LEGENDS ISSUE: Kevin Mawae, the brightest star of LSU football’s darkest days, still feels the same passion for the game 7/1/2015 6:00:00 AM By JAMES MORAN Tiger Rag Associate Editor Germany is world-renowned for the more literal interpretation of football. The beautiful game is as much a part of the Deutschland as brats, brews and the ancient tale of Brunhilde. And, at least until the next World Cup rolls around, the Germans are the sport’s presiding king. Nonetheless, this is where Kevin Mawae first dipped his toes in the competitive waters of football’s American counterpart, the national pastime that would make him a legend. Mawae, the son of Sgt. 1st Class David Mawae, never stayed in one place long enough as a kid to call it home. He has no memory of Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, his birthplace, having moved to Washington state six months later when his father was deployed in Korea. From there, it was on to Fort Riley in Kansas and, around the time of his seventh birthday, the family moved overseas to Hanau, a large army base located about 30 minutes east of Frankfurt. "Germany is where I first started playing football,” Mawae says. "It was great. I lived on a military base and we played teams from other military bases and stuff like that.” That was the first step in a career surely destined for Canton, as soon as Mawae, who retired from the game in 2010, becomes eligible to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Despite playing in one of the least successful periods of the program’s rich history, the former All-SEC lineman is already enshrined in the LSU Athletics Hall of Fame. During a 16-year NFL career, Mawae was named an All-Pro eight times and selected to eight Pro Bowls. In his later years, he fought for the rights of his fellow players as a two-term president of the NFL Players Association.
More: Mawae, as much as any man who has even been around the game, has lived a football life. And believe it or not, it all began more than three decades ago, playing flag football on an army base in south-central Germany. "Fred Moses was my first football coach,” Mawae says. "He was my mom’s boss, and we played flag football for the Hanau Panthers. He’s the one who instilled the whole love of the game for me. After the first day of practice with him I came home and told my mom I was going to play in the NFL one day. That’s just how much I fell in love with it.” Though he’d go on to play for some of the game’s great stewards of offensive line play — Mike Munchak and Howard Mudd, just to name a couple — Mawae says no coach made more of an impact on him than "Coach Moses,” as the now 44-year-old still refers to him all these years later. Moses taught Mawae to love the little things about the game that separate a good player and a true great. To be passionate about tedious intricacies like the proper first step for a pulling guard on a sweep left or precise hand placement that make up the difference between winning and losing the war in the trenches. Most of all: To prepare like a professional. "Coach also ran the local movie theater in Hanau, so prior to a game on Saturday morning, he’d call the entire team to the theater and turn the lights off,” Mawae says. "You’d just have to sit there and think about the game. You’d get in trouble if you were joking around. Your job was to sit there and concentrate on your plays and the game you’re about to play. That, for me, was part of the process.” He adds: "I had a playbook when I was eight years old. So Coach Moses was the one who instilled that love of the game and the foundation for the mentality that I took along with me for 30-something years of playing football.” More than four years have passed since Mawae took off his pads for good, but that mindset still lives on. It’s a way of life. Not even retirement can change that. LOCATED LESS THAN 50 MILES EAST of the Texas border, the small Louisianan city of Leesvile is practically built around Fort Polk. Hell, its official motto is "Best Hometown in the Army.” After five years overseas, David Mawae was stationed to Fort Polk. And even though young Kevin never stepped foot there until he was on the precipice of middle school, it was the first place he’d ever felt at home. It was two years before the family would move off base, but just being stateside for the first time in years opened up a whole new world. "Me and my older brother John, who played at LSU with me, were just happy to be able to leave the base to walk around and actually go places,” Mawae says. More than anything, Mawae was excited about the opportunity to play football for a school. He’d only played on military base club teams up to that point, and the idea of playing for his school felt "big time” comparatively. The first day of school was an eye-opener. Even so close to the base, almost the entire student body was homegrown. Mawae never had trouble adapting to new strangers — a byproduct of his military upbringing, he says — but it’s tough to fit in with people who have never lived anywhere else for a kid who has seemingly lived everywhere but. Ah sports, the great social lubricant. "You try to make a niche for yourself, and for us, football was the in,” Mawae says. "The ability to play football that we had gave us an in with the homegrown kids. There were some other military kids, but the transition was much easier because of football. It’s much more difficult for kids transferring from school to school who don’t have an activity. Because once you get in that locker room, it doesn’t matter where you’re from. All that matters is can you play.” Boy, could he play.
