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Patrick Mahomes calls right on time. When my phone rings, the area code flashes “Tyler, Texas,” where the young Kansas City Chiefs quarterback grew up. It's early June and a pivotal point in an already momentous off-season. Whatever he might have expected as he walked off the field in February—a first-time Super Bowl winner, coronation complete, celebration on the horizon—was upended by a generational pandemic. And now, historic protests roil the country. Two weeks have passed since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and the 24-year-old Mahomes is still trying to make sense of the moment.
Patrick Mahomes covers the August 2020 issue of GQ. Click here to subscribe to GQ.
Just a few days earlier, Mahomes had joined more than a dozen other Black NFL stars—Odell Beckham Jr., Michael Thomas, and Saquon Barkley among them—in a powerful 71-second video, calling on their employer to condemn racism. It shouldn't have been a bold assertion. But, of course, it was. While nearly every big American corporation was addressing the significant work to be done on racial justice and equality, the NFL was being asked to address a particularly egregious track record. This is a league in which 70 percent of players are Black but only three coaches, two general managers, and zero majority owners are; a league in which the response to Colin Kaepernick's protest of police brutality was to promptly run him out of a job.
This time, though, the reaction was different. Less than a day after the players' video, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell filmed a clip of his own, offering a point-by-point affirmation of the players' requests. According to a report from ESPN, a key factor in his swift response was the participation of one young player in particular: Patrick Mahomes.
“I understand my platform,” Mahomes tells me. “I understand that my part in the video is a big part of it.” He was working out a new contract, and knew that speaking up might prompt some blowback that could negatively affect those talks. “I'm in the middle of negotiating my next contract, to hopefully be a Kansas City Chief for a long time, but I still thought this was important enough and this was something that had to be said. It wasn't something I could sit back on and worry about my next contract, because I needed to use my platform to help. Sometimes it's not about money. It's not about fame. It's about doing what's right.”
Mahomes had spent a lot of time listening in recent days. He'd been on the phone—with other players; with members of his family, some of whom are police officers; with Chiefs chairman and CEO Clark Hunt; and with Goodell. His conversations left him feeling optimistic, particularly his discussions with Hunt and Goodell. “They, as much as us, want to do the right thing,” he says.
Though the extent of Goodell's willingness to change remains to be seen, Mahomes sounds committed to a dialogue. During his chat with the commissioner, Mahomes says, Goodell was curious about the young quarterback's perspective and about what he wanted to see and do going forward. Mahomes explained that he wants to draw attention to voter-registration efforts: “Helping young adults, but especially the Black community, get registered to vote. It's the first step.” (Days later, Mahomes would announce that he'd be lending his support to LeBron James's More Than a Vote organization, to boost voter-registration efforts and battle voter suppression.)
He also talked with Goodell about NFL teams hiring personnel tasked with helping players become more useful activists in their communities. “I remember talking about having maybe a social-justice officer that can point people in the right direction,” he says. “So whenever you wanna help out the community, you have someone that works with the team that can help.” He was encouraged. “It was a great conversation,” Mahomes says. “It lasted, like, 30 minutes to an hour.”
When the protests began, and when the Saints' Michael Thomas reached out to Mahomes and asked him to appear with the other players in that social media video, Mahomes said he did a lot of listening. He began talking with players across the league, from “five, six, seven different teams.” Trying to gather perspective and educate himself, he told me. He'd grown up in circ*mstances that differed from those of a lot of players. As the son of Pat Mahomes, a pitcher who spent a decade in the major leagues, he had access to a privileged realm; as the son of a Black father and white mother, he experienced a duality of identity that helped to shape his worldview. What has stuck with him in his conversations after George Floyd's death were the stories guys shared about feeling unsafe. “They felt like they were in trouble when they were doing nothing wrong,” Mahomes said. “That stuff is what really hits home with me, because I've had those slight feelings before, but never to the extent that they have—of being really just targeted. And that's something that's really resonated with me.”
