Mikes Aviles’ twin daughters to throw first pitches tonight
August 13, 2015Report: Greg Oden to try out for CBA’s Jiangxu Tongxi Monkey Kings
August 13, 2015Nate Orchard is not Johnny Manziel. I hate to kick sand in Johnny’s face after his tough rookie year, and especially since he’s said and done all the right things for the past several months; it’s a striking comparison is all. Whereas Manziel came to Cleveland with a persona and a legend too wieldy to manage, Orchard comes with none. The only things that he has shown as a Brown are gratitude for being a professional football player and desire to become a better one. Take a few things he’s said during training camp, for instance:
- On the prospect of practicing against Joe Thomas: “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to go up against someone who has been in a Pro Bowl eight years in a row. I’m beyond blessed.”
- On if he’s doing well in practice: “Yeah, I think I’m doing well, but at the end of the day there are always things to improve on technique-wise. …There’s so much on the table so every day you just have to keep building and building.”
- On his place on the team: “As far as my role in this defense, I’m just doing what the coaches want me to do.”
He was like that in college, too; pure vanilla. Before his junior season at Utah, long before he broke out as a potential NFL draftee, Orchard was thrust into a leadership role by way of upperclassman departures. Even then, he spoke like a three-time captain: “There’s plenty of talent on the defensive line. We just have to get down the fundamentals. That’s all it is. …It’s just going to take time, spring and fall, just to fine tune everything, and we should be good.”
It’s sooo bland. He speaks largely in cliches, which may be the most telling indicator of NFL maturity. I’m not worried about Nate Orchard adjusting to the NFL one bit, for Nate Orchard is already a grown-ass man.
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He’s a grown-ass man now, but he wasn’t always — no one is, I suppose. He was forced to grow up fast, having moved from Inglewood, CA to Salt Lake City, UT when he was 10 years old. He shacked up with his then-18-year-old brother Max, who by that time had two kids with a third on the way. It wasn’t exactly a traditional household, nor the most nurturing for a budding student-athlete. Nate attended school sporadically and considered returning to southern California, the very place his brother fled before he could get caught up in gang life.
From Brian Hamilton’s story for Sports Illustrated:
[In Utah] Nate helped care for his nieces, who he adores. He helped clean the house. But structure was limited, and school wasn’t exactly a priority; he describes the policy as, if you want to go, go. This was another stop of a life seemingly always on the move, torn between here and there. …When Nate was 12, his biological mother talked to him about returning to California.
If I come there, I will be dead or in prison, Nate was said to respond. If I stay here, I will have a life.
Nate Orchard stayed in Utah, but his troubles weren’t over. His brother was on the verge of being evicted. Staying in Salt Lake City freed him from the risk of gangs, only to be replaced by the prospect of homelessness. Having moved around so much at so tender an age, Nate looked up to another athlete who’d dealt with similar circumstances: LeBron James.1
By that time, a bit like LeBron, Nate had started playing in a basketball league. Already showing promise, if not the ability to completely harness his athleticism, a coach from another team asked if he would like to join. Nate was hesitant, but decided to say yes in part because the team had nice uniforms. The coach’s name was Dave Orchard. At the time, the player’s name was still Nate Fakahafua.
Dave gave Nate rides to and from practice from time to time. It was during one of these rides that Nate asked if he could live with the Orchards. The family was initially hesitant, as the Orchard household had inadvertently functioned as a sort of halfway house for troubled kids in the area.2
After the initial periods of ambivalence, he showed up at their door after a walk down Oneida Street that day, and the decision was made for everyone. “When he first came here, we didn’t know if he’d be here for a month or a year or the rest of his life,” Katherine says. “We didn’t know what it was going to be.”
It turned out to be years. It was a new lifestyle for Nate. He slept in a bunk bed — on the bottom bunk — in a room he shared with the Orchards’ youngest son. He ate his first ever English muffin. He helped around the house and raked neighbors’ leaves. Still, he bristled occasionally at this new household concept. He’d never had a bedtime before. He’d never been told no. He ran away on multiple occasions, once for three weeks.
He was still Nate Fakahafua, still more guest than family. It wasn’t until the family’s annual trip to Newport Beach, CA went wrong that he became part of the Orchard family tree. Playing in the Pacific Ocean surf, he got caught in a riptide. He didn’t know how to swim, and his legs and feet cramped as he tried to paddle to shore. A lifeguard pulled him to safety. The trip back to southern California turned out to be a turning point.
On the ensuing ambulance ride, Nate shivered and cried, saying he just wanted to go back to his mother. In fact the episode offered a convincing counterargument: The Orchards didn’t have insurance for Nate. They paid for that day’s medical care in cash. To avoid that in the future, they had to buy him the insurance, which is how, after talks with Nate’s biological mother and signatures on the required paperwork, the Orchards became Nate’s legal guardians.
“After that,” Katherine says, “he was really kind of ours.”
