Long, but worth reading. Article is a subscriber exclusive, so link will only work if logged into Star's site.
https://www.kansascity.com/sports/sp...238089644.html
The trials and triumphs of Charvarius Ward: Chiefs corner has always battled obstacles
BY SAM MELLINGER DECEMBER 06, 2019 05:00 AM
If you are a Chiefs fan, you might not want to know what Charvarius Ward is going to say about the last time your favorite team played the Patriots. You remember the game too well already.
Patrick Mahomes’ comeback. Ward’s interception. Dee Ford’s offsides. The coin flip. An overtime loss in the franchise’s first-ever AFC Championship Game at Arrowhead Stadium.
You’ve been through enough. No need to go back. But we’re going to tell you this anyway, so here’s your warning in case you want to protect your heart. Skip to the next section.
Charvarius will also talk about growing up next to a cesspool, of waking up to gunfights, how time as a kid in a wheelchair sticks with him today, and the dark place in which he found himself during training camp, when he thought about quitting football or even hurting himself. He will open his heart, so feel free to jump ahead, but there’s this one football thing we need to mention.
Ward is talking about a third-and-10 in overtime, when Patriots receiver Julian Edelman split wide to the right, then motioned toward slot receiver Phillip Dorsett at the snap. Ward followed Edelman, the snap timed so that Dorsett rubbed Ward and gave Edelman an extra step.
Tom Brady’s pass, of course, was completed. First down. Three plays later, another conversion. Three plays after that, the touchdown that ended the Chiefs’ season.
"I knew that was coming,” Ward says. “But I couldn’t do nothing about it.”
Ward means he could not stop it because of how he and his teammates were coached. The Patriots had run the exact same play on a third down earlier in the drive, on the other side of the field: Edelman split wide left, motioning toward Dorsett in the slot, his route aided by a rub, the pass completed for a first down.
“So I knew it was coming,” Ward continues. “I couldn’t do nothing about it because I was told to stay down. If I would’ve been like, ‘Nah, nah, nah, let’s in-and-out,’ it would’ve played out different. (If they) kick a field goal, miss or make it, Pat Mahomes goes down and scores a touchdown and we win the game and we’re in the Super Bowl.
“I was instructed to stay down, but I could’ve told (fellow cornerback Kendall) Fuller, ‘Man, let’s in-and-out.’ Because the same thing just happened on the other side.”
Ward pauses. Bob Sutton, then the Chiefs’ defensive coordinator, had been clear in his directives on the Patriots’ fateful drive. Players lose jobs for freelancing.
“But I’m the one that’s playing,” Ward says. “I still could’ve overruled that, and told Fuller, ‘Let’s work together.’”
Another pause.
“Bob was ... man.”
One more pause.
“I ain’t going to say nothing about that.”
This is Charvarius Ward saying that in his fourth game as a starting cornerback he could’ve defended an overtime pass and given the eventual NFL MVP the chance to send his franchise to its first Super Bowl in nearly half a century.
And it is not the most interesting thing he will say in this conversation, which happened over the summer in Los Angeles, or others that will follow via texts, in the Chiefs’ locker room and across the table from his mother in a spare room at his house.
This story is nearly a year in the making, when we published a column about that wheelchair and how Ward didn’t play football as a kid because he wouldn’t leave his mama’s side. He reached out shortly after that piece was published with a message: “Crazy part is that it’s way more to that story.”
IMPOVERISHED UPBRINGING
Charvarius Ward once counted 19 heads sleeping in a house that went without hot water for three years. Some days he skipped taking a bath. Other times, he jumped in after a sibling finished, sharing the same water.
They turned the dining room into a bedroom, but that didn’t matter on some nights because everyone crowded around the space heater in the living room. If you weren’t close enough, you slept cold.
The place crowded the most on the 10th day of each month, because that’s when the food stamps came and Charvarius’ mother would begin her recurring magic act. Tanya Ward stretched food stamps for four into enough food for four times that many, at least for a while. The memories aren’t all bad. Sugar sandwiches, for instance.
“I used to get some bread, slick some butter on it, then put some sugar on it, then put it in the microwave for like 10 seconds,” Charvarius said. “It was so good, though. Swear to God, it was so good.”
Charvarius grew up in a McComb, Mississippi, apartment complex his mom describes as “the ghetto.” He woke up to arguments. To fist fights. To gunshots.
