How the KC Chiefs’ run to Super Bowl LVIII was fueled by traumas that molded them
Before the Chiefs’ 2022 NFL Draft class emerged as one of the deepest and most pivotal in franchise history, something about its composition was so striking as to feel potentially revealing.
It wasn’t simply that the 10-man group appeared to deftly address the team’s greatest needs. Or that it seemed a particularly excitable bunch on draft night, with Trent McDuffie declaring that putting on his Chiefs jersey “made it light like a flame under me” and ever-eager George Karlaftis talking fasterthanthis about his love of the game and Jaylen Watson “running full speed down the street” when the Chiefs called.
What resonated was the shattering losses and tribulations that had formed and fueled them.
“My confidence,” running back Isiah Pacheco said then, “comes from my hardships.”
From Pacheco enduring the separate murders of two siblings back home in New Jersey to McDuffie’s older brother, Tyler, dying young, from Karlaftis losing his father as a 14-year-old to Joshua Williams’ mother dying when he was 6 months old and then living on his own at 16.
Among other agonizing journeys that now reverberate as emblematic of piercing foundational experiences throughout this team that are part of its collective soul.
The Chiefs on Sunday will play in their fourth Super Bowl in five years, an astounding accomplishment, largely because of a synergistic resilience and resolve that can be traced to individual adversities so many have faced off the field.
Those trials and tales can be found all across their locker room, transcending socioeconomic, racial and geographic lines. And while perhaps that can be said in any number of NFL locker rooms, the Chiefs will tell you that it lends a galvanizing element to their identity as a team whose own ups and downs this season were nothing compared to the real-life distress so many have known.
“Absolutely, absolutely: Everybody’s got a story … and you can build off of one another’s energy,” Pacheco said this week as the Chiefs prepared to play the 49ers in Super Bowl LVIII. “You feel it, you bleed it. You’ve got guys, look to the left and right, they show you how hard they love you by playing (hard together).”
As linebacker Drue Tranquill considered the impact of the ordeals he and so many of his teammates have faced, he thought about a lingering narrative that the Chiefs perhaps weren’t as rugged as the Bills or the Ravens — the teams they beat on the road to get here. Or the 49ers now.
But Tranquill, who says the worst days of debilitating anxiety are behind him but still is mindful of it, scoffs at the notion the Chiefs somehow aren’t just as gritty.
“And I don’t think you just get tough from going through hard practices in training camp and hard practices in the season,” he said. “I think we’ve got a lot of guys who’ve been through a lot in their life — whether that’s injuries, whether that’s loss of loved ones, whether that’s tough home environments growing up.
“And we’ve got a lot of guys who have overcome a lot to be where they are at now.”
A lot of guys, as long-snapper James Winchester put it, “who are very comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
Their formative stories, including some in adulthood, have both influenced and revealed many individuals that make up the mortar of this team. While there are others to be told, known and surely unknown, we write here only of those with whom we’ve been able to speak on the topic.
‘To play for something bigger’
McDuffie was 13 when his second-oldest brother, Tyler, died from what McDuffie called a heart complication.
He “blacked out,” as he put it when we spoke in August, for “a good two years” and for a long time found it difficult to speak about it publicly.
But when he left Southern California for college at the University of Washington, he was randomly assigned jersey No. 22 — the number Tyler always wore.
Whether by fate or coincidence, that helped him learn to accept all the emotions and to realize talking about Tyler was another way to hold him near: When Star photographer/videographer Nick Wagner and I finished speaking with McDuffie on Wednesday, for instance, he thanked us for asking about Tyler and tapped his hand to his heart.
Since then-teammate Juan Thornhill already had No. 22 when McDuffie arrived, McDuffie wore No. 21 last season. But he was quick to reclaim 22 when Thornhill left for Cleveland after last season, and it made him “feel like me again,” he said before the start of what became a first-team All-Pro season.
Memorializing Tyler with the jersey and a pre-game warmup ritual on the 22-yard line, he said Wednesday, “allows me to play for something bigger” with the feeling of being watched over from the best seat in the house.
“Every time I go on that field,” he said, “it just makes me so much more grateful … (that) I get this opportunity to share something about my life that a few years ago I didn’t want to share.”
Something he knows he shares with many teammates, making for another dimension of bond.
“To be around guys who understand that pain, who’ve gone through those emotions, everybody feels for each other,” he said, later adding, “We’ve been through it all.”
So much so that during all the turbulence and outside doubts of this season, he said, the prevailing “collective feeling of this team is, ‘We’ve got each other.’ ”
‘I didn’t want to let him down’
Cornerback L’Jarius Sneed grew up in chaos that included both his parents being imprisoned for years and being raised by two older brothers — most of all by the eldest, TQ Harrison, 9 years older.
In Star columnist Sam McDowell’s penetrating 2021 profile of Sneed’s life, Harrison spoke proudly of changing diapers, ironing clothes and walking his brothers to school. But he couldn’t take away the distress.
“What I’m still trying to understand is how the childhood trauma I went through is still messing with my head,” L’Jarius said then, tapping his right temple with his index and middle fingers and adding, “Because it’s in there, man. I can feel it.”
More tragedy was ahead: In December 2021, Harrison was fatally stabbed in their hometown of Minden, Louisiana.
“I wish he was still here, you know, to see what I’m doing,” Sneed said with a smile on Wednesday before adding, “He’s looking down at me … (and) I know he’s proud of me.”
