THRILL HILL
Chiefs’ explosive wide receiver appreciates mentor with familiar name
Making for a certain mystique about him, much of the origins of human blur Tyreek Hill remains as elusive as he is on a football field.
We know he grew up in rural southern Georgia with his “amazing” maternal grandparents after being born to athletic teenage parents, an adolescence he speaks of fondly but sparingly. And we know the grandparents, Virginia and Herman Hill, have been disinclined to be interviewed about him since the Chiefs drafted Hill in 2016.
But if you want to shade in some of how he became among the fastest and most electrifying players in the NFL, if you want to understand how he got here from there, you could learn a lot by asking him about Jerry Hill — to whom he is not related but is still forever tethered.
In the process, you also could be reminded about the profound and poignant impact one person who believes in another can mean at a pivotal time in life.
In this case, you could see it all encapsulated in a few snapshots at the Pro Bowl in January, when Jerry Hill was Tyreek’s special guest.
As the high school track coach of the Chiefs receiver sat with his wife, Staci, at the bar in the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Fla., the protege approached from behind and put his hands on the mentor’s shoulders.
Then he introduced Jerry Hill to his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, and said, “This is the guy I’ve been telling you about.”
Then he looked at Jerry Hill and told his girlfriend, “I just want you to know, this is why. This man right here. This man right here is why.”
Where it all began
This “why” stems from a fascinating convergence: One of the fastest men on the planet now, and a coach and science teacher at Coffee High who had worked in pest management until he was 35 and never coached sprints until Hill’s senior year in 2012.
That was when the shotput and discus coach became the head track coach after four others declined. He taught himself fundamentals by scouring YouTube and poring over old videos from the girls’ coach.
“The why” comes less from fundamental expertise than an emotional connection that coaxed Hill from innately fast to warp speed, most notably in running the 200-meter dash in 20.14 seconds. That was then the second-fastest 200 ever run by a U.S. prep athlete and would have been good for sixth in that year’s London Olympics.
That 200, Tyreek Hill said, “changed my life” — including opening up his sense of the world and helping launch him to the Junior Olympics in Barcelona, where he won bronze in the 200 and gold as a member of the U.S. 4x100 relay team.
Mostly, though, “the why” is about lowering his walls and trusting an authority figure to have his best interests in mind.
He was “clutch in my life,” Tyreek said, and “the father away from my parents” and “the greatest high school coach ever, man, like for real.”
Because he stayed with him and on him in the good and bad times to come, including telling him “you own it” after his arrest and subsequent guilty plea for domestic abuse that led to a three-year deferred sentence that just concluded with the conviction expunged from his court record.
Tyreek Hill, who now bears a tattoo on his throat that says “Forgive Me,” earned that resolution of his case by owning it: expressing remorse and carrying out all court-ordered mandates and, moreover, getting involved in community service and starting a foundation.
Jerry Hill is “the why” because he counseled Tyreek when he was a teen seeking direction and helped him believe in himself and realize he could — and should — venture out from his home in Pearson, a 3.4-square mile town of just over 2,000 people about 220 miles southeast of Atlanta.
It’s a place with what might be called a gravitational hold. “Crabs in the barrel,” Tyreek Hill’s father, Derrick Shaw, told The Star in a 2016 interview, alluding to the notion of people there trying to pull back anyone who tries to climb out.
It’s a place that now bears a sign touting it as HOME OF TYREEK HILL #10 NFL KANSAS CITY CHIEFS.
It’s a place he might instead still be if not for a family decision to send him 15 miles north to high school in Douglas, and several influential coaches. None more so than Jerry Hill.
“‘I really need to listen to this guy and buy into what he’s trying to get me to do,’ ” Tyreek Hill remembers thinking. “Because I (had) all the assets, and I didn’t want to be, like, another lost piece … I didn’t want to be, like, another guy in my city who’s got everything in front of him and just let it all go. Especially with a coach like Coach Hill, man.”
‘He’s an anomaly’
Tyreek Hill’s father, Shaw, grew up in Pearson and played basketball at Life University after winning a state 300-meter hurdle championship and finishing fourth in the 100 during his senior year of high school.
His mother, Anesha, played basketball and was a track sprinter — “She was cold, for real,” as an athlete, Tyreek said. He likes to say his speed comes mostly from her.
That makes sense to Jerry Hill, who majored in biology and minored in chemistry at Valdosta State and figures that the only way to begin to account for Tyreek’s speed is “strictly genetics.”
But he believes this phenomenon comes from more than just being the child of two athletes.
“Knowing genetics like I do, and I teach it and I study it, the chances of this are so remote that it’s just an anomaly,” said Hill, who in April was named Coffee’s teacher of the year. “He’s an anomaly.”
How else to account for him being so swift despite stunningly little flexibility? Tyreek Hill acknowledges he can’t touch his toes … though he says yoga is getting him closer now.
“He’s like a rubber band who’s pulled so tight there’s no bend,” said Jerry Hill, who surmises that Tyreek has more fast-twitch fibers than 99.9 percent of the population, and that “it’s almost like his body doesn’t make the lactic acid because his muscles keep firing.”
How else to explain his speed despite such a nontraditional running form?
“I’d tell him ‘you’ve got to keep your elbows (in) close,’ but his lats were so thick he couldn’t keep them in,” he said. “He can’t run with the proper form, what some people (consider) the proper form.”
How else to reconcile that he typically accelerates out of a cut — and all the athleticism and body control that implies?
“What he does almost goes against physics,” he said. “He breaks the laws of physics.”
Even young Tyreek was a blur
The pure-speed part was apparent early. By about age 6, as told by Tyreek: One day he was playing on a dirt road with cousins about twice his age when wild dogs suddenly approached, and, whoosh, he was first back to the house.
After he dominated Pop Warner Youth Football, Jerry Hill remembers first seeing him as a Coffee freshman running roughshod in a scrimmage against the varsity defense he coached with several Division I defenders.
“Dear God, man, he just made us look stupid,” he said.
On a recent Saturday, then-Coffee offensive coordinator and current receivers coach Shannon Shook unearthed Hill’s junior year highlight reel and played it in the coaches’ office.
“This is what I call his comingout party,” said Shook, proceeding through the video of ridiculous plays by Hill. “It’s unreal, the moves he has.”
A year later, Hill seemed to everywhere on the field at once. That included going wild out of the Wildcat formation and on occasion playing rush end on defense despite his size — still only about 5-foot-7 or 5-8, then about 150 pounds to his current 200-ish.
It was one thing for him to have that sort of impact then, another to make it look almost the same in the NFL.
But Hill, whose academic lapses kept him from being a major-college football recruit directly out of high school, still didn’t find the gear and the mindset that would make all this possible until the following spring.
“He had to get his physical gifts untapped,” Jerry Hill said.