RAISING THE GAME
How NFL superstar Patrick Mahomes is resetting the bar for sporting greatness
Patrick Mahomes, virtuoso quarterback with the Kansas City Chiefs, is a 500 Million Dollar Man. More than that, as the most important player in America’s most important sport, he’s redefining the limits of what an athlete can accomplish – on and off the field
Patrick Mahomes II doesn’t need to train right now. But at this exact moment, more than anything, he really wants to. It’s 7.03am on 7 July 2020, and he’s nearly alone in the cavernous Athlete Performance Enhancement Center (APEC) in Fort Worth, Texas. He’s less than 24 hours removed from signing a 10-year, $503m (£356m) pact with the National Football League’s most dominant team of the past five years. But in his mind, his standing as the face of the league and owner of the most lucrative contract in US sports history is already irrelevant. Two days earlier, when he was summoned to Kansas City for the physical exam and press conference that come with every historic contract, he planned this workout. And he texted Bobby Stroupe, his trainer since childhood, a promise: “I’ll be back to work on Tuesday.”
It’s time to deliver. Mahomes accepts Stroupe’s congratulatory hug, then jumps into his workout. His training mixes hi-tech ideas (he opens by kneading his legs with a massage gun) and a simplicity that allows him to go all out. Mahomes isn’t a freak athlete. He relies on a cocktail of flexibility exercises and explosive movements to develop the athleticism he needs to excel as a quarterback.
He goes through a multidirectional leap-and-hop series, then grabs a med ball, squats down, explosively leaps a foot in the air, and heaves the ball over his head, 30m down the turf. Laser-timed sprints come next, then Mahomes steps into a Keiser squat machine. A Keiser machine looks a lot like a standard weight machine – minus the weights. Instead, it uses a unique form of pneumatic resistance that can fully absorb the weight-rattling, explosive oomph that you sometimes hold back with standard free weights or machines. Mahomes leans his shoulders against the contraption’s rubber pads, squats low and delivers three rapid-fire reps of oomph. Each time, the machine bounces off the floor.
Two hours and one sweat-soaked T-shirt later, Patrick Mahomes has worked. He has muscled through 23 different exercises and thrown about 40 passes in a workout that sets the tone for his new 24/7 fitness lifestyle. For years, he had trained hard. But last off-season, motivated by Stroupe, he started to take a holistic view of fitness: fine-tuning his diet, optimising his rest and embracing and exploring advanced recovery treatments in an effort to drive his training to the next level. “I had to find a way to make myself better,” he says later. “It’s trying to find the next step.”
It has always been about what’s next for Mahomes, who, at 25, is four years into a career that has commentators struggling to find enough superlatives to do it justice. He doesn’t stand and survey the defence; like a midfield general, he probes and penetrates it, searching for a target or a running lane. Other quarterbacks set their feet for each throw; Mahomes plays a perpetual game of on-the-run darts, wrist-flicking screen passes and 50-yard bombs alike.
He is, in effect, unplayable. In
2018, his first year as a full-time starter, Mahomes became the third quarterback ever to throw 50 touchdowns in a single season and was named the MVP. The next season, he won his first Super Bowl. In November, he became the fastest quarterback to reach 100 career touchdown passes.
Through it all, Mahomes has become increasingly obsessed with optimising his fitness. He knows that fitness is the key to the success and career longevity that GOATs such as Tom Brady, 43, and LeBron James, 36, are currently stretching beyond what was ever thought possible. It also offers a kind of cultural power – a platform, in brand speak – to help him make his mark on a country that is increasingly looking to its athletes to be activists and inspirations. For Mahomes – the son of Major League pitcher Pat Mahomes, who is black, and Randi Martin, who is white – an opportunity to test that power arrived last summer, when he added his influential voice to the nation’s social-justice conversation and instantly became a key figure in 2020’s athlete awakening. (A lot more on that later.)
But Mahomes knows better than most that success and influence can be fleeting. In 2000, while playing with the Mets, his father helped to advance the team to the World Series. “I got to see him battle and grind to try to get back there,” Mahomes says today. Pat Snr never reached the play-offs again. “You never know if it’s going to be like this for the rest of your career,” Mahomes says.
“So, I just try to win as much as possible now, and do whatever I can to win multiple Super Bowls. I’m at the right point in my career where I can use my voice, and people can really, really make an impact in this world. This year, with everything that’s happened, it prompted me to really be bigger, and then be more than I had been before.”
Mahomes wants more. The closer he creeps to GOAT status, the more we will all listen to his message, in the same way that people hang on LeBron’s every tweet and analyse Brady’s baseball caps. But it takes more than three great seasons to attain that. Mahomes has studied the greats, both at his position and across other sports and disciplines,
MAHOMES KNOWS THAT OVERALL FITNESS IS THE KEY TO LONGTERM SUCCESS
because he wants to stick around. He has spoken to Donovan McNabb, the first quarterback to thrive under Chiefs coach Andy Reid, back when Reid ran the Eagles. Mahomes’s fiancée, Brittany Matthews, has been with him since they were in high school and says he looks up to Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant, both of whom played into their late thirties.
