The Tragic Death of Korey Stringer, the NFL’s Enlightened Man

This article originally appeared in the September 2001, issue of Esquire with the headline “The Enlightened Man.” Tragically, on August 1, 2001, Korey Stinger, the subject of the story, died after succumbing to heatstroke on the second day of training camp. The horrible news came just as the article was about to arrive on newsstands. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access.

First we have the bull. Yeah, that was his first piece. He’s stretching his V-neck down to provide a view of that bull depicted on his splendid left breast. Yeah, he knows. It’s the size of a pasta bowl, that breast. Yeah, it’s a dark-brown hunk of human worthy of fear and awe and God’s glory. It’s a rock-solid, bulbous slab of man-flesh commanding adoration. Yeah. But what about the bull? Now, ain’t that a good bull?

Tattoo-wise, the bull was an obvious first choice for a man whose body has always been the main event. A more or less 338-pound, six-foot-four body with a forty-six-inch waist and a size-14 foot, a body that could easily bring to mind thoughts of steak and hide and cowboys getting thrown off it. The kind of body that was always different, always extreme; you know, his mom would get so sick of having to take his birth certificate to T-ball games back home in Warren, Ohio, to prove that, in fact, her son really was only eight years old, even though he looked more or less like a sycamore tree.

He shrugs. This movement makes him sweat. Yeah, he almost always sweats, beads of liquid pooling and spilling, pooling and spilling down a deep brown brow. A thoughtful, earnest brow that seems to bear the weight of centuries but actually is topped by dreadlocks sprouting happily, joyfully, as if dancing maybe to the theme song from Wally Gator.

His cell phone rings. Doodle-loodle-leet. Doodle-loodle-leet. It’s his dad on the cell phone. His dad is saying, How about I make liver and onions on the stove for when you come home to Warren, Ohio, tomorrow? Korey feels a glow of happiness inside him. It’s this whole situation, is what it is. Here in his roomy house in the fine Hillcrest Lakeview Farms development in suburban Minneapolis, with Kelci upstairs cooking chicken in the oven and their three-year-old boy, Kodie, watching Dipsy and Tinky Winky on the kitchen TV. And him, Korey Stringer, down here on the supersized black leather couch in front of the big-screen with the PlayStation on, and now with his dad calling about cooking liver and onions on the stove for when he comes home. Has there ever been a more perfect and comfortable intersection of time and space? This, he thinks, is what people long for. People don’t really long to be rich or famous. Most people long to be comfortable. Comfortable with their families and comfortable with their houses and comfortable in themselves.

He realizes, okay, comfort differs from man to man. Because for him, comfort is also the feeling of being in like thirty car wrecks every Sunday afternoon. Yeah. Comfort is trying to knock the living shit out of some enormous, angry, bile-spewing brute snarling at you from across the line, over and over again, every play, like eighty times, banging your head into a wall of viciousness and barbarity. It really is. You know, football is a violent game. That’s why you use words like destroy and crush and dominate and kill and all like that. Most people, like the average person, if you were an offensive lineman and you ached in the places that he aches after the game, after three hours of just heaving your entire body into men the size of side-by-side refrigerators, you would go to the hospital probably. You would go to the hospital and get yourself checked out.

But it makes him comfortable, so that’s his gig. It makes him comfortable because he’s an expert in controlled rage. He’s twenty-seven years old, he’s started all but three games at right tackle for the Minnesota Vikings since he entered the NFL seven years ago, he’s been doing this since junior high school, so trust him, he’s an expert. Football gets in your muscle memory, is where it gets. It gets to where the hard part is not doing it. That’s where in the past he has always messed up. That’s where, more or less, you could see his life falling apart. During the off-season. Never during the season, when he had the sweet, dependable rhythm of getting in thirty car wrecks every Sunday to count on.

