JOEY CHEEK INTERVIEW
Heisman Trophy Podcast with Chris Huston
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CHRIS HUSTON: The 2026 Winter Olympics have wrapped, but a lot of Americans, I think, still have Olympic fever. There were so many amazing performances that came out of the quadrennial extravaganza held in Milan and Cortina — so many extraordinary athletes shining on the world stage. Our featured guest on this episode of the Heisman Trophy Podcast was also in Milan, providing superb commentary and analysis for NBC's coverage of speed skating.

And it was incredibly appropriate, because 20 years earlier he won his own gold medal in speed skating — right there in the Italian region of Piedmont — at the 2006 Olympiad in Turin. He also added a silver to go with the bronze he won at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. In short, he is a speed skating and Olympic legend. He's also the first winner of the Heisman Humanitarian Award, which is an honor the Heisman Trust gives out to recognize sports figures who use their platforms to help those who are less fortunate. This guest was a trailblazer in that regard. I could keep going, because he's done so much, but we have to save some things for the podcast. So welcome, Joey Cheek, to the Heisman Trophy Podcast.

JOEY CHEEK: Chris, thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it. This was a heck of a games, wasn't it?

CHRIS HUSTON: Man, I think it was one of the best in a while — it really made an imprint on a lot of people.

JOEY CHEEK: Absolutely. NBC was certainly happy. I was thrilled as a former athlete and now fan watching it. Obviously my heart belongs to speed skating, and we had an absolute rock star in Jordan Stolz, who took home two golds and a silver. So it was fun to be on the call. I've been on the call for speed skating when we had a much darker time, so this was nice.

CHRIS HUSTON: Yeah. He's still really young. What makes him so good at such an early age?

JOEY CHEEK: He's 21. He's extraordinary, and the thing that makes him extraordinary is he's extraordinary in multiple ways — so it sounds like a cop-out, but the man won the 500 meters, the shortest race in speed skating. That's a race I won. He also typically has the best last lap of the 1500. Now, in this 1500 he did get beaten — he was silver — but no one who races the 500, even if you make it to the 1500, has the best last lap and wins the 1500. That combination of pure speed and kick — people shouldn't be wired that way. You tend to be one or the other, and he's extraordinary that way. And then mentally as well, he's probably the toughest guy in the field. He's just all business. He cares about nothing other than winning at speed skating.

CHRIS HUSTON: That's actually one of the areas I wanted to ask you about later — what separates elite athletes from other elite athletes, especially at the Olympic level, and how you handle the pressure and all that. I remember Eric Heiden; that was my introduction to speed skating. I remember after that happened I was like, I want to go be a speed skater. But I was in Orlando, Florida, and there weren't many opportunities for speed skating. You were in Greensboro, North Carolina, and you fell in love with the sport. How did that happen?

JOEY CHEEK: Yeah, similar situation. I grew up racing on inline speed skates. You remember the '90s, right? Everybody was on rollerblades. I was the U16 national champion for speed skating on wheels. And in the '90s, Rollerblade the company was selling ten million pairs a year — tens of millions of kids skating. Even if only one percent of them wanted to race, you're still talking about hundreds of thousands of kids across the country racing. That was a huge talent pool, and I was one of the top inline guys.

So when I was 14, I was watching the '94 Olympics and I saw Dan Jansen win his gold medal for the US in speed skating. And I saw a Norwegian guy named Johann Olav Koss win three gold medals. I was blown away. I told my mom — we were in North Carolina in my mom's living room in February — "I want to do that." And she said, "Well, it ain't going to happen here in Greensboro." So I left home the next year, turned 15, and started moving — Midwest and Canada for a bit, and Utah for a bunch of years. You just move where it was cold. Inline skating allowed a bunch of kids from Florida and North Carolina and Texas and California who otherwise would never have been speed skaters to at least have access to the sport.

CHRIS HUSTON: What were the physical attributes you had right off the bat that made you a natural candidate to be a speed skater?

JOEY CHEEK: I think the two things that were natural — although at the time I don't know that people said it — were that I was really good right away. I won national age group titles my first year on wheels, so I clearly had a knack for picking it up. But what I've realized now, especially having my own kid and seeing which traits he picks up or doesn't, is that I've always had what they used to call being a mountain goat — I never fall. Like we're on the side of a mountain, rocks slide out from under you, and I've got a natural feel on my feet. Good balance.

And then there were two other physical attributes I know because we measured them: I had really good Type 1 sprint fibers. It wasn't until we started doing genetic testing that we began to see how significant that is. A very small percentage of people of European descent have this sprint gene. I had a 37-inch vertical in high school and a VO2 max that was quite high. So a number of things aligned.