Mahomes knows that legends dominate across multiple acts. “I just always wanted to find a way to be on top at the end of the day,” he says. “I was able to do that early in my career, and I’m gonna try to continue to get back to that feeling again.” To make you listen,
Mahomes believes he must keep winning. And to keep winning, he’s convinced he needs to train harder.
Book of Brady
The Chiefs have the day off. Mahomes does not, which is something of a theme. It’s a Tuesday in early December, and he’s in an empty gym with Stroupe, who has flown up from Texas. Two days earlier, the Chiefs beat the Broncos, clinching a play-off berth and another shot at a Super Bowl. But Mahomes wasn’t sharp, throwing just one touchdown pass. Stroupe texted him afterwards, telling him to make quicker decisions. In response, Mahomes asked Stroupe to run him through a session.
It’s a play right out of the Book of Brady, who once had his own trainer, Alex Guerrero, roaming the sidelines at Patriots games. Stroupe isn’t Guerrero (he is a qualified strength trainer who runs his own business, APEC, and has a host of professional athletes as clients), but he is integral to
“I’m at the point in my career where I can use my voice and make an impact in this world”
Mahomes’s new focus on total fitness. He has worked with Mahomes since the quarterback was a 10-year-old in Texas, and Stroupe knew enough back then not to mess with the boy’s unique physicality. While other talented kids headed to quarterback camps, Mahomes grew up playing not just American football but baseball and basketball, too, and he never learned that there was any one way to throw a ball. He just learned to get the ball to targets, whether as a short-stop whirling and throwing to first base, or as a point guard throwing a no-look pass. “I almost learned the quarterback position backwards,” Mahomes says. “That was the reason I play the game the way I do.”
Stroupe understands Mahomes’s strengths and weaknesses. “Let’s just be honest: he’s not a Greek god,” Stroupe says. “If you look at his anatomical set-up, his body is built like a reverse centaur. He has a really big upper body and a triangular, smaller lower body.” That limits the amount of leg drive Mahomes can create on his throws. And there’s Mahomes’s spine – he seems to be able to explosively twist and turn his upper body in any direction. Stroupe says it’s “the most athletic spine I’ve ever seen.”
As if to prove his flexibility on this particular day, Mahomes works through what Stroupe calls the “chunk drill”.
The objective is to lunge in one direction while twisting your torso as violently as possible, aiming to look straight behind you. Most athletes fall short of that goal. Mahomes moves like a creature out of The Exorcist. With the ball gripped vice-like in his right hand, he stands facing Stroupe, then rotates his hips 180° counterclockwise and genuflects on his right knee. “Spin it,” Stroupe says. Somehow, Mahomes’s upper body keeps whirling. He ends with his face almost looking back at Stroupe, before reversing the process. This uncommon mobility allows Mahomes to create upper-body spring by arching through his spine or twisting quickly through his shoulders to make his masterful, on-the-run throws.
Stroupe’s training consistently builds on all of this. He is known for a series of drills that challenge total-body mobility (like the chunk drill). These help Mahomes to move better without packing on more muscle than he needs. Stroupe also loves med-ball movements, which are effective at challenging the spine.
When Mahomes decided to overhaul his fitness last summer, Stroupe knew how to direct him. First, Mahomes was tested for allergies, so he could calibrate his diet (verdict: he is allergic to “most nuts” and, um, grass), then he hired a personal chef. He also donned a Whoop band, streaming all of his personal data directly to Stroupe’s phone. Stroupe zones in on Mahomes’s recovery score (a Whoop measure of how well his body recovers while he sleeps). It is calculated using data on resting heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep quality and heart-rate variability (an analysis of the time between heartbeats). Based on those numbers, Stroupe advises Mahomes on his training intensity. He has developed his own targets for Mahomes and chases consistency, especially when it comes to recovery scores. His goal is to keep Mahomes between 40% and 80% recovered every day. Yes, that’s better than a full recovery (100%) or a complete in-the-red crash. “It’s not good if he’s on either end of the spectrum,” says Stroupe.
This is all exactly what Mahomes wanted. “I told Bobby just to continue to challenge me, continue to bring different stuff,” he says. “He has really helped me execute at an even higher level on the field.” When the pandemic was at its height, Mahomes found himself stuck at home, and with
Stroupe grounded in Texas, Mahomes turned to another trusted fitness source: his fiancée, a certified trainer with a degree in kinesiology who has already built her own fitness brand, Brittany Lynne Fitness. Matthews drew up his workouts, and Mahomes rose at 6am every morning and coaxed her out of bed so they could train alongside each other.
Between his trainer, his fiancée and his own drive, Mahomes has never been stronger or faster. Three years ago, he weighed 108kg. This past year, despite COVID-19 restrictions that limited one-on-one sessions with Stroupe and curtailed access to the Chiefs facility, he sits around 102kg on game days. He feels ready to achieve his ultimate goal, which Stroupe knows well. “Maaaaaaan,” Stroupe says, “he’s chasing legacy.”