This brings to mind his second tattoo. He pulls his sleeve up to provide the view. Yeah, they make belts for women that would be too small to fit around this upper arm. Yeah. But here on this upper arm, we have the initials “FTW” forming an arc over the planet earth, which is being cupped by a human hand supposedly intent on crushing it. This piece, inscribed on Korey’s right arm when he was twenty-two years old, bears full and exact witness to the sum of his belief system at the time of its inscription: “Fuck the World.” Yeah. That pretty much said it. He calls this period of time his FTW stage. It was his second year in the NFL. It was ugly. It was the culmination of everything. It was the dark cave into which the pilgrim retreats and, if it shall come to pass that he truly is to become the mythic hero, finds the way.

Which is damn convenient. Because now in his sizable square head, he has converted FTW from “Fuck the World” to “Find the Way.” And when you really examine the tattoo, you have to note that the hand isn’t really going to crush the earth at all; matter of fact, that hand is holding up the earth and all its people with all their problems and all their badness and all their goodness, whatever their gig may be.

His gig. Is he wandering too far off his original point? He’s sorry, but this is the way his head works. He spends a lot of time alone with his head. That’s like his most comfortable place probably in the world. He’ll just sit there and talk to himself in his head, and of course when you’re talking to yourself in your head, it doesn’t matter how much you wander off your original point. It’s funny. People don’t automatically associate the word pensive with a giant football player such as him. Matter of fact, people don’t expect anything they first get from Korey. Like, he’s a clown. He’s an entertainer. He can do impressions of anybody; he’ll keep the crowd happy no matter what it takes. His perspective on it is, he has a duty to give you every opportunity to have the chance to like him. But people have no idea, like maybe only a couple people have an idea, that in his head he isn’t funny, he’s serious, he’s thinking stuff through constantly.

He’s sweating. He brings up a towel to wipe off the sweat. He almost always has a towel with him to wipe off the sweat. His position on it is, you’ve been blessed with an automatic sprinkler system, you should always bring a towel. He changes the big-screen from PlayStation over to ESPN. He holds the remote gently, like it’s a gerbil or a hamster maybe. His fingers are long and thin and still and tender, his forearm as thick as a car door.

His gig. Don’t get him wrong, there are frustrations during the season. There are the ones you’ve probably heard of. Like a defensive lineman, that guy could be on the field for fifty plays in a game, but he gets two sacks, and, you know, he had a great game. He’s player of the week. Then you take an offensive lineman who doesn’t really get a break, doesn’t get to rotate and stay fresh like the defensive linemen do, has to continually stand there and bash himself into guys, and he might be on the field for eighty plays in the game, but he gives up two sacks and he’s a bum. He’s trade bait. Regardless of whether the other seventy-eight plays were excellent. It’s those two sacks that everybody is going to talk about. It’s not a good position to play if your intent is glory.

But there is another frustration. There is this whole business of being cut off from where you just came from. From the past, you might say. When you think about it, his job as an offensive lineman is to move forward into a place that doesn’t actually matter except to the people in the present, who haven’t even gotten there yet—okay? Just stay with him on this. It’s like once you break the huddle, you’re thinking about the play, the snap count, the guy that’s lined up over you, what the defensive alignment is. You’re thinking about which way your man is going to go and how that’s going to affect the play that you’re running. You’re blocking. You’re attempting to move a three-hundred-pound man in a direction he totally does not want to move in. This goes on and on; time is elongated, you might say. You’re blocking so long—at least it feels so long because you’ve got your back to everything, to the action, to the quarterback, to the running back—on and on and on it seems like, because now all you’re feeling, it’s like you almost can’t stop yourself, it’s like you just gotta know, you want to turn your head around and look back and see what the hell is going on in the play, in the present, in everybody’s whole reason for being here today. You get curious is what you get. But you can’t ever look back. You are being paid almost $4 million a year to be a forward-headed bull, to use every available ounce of your God-given talents of explosive acceleration. You are among the best in the world at being a forward-headed bull. Even though looking back is basically 100 percent fundamental to who you are.

Looking back is Korey’s way of understanding. Looking back at where he came from and how he got here. He spends a lot of time in his head doing this. Just in everyday life even, he spends a lot of time in his head going back to Warren, Ohio. You might say he spends a lot of time in his head gaining historical perspective.