But in terms of challenges — because of course it always seems like, "Oh, of course you won medals, you had all these things" — I was probably the weakest physical guy on the team in terms of pure weight. When you looked at the guys in the weight room, I was never the strongest. I had really high strength-to-weight ratio, but I was never that strong. And I created way more lactic acid than any of my competitors or teammates. We tracked lactic acid every day. So I was skating the 1500, but I would explode spectacularly at the end of the race, and it limited my distances.

CHRIS HUSTON: You talked about the muscle fibers — is that mostly in the hamstring area? Is that where most of the benefit was?

JOEY CHEEK: It's all over. Whatever your muscle fiber composition is, there's a strong genetic component to it. There are the sprint fibers, then fibers that can be trained to be either sprinter or endurance, and then pure endurance fibers. At least that was the science when I was skating — fast twitch and slow twitch. And there's a set of slow twitch that you can train up toward fast, and a set of slow twitch that will never train up; they just stay slow twitch. I was very high on the fast twitch. There are markers they can track now.

My wife, who is also an Olympian — she was in kayak — has this same very rare European sprint gene. It's a recessive gene, so our kid was guaranteed to have it. We're like, we may have over-indexed on speed. We see this kid tearing around and we're like, we bred him too strong — we can't overpower him.

CHRIS HUSTON: Oh my gosh! You had his website set up from birth.

JOEY CHEEK: He's probably going to be a cellist or a poet or something. He's like, "I don't want to be an athlete." I haven't joked with him this way because I don't want to put a weird complex in his head, but I've been thinking, "Look, kid — I gave you the best genetics I possibly could. It's up to you now."

CHRIS HUSTON: You came from the Piedmont Triad, which I think is funny because you later won gold in Piedmont. Did you play any other sports? Did you try track and field? Did you ever time yourself?

JOEY CHEEK: I never did, because as soon as I put skates on my feet at about nine years old, it felt like the thing I was made to do. However, I grew up loving Michael Johnson — the famous 200 and 400 meter gold medalist. My athletic hero was a track and field guy. And my race, the 500 that I won, is 38 seconds, so we're kind of in the middle — shorter than a 400 meter but in that range.

I decided that when I finished my sport and went to graduate school, I was going to run track and field just for fun. I started doing masters track — old man track. I never ran in high school, never ran in college, and I started training with some folks from the New York Athletic Club, which is a pretty funny story because they totally ran me through the wringer. But I did run a sub-54-second 400 as a 38-year-old. I was good enough that I thought, "Okay, had I been training for this, I would probably have been passable as a track and field person" — but I think those are the best athletes in the world, so I don't put myself on the same level as what those men and women do.

CHRIS HUSTON: So when it comes to speed skating — when it comes to being ready to perform in that gold medal race — is it similar to track and field in the sense that you're trying to peak at the right moment?

JOEY CHEEK: Yeah, for sure. There are a lot of similarities, mentally and physiologically. Speed skating is an incredibly technical sport — probably one of the most technical sports where mastery of how to push against the skate makes an enormous difference in your performance. I know that because I've seen the same person swing quite a bit depending on whether they're technically on or not. I almost liken it to golf. Golf is such a technical sport that someone who knows how to put their body weight behind a swing will absolutely crush it straight and far, regardless of their fitness. If sports are a spectrum — purely technical on one end, purely physiological on the other — speed skating is in the middle, maybe like swimming.

Even now, long since my career ended, you could put great athletes on ice skates and it takes them years, and they still will never quite get the feel. You can always see it in their body language; it never looks natural. So that technical mastery really matters, and having everything come together on the day of a big competition — mentally, physiologically at your peak, and technically sharp — that's the trick.

CHRIS HUSTON: Do you break down the race into separate components and work on those components individually?

JOEY CHEEK: For me, because I was a sprinter, it was honestly learning how to not try too hard. From a technical perspective, there were physiological keys and things I knew worked for me. When I did those things, I won. When I didn't, I wouldn't win. So the trick over multiple years — really the last four years of my career — was drilling those same technical cues over and over and over, so that when the gun went off I just automatically executed them. You don't get into a situation where you panic or try too hard.

The interesting piece I realized — and this is sort of a cornerstone of my belief on human performance — is that I think almost everyone already knows what they do well and don't do well. If you've done any sport for any length of time, you actually know what you aren't doing well. The trick is finding what fixes the things you don't do well and then drilling those. Most people don't have the discipline to do it. People know — you ask, "Why didn't you skate well in that race?" They usually know: "I did this" or "I did that." You go, "Well, why'd you do that?" And they say, "I don't know." Finding the cue to fix it and then religiously drilling it — that was all I thought about. I had a note card with three things that I looked at every day. That's all I worked on for four years straight.

