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I went to the bottom of the internet trying to understand what it’s like to have an arm like Patrick Mahomes‘. I found a throw so rare that it technically doesn’t exist, erased on account of a holding penalty. November 2014. Mahomes is a 19-year-old true freshman at Texas Tech, facing Oklahoma, in only his second start. It’s third-and-10 at the Sooners’ 39-yard line. He’s been coached to look at a pair of receivers in sequence and, if they’re both covered, make a play. One, two, go. He takes the snap and is under immediate pressure — “one, go” — and he scampers left, not fast but elusive, away from the rush but into a trap. He’s within a yard of the sideline and all four Sooners defensive linemen are closing fast … until, with his weight moving left and a rusher’s helmet at his chin, Mahomes snaps his arm — in that instant, it’s his only body part in motion, as if isolated for maximum effect — and the ball assumes a trajectory that seems impossible without more of a windup, the physical expression of a metaphysical quality, a radical confidence known only by a blessed few. The ball hisses; it spirals fast and tight; it seems to alter the physics and change the possibilities of a football field — hovering low as it sails across and deep — until it sticks to a receiver’s chest in the end zone as Mahomes hits the ground. I watched that throw 20 times. I saw improvisatory football genius and sheer stones. I saw a man making calculations and assessing risks I couldn’t compute. I watched the throw until I was certain of what I was looking at.
And then I sat down with him and raved about passes like it. And he took the compliments with a dull stare, as if none of what I attributed to it ever occurred to him. It was just a throw. A throw he always makes — and has made since he first held a ball.
In any given generation, there are only a handful of truly transcendent arms. These guys are born, not made. If you don’t have it, you still can be a good NFL quarterback if not paid like a great one. If you have it and waste it, you’ll be a 30 for 30. But if you have it and don’t waste it, and combine it with an Academic All-American’s mind and a craftsman’s work ethic — well, that’s what I want to explore with Mahomes.
On an October afternoon in an office at the Chiefs’ facility, Mahomes doesn’t look like he wants to be explored. He looks explored out, polite but also maybe existentially exhausted from having his life change forever this season. He is 23 years old, without even 16 games under his belt, and he has a game-worn jersey in the Hall of Fame and leads the league (through Week 9) in touchdowns and yards and is second in passer rating. It’s been a year. Most impressive, he has normalized the impossible, making throws each week that defy reason and kinesiology.
The other day, in Mahomes’ apartment in the Country Club Plaza neighborhood of Kansas City, his grandfather asked him, “What’s it like to be famous?” For one thing, it means he eats less ketchup. He spent most of his life putting ketchup on everything. He would get bottles of it for his birthday. But now that everyone is watching every move he makes, he is sheepish about ordering ketchup. At a restaurant recently, his mom, Randi, recognized an unfilled desire as he dove into a steak. “Just ask for it,” Randi said. “I know you want it.” Patrick wouldn’t. So she asked for the ketchup and slipped it to him.
But the intersection of fame and ketchup is a story for another time. We’re here to talk about his arm, so I ask him a question I know better than to ask an obsessive technician like Tom Brady, for example.
“Have you ever had to think about throwing?”
Mahomes normally talks fast, and sounds rehearsed, praising his coaches and teammates, but he pauses now, as if this is the first time he’s thought about thinking about how much he thinks about his gifts, and says:
“Not a lot.”
I’m standing with John Elway as we watch Mahomes warm up at Arrowhead Stadium before the Chiefs play the Broncos in late October. Mahomes rolls left and throws deep right, then rolls right and throws deep left. He tosses it 60 yards without a strain or grunt. He looks like he’s goofing around — even checks his phone between reps — but this is actual practice. In games, he makes those throws. A few Broncos coaches watch Mahomes, seduced by the spectacle of it all. He has skills at his command that are the envy of anyone who’s ever played quarterback, and if you’ve ever thrown a ball well enough to have an idea of how hard it is to do what he does, it’s even more fascinating and thrilling and full of lovely subtleties, like the angle at which the nose rises and falls, how the ball seems to gain speed with distance rather than lose it, violent yet catchable. These passes change more than a game’s momentum. They suspend time, forcing you to look up from your phone and making you wonder what it feels like to unleash such force. Elway knows.
I ask Elway, “When your arm was its strongest, what was it like to throw?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He chews on it for a second and gives me a football version of the “I could always just play” scene in “Good Will Hunting.” “You just feel like you can do anything.”
To succeed in the NFL, most players have to come to terms with their limits. You learn to work within and against them. But if you are born with an arm like Mahomes’ or Elway’s, it allows you the blessing of never having to reconsider yourself — unless, of course, a few painful postseason losses force you to reconsider everything.
“It felt like the nose of the football went through my hands,” Mahomes’ dad says of one of the first times his son threw a football to him in the backyard. Hana Asano for ESPN
Mahomes might not think a lot about his own throwing, but many close to him have spent a lot of time thinking of ways to get him to slow down. His father, Pat, was a pitcher for 11 years in the majors, and the family often lived in apartments and hotel rooms in cities where he played. As a toddler, Patrick would go to the ballpark with his dad for batting practice and then come home, watch the game on TV and throw during commercial breaks. It was fun and exhausting. Randi would toss a ball into a corner or down the hall, hoping to buy herself a few moments of peace. “I thought, ‘I can read one more paragraph of this book until he gets the ball,’
” she says.