“I told my trainer to continue challenging me, continue bringing different stuff”
A Bigger Conversation
Patrick Mahomes entered the NFL in 2017, just as players were starting to express frustration over the race issues plaguing the country. Mahomes didn’t jump headlong into the conversation. His godfather, ex-Major League pitcher LaTroy Hawkins, advised him to wait.
“My conversation with him was: ‘You’re new to the league,’” Hawkins says. “I said, ‘Your main objective right now is learning this playbook and building leadership skills.’”
During Mahomes’s first few years in the league, his play gave the lie to decades of unfair racial stereotyping that dogged every black quarterback since Fritz Pollard a century ago. Scouts love labelling styles. Black
quarterbacks are often “athletic scramblers”, while white quarterbacks are “polished passers”. But Mahomes defies those labels and firmly underlines their spurious nature.
On any given down, he can throw the prototypical deep ball, or yet another what-the-hell pass threaded through three hapless defenders.
The most powerful platforms are rooted in the strongest performances – the moment you stop winning, everyone can opt out. The biggest thing that Colin Kaepernick had going against him and his career in the NFL was timing. Kaepernick began kneeling in protest of police brutality in 2016, months after a series of surgeries and three years after his only Super Bowl appearance. So his detractors conveniently dismissed him as “in decline”.
But when history came for Mahomes in June last year, following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police
– the ugliest moment of 2020, according to Mahomes – he was a Super Bowl MVP and very much on the rise. He still struggles for words when discussing it. “I mean, seeing that video, I mean, you can barely watch it,” he says, his voice dropping low. He slows down, choosing his words carefully. “You have to stop the video, because it’s just sad to watch. And being from a racially diverse family, I could see someone in my family being in that position. And so I just didn’t want that to happen again.”
He didn’t speak publicly right away, and those close to him suggest that he was conscious that his biracial background could undercut anything he said. He had lived a childhood of privilege, with three parental figures in his father, his mother and Hawkins, his godfather. He spent time in Major League Baseball locker rooms with his father, then relaxed with his mother at home. And when his parents divorced in 2006, they made sure that Mahomes never had to choose between families. Mahomes lived with Martin, but his father was always “at school, at practice, at every game”, Hawkins says.
Mahomes moved freely through multiple worlds, enjoying the best experience that a biracial child could, making friends with both black and white children. He was never forced to label himself as black or white. “I don’t want him put in a race box,” says Hawkins, bristling slightly.
“When you put him in a box, you completely ignore his momma. He’s the product of a Caucasian family and a black family. They’re both human beings.”
Still, in the wake of Floyd’s death, Mahomes was angry and wrestling with his duality. He spoke with Hawkins, who is black and works not far from where Floyd was killed in Minnesota. “He was very disturbed, just like everyone else,” says Hawkins.
But Mahomes decided that he could no longer just be “everyone else”. On 1 June he released a statement on
Twitter, acknowledging first that he was “blessed to have been accepted for who I am my entire life” but adding that “this isn’t the case for everyone. The senseless murders that we have witnessed are wrong and cannot continue in our country.”
“I’m trying to be at the top of my game for the longest time possible”
Stronger Together
Days later, he appeared with other players in a social-media video hashtagged #StrongerTogether, saying directly to the camera: “Black Lives Matter.” Less than a week after that, Roger Goodell, the NFL
commissioner who effectively allowed Kaepernick to be run out of the league, uttered the words “Black Lives Matter” in a video statement. In August, he went further, announcing in an interview on social media that the league “wished we had listened earlier” to Kaepernick’s kneeling protest. True, it was ultimately just a standard, corporate apology. But just as true is the fact that, after Mahomes joined the discussion, the league finally shifted its political agenda.
Mahomes eventually had a meeting with Goodell with the goal of urging the league to back up its talk. “I got to talk to Goodell. I talked to other guys around the league,” he said on Fox Sports’ Undisputed in August. “Obviously, now it’s about action. I’m excited that we’ve had these conversations, but now it’s about going out there and acting on it.” It’s always about what’s next.
Mahomes is already moving past last season. That’s because, as brilliant as his 2020 was, he is already hunting for his next opportunities for growth and new ways to stay on top. In a decade’s time, maybe two, Mahomes wants people discussing him in the same way that they talk about Brady and LeBron today. “Those guys, they’ve prolonged their careers,” he says. “And if I start early, I’m trying to get myself as much opportunity to go out there and be at the top of my game for the longest amount of time possible.”
Right now, there are more conversations with Stroupe. Trainer and quarterback are discussing new off-season goals and finding other lifestyle tweaks they can make to drive even better performance. Stroupe thinks that Mahomes can add speed and power, and Mahomes believes he can become a more consistent performer. The 2021 season starts in September and Mahomes is on it. “To me, if it’s not broke, it’s not broke,” he says. “We’ve continued to build this plan and continued to get better and better.”