Sneed has commemorated his late brother in various ways, including inscribing “Long Live TQ” on the tape on his wrists. But perhaps he’s demonstrated his feelings most through his play as he’s become one of the best in the game at his position.
“It definitely added an edge to me, you know,” he said. “And I know I didn’t want to let him down.”
He also doesn’t want to let down teammates like McDuffie, to whom he’s turned to ask how he’s dealt with such loss. With that feeling, Sneed said, comes a deep connection.
“And that’s how we play on the field,” he said.
‘Trauma ... helped mold me’
Karlaftis was born in Athens, Greece, and still returns there several times a year. But his world was tilted by the unexpected death of his father, Matt, in 2014.
His mother moved Karlaftis and his siblings to Indiana to be closer to her family. That made for the comforts and support of loving relatives but also major adjustments from what ESPN called a traditional Greek upbringing while contending with the profound void.
Football ultimately eased the transition for Karlaftis, who had been a goalie on Greece’s U16 national team.
“I feel like I’ve lived a lot of different lives already; I’m just 22,” Karlaftis said, noting his moves and travels and learning different languages.
“Having had to mature at a very young age,” as he put it, made him all the more determined to take care of his family by fulfilling what became his goal to play in the NFL.
“And I think that whatever childhood trauma I had kind of helped mold me and shape me into what I am today,” he said.
That includes coming into his own this season with 10.5 sacks, among other steps forward, but also cherishing being part of a unit essential to the Chiefs’ return to the Super Bowl.
And even if their shared heartbreaks aren’t “something that is necessarily talked about,” as he put it, “that’s something that definitely changes your personality, for sure.”
And something that is part of the emotional makeup of this team.
‘An underdog my whole life’
Nineteen months after Pacheco’s brother, Travoise, was murdered, his sister, Celeste, suffered the same shocking fate in 2017.
Amid the devastation, Pacheco days later insisted on playing in Vineland High’s game against Egg Harbor Township and rushed for 222 yards and returned a punt 79 yards for a touchdown. A week later, hours after his sister’s funeral, he rushed for 157 yards and three touchdowns in a 60-6 win over Cumberland.
“I did this for my sister …” he told the South Jersey Times after the game. “I’ll probably go home and have a nice cry later. I’ll probably cry myself to sleep tonight.”
All the tears and all the mourning, though, funneled into its own force within him. An already electrifying player who ran with fury found another tier of that in summoning their spirits.
Whether praying for them or otherwise thinking of them, Pacheco said Wednesday, has “made me only go harder.”
As he thought of Pacheco’s way during a phone interview last fall, former Rutgers coach Greg Schiano said, “Sometimes he gets up so fast people don’t even know he was down.”
That’s just as apt off the field as on, where Pacheco found humor in the notion of being an underdog this weekend.
“I’ve been an underdog my whole life, so I ain’t really worried about it,” he said. “I don’t even know what underdog feels (like) no more.”
But he knows what it feels like to be surrounded by those who can relate as they go into this game.
“Focus on one another and leaving it all on the line,” he said, “it makes you feel like a winner at the end of the day whether you win or not.”
‘We’ve got fire, man’
Largely through family and faith and other support mechanisms, Tranquill’s battles with what at times were paralyzing negative thoughts have helped him learn to avoid thinking of “what if?” things go awry later vs. embracing the here and now.
The future, he said, is “not for me to worry about. I’m just going to try to be present in this moment.”
He added, “I think when you kind of break it down and take it moment by moment, there’s a lot more peace.”
Peace he hopes to help promote by demystifying mental health issues: “Hopefully it will help somebody out who might be struggling with it,” he said.
As Tranquill contemplates what he and teammates have overcome and how appreciation of the opportunity plays into who they are now, he said, “We’ve got fire, man. And the relentless hunger to win is very evident.”
You can see that, too, in fellow linebacker Nick Bolton. He’s endlessly inspired by sister Jazmine and mother Jalunda, each of whom are cancer survivors after being diagnosed when he was growing up.
Seeing Jazmine prevail through such hardships, Bolton said, “kind of lets you know you have no excuses” and his mother’s positivity has been a prevailing “beacon.”
In a similar vein, receiver Justin Watson plays and lives by the code of “there are no bad days.”
It’s a term and a concept inspired by his older brother, Tommy, who was born with cerebral palsy, and the realization that Tommy would do anything to have his opportunities. It came to him, he told me last year.
“Man,” Watson said, “if Tommy had one day in my shoes, he would run until he passed out. Until his feet were bleeding. Until he threw up. And as soon as he could do it again, he would.”
He added, “Anything I’m going to do, I’m going to do with (Tommy) in mind.”
‘Blessings we draw from’
On the first anniversary of the murder of Winchester’s father, Michael, James and I spoke about why it was so meaningful for him to play for the Chiefs a few days later: to honor his father.
Leaning on his Christian faith, he also spoke of embracing forgiveness, lest he “breed hate.”
“You know that stuff is going to happen in life, and you know you’re not the only one,” he said in 2017. “There’s people all around us who never knew their parents growing up, who had bad relationships, things like that.
“So there’s just so many blessings that we draw from, so many positives, it’s hard to stay down.”
Including the blessing of being locked arm-in-arm with others who’ve contended with so much, and channeling that on the field.
This story was originally published February 9, 2024 at 2:45 PM.