CHRIS HUSTON: Wow. So for you — was it your start? Your ability to turn the corner?

JOEY CHEEK: Yeah, I was good at it. I was by far the best. Here's the nicest compliment I ever got about my speed skating. One of my old teammates — a phenomenal junior who just barely missed an Olympic team — said he had never seen anybody who used everything he had the way that I did. There were people who were better athletes. There were people who were better technicians — not many, but a few. There were people who worked harder. There were people who maybe had a better mental game. But he said no one had maximized all four of those things the way that I did.

It was an incredibly kind thing to hear — it made me feel incredible. But it also keeps you pretty humble, because as soon as I start strutting around, the universe has a way of knocking me back down. Regularly I was not the best at individual elements, but when I put them all together, I could be the best — I was the best, for that moment in time. It's a lifetime of building for one moment.

CHRIS HUSTON: That actually is a really great and effective compliment, because it doesn't make you feel great at any one thing. It's almost backhanded, right?

JOEY CHEEK: A tiny bit. When I first heard it, I was a little offended. But it worked — it wouldn't have been as kind if it hadn't all come together. When you lay everyone out on paper, there were people who were better at all kinds of things. But that's not what matters. What matters is that you're able to put it together on the day that counts. And I always was.

CHRIS HUSTON: So when you're getting ready for Turin in '06, is there a point in the process — after qualifying, after preparing — where you started to get nervous?

JOEY CHEEK: I was chronically nervous. I was famous for being super nervous before my races. I only remember this clearly because I had the conversation with a guy named Casey FitzRandolph, a US Olympic gold medalist in speed skating. The day of the Men's 500, we were at breakfast together and I was talking with him and said, "Yeah, it's weird, Fitz — I'm not nervous at all." I said, "I don't know if that's good or not; we'll see in a couple of hours." And that was one day where everything was locked. But almost all of my races, I was always kind of nervous. That strategy of "what are the three things you're focusing on" — it's almost Zen-like in the way you train by repetition; it almost serves as armor against nerves. The right amount of nerves is great because you perform better, and I was always better on the day that mattered. The adrenaline rush was a management thing — manage it so you don't spaz out, but use that wave to get more speed and more power.

CHRIS HUSTON: Describe to me the feeling of getting out there and getting ready for the race — the world's watching you, people back home are watching, you've got the crowd there, the camera in your face.

JOEY CHEEK: I loved it. Speed skating in the US — we're only a sport every four years, really. I would love to hear what the football players say who go to the Super Bowl, but for that moment, especially in the 30 seconds before the starter gives the gun, it feels like the entire world just stops. That was the purest moment. Honestly, it's a dragon I'm still chasing to this day and probably will my entire life — the combination of being the best you've ever been at something, being the best in the world at your thing on the day the whole world is watching. It's incredible.

CHRIS HUSTON: That's different from, say, being the world's best cellist, right? There's no event that crowns you the world's best cellist. The Olympics is uniquely that — a moment where you have to prove yourself in one extraordinary circumstance. And some people wilt under the pressure, for understandable reasons. We saw that a few times in these Olympics, like in figure skating.

JOEY CHEEK: Yeah. The real world is super mushy. I didn't know that, because to me the real world was skating until it wasn't. Most of my life, most of my adult life, was: here's the goal, here's the exact distance, it's a 400-meter oval, we're going to do it on this day in February at this hour. You generally know the times people are going to skate — within a tenth or two, you know what the likely winning time will be. All of it is laid out: four years from now, this is the goal. Three years, two years, one year. It's so structured. You build a training program and you've done it for years. And then you get into the real world and you think — what is winning now? There's no winning. You can lose, but there's no winning. It was an awful shock. I think that's why so many athletes struggle when they leave: the structure of their life is gone, and you feel like a horse that's had blinders on and suddenly doesn't know where to look. And what am I even doing this for? "Okay, say I absolutely kill it on this Excel spreadsheet." Who cares? It's a hard transition.

CHRIS HUSTON: But you had some ideas. You were not a guy who was going to coast on a victory lap. You had thoughts about what you could do with that moment. Tell us — first, give away your prize money, and then we'll talk about what you did next.

