The boy in the video is small, only 8 years old, clad in a yellow jersey and white gym shorts. He’s playing basketball, alone at this moment, beckoning a pass. The court he’s playing on is smaller than regulation size; it’s two courts that run horizontally, side by side.
This boy receives the ball, as the game’s final seconds tick away. He dribbles twice with his right hand, plants near midcourt and lets go of a one-handed shot that looks more like a downfield pass. The ball launches from his right hand toward the basket, which is maybe 30 or 40 feet away. He falls to his left, naturally, the wobble indicative of the force required for this heave. The attempt arcs, floating almost, until the ball drops toward the rim, rattles in both directions and … .
Game, over. Bedlam erupts around him. Teammates rush over, surrounding him, patting his back, lifting him off the ground. Anyone watching this video now knows who the 8-year-old became. They can see the genesis, right there, the athleticism that drops jaws, the rising to meet the moment and that arm, the one that will, one day, be replicated in statue form.
Patrick Mahomes is that 8-year-old.
But what viewers—or fans of his more typical work, undertaken on Sunday afternoons—might understand less is that this video projected not just success in his chosen sport but how he would revolutionize pro football’s most important position. Mahomes dazzles. Mahomes dips and spins and darts, regardless of body position. Mahomes slings footballs from the oddest angles, throws touchdown passes with a vicious sidearm delivery or while leaping and midair, and tosses short attempts underhand, as if shoveling loaves of bread toward open teammates.
Part superstar, part novelty, part innovator, Mahomes is a football wizard. But for most of his six pro seasons—five as the Chiefs’ starter, two league MVP awards, two Super Bowl MVP honors, three appearances in the NFL’s final game and two Lombardi Trophies—his creative, how-did-he-do-that style has been largely attributed to his athletic gifts and baseball background. That sentiment is both true and woefully incomplete. Because when those who know Mahomes best watch him play quarterback unlike anyone ever has, they see his short-lived high school basketball career as a pivotal influence, perhaps, even, the primary driver.
“You know, just the arm angles he uses to sling that thing,” says Ryan Tomlin, Mahomes’s basketball coach at Whitehouse High School for three seasons. “I mean, Pat was a great, great, great distributor of the basketball.”
Maybe Tomlin’s take is obvious. That a quarterback who will turn 28 on Sept. 17—and could already make the Hall of Fame if he never played another down—can, well, something with great skill. But it’s rarely relayed that way, with hooping as central to Mahomes’s stylistic leanings on the football field.
Basketball, in fact, intertwines with Mahomes’s story in myriad ways. The most compelling is the athlete-to-athlete comparison he most favors. Mahomes loves when anyone says he reminds them of Steph Curry, the Warriors shape-shifting, sharp-shooting, championship-collecting guard. The similarities seem obvious—and apt. What made Curry distinct also made him divisive, at least in how teams evaluated him. Same with Mahomes. Neither would rank among the best in their profession at any specific athletic attribute, whether speed, agility, strength or quickness. And yet … both play different sports with the same verve, same vibe. Because their styles differ drastically from their peers, opponents must spend extra time accounting for the variance. But since both are creative, not to mention adaptable, and because both are said to possess brains that are more like computers—able to input and apply data from games in real time—they simply pivot into another way to win.
“With Curry, you can’t give him a window of space,” says Tomlin, over the phone from Texas, where he now works at another school. “If you do, he’s gonna make you pay. Pat, he does the exact same thing.”
