectations of being “The Honey Badger,” as opposed to playing for yourself. Is that a fair characterization of what happened?
Yeah, I think so. Being from New Orleans and growing up there, LSU is bigger than New Orleans Saints football. Being 18,19 in Louisiana, I felt like Lil Wayne. [laughs] It was crazy. It's everything you dream of as a kid: being popular, being famous, a celebrity in your space. It can get to your head and you can lose sight of what it is you love to do, and, for me, it’s being a part of a great team and being part of a great family. I bought into the distractions and the hype, what everybody was telling me I was.

I wouldn't be here today if Les Miles didn’t kick me off the team. You see that happen with a lot of guys—they kind of continue to get passes and we get to a certain point where there's no more passes, and they don't amount to it at this level. So I'm grateful for people that made hard decisions. Because I'm the kind of guy to go home at night and kind of reflect and sit on that.

Growing up, I felt like a lot of people abandoned me, they weren’t there for me, and I think I just got to a point where I realized everybody in this world is not out to get me. Some of these people are really trying to teach me a lesson that's going to be able to carry me throughout my life. I was grateful for that.

You just won the Super Bowl. Has your mindset changed throughout the years on how you approach a high point like this?
I'm still motivated and I'm still fueled. I can remember [when] I got kicked out of school. A lot of people in my family started taking down the Honey Badger posters. I remember my sister called me. She was like, “Yo, you might as well get a regular job.” And I'm just thinking to myself, Wow, these people don't really know me. They don't know my drive. They don't really know who I am. I still feel like those things are still motivating me.

I'm a part of a great family in the Kansas City Chiefs. But I think deep down fundamentally I'm still chasing the same thing I was chasing when I was five, when I started to play football. This game was gonna bring my family together, and help me get my father out of prison. It was going to hopefully help my mom to accept me, even though I don't know what I did to her as a kid. I was like the only child she didn't raise.

I'm hoping one day people can see me through this football lens and see what it is that I was always chasing. It wasn't trophies and it wasn't nicknames. It was simply to be in a position to keep my family together, to bring my family together, allow my father to be a part of my blessing, allow my mother to see the blessing that I've always been, even when she didn't see that. So that's what's pushing me right now.

Have you been able to find that with your mother or your father?
With my father. Growing up, I always heard stories about him being one of the best players in New Orleans. I was always chasing that. 

We talk a lot. Being 28 years old, I feel like I'm 12 in the sense that I look forward to my dad calling. Even when I miss his calls I'm like, “Fuck!” Cause I know I can't call him back. [laughs] Some days I do call back just to see if somebody's going to answer. Usually it’s the automated message lady, like, “You can't do this, you can't call.” [laughs]

He's one of the first people in my family to remind me that I wasn't a mistake, like I was a blessing. I'm grateful to have that connection with him.

He's closed a lot of doors that I had opened within me.

Is he able to watch you play?
I think there’s close to maybe 30 TVs in there, so the joke is every time a Chiefs’ game’s on, all 30 TVs better be showing the Chiefs' game. [laughs]

What advice do you give to younger guys on the team, about taking time for themselves or not getting caught up in the rush of things?
I tell them this is all a game, and if you're not yourself, and if you're not thinking for yourself, you can not play the game. You won't have a very long career. You'll be easily influenced. You won't be able to be coached by multiple people. You'll have this ego and it’ll get in the way.

I feel like that’s just a problem that a lot of people have. They don't really know who they are and they don't really know what they want. A lot of them just fell into this football thing. Everybody told them they were fast and big and strong, so they just became a football player. For me, it's easy. I love football. Not everybody loves it the same. So you just have to be able to sit quietly with yourself and find out what it is that that's going to make you make the most out of this.

Because on the outside, we all look good. It all looks fun: getting paid millions of dollars and celebrity status. But do you really know who you are or are, or are you just caught in the herd? Don't ever let the game or outside expectations shrink you. We have to continue to grow as people.

How does the pressure right now feel compared to this time last year?
For me, it's no pressure at all. I love it. That's what I love about Mahomes too. There’s no pressure for him. This is just another challenge.

The ultimate goal is to win the Super Bowl, but a fundamental part of that is staying committed to the guy next to you, truly believing in your coaches. Very rarely do you get guys on the same page. Even that play in the Super Bowl: Mahomes to Tyreek Hill. Maybe Tyreek Hill wanted to run a go route that play. Maybe Pat Mahomes wanted to do something different. Maybe Andy Reid wanted to do something different. Rarely do you get guys coming to the huddle and they all want to do the same thing. That's the ultimate commitment to team. That should be the only thing we should chase, because we already have the talent. We already have the coaching. But can we stay committed? Can we all believe in the same thing at the same time, whether it's a positive moment or a negative moment. Can we conquer that together?

As a leader, how do you get the guys to believe in that?
It starts with guys like myself, Patrick Mahomes. We're coachable. We don't get into meetings and tell Coach, “We want to do it this way.” Setting a certain standard that allows coaches to coach, and sets the table for players to understand we're here to learn and those guys are here to teach us. We may not like them. Half of us didn’t like the schools we went to—but we went to school! We tried our best to get that education. It’s the same deal here. Everybody's here to do a job. Allow these men to teach us. 