JOEY CHEEK: The reality is that I won my first medal after a really hard year. The 2002 Olympics were agonizing — all kinds of insomnia. Now you'd call it a mental health challenge, anxiety — it's super normal. You're 21 years old, getting ready for your first Olympics in your home country. 9/11 happened that year, so there was this existential sense of "are we ever safe again?" I was absolutely miserable. I was skating better than I'd ever skated, but I was so anxious every day. "I was better than I've ever been — how am I going to be better again tomorrow?" So it's really hard.

I won my first medal — I'd never won an international medal before, never won junior worlds, world championships, or a World Cup. I get to the Olympics, I win my first medal, and it's amazing for about a day. I won a bronze, and of course bronze medals in the US are respected, but not the same as gold. Everyone cared for about a week. And I finished and I thought, "Oh — is that it? That's what I've been torturing myself over?"

And so I made a decision — not exactly in that moment, but around that time — I was like, "Okay, I'm only going to do this if I enjoy it, because it's not worth being miserable over. It's hard. You don't make any money in speed skating. No one knows who you are. It's not worth it just for that one moment." And two, I realized how many people did watch for that one moment. And I thought: if I've got the world's attention, I'm going to try and do something worthwhile.

I know how the media works. I've always liked watching what's happening around me and finding it interesting how that machinery tells stories and shapes narratives. Even as a young man I had an intuitive sense of it. So I thought, "I know that if I have something differentiated enough and worth saying, I'll be able to take people along on this." That part I knew. I didn't know much else.

Going into the 2006 Olympics, I won the World Sprint Championships — the first American man to do so since Eric Heiden and Dan Jansen. So I'd linked myself in some small historical way to my heroes in the sport. I had a great shot at winning. And so I thought, "If I win a gold medal in these games, I'm going to donate my prize money" — I donated it to Johann Olav Koss, the guy I first watched in '94 alongside Dan Jansen, and to his charity that he started for refugee children.

I thought, "This is all incredibly poetic. It all works. Hopefully people will see this and be moved and we can make some sort of impact." And it really blew up in an incredible way. By far, until I had my kid, this was the most meaningful thing I'd ever done in my entire life — nothing else even remotely compares. But I had that one day where skating was perfect. I skated out of my mind, better than I ever dreamt. We had the press conference, I made the announcement, and people jumped on board. We raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single day from sponsors and regular donors. The total across everything was well over a million and a half in a couple of weeks — which in those days was real money. Better than I ever could have dreamt.

CHRIS HUSTON: Very poetic, as you say. The organization Right to Play — what exactly did it do for refugee children?

JOEY CHEEK: It was a sport and play program for refugee children. Johann Koss started it. This hero of mine — after he won, he essentially donated his goodwill to start this charity. There are tens of millions of displaced children across the world, and most people have no idea what a refugee camp is. People may have seen those old commercials showing starving children — those situations exist. But the reality is there are also millions and millions of children and women living in camps who've been driven out of their countries, who are not welcome in the host country, and who are corralled and barely kept alive. They're sheltered — usually by the UN or another group — but there's nothing going on in there. No school. Nothing for people to do. And that's not living.

So Johann Koss started the organization because he said, "Look — people absolutely need food, shelter, and medicine, but they also need more. Children need a reason to be excited and happy and to live." They started by providing sport equipment for kids in refugee camps who had literally nothing. And then it evolved into using sport as a teaching modality — to educate kids who didn't have schools, to teach conflict resolution. In some of these refugee camps, tribal factions that had been at war in their home country and had both been driven out would end up in the same camp. Gender equality, HIV education — all of these programs organically grew from the needs of those children. Sport is so wonderful for reaching people because children just learn through play. We do it automatically. Put kids outside and they'll find things to play with. Use that impulse to educate, and it's super effective. That was what Right to Play did.

CHRIS HUSTON: Tell me about Team Darfur.

JOEY CHEEK: At some point in this journey, I was advocating for the protection of civilians from Darfur. I picked a very specific region. In the mid-2000s, the Sudanese government had empowered a group of militias to wipe out people and take whatever they wanted. Millions of people were flooding out of Darfur, and hundreds of thousands of people had been slaughtered in their villages.

What I realized was that doing humanitarian work — which is what Right to Play's support was doing — was important. But what those people also needed was to not be gunned down by helicopter gunships and warlords.

When I made that transition from humanitarian work to activism — from "feel good" causes people aren't really going to question to advocating for political change — I found, astonishingly given the world we live in now, that this was a genuinely bipartisan issue in the US. Really deeply religious Christian Republicans were supporting it as well as very liberal Democratic lawmakers. So I didn't face political heat domestically. But when you say "there needs to be intervention to protect civilians," you're treading into territory that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. If not dangerous territory, you're certainly out of your speed skating wheelhouse, and I started getting heat for it. You do the best you can.

