FOXBORO, Mass. — For a 24-year-old professional athlete on the precipice of stardom, muscular and powerful at six-foot flat and 227 pounds, naturally this confession tumbles slowly out of Rhamondre Stevenson’s mouth.
Stevenson may not fear getting buried at the bottom of a pile of tacklers or a Bill Belichick tongue lashing or even getting blindsided by a 300-pound defensive tackle. He does, however, quake a little at the sight of … pallets.
Specifically, pallets carrying milk.
It harkens to his days as a Walmart stocker in 2016, an overnight job Stevenson held for seven months after graduating high school, a time of great personal uncertainty. Stevenson worked seven-hour overnight shifts offloading dairy products from trucks and into the Las Vegas store, including one night he and a friend dropped a pallet carrying 50 gallons of milk. The memory of milk spilling everywhere, seeping inside the truck and dripping outside out of it, still reeks in his head.
“I almost quit,” Stevenson says with a laugh. “If it’s a quantity like that, I’m a little nervous now. That’s a lot of milk.”
Years later, as Stevenson established himself as a future pro at the University of Oklahoma, he would visit the store on return trips home, greet the new greeters and old coworkers alike. Most offered some form of congratulations on his success, and Stevenson replied thank you for two reasons. The latter being that store and those people were living reminders of what could have been.
“It gave me more structure just going to work every day and getting a taste of what the real world is really about,” Stevenson said. “That’s what made me get into football again.”
Stevenson’s story is hardly unique in the Patriots locker room, a place where unusual job experience for professional athletes is completely normal.
Patriots captain Devin McCourty worked as a groundskeeper for his own football team at Rutgers, a job that paid eight dollars an hour. Before that, McCourty was a Target cashier during his senior year of high school.
Ever since he drafted McCourty in 2010, Belichick has consistently described him as coachable. That same trait helped him thrive at a cash register.
“I was pretty good,” McCourty said. “It was fun.”
At Target, McCourty remembers being trained to expedite every transaction and was evaluated almost entirely on how quickly he could cycle customers through his checkout line. Each interaction with a customer was timed from the moment he scanned their first item until the customer left. Meaning before he could confront quarterbacks with cannon arms and quick releases, McCourty had to stare down grandmothers slow on the draw with their checkbooks.
“It was all about speed,” McCourty said. “The worst was when you would ask for payment and people would start going through their wallets, so I would always pause the timer so they wouldn’t kill my score.”
Was that cheating?
McCourty flashed a small grin. “I was doing what I had to do to get a good score,” he said.
Wide receiver Kendrick Bourne and rookie left guard Cole Strange labored during their high school summers with their fathers, both landscapers. Strange would rip plants out of the ground with his bare hands. Bourne preferred a little mechanical help, working five days a week at a 9-to-5 clip.
“My favorite part was blowing debris away,” Bourne said with a laugh. “I don’t know why. (My father) used to let me do that as a baby.”
Like Stevenson, Bourne credits the unbending routine of that summer for fostering a work ethic he hadn't known yet. The pay wasn't bad, either, for an 18-year-old, putting an extra two to three hundred dollars per week in his pocket. Sometimes, Bourne would even skip school to work.
Jalen Mills can't say the same.
The Patriots' veteran cornerback lasted all of two summer weeks as a paperboy in Dallas before focusing full-time on football. An older teammate courted Mills to help push a local publication over established news outlets like the Dallas Morning News as a door-to-door salesman. The teammate made good money, according to Mills, who would wait to get picked up at a predetermined location near his house and ride with the teammate and another friend in a van.
Mills would get dropped off at one edge of every neighborhood they targeted, and his friend would start on the opposite side. Hitting every house, they would work their way toward the middle, find each other and call for a pickup. Then, it was on to the next neighborhood, as temperatures often climbed up to and over 100 degrees.
"Some people did slam the door in your face, some people were nice," Mills remembered. "One family said they didn't want the paper but felt bad for me and gave me a Gatorade. I left, and the dad ran back out and gave me another one after seeing how fast I killed it."
Quitting was easy for Mills, who said he stopped showing up. Other interests were calling, namely football, something he hasn't quit since.
"I loved playing, and all the girls liked the football players. So from then on, it was just me playing ball," Mills said.
Elsewhere in Dallas, a young Adrian Phillips was cutting his teeth in the kitchen. Roughly once a month throughout high school, Phillips worked alongside a professional chef his father befriended in church. He cooked sides, arranged desserts and served plates at large weekend functions that occasionally reached upwards of 450 guests.
The shifts typically ran seven hours, starting with two to three dedicated to food prep and another for cleanup. Phillips enjoyed the work — mostly.
"The only thing I hated about it was not being able to go out with friends," he said.
As a second-semester senior at the University of Arizona, all Nick Folk had was time for friends in 2007. The only thing more valuable that he had less of was money.
In the spring, Folk needed a financial bridge from the end of his senior season in December 2006 to the NFL draft in late April 2007. So, he joined the marketing team in Arizona's athletics department part-time and assisted with game-day operations for the baseball and softball teams. He ran the scoreboard, kept official score and committed an error or two himself.
"On a fielder's choice, I didn't know he was technically out," Folk said. "I thought he's on base, he's faster, that's a hit. And I kind of got in trouble for that."
To this day, Folk says a few of old co-workers remain at Arizona, where his 15-year NFL career was first born. Folk now stands as the Patriots' most accurate kicker in franchise history and a player Belichick says is worthy of Hall of Fame consideration. It's a career Folk has built on maximizing moments, starting with the three months of work logged away from the football field so he could eventually return and remain for years to come.
"With that little money, I was able to earn enough to get by. And they let me train, too," Folk said. "It got me through until I got drafted."