MOST LSU GREATS SHARE the same basic backstory. Growing up in Louisiana before the explosion of recruiting as a nationwide spectacle, they could never imagine playing for anyone but the Tigers. Their minds made up as soon as they received that offer and the rest is history. Mawae’s came with a twist. Truth is, he’d never even heard of the Ole War Skule until his freshman year as Leesville High. Growing up in Germany, there was only one football game on television each week, and the national game was almost always from the Big 10 or Pac 10. Rarely the SEC, and never LSU. But, as teammate after teammate — including ‘Earthquake Game’ hero Eddie Fuller — went on to pledge purple and gold, the all-state linemen knew he wanted to take his talents three hours southeast to Baton Rouge. "I looked around at all the stars of Louisiana football and it kind of dawned on me that I was their teammate now,” Mawae says. "It was just this feeling of, wow, I’d made it to this level. I knew at an early age that I wanted to play in the NFL, and this was the next step to that, but playing at LSU was special.” Citing a bit of a learning curve, he redshirted that first season, taking the time to bulk up and hone all the mental intricacies of his craft — just as Coach Moses taught him back in Hanau a decade prior. "I wasn’t ready to play my true freshman year,” Mawae says. "I was too small, and technique-wise I was fundamentally unsound. But over the course of that year and spring ball, I felt like I was at the level you need to play offensive line in the SEC.” He dressed for the first time as LSU traveled to College Station to play Texas A&M the next season. When a rash of injuries hit the line, he’d rise from reserve center to starting left tackle by midseason and was voted to the Freshman All-SEC team. Starting all 11 games at either left tackle, left guard or center, Mawae was named First Team All-SEC as a sophomore. As a junior, he earned an All-America recognition as a left tackle before making the full-time switch to center — the position he profiled at best for the next level — before his senior year.
"By the time I was a senior, I had to rely on my technique so much because I wasn’t as big as everybody else,” Mawae says. "But, as a player on a scale of one to 10, if I came in as a one, I left at a 10-plus. That’s just kind of how I viewed myself. It’s at the next level that you really find out who can play, and when I got to Seattle for my rookie year, I wasn’t behind the eight ball at all.” And yet while Mawae grew into one of the best lineman in the country, the program itself sunk its lowest point. Before the 1991 season, Mike Archer and his staff were fired and replaced by Hudson "Curley” Hallman and his crew. In Mawae’s three seasons under Hallman, the Tigers’ record was a combined 12-21. LSU never finished higher than a tie for fourth in the SEC West. "There’s not many good things I can say about that staff,” Mawae says, as if leveling with the question a bit. "I joke around that we played in the dark part of the program’s history because if you read any book about the history of LSU football, it begins in the 1800s and runs up until 1988. Then there’s a gap from ’88 to ‘95 when (Gerry) DiNardo came in that nobody writes about. Guys older than me had success early on and then finished their careers in the gap. Guys who came after me struggled at first but finished up in more successful times. I lived in that gap the whole time.” Offensive line is a thankless position. Often made the scapegoat when an offense is struggling as a whole — the unyielding norm during the Hallman era — only an educated eye is capable recognizing and appreciating strong offensive line play. No one would have begrudged Mawae or any of the other players of his era from letting their spirits fall. Losing grinds away at a locker room, especially when the players have such little belief in the staff. On a team with so many issues, who’d have even noticed? "It was difficult. It was a trying time, but for me the love of the game trumped the disappointment of the winning and losing,” Mawae says. "For a lot of guys, it wasn’t like that. It was all about winning. I enjoyed the game, and even though we were losing, the competition of playing the game I loved in Tiger Stadium meant more to me than the disappointment of how things were going.” That passion