Two AFC juggernauts meet in Week 14 as Patrick Mahomes leads the Chiefs against Tom Brady and the Patriots. BY ERIC GARLAND | PETE GRATHOFF
He never really knew much about his dad. Tanya said Charvarius’ father went to jail a few months after Charvarius was born, then went back again, when Charvarius was in kindergarten or so, for nine years.
At some point, Tanya and Charvarius and his siblings moved to Louisiana with Tanya’s boyfriend, to a place surrounded by weeds and bushes so high they approached the roofline. They found snakeskin around the house and enough other animals in those weeds that they got a cat. The house sat near a cesspool, too. A literal cesspool.
“I actually fell in one time,” Charvarius said.
He grew accustomed to seeing bobcats steps from where he slept. Once, a wolf watched him and his friends playing basketball late at night. He still heard shots, but at least now they came from hunters.
“It was a bad situation,” Tanya said. “But it was better than being in your house asleep and there’s a gunfight going on.”
Growing up poor is not unique. Lots of Americans do it, and Charvarius Ward isn’t the only one who did to eventually make it to the NFL. He fought other problems, too. A nasty fall in second grade turned into a cancer scare that Tanya never told him about. Charvarius avoided the worst diagnosis, but the injury left him on crutches for six months, then in a wheelchair for six more. Additional time on crutches followed.
Looking back, Charvarius thinks that time changed him. He wears big smiles in his school pictures from kindergarten and first grade. After that, not so much. Second grade was a long time ago. But in some real ways, it still lingers today.
“That’s your childhood,” he said. “That’s when you learn how to talk to people, interact with people. I wasn’t doing none of that.”
He became, in his words, “anti-social.” Once, when he was on crutches, Tanya coaxed him out of the house for fresh air. He turned the corner, heard some people and stopped cold, petrified. He broke down in tears. Tanya helped him through. She always has.
Charvarius’ story is Tanya’s story. The two are intertwined, even more than most mothers and most sons. Tanya became a sister or mom to so many. That’s why everyone came around on the 10th. She provided.
She even adopted her stepsister’s son, a boy born in such bad health he spent most of his first six months in the hospital. He couldn’t make a sound, even when he was crying, which meant Tanya had the damnedest time sleeping. How could she rest if it meant not hearing a baby that might need her?
That boy still has a long scar on his head, almost like a basketball, but these days he won’t stop talking. He’s the happiest kid Tanya knows. Again, they’re not all bad memories. Tough times can provide the best perspective.
“I look at him now, and if he can do what every doctor he was seeing said he couldn’t do, then I can do whatever it is,” Tanya said.
There is an analogy to make here. Not physically, obviously. But Charvarius, who grew up so shy he wouldn’t leave his mama’s side, is now making his way in the NFL, perhaps the most fundamentally alpha-dog work environment in America, at the position that perhaps more than any other requires one to be steadfastly self-assured.
A constant struggle exists in that juxtaposition.
NON-TRADITIONAL PATH
Charvarius Ward knows this does not make sense. But it’s his truth, so he’ll tell you straight: He did not think he needed to play football as a kid, or even in high school. He thought he could walk on in college, take the spot of someone on scholarship, then show enough potential to reach the NFL.
The path he ended up taking is close enough: He finally went out for football as a senior at McComb High, playing well enough to earn a scholarship at nearby Hinds Community College, and then at Middle Tennessee State.
During Ward’s senior year, Middle Tennessee State made the Camellia Bowl, which was televised on ESPN — the only game on at the time. Ward had what he remembers as five or six pass breakups.
Then he ran a 4.4 at his pro day. He was measured at 6-foot-1 and nearly 200 pounds, with big hands. Nobody close to Charvarius has any idea where his athleticism came from, including Tanya. She laughs when asked if there are athletes on either side of the family.
Yet somehow, this wild expectation was creeping closer to reality.
“Even though I lacked confidence a lot, I still felt like i was going to make it to the NFL regardless,” he said. “Like, I don’t know why I had that thought in my head. But I think that’s why it’s happened, because I always said it and the universe made it happen.”
He signed with the Dallas Cowboys as an undrafted free agent, then was traded to the Chiefs just before last season. He made his first start on Sunday Night Football at Seattle against Seahawks star Russell Wilson. He struggled that first night — at one point he was so beat physically and mentally he asked out of the game — but the Chiefs stayed with him.