Team Darfur sprung up as an idea to help get athletes who wanted to be more active on the advocacy side of things — and to do so in a way that wouldn't harm the work Right to Play was doing, which was extremely necessary and generally apolitical. Two amazing water polo players from UCLA had already started Team Darfur. We were doing the exact same thing, so we merged. Their name was infinitely better than ours. Why reduplicate efforts?

Now, this all connected to geopolitics in a very direct way: China was hosting the next Olympics, the 2008 Games in Beijing. And China was Sudan's number one trading partner. So the chessboard was set. You can see pretty easily how, if you're using the Olympic movement to talk about peace — which is ostensibly what the Olympic movement is about — you're suddenly treading into areas that will make people very upset.

CHRIS HUSTON: Now, you went to Chad and Darfur — you went down there to check it out firsthand?

JOEY CHEEK: I started what became Team Darfur — or rather helped build it. But I never went to Khartoum or to Sudan. I'm banned from Sudan — I maybe could go back now, but I haven't tried. It certainly wasn't safe for me to be there at the time. I went to Chad and traveled along the border with a number of other people. We went all over other African nations trying to drum up support from African Union member nations that were already doing things to support the effort — Egypt, Ethiopia. The closest I got was the Chad-Sudan border, where I believe there were six or seven hundred thousand Darfuri refugees in camps.

CHRIS HUSTON: Did the Sudanese government shake their fist at you? Were they getting annoyed?

JOEY CHEEK: Yeah. There was a lot of "this guy's an idiot ice skater, don't listen to him" — that sort of thing. I don't remember much specific pushback from the Sudanese government. But I did get banned from China as well, so I didn't get to go to the Beijing Olympics. I had my visa pulled the day before I was supposed to leave. And what's interesting — or challenging — about that is that the US Olympic Committee and certainly the International Olympic Committee aren't going to go against the host country unless the host country is doing something profoundly awful. They don't want any heat. The IOC wants the Olympics to be seen as this great force for good. And I believe good things happen because of it — I'm a realist about it. I think the world is much better having the Olympic movement. But there are limits to what the Olympic movement does in the real world of realpolitik and governmental machinations.

So the IOC very quickly sided with China and put out the message that "Joey Cheek doesn't speak for us; he's an individual." I suddenly went from being a celebrated gold medalist — "look, this is the best of what the Olympic movement stands for" — to "he's a private citizen doing his own thing." That one stung even more than any criticism from a country that obviously had an incentive to silence me. That was tough.

I'll say this, though: I felt very supported by our own government — a government that was considerably less divided than it is now. In some ways it felt like the last moment in which all factions could agree and believe in something together. That made it easier.

CHRIS HUSTON: Was USAID working there?

JOEY CHEEK: Yes — and man, I learned so much. USAID was doing incredible work. They were feeding people on the ground. That's the governmental organization doing the feeding — when you hear that the US is feeding people in other countries, there's a government agency that boxes up American-grown food, puts it on C-130s, flies it to distribution stations, gets it out there, and people live because of that work and the generosity of the American people.

When I made my announcement, it was pretty far afield from typical Olympic fare. I was passionate about doing the right thing — or what I believed was the right thing — and I was getting interviewed constantly by a lot of media. In retrospect, the volume of media attention we were getting was wild. Multiple people in the State Department reached out, and I can't remember exactly how high up it went, but it was somewhere around the Deputy Secretary of State level. They asked me to come to DC, to the State Department, and sit down: "We're going to show you our stuff. We're going to show you satellite photos, talk to you about what's happening, because you're already out there talking about this and we want to make sure you at least know what you're talking about — or know our side of it." This was pretty heady stuff. I was 27 years old. I hadn't started graduate school yet. I was just off the Olympics, having never done anything other than train and read about the world through books. And now I'm being called into the State Department to look at satellite imagery of villages that had been burned and troop movements they were tracking. And I start to grasp the enormity of what our government does in the world. I'm like, oh my goodness.

It felt like the Wizard of Oz's curtain was being pulled back and now you're seeing how the world actually works — in a way you'd only read about before.

CHRIS HUSTON: Did you have to get security clearance for that?

JOEY CHEEK: I assume the material had been reduced in classification or cleared in some way, because I never had clearance. I think in those days — with Google Earth just starting to emerge as the first satellite imagery the common person could see — we took a lot less for granted about how much you can learn about the world. At that point you trusted what was on the news. CBS, NBC, ABC. This was the tail end of those outlets being the trusted voice of what the world was.

