This is a story about a guy who loves football.
He loves football so much, this guy, that there was a time when his life was only football. He let other things like family, school and life slip away through his linebacker gloves.
This guy was — still is — a good player. Fierce. Competitive. He’ll take your head off if you look at him funny. He’ll put you on the ground and bounce up, point to the sky. He loves the rush.
He’s the guy who said before the season started that he “couldn’t wait to hit somebody.”
But during the offseason, this guy was hit hard himself. He was hit harder than any fullback could ever hit him. And bouncing back from that hit has been the most challenging, and most rewarding, play of his life.
This is the story of Kevin Mitchell, the toughest guy on the football field. The linebacker who, last March, gained some perspective on what it all means — this football, this thing called life.
Kevin Mitchell’s grandfather used to come to all of Mitchell’s games. Whether it was at Mater Dei High School — the national powerhouse from Los Angeles — or Oregon, Gary Granville was usually there.
Even when he started having heart trouble last fall, Granville saddled up in a wheelchair and rolled himself to the Rose Bowl to see Mitchell’s Ducks play the UCLA Bruins. Granville always wanted Mitchell to play football, and he ultimately wanted him to play at UCLA, where Granville once taught and many other family members graduated.
“The first time I played in the Rose Bowl, he wasn’t going to miss,” Mitchell says. “I wanted to cry right there. He said, ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’”
Granville wasn’t just watching his grandson at the Rose Bowl that day, he was watching his investment. When Kevin’s parents couldn’t afford to send him to the private, catholic Mater Dei, Granville paid the tuition because he knew Mitchell had a passion and a talent for football.
But his grandfather was much more than an open wallet to Mitchell.
“It’s the little things he did which meant more to me than him paying for high school,” Mitchell says. “The little things like letting me drive when I was 13. Or on Christmas morning, Mom would get up and make eggs and orange juice, right? Grandpa would come over with a box of doughnuts.”
When Mitchell ditched the idea of UCLA for “something different” — Oregon — Granville didn’t complain, he just started flying to Eugene for Duck games. When Mitchell was on the field for the kickoff against Nevada in 2000 after redshirting a year, Granville and the rest of the Mitchell family were there to witness it.
Two years later, Granville saw his son play in the Rose Bowl, the first and last time he would witness that feat. The game was a thriller, with Mitchell and the Ducks’ defense stopping the Bruins at midfield on a crucial drive to end the game. To Mitchell, the contest seemed significant only because it was an important, possibly season-saving win. He went through the rest of the season wrapped in a BCS blanket, suffocated by statistics and won-loss records and billboards and hype.
“I was playing football for the wrong reasons,” Mitchell says. “People knowing who you are, the billboards. I realize now that I don’t play football for that. I don’t need that.”
In March, Granville succumbed to heart failure.
“When his grandpa died, it made him think about, not really his mortality, but it kind of made him think about what’s important in his life,” says Jason Fife, the Ducks’ starting quarterback and Mitchell’s roommate for two years. “It grounded him real quick.”
Soon thereafter, Mitchell decided to ask longtime girlfriend Melanie Taylor for her hand in marriage, and he says that Granville’s passing has put his life into perspective more than any football game ever could.
“(I’m) getting married and achieving a college degree, something other than football now,” Mitchell says. “Where if I could never play again, or if something tragic did happen, at least I would have known that I tried to accomplish other things other than
football. That I wasn’t just a football player.”
There’s always someone bigger than Kevin Mitchell.
That’s Mitchell’s mantra. At 5 feet 11 inches, 210 pounds, there’s always someone on the other team who’s stronger or faster. But mostly they’re just bigger.
That’s all right with the junior linebacker. Despite all the recent changes in his life, Mitchell is still a force on the football field and a passionate purveyor of the game.
“I play football because I love the game, nothing else,” Mitchell says. “I don’t want to lose perspective of that.”
It doesn’t hurt that Mitchell’s such a winner. He’s won so much, Vegas casinos cringe at the sight of him. In four years of high school ball and three years at the college level, Mitchell has lost five games. Total. Mitchell-led teams have finished first in the nation once and second twice. He’s played in three state championship games and one BCS bowl game. Count the teams that have beaten him on one hand: Long Beach Poly, Wisconsin and UCLA are among the lucky few.
“I’ve been real fortunate to play for programs that know how to win, that have coaches who push their players to be winners,” Mitchell says.
That’s just like him, not taking credit for years of winning. See, to Mitchell, it’s all just football. Go ahead, ask him about being on
the best high school team in America, maybe the best high school team ever.
“It was fun,” he says.
Silence.
Just fun.
It’s hard to imagine Kevin Mitchell on a golf course, with his bulging biceps covered in tattoos. But apparently he’s a big golfer. Or so says Fife.
“He’s really a happy-go-lucky guy,” Fife says.
Seems there’s more to Mitchell than just the football.
Maybe last year at this time, if you would have talked to him then, Mitchell might have talked your ear off about BCS and his solo-tackle statistics and the snazzy billboard featuring his likeness.
Things change. People change. The game changes constantly, audibles and coverage shifts abound.
For Kevin Mitchell, a negative change — the death of one of the most beloved people in his life
— turned into a host of good changes, including marriage and a new outlook on life. Now the football season is just a precursor to his wedding next summer, Sunday is another chance to study for that test and a trip to the Rose Bowl is just another chance to see the family.
Not that Mitchell won’t still knock around a few heads come Saturday.
He loves football too much to give up that.
“You ever get that feeling that you don’t know what it is, something about something, that you just get this feeling and you can’t explain it?” Mitchell says. “It’s that feeling that I get, but I have no idea how to describe it. It’s that love I have for football, and it’s just there.”
The guy still loves football. It’s just that now, he takes away the “only” in front of “football.”
Now he’s enjoying life, too.
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