It’s funny to think about. He’s just making this connection right now: His high school coach at Warren G. Harding High School was a history teacher. Maybe that’s how he came to appreciate history so much. He loves to read. Mostly biographies. He loves to read how other people got where they got. And anyway, he’s just thinking about this now: Do you know now they got a coach at Warren G. Harding who doesn’t even teach—his whole entire job is to coach football? That can’t be good for the kids. It certainly can’t. How can it be good for a kid to idolize a man who is paid to think football is the center of the universe?

That’s Korey’s job with his rookies. He calls them his rookies. He thinks of it as his job. Keep the young guys reminded of the fact that there is more to life than football. Keep the vibe in the Vikings locker room loose. It’s a high-pressure situation, but it’s still the game you grew up playing as a kid. Oh, there’s so many things to teach his rookies.

Like, earlier today, he drove his rookies back to their hotel. Oscar and Mo and Isaac. More than thirteen hundred pounds of human in one car. It was after a blazing-hot day of pushing the five-man sled around while offensive-line coach Mike Tice was riding on top, Tice all clean and perfect with his Bermuda shorts on and his skinny calves, yelling with that booming voice, you know how he does, Get your hands inside, there’s a helmet there, I want your hands on each side of the helmet, I want the drill done perfectly, keep your hands on each side of the helmet, push the pad, if I see fingers outside the pad, you’re gonna go again, I don’t have anything else to do today. Set, thirty-eight, thirty-HUT! We’re not done yet, all right, here we go, all SET, thirty-eight! Thirty-HUT!

Oscar and Mo and Isaac, they were tired. They probably had headaches. They were stuffed like giant baked sweet potatoes in Korey’s car, reminding you why General Motors invented a car as big as a Yukon. “Is there any particular music you’d like to listen to?” Korey said to them. “Okay, we got the oldies station. We got a little bit of every kinda CD, you know, I take requests: EPMD, Jackson 5, Bill Withers, Keith Sweat, Al Jarreau….”

The guys didn’t respond; they just sat there, smelling like a pine forest after rain. So Korey put in Al Jarreau, cranked it.

“Yo, Korey,” Oscar shouted over the music. “I gotta get me some new pants. Where I’m gonna get me some new pants?”

“All right, okay,” Korey said, pleased to oblige with the inside track on where a giant man might find clothes in Minneapolis. “I’m gonna write you down the directions. I’m gonna tell you how to get to the mall with the Big and Tall.”

See, now, most guys, they don’t pay any attention to the rookies, whereas Korey gives them directions to the Big and Tall. Korey routinely has them over to his house, throws some burgers on the grill. Hey, he believes every human being on this earth, no matter what their station in life, has the right to be comfortable.

He believes “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He mostly came to this belief when he was a rookie, wishing he was done unto better. He was barely twenty-one. He left Ohio State a year early to become a Minnesota Viking. Overnight he went from not being able to afford to pitch in for a pizza to making like a million dollars a year. He was supposed to be happy. He was supposed to be on top of the world. Instead he was sitting there all by himself in a Minneapolis hotel room with free soap and free shampoo, bored and afraid and soothing himself with TV and beer and calling home to his mom and his dad and his brother and his sister and Zig and Pap Pap and anybody else who would talk to him. They would say it’s going to get better, they would say it’s always hard starting out new somewhere, but of course what they couldn’t know was that first it had to get a lot worse.

It always comes back to this. In his head it always comes back to FTW. In a thousand languages over thousands of years, this is the story of the enlightened man.

Okay, now, this right here is Southwest Boulevard. This is his street. It looks a lot smaller now. It was huge when he was coming up. He’s crammed into the driver’s seat of a bright-red Jeep Grand Cherokee rented from the Avis corporation, and he is dressed up fancy to come home here to Warren, Ohio. He’s in his mustard-yellow velour warm-up suit and he’s got on his big triangle diamond earrings and his big charm bracelet and a platinum necklace as thick as a copperhead snake.