They played the long game with him, as he was doing with his career. He saved his money, his biggest splurge being a Rolex he bought with the game check he won off a veteran teammate in a footrace just before Thanksgiving.
He has people to take care of. His sister, his brothers. Cousins. Mom. Grandma. Ward figures he regularly helps as many as 10 people in some way, from a few hundred dollars for a bill, to putting them up in the house he rents in Lee’s Summit.
“That’s just him, though,” Tanya said. “He was doing that before he got to the league.”
In other words: This is one more spot where Charvarius’ story is Tanya’s story. He watched his hero take on more than she probably should have, and then became a man who sent his Middle Tennessee scholarship check back home to help.
So he’ll offer a room to a cousin for $300 a month, buy winter clothes for his siblings and send a few hundred bucks to someone else for the right reason. It doesn’t seem that long ago that Charvarius raced the other kids for a spot next to the space heater. Now he’s a provider, even before he has kids of his own.
“But I’m not just giving you money to buy some weed or buy some beer or go to a party,” he said. “There’s gotta be something you need for me to give you money, unless it’s my mama.”
This is also a problem for Ward. Or, at least, that’s how Tanya sees it. Charvarius can sometimes be motivated by the wrong things. Maybe a better way of putting it is that he can be worried by the wrong things.
He keeps his social media accounts open for private messages, and if you think the stuff posted publicly on those sites can be wild, you should see his DMs. When Ward plays well, it’s all good. He’s also seen messages wishing him the worst kind of physical harm.
“I’m telling him if you let people talk about you and ruin what you have going on, that’s a mind thing,” Tanya said. “So to me, it was like he wanted to do good for us. You can’t do good for us if you’re not doing good for yourself. You’ve gotta put yourself first before everybody else.”
That sounds like something a mom would say. But it comes from a very real place, a raw place, one that Charvarius wanted to share here.
SUMMER STRUGGLES, AND STRIDES
This summer, Charvarius Ward saw a doctor early in training camp, believing he had ADHD.
He would feel his focus waning, or his confidence shaking. He left the appointment with prescribed medication for social anxiety and depression. Ward can see now the pills created a wicked cycle. He felt bad, so he’d take the medicine. Then he’d feel worse, so he’d take more.
“It was really (messing) with me,” Ward said. “I was about to do some crazy (stuff). I really wanted to quit football in training camp. That’s how bad it was.”
And it wasn’t just the medicine. He’d been given a starting spot late the previous season but read along with everyone else about the Chiefs’ desire to acquire more cornerbacks. Then he spent his first Chiefs camp chasing the league’s fastest receiver, teammate Tyreek Hill, on passes thrown by Mahomes, the reigning MVP.
Two days before the first preseason game, the Chiefs signed veteran corner Morris Claiborne.
“I just knew they were signing him to replace me,” Charvarius said, and the cycle continued.
All of his insecurity and low self-esteem from second grade came rushing back. He wanted out. Of football. Of the Chiefs. Of everything. He thought about asking for a trade. He felt tired constantly, and not just from football. When he moved into his rental house he collapsed on the living room floor, long before the moving was done, sleeping for four hours.
He napped twice a day, often three, and still always fell right asleep at the end of the day, sometimes in tears.
“I called her one night,” Charvarius said, nodding across the table at his mom. “I was like, ‘This medicine’s got me thinking about hurting myself.’”
That’s when he stopped taking it. The doctor told him if he had those types of thoughts to quit the pills and call. He changed medications and says he doesn’t take the pills as often as he used to.
He started and played every snap of the Chiefs’ season opener in Jacksonville, but even then he thought that was only because Claiborne was suspended for violating the league’s substance-abuse policy. He was burned by Jaguars receiver D.J. Chark for 69 yards, a rough moment borne from a bad decision and miscommunication.
He remembered Jalen Ramsey, a star then with the Jaguars and Ward’s favorite cornerback, standing on the sideline yelling “THROW AT 35! THROW AT 35!” Ward yelled something back about the scoreboard, but inside he was shook.
“I was so scared, man. Every time we were on the field, I was just shaking inside,” he said. “I was like, ‘Man, I’m in a hurry for this game to be over with. Man, I can’t feel this way all season or I’m going to have a terrible season.’
