SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Patrick Mahomes is sitting behind a microphone, at the center of the spectacle that accompanies these Super Bowl media days, the subject of mostly glowing questions.
And why not? At 27, the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback is here for the third time in four seasons, days before he will almost certainly be announced as the league’s MVP for the second time in four years.
Which makes what follows seem a bit contrarian. See, I’ve spent the past several days on a search, of sorts, into what would classify as ancient history when you’re just 27. A dive into the high school version of Patrick Mahomes.
In his senior year at Whitehouse High in Texas, fall of 2013, Mahomes threw 50 touchdowns and flirted with 5,000 yards — in just 13 games.
But meshed into the highlights, he threw six interceptions. Some of them were immaterial. Some of them were game-changing plays. Some of them were life-changing plays, come to think of it.
How about a reflection on those?
“I mean, you never forget the interceptions,” he says. “They’re more memories than the touchdowns.”
That’s an ironic response for this project. You think he’s never forgotten them? What about the guys who picked him off? You know, the teenagers who would never sniff the NFL as they grew into adulthood, but, hey, they intercepted a Patrick Mahomes pass. Can you imagine forever having that story in your back pocket?
I didn’t want to have to imagine it. I wanted those stories.
And thus began a mission to track them all down.
A mission to find the Chosen Six.
The search begins
The phone rings, and I flip on the speaker to better record the ensuing interview.
Let’s hope.
This is a cold-call. While I would later get confirmation, I initially found the number on one of those Google searches. To be honest, I have no idea if this Terry Ausborne is the Terry Ausborne I need — the Terry Ausborne who, while a member of rival Tyler High School, once intercepted that Whitehouse quarterback who was destined for Texas Tech and then the NFL.
The phone rings a second time.
Heck, I don’t even know if that old newspaper article got it right — if Terry Ausborne is actually the high school kid who got Mahomes in early November 2013.
A third ring.
An answer.
“Hello?”
“Is this Terry Ausborne?”
“Who’s this?”
“Yeah, um, I’m Sam McDowell, a sports columnist with The Kansas City Star. This is a bit unusual, but I’m trying to track down someone, and, maybe it’s easiest just to ask: Did you ever play against Patrick Mahomes?”
“Mannnnn, I didn’t just play against Patrick Mahomes. I picked him off.”
Guess we’re off and running.
This particular interception came early in a game between Tyler and Whitehouse, evenly-matched rival schools separated by just 15 miles. Mahomes attended Whitehouse, but he actually tells people his hometown is Tyler, Texas. That’s where he grew up.
During a first-half series, Mahomes had driven Whitehouse into Tyler territory. On this play, he rolled to his right and threw a ball near the sideline. Ausborne, a safety, cut in front of it and snatched it out of the air.
“We were playing at their house, so I tried to take it to the house,” Ausborne says. “I wasn’t able to do that. Still, though, man, I got me one.”
Two, actually.
The first successful call, tracking down Ausborne, is a unique one. He intercepted Mahomes twice, once as a junior and again as a senior.
“So how often you tell people about this?” I wonder out loud.
“Come on, man,” he replies. “Every chance I get.”
‘The best player I’ve ever coached against’
The journey to find these six started with a conversation with Adam Cook, the former Whitehouse High football coach.
I figured it might be a long shot to track down all six players — to see what they remember about the play, the place it holds in their own memory, given what’s become of Mahomes, and also what’s become of these six now.
Cook was game from the jump. He linked me with the former head coaches from each school, and there’s a caveat there. Mahomes threw six interceptions as a senior, but against just four schools. Two got him twice.
Some of the coaches remember exactly which players recorded the interceptions. Some point out that, well, it’s a lot to ask a guy to remember a distinct play from more than nine years ago. These occurred in fall 2013, after all.
But they haven’t forgotten the quarterback. And a string of group-text messages quickly shifts focus to that.
“He is a stud,” Poteet head coach Kody Groves replies in one text. “Has been for a long time.”