This is the house he grew up in. His brother, Kevin, lives here now. He just had this garage built. It’s kind of swampy back in that corner. But for the most part, this is it, you know. In Warren you could get a decent job, either at the GM plant or at Packard Electric. You got one of those jobs, you could afford a little house to raise your kids in. There were blacks and there were whites here in the Palmyra Heights section. You grew up knowing which you were, but you grew up wondering why it mattered, since everyone had more or less the same basic job and the same basic house.

Him and Kevin, they shared the room with that window right there. Kevin is two years older. Kevin had allergies. He was all brains, you could say. Korey was brains, too, but a different kind. Korey had a certain philosophicalness to his being. His main thing was, he just wanted to do what he wanted to do. This, you might say, was at the root of his philosophy.

Okay, Chris and Grady lived right here. And Shug and Shawn there. And Michael and Terrence. Clarence and Junie. Jermaine and Elbert. Clyde and Mitchell right there. Kevin and Toot. Popeye, Trevor, and CC. It seemed like every house had boys his age in it to play with. Baseball was Korey’s main sport coming up. He was a natural athlete, good at anything he played, one of those kids who could hypnotize you with his power and rhythm and flow. His mom would not let him play football until he reached junior high school, which was kind of ridiculous when you consider football was everything in Warren, Ohio. Like in the old days when his father was born, like, if a baby boy was born, they’d give him a small miniature football at the hospital. Yeah. That tells the story right there.

But really, to Korey, any game was cool. Kickball, stickball—he’d compete at how many lightning bugs you could catch. His main thing was not losing. Just like he and his mom and Kevin would play Parcheesi or Trouble or something, every single night they played a board game, and if Korey came out the loser, it would be like something inside him was dying, like he was saying goodbye to a friend, having a damn funeral. Tears would start pouring out.

Korey was hungry all the time. No matter how much he ate, it was never enough. It was like he just needed constant fuel for a body on fire with growth. One time he was in the backseat on a family trip to Detroit, he was like in seventh grade, and he was like, this is ridiculous. He told his dad to pull over. His legs hurt. It was like his bones were just growing right there in the car. Eventually, the doctors gave him support sleeves for his legs to give the tendons a chance to catch up with his bones growing. By the time he was fourteen, he was six foot one, 210 pounds. Another kid might’ve gotten made fun of for being so big, but Korey had charm on top of his bigness. He knew how to use his bigness. He was the one to say, “Yo, this is stupid” to guys bashing each other up on the bus, and his bigness really helped the point be made.

He stops at the stop sign, leans in to see if anybody’s at the Corner Store. All right. Yeah. Now. This is his other street. This is Fourth Street. This is the house he lived in when his mom and dad fell off for a while. They’re together now. His Aunt Becky lives here now in this house. His father’s parents still live next door. You want to go meet Pap Pap?

Pap Pap is waving out the window. Pap Pap is wiry thin with practically nothing on him but a belly and a smile. He sure is glad to see Korey. Grandma is upset because she didn’t know anyone was coming or she would have made herself presentable. “You’re still the most beautiful girl in the world to me,” Korey tells her, and plops himself into the Barcalounger because Pap Pap took the couch in front of the big-screen, where Tim Conway and Don Knotts are starring in The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. Pap Pap, he’s complaining about the Troy-Bilt rototiller he got, it’s so hard to switch the gears, he should have gotten the Honda.

“I guess you noticed all my teeth fell off the top,” says Grandma, who is sitting out of view, in the dining room. “They just up and fell apart.”

“They fell apart?” Korey says.

“Well, something happened!” she says.

“Uh-huh,” Pap Pap says.

“It just means you went through a lot of chewing, Grandma,” Korey says.

“Yeah.”

“Unh-huh. All right.”