The two things that struck me were: one, again, the sheer enormity of the operations. When you think about the US budget — and the military is another trillion or two on top of that — it's an unfathomable scale. Every country has a State Department, a CIA equivalent, a military. The whole world of NGOs on top of that, which can be subcontractors or operating independently on their own fundraising. How gargantuan the system is — it's wild.

And then the other piece: you always hear people say something looks like a well-oiled machine. And then you realize how much of it is being held together with bubble gum and dental floss, and how much the world turns on dumb luck. My belief now — years later — is a lot less deterministic than it was. I used to think there was a lot more determinism in your ability to affect your outcomes at the Olympic stage. As I've gotten older, I've seen people who were too good — and one dumb bad thing happened — and you go, "That was not their failing. That was bad luck." We don't like to believe that. We want to think that if you will it and want it and try hard enough, you can overcome bad luck. But sometimes it's just bad luck.

When we were in Chad at one point, being briefed — with State Department people and some UN people and some local governmental officials — there had been a coup attempt. And the coup was thwarted not because soldiers had fought off the attackers. The insurgents stopped someone in the street, their convoy of guys in Toyotas with machine guns, and got directed to the parliament building instead of the presidential palace. There were more guards at the parliament. And that was the determining factor. I was in a meeting with very stone-faced, serious people, and I started laughing — probably a little hysterically — because this cannot be how the world works. And they were all just like: yeah, that's how it goes.

CHRIS HUSTON: It happened in 1914 with Archduke Franz Ferdinand. They tried to shoot him and missed; his motorcade rushed him down the street, and he happened to end up in front of another assassin. And here we are.

JOEY CHEEK: And that's what starts World War I. So yeah — those two realizations: that our force is huger and more complex than I ever thought, and yet how barely held together the machinery is and how one thing can blow everything up. That was honestly unnerving. I have felt less certain and less comfortable in the world ever since.

CHRIS HUSTON: A lot of people out there are faking it until they make it — and they're in government too. They've got titles and everything.

JOEY CHEEK: I have deep respect, and I hope this doesn't come across as anti-government — it's not. I think it's an almost impossible task. I met really smart, really hardworking, really caring people doing the best they could in a very chaotic world. That's just how it goes.

CHRIS HUSTON: It's a probabilistic universe. You never know what's going to happen. What do you think would have been different had all of this happened during the full flowering of the social media era, versus back in 2006 when the internet was still relatively young?

JOEY CHEEK: I think this would have been my medium. I really do. I was early on vlogs, and I really loved it. I was, I think, a good blogger. Had I been born at a time when I had the ability to distribute my own content — I would have really enjoyed having that access. After my gold medal, I went to sleep and woke up the next day with 30,000 Myspace followers. In these days that's nothing, but at the time it was a remarkable jump.

My wife says to me, "You sound like such an old man when you say stuff like that — 'I would have been great at it.'" But the ability to communicate directly with people, unfiltered — it's both horrible and incredible. That's just how it is. If you use it for horrible things, you get horrible outputs, but you can use it for incredible things as well. You can communicate stories about people that you'd otherwise never hear. Distribution is king. It's not as gatekept as it used to be — it's still gatekept, but it's not the world where Tom Brokaw either says it or it doesn't get said.

I am torn. There's a lot right now that feels very scary and uncertain, and for my kid I'm like, "I don't know if I want him growing up in this age where everything is visible online and everyone is online all the time." But I think I would have liked the chance to have been on the scene at the dawn of it, when you could capture the people who actually wanted to hear what you had to say.

CHRIS HUSTON: You could still do it. You could still go on there and do that stuff.

JOEY CHEEK: I also have a pathological aversion to self-promotion. In the real world, I don't — there's a shamelessness factor to social media that I still bristle at. Although I did do a post from Milan that was absurd. You know how they say men wearing sweaters over their shoulders is a whole look? I had this running joke with my producer for the entire broadcast about putting more and more sweaters over my shoulders in the middle of a show. So I did a post outside the Olympic rings with like fifteen sweaters wrapped around my neck and a caption like "It's called fashion, look it up." That one did okay. So I guess I'm not totally avoidant of doing cringey things for clicks.

CHRIS HUSTON: There's the current crop of athletes in this social media and AI age — a whole different set of pressures. Enormous vitriol, and you wonder whether any of it's even coming from real people.

