The lightness of being Christian McCaffrey
— -- This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's August 22 College Football Preview Issue. Subscribe today!
QUICK: WHAT DO you see when you look at Christian McCaffrey? Don't think. Just answer. Say it out loud -- commit to it.
OK, next question: How confident are you in your answer -- that what you say you see, and what you see, are one and the same?
One hundred percent, no doubt. Because the answer is as straightforward as the question is stupid, right? He's an athlete, after all, a visually explicit human being. Call up a YouTube highlight. The who and the what become obvious in five seconds.
At this particular moment, I happen to be watching a Christian McCaffrey high school highlight on YouTube ... while in the presence of the living, breathing, real-time Christian McCaffrey. I'm doing this for two reasons. The first is that wherever you are and whomever you're with, it's always time for a McCaffrey video on YouTube. Known fact: McCaffrey highlights, without exception, are absolutely bananas. What's more: They serve -- again, without exception -- to cheer you up and renew your capacity for surprise and make you a better person.
The other reason is, well ... bear with me a moment. So McCaffrey the Actual is seated next to me on an hourlong flight from San Jose to Los Angeles. It's a Wednesday, the 13th of July, and the running back and three of his Stanford teammates are attending tonight's ESPYS. (McCaffrey, up for best record-breaking performance, will lose to Stephen Curry.) This flight is a chance for "some good one-on-one time," as the team's PR man has put it. Yet now that I'm here, I find there's something about this moment I'm hesitant to disturb.
It began with the flight attendant's safety announcement. Or, rather, the full attention McCaffrey gave to the man who was making it -- a courtesy there, an acknowledgment, small but unmistakable. Then the announcement ended and the charts came out. Laminated sheets, dozens of them, each a diagram of a play that Stanford coach David Shaw has devised. Each laminate was accompanied by a separate piece of paper listing a dozen or so words -- mnemonics McCaffrey designed to embed the play and its call words in his memory. Shaw constructs complex, pro-style, run-first offenses, and this, apparently, is what is demanded of the keystone player.
The intensity of this kid! There's an immersion and stillness and deep rhythmic groove he achieves as he traces with his right index finger the motions plotted out for him and his teammates while also quietly incanting their mnemonic tethers. White. Sixty. Ox. Robin. One row over, one of McCaffrey's teammates, smirking, unburdens himself. It's silent but deadly -- a weaponized, wet-velvet, all-but-visible wave of flatulence that warps the air of the cabin. I exclaim Save us from Satan while pulling my shirt collar over my nose and mouth. Others around me do the same (more or less). But not McCaffrey. No, McCaffrey is in his bubble, impervious, tracing, incanting, learning, maintaining his rhythm: After "finishing" a given play, he moves on, then returns exactly five minutes later to test his retention.
It's not the intensity that I'm loath to disturb but the earnestness. It somehow seems of a piece with his regard for the flight attendant making the safety announcement, quietly touching in the same way. I table my voice recorder for the moment and open a notebook. Perhaps because McCaffrey happens to be a pretty good self-taught pop-song pianist (again, see YouTube), I scribble this mincing fancy: Like a conservatory piano student working his way through a Chopin ?tude. The instant I do, though, another, even less appetizing, phrase bubbles up to consciousness. That phrase.
He's a student of the game.
You know it well. We all do, and what it's code for: He's white. Just as we know that he's a great natural talent or he's an instinctive athlete means he's black. In the past couple of decades, these codes -- that linger and gnaw, undead, at the notion of sport as pure and blind to color -- have been applied almost exclusively to quarterbacks and the false either/or proposition of old-school pocket passer vs. the newfangled read-option player. But now McCaffrey, as great a natural talent and instinctive athlete as you'll ever see, a generational star, perhaps the best since Reggie Bush, has come along.
What he does on the field -- breaking Barry Sanders' collegiate single-season all-purpose yardage record as a 19-year-old sophomore -- defies the eye. It might seem presumptuous, an obnoxious projection, to say that the simple act of looking at McCaffrey, uplifting as it is, isn't always as simple as it seems, that it's in fact loaded, because of the way people, with varying degrees of self-awareness, mentally caption the sight of him with the words, "And he's white!"
Indeed, it would be presumptuous and obnoxious if it weren't for the fact that before he became a proven commodity, many people -- football people, recruiters, experts -- looked at McCaffrey and saw him wrong, got him wrong. Saw him as a potentially useful general "athlete" who might be purposed in some specific situations. Even Shaw, who envisioned and recruited McCaffrey as a carry-the-team running back with world-class vision, power, quickness and breakaway speed, didn't initially apprehend the scope of McCaffrey's talent.
"Christian came to our spring camp before he came in as a freshman," Shaw recalls. "I thought I knew this kid. I had it in my mind that, 'This kid is different, this kid is special.' But after four runs in camp, I thought, 'Oh my god, I haven't seen that on this field since Glyn Milburn. Or maybe even Darrin Nelson.' Do you understand? This was freaky stuff, scary stuff, OK?"
This is the second reason I've paired the superhuman highlight-reel Christian McCaffrey in front of me with the real-time studious Christian McCaffrey next to me. A thought experiment to help ascertain what it means -- with an awful racial static alive in the national air -- to think, and commit to paper, and possibly even publish, the facts that Christian McCaffrey is "a student of the game," a "great" and "instinctive natural talent." ("And he's white!")
All that said, it boggles the mind that anyone tasked with recruiting could ever view the highlights I'm now watching and not exclaim, Unto us the next Marcus Allen is given. Mon dieu! And yet it happened.
The signature moment occurs three minutes in. A ridiculous end-zone-to-end-zone touchdown run. McCaffrey waits, waits, waits for the hole, shimmies once, twice, then breaks into open space. The announcer's alarmed voice glissandos up a whole octave in the time he observes that, "He's pickin' up speed ..." The screaming begins then. A girl in the stands. An unjaded teenage love scream shot through with incomprehension and surrender, the kind that greeted the Beatles when they first deplaned at JFK -- a scream whose time, you'd have assumed, had passed. All in all, it seems like both a perfectly understandable reaction and the best description I've encountered of the human explosion that is Christian McCaffrey.
Later, I describe this moment to Shaw. On the one hand, there's the student of the game ensconced in his carrel. On the other, the natural talent going nova over entire defenses. Which one explains Christian McCaffrey? Which one is the there there?
"The answer to your question," he says, "is yes."