An hour of afternoon goes by like this, Korey sweating and wiping off with a towel, until he heads out again in the car to make sure everything else is still in place. Like the Hot Dog Shoppe. Yeah, okay. He rolls down the window so as to smell the grandeur. They cook them on the grill, they don’t boil them, and the superdogs are almost like a Polish sausage, but mostly what he gets is the two regular chili-and-cheese hot-dog special. Then this here is Eli’s Barbecue. That’s major. But at Eli’s you gotta put the order in early. They take a little while, but it’s gonna be right. And this is Carmen’s Pizza, they’ve been slipping lately on the crust.

Coming up, Korey did dream of being a football star, but the dream wasn’t about college or pro ball. His perspective on it was, it’s the same game as they played in high school, so what was the difference? Coming up, he idolized the guys who played with Warren G. Harding and Western Reserve high schools. Those were the heroes of Friday nights, when pretty much all of Warren would drop everything and go watch one team or the other. Those guys were celebrities, just like Mean Joe Greene was a celebrity. Only those guys would talk to you.

As soon as he got to high school, Korey was put on varsity, unheard of for a freshman. So in a way he had achieved his life’s dream right there. One day he got called into the coach’s office. All the coaches were looking at videotapes of Korey, watching his nimble toes and his natural knee bend, how he could dance despite all that bulk. They were marveling at his power, which seemed otherworldly. They told him he was special, that he was not like other guys. They told him to be prepared for college recruiters, who indeed would start contacting Korey by his sophomore year. His coaches worked with him on how to hold on to his soul with everybody promising him the moon.

Whatever. The college thing didn’t impress Korey much one way or the other. He just didn’t want to have to go to like California or something like that. There was no way he’d go that far from Warren, where, by the way, a legend was being made: In 1990, the Warren G. Harding Raiders won the state championship, the biggest excitement to hit Warren in generations. Korey was a junior. By his senior year, he was two-time all-state and had been named to the all-American team.

Sitting here in this car thinking about this, Korey has regrets. He clicks the radio on, as if Destiny’s Child might help drown out the grief. In his senior year, the Raiders didn’t even make the playoffs. Didn’t even get a chance to defend their title. He thinks about this all the time. It’s his biggest regret in sports.

He ended up picking Ohio State, mainly because it was only two hours away. By his third college game, he was named a starter, and then Big Ten freshman of the year in 1992, then to the Associated Press All-American team in 1993 and 1994, and voted MVP of the Ohio State team. Yeah. By junior year he had accomplished all of that without a lot of headache, and, really, he was feeling done with the college gig. Just done. School was starting to feel like a bird pecking on his head. It was just like, stop it.

But, by the way, in college he did well with the ladies. Sure he did. He was Whatever Man. No, he was the Amazing Whatever Man. You want to be with him, you gotta just take whatever you get. And the girls would do it. No resistance whatsoever. All of them except for a certain girl named Kelci. She was Whatever Woman. No, she was I Got My Shit Together and No Guy Is Gonna Screw It Up Whatever Woman. He couldn’t stay cool with her for more than one day at a time. They were always on-again, off-again.

The night of the NFL draft in 1995, Korey and Kelci were semi on-again. His mom was having a draft party, and Kelci was helping out, the two of them praying that Miami or someplace like that didn’t pick Korey, because with the kind of temptation in a place like Miami, there was no way a gentle soul like Korey could survive. He wasn’t what you’d call wise to the ways of the world. He was the kid who never had to work tremendously hard to get what he got, the football version of the straight-A student who never went to class, could just waltz in and ace the exam.

Korey himself was not at the draft party. He was over at his dad’s. His mom and his dad were semi off. Korey and his dad and Kevin and Korey’s best friend, Maceo, had a case of Bud Light, and they watched The Lion King and they watched Raising Arizona. They were Whatever Men. This draft thing was not going to matter. Korey was not going to get rattled by all the talk that had started: Korey was getting fat. Korey was out of shape. Korey needed to work out. Korey had to start caring more about a thing called a career. What-ever. For a while there, he’d been projected as a top-five draft pick. But now, with him not working out, with him putting on weight, with his attitude of not caring, well, put it this way: By the time he’d arrived at the NFL combine—late—he was tipping the scale at 348 pounds.