JOEY CHEEK: Yeah. I think it goes back to that beautiful and horrible at the same time. I'll say this: these young men and women are savvy. The ones who really get it — who are putting out media in the modern vernacular, speaking the language of social media — they're incredibly savvy. There is enormous vitriol that is spewed at female athletes in particular. No question. I know that for a fact. I know a lot of women athletes, and I know the comments I get on my tiny little platform. I'm not famous — so the comments I get and the comments they get are in a completely different league. And that is obviously and verifiably different. So the fraught quality of social media is real.

I think the most distasteful aspect is how distracting it is from actual performance. Being good at social media and being good at your craft are totally unrelated skill sets. There are people who are not Olympic-caliber athletes who come out of the Games almost better known as entertainers or social media influencers. And that doesn't quite sit right with me, because I'm still a little bit of a purist about these sports. You're there to perform. You're there to compete. I don't want us to lose sight of the big goal.

CHRIS HUSTON: We're seeing a new mentality among athletes now. For a long time in the '90s there was this whole idea that you must be this obsessive, single-minded person. You must be a maniac to win. But we're seeing people in various sports who have other interests. Fernando Mendoza just won the Heisman — a kid who is making the most of his time as a college student, doing internships, interested in stoicism, and it's not a gimmick. He can talk about it. And you — you went off and went to Princeton. And the funniest thing, maybe I just think it's ironic: you get banned from the 2008 Olympics and then you go study Chinese at Princeton.

JOEY CHEEK: Yeah, I stumbled into that one. I spent four years studying Mandarin. That is a very difficult language for a non-native speaker. I looked at the world and — it's obvious I'm interested in geopolitics. We're essentially in a bipolar world, or maybe tripolar if you count Europe alongside the US and China. I'm not smart enough to say for certain, but the US and China are unquestionably the major forces. I wanted to learn the language, culture, economics, and history because I felt like they were going to matter, and I should probably know something about them — good and bad — more than just the superficial or what's been propagandized toward me. And yeah, I'm pretty obviously on record being like, "They're doing bad stuff here; we should push back." So I studied Chinese and then got banned from the country.

CHRIS HUSTON: But can you still read the Beijing Daily or the Shanghai papers?

JOEY CHEEK: I could when I was in school, man. It slips fast. There's no alphabet — the characters are singular, you don't spell things with them. And if you're not reading every day, it goes really quickly. By my last year, I'd read a paper and encountered half the things on the page that I thought I'd learned. It goes very quickly.

CHRIS HUSTON: Among the many things you accomplished in and around your Olympic triumph, the Heisman Trophy Trust said, "We're doing this new award, and we'd like you to be the first recipient." What was that like? How did they get in touch with you?

JOEY CHEEK: I was actually shielded from a lot of the mechanics. I had an agent at the time who was extraordinary. My agent found out about it, and there was some very secretive negotiation going on simultaneously with everything else that was happening. First of all, I was deeply, enormously honored. And I think I have the honor and pleasure of being the least powerful, least impactful, least successful, and least wealthy of all the Heisman Humanitarian Award winners. I'm honored to have been the start. I think it's only gotten better.

Here's the crazy thing: it was all extremely hush-hush, but at the same time I was being asked to go on a diplomatic mission with George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Tegla Loroupe — who was the marathon world record holder — and a number of other really important state-level figures. We were flying to China, Egypt, and Turkey to essentially lobby those governments for more civilian protections. It was happening simultaneously with the ceremony. So I couldn't attend. I sent my mom. Mama Cheek went to the Heisman ceremony and accepted the very first Heisman Humanitarian Award on my behalf — because I was literally on a jet going to meet the President of Egypt, or someone of that stature. And even saying this now, it's so absurd when I think of how prosaic my life is today. When I finish here, I'm going to go back to my office because I need to finish a city grant report for my organization — I couldn't get it done because I was at the Olympics — and then I'm going to go feed my kid dinner. Equally amazing. But once upon a time, yes, I had to profoundly apologize for not being there in person because I was going with movie stars to meet presidents to discuss humanitarian issues. I can't believe those words come out of my mouth. It's so absurd.

CHRIS HUSTON: What a life. Two questions: Was it Mubarak? And what's it like hanging with George Clooney on a jet?

JOEY CHEEK: Oh my gosh — yes, it was Mubarak. We actually ended up meeting with his son, because Mubarak wasn't long for power at that point. I think the Arab Spring was starting to stir. So Mubarak was still president, but we met with his son. Clooney — he is every character he plays on TV and in film. Some people, I think, are method actors — Daniel Day-Lewis can become anyone, but no one really knows who Daniel Day-Lewis is. Clooney is the guy you meet and think, "Gosh, I just wish I could be friends with him forever." He's so genuinely charismatic, genuinely kind in every interaction I ever witnessed, fiendishly charismatic but roguishly so. You think: you are exactly who you appear to be.

