On a through-line from Satchel Paige to Patrick Mahomes and a Super Bowl breakthrough

As a transcendent force bending, if not extending, the very boundaries of the way pro football is played, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes seems to be playing the right position in the right sport — for the right team, for that matter.

But Mahomes was startlingly under-recruited coming out of Whitehouse High in Texas. There were a few reasons for that, he’ll tell you, including a wide perception that baseball would be his calling, that he hadn’t been on the elite camp circuit and the fact that he didn’t become his team’s starting quarterback until his junior year.

“I didn’t have the normal quarterback background … so they didn’t know exactly who I was at the quarterback position,” he said.

Still, it seems preposterous for a few reasons that the University of Texas, and perhaps others, looked at Mahomes and saw him as a safety.

For one thing, as his father, Pat, told Don Williams of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal in 2017, “I told ‘em that lets me know they don’t watch film, because that boy ain’t tackled nobody in two years.”

Or as Mahomes smiled and put it Tuesday as he prepared for his third Super Bowl in four years and to likely receive his second NFL MVP award: “I would have been great at reading the quarterback’s eyes and knowing their concepts, but I do not like tackling people. … So you know, I wasn’t really filling the run gaps and everything like that.”

More strikingly, though …

“I see Patrick as a lot of things,” Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick said with a laugh. “But a defensive back is not the one I would have seen. … With an arm like that and a mind like that, I think quarterback was the position he was supposed to play.”

As Mahomes reflects on that time, he’s rather certain he wasn’t pigeon-holed because of race. He’s also grateful he landed at Texas Tech. And among ample other evidence that it really wasn’t overtly about race, Texas had won a national championship with spectacular Black quarterback Vince Young only a few years before.

But Texas’ apparently benign miscalculation might also be understood as at least in part a subconscious vestige of what for generations was the prevailing stereotype.

As with counterparts on the mound and behind the plate, Black athletes were long suppressed or steered away from having the opportunity to play such cerebral positions at their most visible levels.

While Mahomes doesn’t suggest that’s been his experience, he’s profoundly appreciative of this history — and the groundbreaking that helped forge his path — entering Sunday night’s matchup against Philadelphia and Jalen Hurts: the first Super Bowl featuring two Black starting quarterbacks.

Mahomes thinks a lot about those who came before him ... and those who were denied the chance. He knows what enabled him was not just the paths of barrier-breakers like Doug Williams, who in 1988 became the first Black quarterback to start a Super Bowl (and was named MVP), as well as others who slogged their way through the anti-gravity of race, such as James “Shack” Harris and Warren Moon.

“But you look at the guys that didn’t make it and how they grinded through,” Mahomes said, “and those guys are who set the platform for us to be in this spot.”

Discerning and thoughtful as Mahomes is, he also understands how that notion extends in ways that might not meet the eye to most.

It hearkens back to the Negro Leagues, to which he is a devotee — as reflected in his affection for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and his occasional tendency to wear a Kansas City Monarchs jersey. He has at least two: one commemorating Jackie Robinson’s No. 5 in Kansas City and another with Satchel Paige’s No. 25.

Kendrick likes to say that no matter what team sport you played, “if you’re Black or brown, then all roads lead to the Negro Leagues.” Mahomes essentially espouses the same sentiment, saying he’s learned that the way the Negro Leagues influenced not only Major League Baseball but “all sports in general gave me a perspective of how great those players were and why I’m sitting here today.”

He picked up some of that directly on visits to the Negro Leagus Baseball Museum. But it also started at home in Texas. Because the favorite player of his father, who pitched for 11 years in the major leagues, was the immortal Paige.

So much so that the younger Mahomes recalls his dad showing off various windups, turning his back to the plate and whirling his arm around in a circle, channeling Paige. Such tributes were described by the elder Mahomes in several newspaper accounts of his major- and minor-league pitching days.

The son was intrigued by tales of Paige, in no small part because his father imparted that Paige had been among those who paved the way for him. As a child, he recalled reading books about the Negro Leagues — part of why he was eager to to go the museum with the Chiefs’ rookie class in 2017.

Given that Mahomes perceives the path from the Negro Leagues and Paige to his father to himself, it’s no wonder Kendrick believes he sees the spirit of the Negro Leagues in Mahomes’ singular style — a signature of substance and show.

“When you combine great fundamentals with great athleticism, you get something special,” said Kendrick, who is as struck by Mahomes’ arm and keen mind as his “must-see TV” arsenal.

As he considered that through-line, Mahomes embraced the suggestion.

“Yeah, I think it’s just you see the creativity that they had as they obviously played at such a high level,” he said. “But they enjoyed what they did, and I think that’s what you see with me on the football field.”

That sense of how he got here and, really, how we got here, explains something about why Mahomes feels a duty to help pry open more doors.

No doubt we’ve come a long way, so far that it didn’t even initially register with Kendrick that each quarterback was Black.

“Which I think was probably a good thing. But it doesn’t negate the historic nature of what is occurring,” said Kendrick, who later called this a “seminal” development. “I think we’re chipping away at that stigma and hopefully we’ll continue to do so.”

But this is not happening in a vacuum. It’s not hard to connect the dots between the thinking that so long prevented Black athletes from having fair chances — at all, to say nothing of playing quarterback — to the ongoing impediments to Black coaches in the NFL.

Witness the ongoing saga of Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, who has interviewed for more than a dozen head-coaching jobs. Or with Steve Wilks, who helped Carolina stabilize as its interim coach this season only to be passed over for the permanent head-coaching position.

Wilks, who also recently spent a year as the Missouri Tigers’ defensive coordinator, previously had been given just one year as head coach in Arizona — one of several such recent examples.

“That’s the area that is of more concern …” said Kendrick, lamenting that others seem almost “grandfathered into jobs” while Black coaches face nothing but uphill battles. “It’s nothing against the talent of those individuals, but, man, (former Saints coach) Sean Payton had a job (with Denver) before Sean Payton wanted a job.”

That’s surely part of what Mahomes meant when he asked, “How can we keep moving forward?”

But it also doesn’t diminish the forward progress and shifting sands we’ll see in real-time on Sunday, dynamics that both reflect change and portend more ahead.

“The quarterbacks that came before me … laid the foundation for me to be in this position. And it goes across all sports,” Mahomes said. “If you think about Jackie Robinson and people that broke the color barrier in baseball, I wouldn’t be standing here today if it wasn’t for them.”

While it can only be on a different scale, Mahomes aims to help provide more of the same on Sunday and throughout the rest of his career. And hopefully, when he’s aged into the elder statesman role of Doug Williams and is looking back, he said, “We’re not even talking about this because we’ve evolved the game so much.”