He ended up being the twenty-fourth pick in the first round. He was going to Minnesota, a place his mom and Kelci thought was good and cold and without a lot of temptation that might hinder a man’s attempt to develop character.

When he got to Minneapolis, there was that whole rookie vibe to deal with, number one. And number two, he was coming from an Ohio State program built around running the ball, and he gets to the Vikings and it’s all passing. So now he’s pretty much blind on top of everything else, because he really doesn’t know how to pass-block, and his coach at the time is basically telling him he sucks, telling him, you know, You’re a first-round pick, we’re paying you good money, figure it out. And he couldn’t. And then in the newspapers, after the first year the newspapers were starting to make fun of him. He wasn’t Korey Stringer, a fine example of what Warren, Ohio, could produce. No, he was “the blubbery kid from Ohio” who maybe couldn’t survive the NFL. He was maybe the wasted draft pick. Yeah, he wasputting on more weight. Matter of fact, the summer after his second season, he got up to 388 pounds. What do you expect of a man who has no routine, no, no, just nothing regular in his life, no schedule, no base, no foundation to his day or to his night? Alone. Like he would leave practice and go to his house and just sit with the lights out, sit there in the dark and think in his head. He’d think, Fuck the World is what he would think in his head. He was in the NFL. Everybody said it was supposed to be some kinda dream come true, and maybe for another man it would have been. But the NFL was never his dream. His dream was just being comfortable. And in his mind, being comfortable had always basically meant just doing what you wanted to do, and this right here is all he wanted to do: Fuck the World. He had his phone cut off because he didn’t want anyone bothering him while he sat there thinking Fuck the World in his head. He would go down to the SuperAmerica and get on the pay phone and call his mom sometimes, but for the most part he would just sit there and eat and drink beer and think Fuck the World and pass out.

The Vikings sent him to a weight-loss clinic in North Carolina. Great. Now people were telling him what to eat and when to eat it. He skipped out and got himself two more tattoos—the Japanese character meaning courage on one arm, the Japanese character meaning strength on the other—etching words on his body the way a man putting on war paint prepares for battle.

He went back to Minneapolis and sat for more time in the dark, alone, in the belly of the whale as sure as Jonah, a cave, the only place he might be able to find Korey Stringer from Warren, Ohio, while at the same time do battle with Korey Stringer from Warren, Ohio. Like Hiawatha and the monster Mishe-Nahma. Like Captain Ahab and the Great White Whale or Santiago and the Marlin or Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, just any of those dudes throughout the history of the world who go through the trial, do the battle, either the dragon slays you or you slay the dragon, it doesn’t really matter, one of you consumes the other, you emerge transformed into a brand-new powerful you.

The thinking, the cave, it led to a revelation, an epiphany as sure as hell. It was: Hey, just doing everything you want to do doesn’t make you comfortable. It makes you fat and miserable and hateful against the world because you hate what it has caused you to become. It was: Hey, it ain’t the world’s fault. It ain’t nobody but Korey Stringer’s fault.

And another thing. Coach Tice came on board with the Vikings. He grabbed ahold of Korey. He had Korey’s number. Like, the most important quality in a tackle is recoverability, being able to react without taking one false step. Most guys have to learn it, have to drill and drill and drill it until it’s in their muscles. Korey was born with it. A combination of quickness, balance, and rhythm. But the thing with Korey, he didn’t value it. He didn’t care. He was throwing it away. Tice told Korey, he said, ‘You can take yourself from being labeled a fat man, a dud, a flop, just another wasted first-round pick, to being one of the premier athletes of the NFL. And you don’t need to do anything except care.”

Korey heard that.

And another thing. Kelci came up. Kelci got a job in Minneapolis. She and Korey had been off-again for quite some time. And now here was Kelci, slender and perfect in her innocence and hard as her long fingernails in her commitment to being the person she knew herself to be. She moved in. He wasn’t alone anymore. It felt like … air. His first gasp of air. Then she said, “Uh-oh.” She said, “I’m pregnant.”