That sounds obvious now. But more enlightening is that Groves said it way back then. Poteet knocked Whitehouse out of the playoffs that season, winning by a 65-60 margin in the Class 4A regional semifinal. The Poteet defense had allowed all of 57 points in its previous six games.
Mahomes hung 60 on them in four quarters.
In a loss.
“That quarterback is the best high school player I have ever coached against,” Groves told reporters after the game.
Here, Groves comes through with a couple of names from that day: Malachi Cobb and Denzel Thomas. He passes along a phone number for Cobb, and after a couple of days, I dig up an email address for Thomas that I hoped would still be active.
It was. Turns out, Thomas didn’t know much about Mahomes heading into that 2013 game. He had been cyber-bullied during high school, he said, which kept him off the internet as much as possible. Almost universally, that decision came absent regrets.
But it meant he was about the only man in Mesquite, Texas, who didn’t now about the kid from Whitehouse. His teammates raved about the quarterback they were about to face.
Thomas? A shoulder shrug.
“I just kept hearing about him, so when I got in the game, I was just flying balls to the wall,” he says. “And what I was hearing was he was a guy not afraid to try to make some throws that maybe some other guys couldn’t necessarily make.”
Heard that about this guy before.
A decade ago, Thomas used it to his advantage. As Mahomes looked for an outlet while trying to escape pressure from future Dallas Cowboy Malik Jefferson, Thomas baited Mahomes into thinking he was about to sprint toward him, knowing the running back a few feet behind him sat open. And it worked. As Mahomes flicked a pass to his running back, Thomas was already backpedaling, ready to haul it in.
That time he picked off Mahomes was the first — and only — interception of his high school career.
And about the only time Poteet stopped Whitehouse that night.
Until the final play.
“The whole game Patrick was slicing and dicing us — we couldn’t get the guy down,” Cobb says. “I remember Malik had him wrapped up, and Malik was a monster, and (Mahomes) just spun off him and threw it 60 yards downfield for a touchdown. And you’re just like, Woah.
“They called him the Whirling Dervish.”
Poteet thought it had a state championship-contending team that year, and a lot of that belief derived from its defense.
On Nov. 29, 2013, which just so happened to be Cobb’s 18th birthday, Mahomes and Whitehouse had put up 60 — and then got the ball back once more in the final two minutes, trailing by five.
“We were on edge — like when Tom Brady gets the ball,” Cobb says. “That’s how he was. You could never count him out.”
Mahomes accounted for seven touchdowns in the game, five passing and two rushing. A couple of completions into the last drive, he had two receivers to his right, as Cobb recalls. Mahomes rolled in that direction and waited on his running back to turn around for a quick throw. But the ball ricocheted off the hands of his receiver, and as Cobb went in for the tackle, he adjusted instead to catch the tipped football.
It was the 60th pass to leave Mahomes’ hands that night.
And the final one of his high school career.
On the bus ride home, Mahomes would pull open his phone and text his basketball coach. He wanted to play in the varsity basketball game.
Tipoff was just 20 hours away.
And, yes, he played.
‘We saw back then’
The next name on the list is Christian Allison, a former Carthage High outside linebacker. Mahomes had breezed through his senior season with 17 touchdowns and no interceptions through four games.
Allison picked him in the fifth.
We have the name, but not the contact information.
Back to the search. I find a few different Christian Allison names in the Texas pages, all in their mid-20s.
A cold call. It goes to voicemail.
Might as well move down the list. A second cold call. An answer, followed by my introduction.
“Patrick who?” is the literal initial reply, and something tells me I’ve got the wrong guy.
One more Christian Allison on the list. Let’s dial it up.
“Man, I honestly think about that play pretty often because it’s crazy,” the real Christian Allison says. “Looking back at life, it’s like, wow, that man is in the Super Bowl.”
Allison thinks Mahomes just plain never saw him on this interception, but whatever the reason, he was the first to get him that year.
Stacy Cummings Jr. got him next.
It’s been an exhaustive search for Cummings, a former Jacksonville High safety, and desperation leads me to a wedding website with Cummings and his bride, LaTonya. It’s all I’ve got to go on.