He hadn’t changed his name yet, and some things didn’t change the moment Nate joined the Orchard household.3 He still struggled, as teenagers tend to. He still dealt with problems physically more easily than verbally. He could be moody. As a wide receiver in high school, he quit because he wasn’t getting the ball enough. Running away often seemed like the best way out. But after a while, he stopped running. He became a state champ in both football and basketball. He earned a scholarship to Utah, where he played in 50 career games and racked up 18.5 sacks in his senior year. And now, he’s a Cleveland Brown.
♦♦♦
When you grow up, leave school, and hopefully find a job, things get tricky. Part of that is your chosen profession, but a lot of it is everything else: finding a house, getting a car, buying insurance, remembering dentist appointments — handling all of the minutia that defines adult life. That stuff adds up, and that’s as a regular non-NFL schlub. Add in payments to agents and publicists and advisers with various degrees of intent, and things only get trickier. There are myriad tales of human cockroaches crawling out from dark corners to sneak a hand in a pocket, enough for an entire documentary about athletes going broke.4 We focus much of our attention on on-field matters, but those off the field can trip up freshly minted professionals just as easily.
Consider this excerpt from former NBA player (and short-time Cavalier) Joe Smith’s letter to his former self from The Players Tribune:
There will be a lot of people pretending to be family who just want some handouts. They’ll say they know you, but that doesn’t mean they’re your friend. Be careful with your finances, because not everyone is going to have your best interests at heart. Keep a close eye on those who surround you only after you have money.
Consider also a similar letter from former Pro Bowler Albert Haynesworth, who washed out of the NFL less than three years after signing a $100 million contract with the Browns’ first preseason opponent, the Washington Redskins:
You’ve heard the horror stories about guys buying a fleet of Rolls Royces and gold chains and going broke. You’re not an idiot. You know you should invest your money, and this guy is showing you a business card that says “Morgan Stanley” and a multi-million dollar portfolio. I know he seems trustworthy. I know he seems smart. But if you let your friend handle your finances, he’s going to take millions from you.
Are you paying attention now?
While the NFL will bring Orchard plenty of money, it will not be his first time dealing with responsibility. He’s a father and a husband, and has been since he was 20 years old.5 He credits both roles with forcing him to grow up fast. When asked during training camp last week how he made the leap from 3.5 sacks in his junior year at Utah to 18.5 as a senior, he pointed to married life.
“Marriage (laughter). I always tell this: it’s a mentality; you have to go in with the right mentality. Going into my senior year, being married, having a kid, growing up so much just in those one or two years, I realized that football is going to help me provide for my family and to take that next level, I have to go in with the right mindset.
Football isn’t just a dream for Orchard, nor is it just a job. It’s a means, to providing a life for his family: his wife, Maegan, and their daughter, Katherine, named after his adoptive mother. Whereas family life was a foreign idea to Nate when he moved in with Dave and Katherine Orchard years ago, he now finds comfort and solace in it. He changed his surname in 2013, shortly before getting married, to honor the family that shaped him. Based on a journal entry he wrote for USA TODAY in the leadup to this year’s draft, he may identify with the lives of his coaches more than his fellow rookies:
It’s funny, because I meet with all the scouts and coaches and GMs, and we have a common ground. The majority of them are married. They’ve had kids. We can relate on that level and so it’s fun to talk to them about that and how the school systems are in these different states. That’s what I’m going to be focusing on and something my wife’s going to have a hand in.
I know what I’m getting myself into going into the NFL. This opportunity only comes once. I’m definitely going to make the most of it, give it my all. I know I can be a great player, and I will be. I’ll continue to work hard. I’ve got a great work ethic, and I think that’s going to take me far and take my family far. So, I’m excited for what the road has ahead of us.
He grew up tough and could be mercurial when he was young. He ran away from home and preferred getting in fights to discussions. But he found a family, and in that family, stability. He played sports and became a state champ. He graduated from high school and then college. He met a nice girl and he married her. They had a daughter together. And when he was chosen by the Browns with the No. 51 overall pick in the 2015 NFL Draft, he got a job. In many ways, Nate Orchard is the American dream.
Just don’t expect Nate Orchard to get caught up. He was a grown-ass man long before he ever cashed his first NFL check.
- “I moved around a lot,” Orchard said. “I idolized LeBron James because of the circumstances he went through.” [↩]
- From Hamilton’s SI story: One seventh-grader’s mother was a meth addict, and the grandmother who took care of him died, so they took him in. Another boy’s adoptive family kicked him out when he turned 18. He was a basketball teammate of the Orchards’ oldest son, and he slept over at the house all the time, so they let him continue to do so until he finished his senior year of high school. “It’s just been very circumstantial,” Katherine [Orchard] says. “It just sort of happened.” [↩]
- He didn’t take on the Orchard surname until 2013. [↩]
- Broke, part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, explores the financial problems of several ex-athletes, including Bernie Kosar. [↩]
- He had his first child, a daughter, when he was a freshman in high school. The girl was given up for adoption, though Orchard reportedly still sees her. [↩]
2 Comments
Go get ’em buddy.
Sorry Barkevious.
Hit em on the blind side!