It could have gone a lot of ways. For another man, it might have gone differently. But the idea of a child, his child, it completed the man. It was like, you know, now it’s something major. It was like, these past two years all you’re doing is thinking of yourself, and the idea of a baby allows you to see it’s bigger than that. It was like, “Let me figure out who I am so I can let my child know. Because if I don’t know, he’s gonna be lost.”

Turbo. That’s how it was. It wasn’t like a diet or an exercise plan or anything like that. It was just waking up. It was sleep. It was caring. It was having so much to care about. It was getting to bed at a decent hour and going to work as a man goes to work, a man who thinks, Hey, I’m gonna make sure I’m hungry when I get home, because Kelci’s cooking dinner and it’s only right to make sure my stomach appreciates the beauty of that fact. He lost fifty pounds, got in the best shape of his life. In the newspapers they started to use the word mauler next to Korey Stringer. He could finish games like never before; he’d still have fuel in his tank for knockdowns in the fourth quarter.

Kodie was born in February 1998. Korey got himself a tattoo on his left shoulder; it says KODIE overtop a yin-yang symbol. Four months later, Korey and Kelci got married. Korey got a tattoo on his right breast; it says KELCI overtop a yin-yang symbol and a rose. Soon after, the Vikings locked him up longterm with a five-year, $18.4 million extension signed on Christmas Eve 1998, which included a $4 million signing bonus.

That’s when he bought his mom the house. He said, Go pick out yourself a nice house to live in. It’s a modest ranch on the east side of Warren with a much bigger yard than anything you’d ever see in Palmyra Heights. She has baskets of flowers outside. And inside, the hall to the kitchen is narrow, with the liver-and-onion smell spilling forth.

“All right, okay,” says his dad, thin and wiry with an intelligent tilt to his head.

“Yeah, okay,” says Korey, shoving his dad’s shoulder.

His mom comes in, a Shrinky Dink version of Korey. She kisses him on the cheek but mostly is caught up in complaining about Scooter, her black cocker-spaniel dog that does everything wrong, everything bad a cocker-spaniel dog could ever do. And then Kevin, who looks like his dad, comes in with a pizza and gives a belly laugh and throws his arms around Korey like maybe Gumby throwing his arms around Barney, those arms can hardly reach. “All right, okay,” Korey says. A cousin is here with chicken wings. Korey’s little sister, Kim, comes in with french fries. Plus his mom had stopped and gotten two Caesar salads in those shaker mugs at McDonald’s. There is no talk of football or the Minnesota Vikings or of last season, in which the Vikings came within one game of making it to the Super Bowl, or of how Korey and his offensive line helped Robert Smith break like a million team records, including most rushing yards in a season (1,521) and most 100-yard games in a season (eight). Or how the line gave quarterback Daunte Culpepper enough time to throw for 3,937 yards and thirty-three touchdowns in his first year at the helm. Or how Korey, the new and improved Korey, got himself named to the 2001 Pro Bowl.

No, the talk is all food and what shift you got put on and Kevin and Korey doing their Fat Albert routines. And his dad is concentrating on the liver and onions on the stove; he’s saying it’s gonna be good, it’s gonna be so good you’ll have to slap yourself and say, Is it for real? The TV trays are up and everyone sits and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is on; it’s a direction to stare in, like the ocean or a sunset or a fire, while you visit and while you eat and while you absorb the wondrous power of home.

In the morning, he shows up at 8:30 after a breakfast of grits with scrambled eggs and sugar all mixed together at the Empire Diner. He shows up here at Mollenkopf Stadium at Warren G. Harding High School. His mom had said, Would you do the event; he said, If it’s for the kids, of course I will, Mom. The event is the eighteenth annual YWCA Olympics, and about 250 first- through sixth-graders are here to run and jump and throw.

“Now it’s time to introduce our special guest, Korey Stringer!” says a blond lady with a microphone who is tickled pink Korey has agreed to do this. “Korey is an offensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings. He grew up here in Warren, playing football right here on this very field. Korey?”