When Randi and Pat signed Patrick up for T-ball in their hometown of Tyler, Texas, the 4-year-old was so advanced he was traded for two players — Texas sports, man — and moved up to play coach-pitch with older kids. At the first practice, he scooped a ground ball at shortstop and fired to first, hitting the first baseman between the eyes and shattering his glasses. “I thought everybody could catch,” Mahomes says now, laughing.
The challenge of Mahomes’ childhood was the challenge of the gifted. How best to teach him? Should you even try? Pat tried to build his son’s arm strength through an array of baseball drills, beginning with long tosses and moving toward throws from different platforms, with both feet parallel or one foot planted the wrong way, hoping to help Patrick find his most powerful release point. Turns out, every release point was powerful. He not only intuitively threw at varying angles — could throw classically, or at three-quarters, or from his hip — he intuitively saw varying angles and the best way for a ball to reach its target. “It turned out to be a perfect storm,” Pat says. When Patrick was nearing middle school, he started to play football in the backyard with friends. One day, he threw as hard as he could to his dad. It’s a throw Pat still remembers a decade later, not only because of its force but because it was a declaration of sorts. His son would chart his own path.
“It felt like the nose of the football went through my hands,” Pat says.
Mahomes has the type of arm that can lead to assumptions. When he was a kid, he entered a summer football camp wearing a baseball hat turned backward. Adam Cook, the camp’s quarterbacks coach and later Patrick’s head coach at Whitehouse High and now one of his best friends, decided to test him. He had heard of Patrick’s arm strength and low release point — coaches tend to see a three-quarter release as the knee-steering of throwing motions, careless and too cool — and thought most kids with that resume were spoiled know-it-alls. Cook approached him and said, “Hey, turn your hat around so I can talk to you.”
Patrick turned around his hat, no questions asked. Although his talent has always meant the game has come easily to him, at heart he’s a conformist who is grounded and eager to work. “Dad, I just want to be coached,” he would tell Pat.
In middle school, he worked with a coach named Reno Moore, who would ask Patrick to lie on the ground next to a football and, when Moore gave the word, jump up and throw to one of three holes on a stand-up net to quicken his release. “His pure arm strength was phenomenal,” Moore says. “He’d make you pull out your hair trying to get him to be exact on his footwork and timing, but finally we just said he’s good enough to do some things that are special.”
“His pure arm strength was phenomenal. God didn’t give out many arms like that.”
– Adam Cook, Mahomes’ high school coach
At Whitehouse High, Adam Cook and his brother, Brad, the offensive coordinator, called a lot of quick screens and marveled at how fast the ball came out of Mahomes’ hand. Years later, Brad analyzed all of Mahomes’ quick screens and found that he released the ball in 0.58 of a second, compared with an average of 0.67 for all Whitehouse quarterbacks since. Adam Cook’s son, Sam, was a ball boy during Mahomes’ years, and he idolized Patrick — not just because Patrick went out of his way to make him feel part of the team, or because Patrick would remember teammates’ birthdays and ask coaches to announce them at practice, but because he wondered what it was like to have that arm. “You watch him make plays and think, ‘Maybe I could do something like that,’
” Sam says.
But of course, he couldn’t. Nobody could. “God didn’t give out many arms like that,” Adam Cook says.
The arm has given Mahomes the blessing or curse of never having to be desperate. All of the future Hall of Fame quarterbacks today have faced a moment in their lives when football could have moved on without them. The closest Mahomes came to that was during an Elite 11 contest in high school. He was tired and raw; he had pitched five innings the day before. He failed to qualify. Cook was angry. Pat Sr. was really angry. Was Patrick angry? Was that his signature scar, a moment — like Tom Brady’s draft slide or Drew Brees‘ shoulder injury or Aaron Rodgers‘ failure to get a single Division I offer out of high school — that becomes lore in retrospect? No. “East Texas isn’t known for producing quarterbacks,” he shrugs. “I was never really on the football circuit. I wasn’t the type of guy that put my name out there.”
His arm gave him confidence that it would all work out. During his senior football season, in 2013, he threw for 50 touchdowns and ran for 15 more. Baseball chased him, but he was bored with the game and told teams he would play only for a $2.5 million bonus, a figure he later told The Kansas City Star he had invented just to dissuade them. Football gave him a platform, a blank canvas on every play. He loves “the daily grind of dissecting and learning about defenses. Just having a new challenge every week.” In a playoff game against Poteet High, Mahomes spun away from linebacker Malik Jefferson, who now plays for the Bengals, and launched a deep pass down the right sideline for a touchdown. Pat Sr. later called it the most memorable play of his son’s career — and noted it’s the type of play Patrick has made “his whole life.” Watch Mahomes roll away from the Patriots’ rush and launch a 67-yard touchdown to Kareem Hunt and you know what he means.