Why Tyrann Mathieu and the ‘Honey Badger’ were at odds, and how they came to co-exist
To watch Chiefs safety Tyrann Mathieu play football is to know he has a keen sense of purpose and self. And you might infer the same from how his teammates respond to him as a guiding star. And by his dedication to family and causes from his foundation to dog safety.
This is also a man who knows and appreciates where and what he comes from back home in Louisiana, where a heroin overdose, AIDS, a car accident and murder were among the ways he’s lost more than 20 people he considered family that he commemorates with crosses tattoed on his right leg.
“32 (his jersey number) came up the hardest way,” he posted Thursday on Twitter. “You won’t find another like me.”
Safe to say this is a person who knows what he wants from his roles in life and is at ease with his identity, which has been nothing less than a shape-shifting force on a vastly improved defense as the AFC West-champion Chiefs (11-4) prepare to play the Los Angeles Chargers in their regular-season finale Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium.
Just the same, there’s this lingering alter-ego matter to be clarified. About a nickname that affixed itself to Mathieu despite varying stages of resistance amid intermittent acceptance of it: from his initial bafflement to grudging acceptance to embracing it to disavowal to what now seems a certain peace with it.
Yes, Tyrann Mathieu is … the Honey Badger.
“Can I be both?” he said, laughing.
To understand why it ever might have been an issue at all, let’s go back to when he was thus dubbed.
By all accounts, the pet name, so to speak, was the doing of John Chavis, the defensive coordinator at Louisiana State when Mathieu was playing there.
Chavis had seen at least one version of the Honey Badger videos that went viral in 2011. One was dominated by foul language, but each featured gruesome action of the undersized animal, including hunting cobras in trees, and became known for lines from “Honey Badger don’t care” to “Honey Badger takes what it wants.”
Mathieu didn’t immediately like Chavis calling him that, especially because the “honey” part didn’t seem so macho. But when Chavis showed him the video, he was all in. And all the more so when he saw video merging his exploits on the field with the animal’s in the wild.
“Honey Badger is such a relentless animal. He’s fierce. And he definitely doesn’t fear anything,” Mathieu said at a news conference just before LSU played Alabama in the 2012 BCS national title in New Orleans. “So I just try to take that same approach to the field and just try to play smart and violent football for my team.”
Besides …
“I look at it like this: I see little kids, and they’re in love with the Honey Badger. So I’ll be the Honey Badger for them,” he said that week, according to the Los Angeles Times.
And that might have been that if not for what came next for Mathieu, who as a sophomore that season had been a Heisman Trophy finalist.
Mathieu was dismissed from the team before the 2012 season by then-coach Les Miles, a compulsory ruling after Mathieu had repeatedly failed tests for marijuana use.
“I had regrets the day before, when I did it, and the day after,” Miles, now the Kansas Jayhawks’ coach, told The Star’s Sam Mellinger last summer. “He was the perfect teammate. We wanted him to stay with us. But you have no rule unless the rule has bite. So there we were. Hardest thing I’ve ever done in coaching.”
And the span between that August and the time Mathieu got drafted by the Arizona Cardinals in 2013 was one of the hardest in Mathieu’s life. He was relegated to the third round because of what had happened and had sobbed off and on from the moment Miles told him he had been dismissed to the call he got from the Cardinals offering a second chance.
And because of what had happened, he was looking for a clean slate — including with the nickname.
“I understand that there’s a lot of people who love it and can’t let it go ...,” Mathieu said during his introductory news conference with the Cardinals. “But … I want people to recognize me as Tyrann. I don’t have anything against the nickname.
“It’s just that ‘Honey Badger’ happened during such a dark time.”
He elaborated on the point in a 2018 essay for The Players’ Tribune.
“I’ve always had the aggression and determination that inspires my nickname,” he wrote by way of thanking Cardinals fans as he was moving on to Houston. “What I struggled with for a really long time was learning to like the person I was away from football: People always expected me to be the Honey Badger, so I tried to keep up with that persona all the time.”
Six years since he was drafted and two teams later, though, Mathieu is 27 and has come entirely into his own. He doesn’t need that distance or distinction anymore.
So he engages with the name again, as recently as Dec. 21 retweeting a @Natureislit description of a Honey Badger escaping a python, killing it and showing two jackals “who’s boss.” Mathieu punctuated it all with four fire emojis and the word “lifestyle.”
Turns out Tyrann Mathieu and the Honey Badger can co-exist. Maybe it’s a little like Peter Parker and Spider-Man. Or like the old Walt Whitman line: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
“A lot of people, they’re familiar with Honey Badger, not necessarily Tyrann Mathieu,” he said Thursday.. “I think when I went through what I went through about 7 years ago, I was just trying to get people to really detach that from Tyrann Mathieu….
“I think I did a good job of that. I think most people recognize there’s a difference.”
That being?
“Tyrann is a good guy,” he said. “I think Honey Badger, he’s emotional. He’s excited to play football. I think people know the difference now. So I can live with it.”
And even be both at once among his other roles.
This story was originally published December 27, 2019 at 5:00 AM.