Korey takes the microphone. He’s in a shiny blue warm-up suit spanning his giant chest with considerable stress. He’s as broad as a billboard. The people in the stands cannot help but shake their heads in awe. “Good God!” and “Whoa!” and “Jeeezus, you could ski down that man.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Uh. It’s good to be back here in Mollenkopf Stadium. Where it all kinda got started. And uh. I appreciate the people at the Y for getting me out here and letting me be a part of this. So uh. Good luck to the kids. And thank you, parents, for coming out.”

He stands on the fifty-yard line, leading the children in their warm-up exercises; he’s doing toe touches, squats, little bitty graceful jumping jacks that make you wonder what magical dimension of reality is absorbing the impact. He’s thinking, Okay, this part is kinda stupid; he thought the whole point of kids was they had ready-made muscles. He then takes his honored place next to the award platforms, one high for the gold-medal winner, and two lower for the silver and bronze. There will be three winners in each of five events for the first-grade boys and the first-grade girls and the second-grade boys and the second-grade girls, gold, silver, bronze, gold, silver, bronze, on and on like this through to the sixth-grade boys and the sixth-grade girls, and another man, his head might hurt thinking about standing here for all of this, and now it’s starting to rain.

“Congratulations, man,” Korey says, hanging the gold medal around Jason’s skinny little chicken neck. “Good job,” he says, hanging the silver on Justin. He tells Bryant to take his ball cap off before accepting the bronze. He handles the medals as if they were uncooked fish and he were preparing a sacred meal. There are cameras flashing. He leans into Jason and Justin and Bryant, whispers: “Look for your mom. Don’t be looking at no cameras except at your mom’s.”

The juxtaposition is odd and beautiful and comical. Here is a man who makes his living practically bludgeoning men to death, and here he is on his day off and all you see is sweetness and love and tenderness. Here is a million-dollar man who thinks seriously about going back to college to get his damn college degree so that when football is done, he can go be a high school teacher, like a history teacher maybe, who can also coach football. But not a head coach, no. He wants to be one of the under coaches, like a strength coach, because that’s where the action is—that’s the coach who gets to spend time with the kids and their heads.

He’s putting medals on, gold, silver, and bronze; it goes on like this for hours and hours and hours in the rain. He is impervious to the rain. He stands here like the statue he has become. He is Father Time. He is Uncle Remus. He is a giant old dude on the bank of the Mississippi with a sax and a dog and a word or two of wisdom that is one half poetry, just language spilling out, and one half miracle. He is a bull. He is a big black sheep in spring before shearing. There is the enlightened man, and then there is the holy man. The enlightened man understands. The holy man brings the understanding out of the cave and disperses it as best he knows how.

Afterward, drenched, he is signing autographs. No, he will not sign autographs for adults. It’s stupid and embarrassing and, think about it, stupid. But he will gladly sign autographs for kids.

“You would like me to sign your shirt, is that what I understand?” he says, coming down to a boy’s eye level, bending at the knees because that’s his natural way.

‘Yeah,” says the boy.

“All right. Is there something else?”

“Huh?”

“Well, you just heard the last two dudes go through the whole thing using the magic words and everything, and you forgot to put the magic in.”

“Oh. Okay. Please?”

“All right. All right. Is there anything else?”

“Huh?”

“Dude, you gotta say thank you.”

“Yeah. Thank you.”

“All right. All right. Peace, my man. Peace.”

At the snack bar, they give him a free lemon shake and also some nachos. He drinks the lemon shake and he eats the nachos and then he gets in the car and the cell phone rings. Doodle-loodle-leet. Doodle-loodle-leet. It’s Kelci on the cell phone, Kelci calling from back home in Minneapolis, asking how it went. He says cool. He makes no mention of what maybe another man, especially a multimillionaire sports star, might regard in terms of discomfort, hours and hours standing there saying the same thing over and over again, “Congratulations” and “Good job,” while water is pouring all over you, and that’s not to mention the way the wind was blowing some of them signs they had into your face. He just says the kids seemed happy with the gig but he felt bad it had to rain on their heads.