There's a whole lot to unpack from Tuesday's 60 Minutes Sports feature on Marshawn Lynch that ran on Showtime. We already know about Lynch making his decision to retire a final decision -- he'll look in any camera you want -- and we know he really likes Taco Bell quesadillas for snacks.
But there was still some new things we found out. For instance, Beast Mode is really not as frugal as reports have indicated.
Friends and media previously reported Lynch hasn't spent a dime of his paychecks earned in the NFL, instead living off endorsement money. That's not true.
"That's false. That's false. I'm human. I make mistakes," Lynch said. "Been down that road. I've also made some good decisions."
The former Seahawks running back is frugal, however. He likes to save his money and live wisely and there's a good reason why: the exchange about pests in cereal between he Jon Wertheim explains it all.
Everybody I've spoken to about you has referenced your financial savvy. What's the source of that?
You ate cereal before?
I've eaten cereal.
Alright. Have you ever had a roach in your cereal before?
No.
You haven't, right?
I have not.
If you came from eatin' cereal with roaches in it before, Dawg . . . Feel what I'm sayin'? You wouldn't want to do that again, right? Once you've seen the lowest of the low, you don't want to go back. But, like I told you before, it's not me--I have a good team and some smart family members around me.
This is a quick reality check for anyone with even the slightest of privileged backgrounds. You listen to Lynch talk about growing up poor in Oakland and it's a reality check.
His mother would punish him for sneaking out to the park and when you hear him describe the park it's no surprise she wasn't happy her son was there.
We'll start from the ground. When you look on the ground, you might see some needles. You might see some Pyrex [the cookware commonly used for making crack cocaine]--you know what I'm sayin', Dawg? There was a lotta drugs. And if you lift your head up and open your eyes, you might see a prostitute walkin'. . . . What I would call real life, man. It wasn't no bells and whistles.
The feature on Lynch also revealed the first thing he did after the infamous Super Bowl loss to the Patriots (when Pete Carroll and Darrell Bevell erroneously let Russell Wilson throw instead of giving the ball to Lynch near the goal line).
Lynch stormed out of the stadium where he was spotted by California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who happens to be a buddy of Lynch's and who also spoke with Showtime for the piece.
"Put it this way, he did not wait for the team bus to leave after the game. He wanted to get the heck out of there," Newsom said. "So I watched as he ran, sprinted out of there and we grabbed him and took off and we got him back to the hotel. He calls me Batman. He said 'Batman we gotta talk about politics.' That was his first words to me right after the Super Bowl. I was like, what do you mean talking about politics. And he walked away. I got the frustration."
But the best part about the entire interview? Marshawn essentially explaining his philosophy on running the football. His uncle, Lorenzo Lynch, was an NFL player and Marshawn explained, in somewhat NSFW-ish fashion, how his family member instilled the values of being a tough-nosed running back early on.
"We went to his house one time and he told me something like this," Lynch recalled. "He said, 'It's 4th and 1, the running back coming through the hole. I'm going to kiss that m*****f--er in the mouth.' That's what he told me. 'Smell his breath.' And this was a young age too.
"That's when it clicked in my mind, if you just run through somebody's face, a lot of people ain't going to be able to take that over and over and over and over and over ... and over and over and over.... and over and over ...
"And over and over and over and over and over again. They're just not going to want that."
Yes, this is, as Wertheim put it, a metaphor for something deeper.
"Run through a m*****f***er's face, then you don't have to worry about them no more," Lynch said.
If basketball is jazz, watching Marshawn run on the football field was always the equivalent of listening to Rage Against the Machine's self-titled album after turning the volume up to 11. So this motto makes an inordinate amount of sense for him.
The only sad part about this piece? Retirement appears officially official, which means our run of Beast Mode glory is ending.