and military-like sense of pride for his craft powered Mawae through 16 grueling campaigns spent playing a brutal position at the sport’s highest level. It’s the drive that allowed him to play in 177 consecutive games while being named to six straight Pro Bowls. It’s the determination of a Jet who famously gamed the New York media and learned to snap left-handed after breaking his right hand the week before playing the rival Miami Dolphins, only to come out swinging with a large club on his broken hand. "When you have a deep desire to be the absolute best at what you do, nothing else matters,” Mawae says. Coach Moses, wherever he is these days, must be so proud. ONE TITLE MEANT MORE to Mawae than any of his awards or accolades: leader. As a center, he naturally was the captain of the offensive line. And as his NFL career carried on, the savvy veteran grew into a leader in the locker room in more ways than one. Yes, he was the iron-willed competitor who wouldn’t hesitate to club an opponent with his own broken hand if it meant taking up for a teammate. Not dirty, but someone who played the game hard, as he likes to put it. But he was also a vocal advocate for his profession, representing and defending the rights of his fellow play in the negotiation room. "I don’t want to say it was a fluke because it wasn’t, but I really had no intention of doing it, I just did,” Mawae says of becoming active in the NFLPA. "But I always kept up with what was going on. I always paid attention to the meetings and wanted to understand the business side of the game. Keyshawn Johnson, who also use to ask me questions about that kind of stuff, nominated me to be our team rep during my first year as a Jet. I said whatever, but I ended up being elected and just dove in.”
After serving four years as a team rep for the Jets, Mawae joined the association’s executive committee in 2002 as a vice president. He nearly walked away from the union in 2008 over decisions that he says were creating a rift among the officers, but instead he decided to stick his own name in the ring and would up being elected president. Between the death of longtime NFLPA executive director Gene Upshaw and the 2011 lockout, Mawae’s two terms were as tumultuous as those of anyone who held the post before him or since. "I really believe God put me there for a reason,” Mawae says. "I said when I was elected in 2008 that if I never enacted a new benefit but got us through a lockout and secured labor peace, then my job would be complete. I did that. My name rests on the 2011 CBA and I’m as proud of that as my 16-year NFL career.” Fighting to secure health benefits for retired players and eradicating two-a-day practices came as naturally to Mawae as picking up a mike linebacker blitz through the a gap. "I firmly believe that leaders aren’t born, I think you develop into a leader,” Mawae says. "There’s that quote that a guy is a born leader, but I don’t believe that. People must develop into it, either because there’s a lack of leadership or because they’re willing to take a stance when somebody else isn’t. Leaders want to serve, and that’s always been my mentality. I’ve always wanted to be at the front of the line or the top dog. It’s just in my nature.” Mawae retired from the game in 2010 and the union once his second term ended in 2012. He left the sport healthy — in the best shape of his life, he says — but wanted to spend more time with his family and enjoy the spoils of retirement. That doesn’t mean he’s completely left the game he loves behind. Mawae still does private lessons, mostly working one-on-one with aspiring NFL linemen as they meander down the path to the draft. He’ll work with them on quickening their first step or precise, powerful hand placement for that initial punch and beyond, just as every offensive line coach he’d ever played under had worked with him, but he also tries to impart something more. To love the game and obsess over the craft. Embrace the details that make the difference between good and great. It can be the motor that keeps you going in a grueling game. Passion, the fortification of human will. He’s been that way long as he could remember. A mentality forged in a dark movie theater, silently studying a playbook hours before kickoff on an early Saturday morning in Hanau, Germany. Football lives can begin in the most unexpected places.