“I’m praying, like, ‘Man please don’t put us in man-to-man, don’t throw the ball my way.’ And I’m knowing I can lock these dudes down at the same time.”
After that game, Charvarius made some changes, and not just in taking fewer pills. The Chiefs’ coaches maintained confidence in him, which helped. His teammates did, too, especially newly signed safety Tyrann Mathieu. He learned a lot about work ethic from Mathieu. The value of film study. Taking care of your body. About being a professional.
He hired a chef. Gave up fast food (except for the occasional Popeye’s chicken sandwich). He gets soft tissue treatment after every practice. Has doubled the frequency of his massages. Started reading more, too, everything from the Bible to self-help books.
“You know how drugs stimulate some people’s minds?” he said. “When I read books, that stimulates my mind. That gets me going. That makes me feel better. It gives me, like, a high.”
The confidence came quick. The difference showed on the field. He played better at Oakland, and again in the season opener against the Baltimore Ravens (one bad play notwithstanding). He gave up the first (and still only) touchdown of his career in Detroit against the Lions but otherwise played well.
The real breakthrough came against the Indianapolis Colts, when Claiborne was done with his suspension but Charvarius still started and played on 70 percent of the snaps. The next week, left one-on-one against Houston Texans star DeAndre Hopkins, he intercepted Deshaun Watson’s pass in the corner of the end zone nearest his family’s seats. He keeps the ball in his bedroom.
He’s given up completions on just 54.2 percent of targets in coverage, according to Pro Football Focus, and quarterbacks have a passer rating of just 73.5 against him. PFF grades him as the seventh-best cornerback in the league among those who’ve played at least 80 percent of their teams’ snaps.
“I’ve been around guys like (Patrick Peterson) who really work at their craft, and I’ve been around guys that go strictly off their athleticism,” Mathieu said. “For him, it’s really his commitment to his craft and getting better. That’s the biggest thing I’ve picked up on.
“He wants to get better. He wants to be a guy who can play off coverage, cover tight ends, he wants to be that guy that’s going to follow the top receivers. You see him with (cornerbacks coach) Sam Madison when he doesn’t have to — that’s when you know he’s serious.”
This is not the finish line. Charvarius has not accomplished enough. He’s preparing better now, mentally and physically, and wants to see how far that will take him.
He’s eligible for a contract extension after this season, and it’s worth noting that out of everything he’s asked about for this story, that’s the only question he wouldn’t answer.
He’s concentrating on what matters now, in the moment.
GIVING, AND HEALING
Last January, Charvarius Ward did something he first promised his mom as a kid. He wasn’t even in high school back then, and at that point the whole thing might’ve been as realistic as flying to the moon.
He promised her a car. She deserved that, at least. To be able to get food when she’s hungry, to run an errand when she needed and, now, to take her adopted son to his doctor’s appointments without being on someone else’s clock.
He bought the car here in Kansas City, a 2018 Chrysler 300 with about 18,000 miles on it. Says he got a good deal on it, too.
He thought about having the vehicle shipped, but he doesn’t like his mama to receive anything without seeing the look on her face. He knew he’d have to be there in person when she saw the car.
So he drove the best 40th birthday present he could think of straight to her front door.
“That was one of the most proudest moments of my life,” he said.
He is mostly disinterested in material possessions. He downsized his rental house this year compared to the one he rented during his rookie season and eats most meals at the Chiefs’ training facility. His free time is spent mostly on video games, or talking to his mom, or reading.
His splurges are mostly reserved for those he loves. If they’re happy, he’s happy, and now that he’s taking better care of himself he’s able to take better care of them.
The cycle that worked so stubbornly against him in training camp is now pushing him forward, and the result is noticeable both on the field for the Chiefs and in what Charvarius is able to do for his mom.
“I just felt like I was a nobody in my childhood,” he said. “I wasn’t a pretty boy, so I didn’t get all the girls. I didn’t play ball, so nobody saw my talents. I was just there, up under (Tanya). You see her, you were going to see me. So this just makes me proud, seeing where I came from.
“I was in a dark place in training camp. All that stuff happened in my childhood, it was coming back to me. I’ve been feeling like this all my life. Low confidence, low self-esteem, can’t really communicate with people that good. That stuff gets to me.
“Seeing where I came from, seeing where I’m continuing to go, I just feel good about myself now. I just feel so much better about myself and I’m going to keep going.”
[Reply]
