Patrick Mahomes To Cincinnati Mayor Pureval, “Thanks For Giving Me My Jabroni!”
On Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs did far, far more than win a conference championship and the right to go to the Super Bowl in two weeks. No, by beating the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20 on a last second field goal, they “won” back the right to naming their own home stadium. The victory pretty much shut up all the Bengals talk about “Burrowhead Stadium,” the nickname given to the Chiefs’ stadium by Bengals fans who were seeking a fun way to highlight the fact that Bengals quarterback Joe Burrows was 3-0 against the Chiefs’ superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
Even the Cincinnati mayor, one Aftab Pureval, got into the act by facetiously suggesting that, “Joseph Lee Burrow, who was 3-0 against Mahomes, has been asked by officials to take a paternity test confirming whether or not he’s his (Mahomes’) father.”
Whoa! Did the Mayor of Cincinnati really ask the best quarterback in the country and the 2020 Superbowl MVP to answer the question, “Who’s your daddy?”
It appears so. But this game illustrated how those who live by the pun, die by the pun. So saith Kansas City’s hulking tight end Travis Kelce, one of Mahomes’ favorite targets. After the game, Mahomes was being interviewed by CBS when who else but Kelce crashed the interview and announced to all the world, “Burrowhead my (expletive), it’s Mahomes’ house!”
With these words, Kelce put the rank and file of Bengal Nation in their place. Then, he proceeded to direct a verbal suplex at their mayor, Pureval, to whom Kelce said, “I got some wise words for that Cincinnati mayor: know your role and shut your mouth, you jabroni!”
Whoa! Did Kelce just call a respected public official a jabroni? (Definition: “a stupid and contemptible person, i.e., a loser.”)
Holy shades of The Iron Sheik and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When you hear that kind of trash talk, you’d better check your GPS to make sure it isn’t Friday night down at your local civic auditorium! We teach our youth to be humble in victory and dignified in defeat, but sometimes it’s just plain fun when athletes at the top of their profession deliver the coup de grace both on the field and off it.
The real lesson for all us, however, is not that trash-talking is fun. It’s that, truth be told, Mahomes and Kelce probably weren’t overly fazed by the likes of Mayor Pureval. No, they were probably no more riled by the good mayor’s banter than Michael Jordan used to be fazed by whatever opposing guard he saw sitting down the floor from him, not staring at him in awe. Jordan used to say that when he wasn’t feeling particularly motivated on a given night, he’d pick a player on the opposing team’s bench who wasn’t looking at him and make up some sort of narrative about how much that player disrespected him.
Was it fair? No. Did it work? What do you think?
At the height of the New England Patriots’ historic run of six Super Bowl victories and the enshrinement of Coach Bill Belichick and Quarterback Tom Brady as the greatest-of-all-time, the only thing you could be surer of than a Patriots come-from-behind win was a boatload of “us-against-the-world” jabber issued from the Patriots—how every living creature from here to Alpha Centauri hated them.
Ditto for another dynasty located in San Francisco where the NBA’s Golden State Warriors have made an art form of (re)positioning themselves as underdogs despite being ranked at, or very nearly at, the top each of the last eight years.
No, the thing that separates the good competitors from the great competitors may very well be the ability to reach deep into their magic bag of motivational hacks and manufacture a chip on the shoulder where none ought to exist. That is why, on top of what Mahomes and Kelce do on the field, they must be considered among the great ones at manufacturing their chip—or in this case, their jabroni.
When Mahomes yelled out to the fans still celebrating in their seats, “Is this Arrowhead?!!!” And proceeded to tell his interviewer that the win was gratifying because “only five percent of the pubic believed we could win,” he was sending a secret love letter to Mayor Pureval for giving him some mighty fine grist he could use to build his chip.
I mean, come on. There aren’t 95 percent of any group of people on the planet who would say that Kansas City “couldn’t win.”
So, the lesson here for the competitor in all of us is to be ready to find our jabroni. We would never recommend lying as a virtue, but the next time you stand before your work team to prepare them to undertake a difficult assignment, don’t dismiss out of hand the idea of reminding your team that somewhere there is somebody who once said, or definitely thinks, that you have absolutely no chance of success.
And then watch the magic happen.