LaTonya is visible on Facebook, so here’s hoping that, please, she might be the wife of Stacy, because we’re just about out of options for research that won’t classify as stalking.
I send her a message.
Are you related to Stacy Cummings, who played high school football at Jacksonville?
“You have the right person,” she replies, and within a couple of hours, Stacy is on the phone with me, reminiscing every detail about the play.
And then the player.
“There were some different things I had to try to key (in on) and read when trying to cover him — because he would side-arm it and throw it like it’s a baseball,” Cummings says. “He was about the only one who could have the arm strength to still get it to where it needed to go.
“Everything you see now, we saw back then.”
No. 6
The idea behind this project — to turn up all six players — was to do something a little off-course.
Something a little less serious.
Something that includes perhaps more willing participants than a collection of NFL players who would probably rather be preparing for the biggest game of their lives than answering our questions.
Early into the process, the group texts with Texas high school head coaches adds a name to the list of six: Darrell Minifee.
Seconds later, an immediate response:
Minifee passed away.
A weeklong project of tracking down all six players was only a couple of hours and one interview old. It would feel incomplete without Minifee’s inclusion. Should we just call the whole thing off?
But after a few days, I stumbled upon his older sister, Rachel Sanders.
“I’m definitely crying right now,” she responds, “and would love to talk with you about this.”
On Feb. 19, 2019, Minifee was found dead in a Houston home. He had been visiting a friend there.
The case remains unsolved.
Sanders would describe him as “full of life, full of love, the kind of guy who’s never met a stranger.” He had one weird quirk, she recalled: He wore thick wristbands every day, even though it drove his mother nuts. After his death, his mother kept some of them.
Sanders’ parents adopted Minifee when he was just weeks old, she recalled, and “from as long as I can remember, he had a football in his hands.”
He thought he’d make a career of it, but his playing days stopped after high school.
Sanders thinks of her younger brother every day and posts about him on social media frequently. She’s a mother now, and her 10-year-old boy can’t get enough of football.
In fact, he has a favorite accessory when he plays.
A handful of silicone bands on his wrist.
The common thread
Stacy Cummings Jr. is a truck driver who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, married and a father.
Christian Allison has moved to Colorado Springs, where, among other ventures, he does public speaking engagements about criminal injustices. He’s spoken all across the state.
Malachi Cobb earned a master’s degree in business, and he works at Sewell Automotive in Dallas.
His former high school teammate, Denzel Thomas, is employed in security with the San Antonio Spurs. He’d always hoped to stick in sports.
Terry Ausborne owns a trucking company in Houston called Ausborne Freight Transportation.
The five of them are spread across Texas — and, in one case, outside the state — and none remain in contact with the others.
Separated yet inseparable.
Think of the level of fame and success this illustrates — those who had a split-second moment in the sun against the guy who turned into the greatest quarterback in the world feel as though they had a brush with their own 15 seconds. Some want it to last forever.
As Mahomes prepares for a game here in Glendale, Ariz., that will be watched by hundreds of millions, football has long been tucked into their pasts. It was a kid’s game to many of them, an avenue to college for a couple, and a $500 million career for the guy they once got the best of.
And the $500 million guy remembers that past.
They all follow Mahomes’ career, by the way, every one of them mentioning they are hoping the Chiefs win the Super Bowl on Sunday, which would be the second NFL championship of Mahomes’ five-year pro career. There’s a sense of pride equaled only by the challenge that comes with hailing from East Texas, or the Piney Woods, as Allison refers to it. Like an understanding: That guy is one of our own.
Mahomes was rivals with some of these guys, in the high school spirit week-sort of sense, but only in that sort of sense.
“He had a real passion for the game, which was something that I loved the most about him, honestly,” Cummings says. “With his drive, it’s not surprising he is where he is.”
Albeit tangentially, they are a piece of his journey to get here.
Or at least East Texas is.
And when they watch on Sunday, which they all plan to do, a story might follow.
“Some people might not believe me,” Ausborne says, “but I know where to find the highlights.”
