Inside the Mind of Kyler Murray
The New York Times
He is the N.F.L.’s Gatsby, mysterious and magnetic, with a brain hard-wired to win. Ask him about the touchdown pass he meticulously mapped out in his mind five days before he threw it.
TEMPE, Ariz. — Kyler Murray never played soccer beyond the FIFA video game, but when Real Madrid and its star forward, Cristiano Ronaldo, visited the Cotton Bowl in Dallas to play an exhibition against AS Roma, he made sure he got tickets.
He admired Ronaldo’s dynamism, his goal-scoring prowess, his flair, and in those days, a week shy of his 17th birthday, Murray evoked a schoolboy version of Ronaldo, capable of implausible levels of sorcery every time he played football or baseball. He had already quarterbacked the Allen High Eagles to two state titles (with a third to come), and he knew he could play either game, or both, in college and the pros.
But as he watched some of the world’s best soccer players, Murray pondered an alternate future, not in football but in fútbol. Turning to his godfather, Mark Johnson, he asked how many years it would take him to be as good as Ronaldo, who, after all, had practiced his entire life to get to be Ronaldo. Johnson, weighing Murray’s athleticism against his inexperience, posited four, maybe five.
