Veteran nose tickle
Tackle that anchors D line brings welcome rush of joy to team
Bill Kollar, the gruff, bear-wrestling defensive line coach for the Broncos, accessed his playful side on the eve of free agency last spring as he spotted one of his players, Kyle Peko, at the team’s headquarters. “He told me, ‘Hey, we’re going to get your cousin,’ ” Peko recalled. “I was like, ‘Really?!’ ”
In that instant, Kyle envisioned his gregarious second cousin, veteran nose tackle Domata Peko, walking through the door with his big hair and bigger grin in tow. He pictured the human 10,000-watt light bulb illuminating the locker room.
Then Kollar dropped the punch line.
“He’s like, ‘No, not really,’ ” Kyle Peko said, laughing at the memory of his coach’s delivery. “He made it a joke that we weren’t going to get him.”
The joke is on every offensive line this season that has
had to combat Domata Peko, who signed a two-year contract with the Broncos in March after spending his first 11 NFL seasons with Cincinnati. The 6-foot-3, 325pound anchor of the Denver’s line is perhaps the player most responsible for the team’s about face against the run this season. His push against opposing offensive lines has wreaked havoc, allowing the defensive ends and the linebackers around him to do damage.
The job of a nose tackle, a position that rarely accumulates big numbers, often goes unnoticed. But there is no mistaking Peko’s presence in the team’s locker room. The Broncos are loaded with veteran players who have played in Super Bowls and earned all-pro honors. There are no shortage of voices that carry weight.
But Peko has brought something else. It’s a lightness, a perpetual blast of positive energy that teammates, particularly Denver’s group of young defensive linemen, have gravitated toward.
“I think football gets such a stigma of being a meathead sport where you’re just angry and just grrrr,” defensive end Zach Kerr said. “And then you get this big nose tackle who’s been in the league 12 years and you never catch him without a smile on his face. Especially when you’re down, and being a young guy like myself going up and down with the game, it’s refreshing to have somebody who has 12 years look at you and smile and say, ‘You’re going to be OK. You don’t have to worry about it.’”
Back to his roots
Peko answered the question about the big smile with a big smile.
He’s asked often how he finds such joy on a daily basis, treating a mid-summer practice in his 12th season like an overjoyed kid putting on shoulder pads for the first time. The answer is always the same.
“I would just have to say it’s my faith,” he said. “It’s living every day and being happy with life. I just want to live my life and enjoy my life while I can because life is short. My dad is a pastor. I grew up in the church in American Samoa. It’s treating people how you want to be treated, showing love, all that stuff from the Bible.”
Peko was born in Whittier, Calif., just outside of Los Angeles, the youngest of nine children — six of them boys. When Peko was in fifth grade, his father, who is still an active minister, moved the family to Pago Pago, the capital city in the island nation of American Samoa, located nearly 6,000 miles from Denver.
Peko was not yet a teenager, but the move opened his eyes, brought him back to where he came from.
“I went from the L.A. lifestyle — fast, everybody’s in a rush, there’s stuff to do every day — to going to Samoa, where the speed limit is 15 miles per hour,” he said. “You never get out of first gear. It’s really slowpaced. Everyone’s chill and everyone knows everyone. The population is only 69,000. Everyone can fit in our stadium. It kind of reminded me of ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ going from L.A. life to that. But I thank God for that because if I didn’t move to Samoa and learned my culture, learned my roots, learn how to respect others, I don’t think I’d be where I am right now.”
The NFL has a rich culture of Samoan players. That includes Domata’s older brother, Tupe, who played parts of six seasons in the league after being drafted out of Michigan State in 2001. Domata Peko didn’t play football until he was a senior in high school. That was just enough time for him to catch the eye of Leon Criner, an assistant football coach at College of the Canyons, a community college 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.
Criner had built a pipeline to the islands, recruiting future NFL players Isaac Sopoaga and Jonathan Fanene. When he heard word there was a raw but massive and highly agile player about to graduate from Samoana High School, Criner didn’t need any more information. And Peko didn’t need much of a pitch.
“He said he had players from Samoa who earned full scholarships and he said, ‘I can do the same thing for you,’ ” Peko recalled of his phone call with Criner, who passed away three years ago. “I said, ‘Heck yeah, man. I want to come out there.’ I graduated on a Friday and flew to the U.S. on a Monday. It was that quick.”
The girl behind the desk
His NFL career has allowed Peko to accumulate generational wealth, “a blessing,” he said, that has allowed him to help both the communities where he has lived and his native Samoa through his charitable foundation. But when he arrived in Santa Clarita, Calif., he couldn’t even afford a gym membership.
“Broke as a joke,” he said with a laugh. Peko wanted to bulk up before his first season at College of the Canyons, a juniorcollege powerhouse that went 21-3 during his two seasons. So he walked into the gym across the street from the apartment and started chatting up the girl at the front desk. Her name was Anna.
“I just started talking to her and told her I was trying to play football at COC,” Peko said. “We just started talking from there. She started letting me in for free and we started building a relationship. All my teammates would come in there and she would let us in there and lift for free. That’s where I started falling in love with her and we’ve been in love since. It all started at juco.”
Chuck Lyon, Peko’s coach at College of the Canyons, likes to take credit for Peko and Anna meeting, an encounter that has led to a 10-year marriage and three sons.
“I did my small part,” Lyon quipped before conceding his lone role in a budding romance was opening a roster spot for a future All-american.
That Peko married the first girl he met in college was of little surprise to his old coach. It represented the loyalty he often saw in his players from Samoa. He had “six or seven” players from the region on his roster each year from 2000 to 2006.
“It’s unbelievable how loyal they are to each other and the culture,” Lyon said. “Now, don’t tick them off, because they will band together and do something about it. The loyalty that comes with that culture, once they’re with you and they believe and trust in you, they’ll run through a wall for you. They’ll do anything you ask them to do.”
“Not just the fellas”
Shortly before Broncos training camp started in July, Kerr’s cellphone buzzed. It was a call from Peko.
“He said, ‘Hey, man. We’re having people over. You can come over if you want to,’ ” said Kerr, another offseason addition to the defensive line.
A few minutes later, Kerr’s phone dinged again. It was a text from Peko, who wanted to rephrase the invitation.
He was like, ‘Hey, Uso, I really want you to come,'” Kerr said. “My girlfriend was pregnant at the time, but we ended up going. When we got there he was like, ‘I’m really happy you came.’
“When you go over there it’s not just the fellas. It’s his wife. It’s his kids. And I’m chilling with them, playing basketball with them. He’s all about family. He keeps trying to get me to bring my newborn (son). I’m like, ‘Bro, he’s a newborn.’ That’s the type of guy he is. He’s a family-oriented guy. He’s always welcoming.”
Whether he’s rounding up teammates to jet out on a lunch run before a meeting or inviting them to a concert at Red Rocks with his family, small examples of Peko bonding with teammates seem to pop up daily.
The word floating around the locker room describes how Peko has made his new teammates part of his family. “Uso,” his address to Kerr in that text message, is a Samoan word that translates to brother or friend.
It’s become the simplest way for teammates to address Peko. Big Uso, they call him. The big friend with the giant smile.
“I think football gets such a stigma of being a meathead sport where you’re just angry and just grrrr. And then you get this big nose tackle who’s been in the league 12 years and you never catch him without a smile on his face.” Defensive end Zach Kerr, on Domata Peko