For me personally, having coaches like [Defensive Backs Coach] Dave Merrick and [defensive coordinator] Steve Spagnulo, I'm so blessed and fortunate. Just with those guys alone, that’s like 60,70 years of football experience. If I could quiet my ego and quiet my pride, so I can pour into that seventy years of knowledge? That's why I had the season I had last year. That's why I was able to carry my teammates. 

Some of my teammates are like, “Tyrann’s a leader,” and I'm trying to remind them that we all lead. Every day isn't a good day for Tyrann. Some days I come in and feed off you. I'm not waking up happy-go-lucky every day. Some days I come in and it's a breath of fresh air to see Pat Mahomes in the building before me. It's a breath of fresh air when I'm trying to do some extra work and I see one of my teammates getting some extra work in.

On that idea of leadership, I’ve been really struck by your participation this summer in speaking out, especially with regards to the social justice movement, participating in the players’ video in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. What responsibility do you feel to lead in these off field issues as well?
We have the ability to remind people of who they are, to not box people in, to allow them to be who they are, what they want to become. And try to help people shift their thoughts.

It's just about sparking the minds of hundreds of thousands—hopefully millions—of kids and telling them, hey, you could actually play a part in the change. You could become a senator. You could become a city council member. You can lead positive rallies in your neighborhood. You can do great things, whether it be marching events or getting together and giving out free food to those less fortunate. You could be a lawyer, you could be a doctor, you could be a teacher. Teachers should get paid so much more because they're sparking minds every single day. I feel like I'm in a position to remind these kids that all these things are cool. All these things are dope. Money don't make you happy. Having a million followers don't make you happy. Trust me. 

Have you been following the Jacob Blake story in Wisconsin?
Yeah. Obviously, it's always a gut check, especially for a Black dude. I never get pulled over, but I got pulled over two weeks ago for apparently speeding. As the cop was approaching—and I'm pretty sure he knows who I am—but I felt scared and unsure.

It's just a sad experience all the way around, and especially with social media. So many kids are on social media, having access to videos like that. We don't want any kid growing up hating the other side, or hating a different race or a different color. It’s really going to be something we've all got to take control of and help stop, because I think that's the last thing we want in this country, is a racial divide. Because so many people from different races depend on each other, love each other. People are working next to people that are completely different than them, and it's cool. But I think the last thing we want to get to is this—it seems like every week, every month, we're back in the same conversation.

How old are your kids now?
My oldest son, Noah, he’s 7. Tyrann Jr, he’s 6. And then Mila—I call her “Sweets”—is nine months. That's my baby girl right there. She’s got the keys to everything. [laughs]

Are your boys old enough to understand what's been happening this summer, with coronavirus and the protests?
Noah is. Tyrann Jr., he's all about sports. He’s nothing else but sport sports sports. Noah is more sensitive to what's going on around him. With coronavirus, it’s just reminding them to wash their hands, cause they're kids. They’ll be running out of the house, don’t wash their hands, grab a burger, got dirt all over they face. You’re just trying to remind them that there’s a lot of people suffering. Outside of that, it's just reminding them to be comfortable with who they are, to just love themselves. 

I bought Tyrann, Jr., a headband to wear for soccer. He’s got the hair like me, got the dreads. He was like, “Nah, dad, I don't wanna wear it.” He was just saying how it would look cool on him if he had lighter skin. It was my moment to explain to him it's okay that your friends are a different color than you. I grew up around all Black people, and Tyrann, Jr., he's growing up around all white people. It’s a different kind of experience for him. But I just remind him: Yo, bro, all these people love you. They love your character. They love who you are. All your teachers speak highly of you. All these kids in the neighborhood and love you. They all want to be hanging around with you. So love who you are. Don't look when you go to practice and see, wow, I’m the only dark colored kid here, or it's just like two of us out here, and the rest of my friends are white. We don't look at the world that way, son. We all the same.

I don't believe his friends or the guys on the team were telling him that. I don't think that they were making him feel that way. I think that it's just human to feel like, wow, I'm a little bit different than the rest of the guys. But, in actuality, y'all are all the same. You’re all six years old. You all don’t wash your hands when you come inside. [laughs] All y’all missing a shoe, missing a sock. Y'all all doing the same stuff. Don’t even worry about whether or not you look cool with the headband. Love yourself for who you are.

What gives you hope, if anything, in this moment?
What honestly continues to give me hope is to see more and more people listening, to see more and more people outraged. The moment is here. The attention is here. Everyone's watching, Everyone's listening. Everybody's trying to understand it. People care. People that may not even have anything to do with it, I think in some way, shape, or form, they realize they're going to be affected by it. So they're tired. The more people we have sitting down from different colors and having these conversations is the only hope we've got. To keep having that conversation. To keep shedding light on the issue. As long as we're talking about it and shedding light on it, it's time to clean it up, right? As long as the light's on in the house, I can see what's dirty. 

This interview has been edited and condensed from two interviews.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Styled by Kathryn Gosik and Cara Gordon
Special thanks to Kaseykeepsmefresh’ Wise Guys Barber Lounge

Originally Appeared on GQ