Of course he's a super attractive guy, so all my girlfriends and the women in my life at the time were like, "Oh, you're hanging with Clooney!" And the wild thing — in terms of sheer attractiveness — there's just nothing wrong with his face. Sometimes it's hard to explain beauty. I looked at him and I was like: I could just stare at this face. Most people you look at — including me — you go, "Something's not quite right, something's off." Not him. Everything is so symmetrical. He's phenomenal. And he also has an incredible heart. I believe — and forgive me if this is apocryphal — that he paid out of his own pocket for several satellites to be redirected to conduct flybys over Darfur for intelligence gathering in support of humanitarian work. He was the one who really raised the profile of the cause. I was an early voice contributing, and a lot of really great voices were helping build the groundswell of public awareness. But when George Clooney steps up, the whole world is talking.

My very brief experience with him was phenomenal. I remember after that trip ended, we were landing in New York, getting off the private jet, and I looked back and thought, "That is never going to happen again, is it?" I was like, "Man, that was a very cool moment."

CHRIS HUSTON: Did he give you his cell number?

JOEY CHEEK: I think he actually did give me his cell number, but he changes it every couple of weeks. He has to. And that's the wild thing about celebrity — especially in our country. He cannot go anywhere. As soon as he does, someone sees him and texts somebody and people show up. Everywhere he goes, eventually a dangerous number of people will materialize. And I realized then: I would not want to live that way.

CHRIS HUSTON: Yeah, you're the proper amount of famous. You had your gold medal, your fifteen minutes, and yep.

JOEY CHEEK: I want good restaurant reservations, but I don't want anyone to come bug me at dinner.

CHRIS HUSTON: Ha. Gosh, Joey Cheek — thanks for taking the time to talk with me and to give our audience this wealth of knowledge and wisdom, not only about your sport but about everything that goes into the Olympics, and of course the causes you work so hard on — causes that led the Heisman Trophy Trust to honor you as a Heisman Humanitarian. Congratulations on the 20th anniversary of your gold medal and of the Heisman Humanitarian Award.

JOEY CHEEK: Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you to the Heisman Trophy Trust. A lot of people don't realize it's a humanitarian organization — or really a support organization — wrapped in a very public award. The work you do with high school athletes, the contributions you make to charities and sports and youth around the country, are incredible. I'm honored to be a part of it. And I hope to make it to New York this year to celebrate with you.

CHRIS HUSTON: Oh, that'd be great! One more thing: you talked about geopolitics, and you are the Executive Vice President of Entrepreneurship at the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce. Is that a precursor? Are you going to dabble in electoral politics at some point?

JOEY CHEEK: I can't fathom it. My wife has told me in no uncertain terms I am not to run for office. But I have moved back to my hometown, and I love helping build this community. I don't know about electoral politics, but I love the work I do now — it feels very important for a very small, local group of people. I still feel like I've got meaning in life.

CHRIS HUSTON: We might need an ambassador to China one day, so that could work. All right, Joey — appreciate it. Take care.

JOEY CHEEK: That would be ironic. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it.

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[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

MONTE BURKE INTERVIEW
Heisman Trophy Podcast with Chris Huston
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CHRIS HUSTON: Monte Burke is the New York Times bestselling author of Saban, a biography of Nick Saban; Lords of the Fly; Rivers Always Reach the Sea; Fourth and Goal; and Sowbelly. His books have won numerous accolades, including an Axiom Award for Biography and Best Book of the Year honors from Sports Illustrated, Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, and Amazon. After a 14-year stint as a reporter and editor at Forbes Magazine, he is now a contributing editor there as well as at Garden and Gun and The Drake. You can connect with him on social media via MonteBurke13 or through MonteBurke.com.

His latest effort is called Men of Troy, and it is the definitive biography of Pete Carroll. It is from Grand Central Publishing, released this past January 13th. The Pete Carroll era at USC ran from 2001 to 2009 and featured a remarkable three Heisman Trophy winners in a four-year span, something that has never happened in Heisman history. Monte talked to over 150 people for the book. At full disclosure, I was one of them. He spent a lot of time with Pete Carroll, who was one of our great coaches, and he is on the Heisman Trophy Podcast to talk all about it. Welcome, Monte.

MONTE BURKE: Thanks for having me.

CHRIS HUSTON: What drew you to this? What really made you think, "I want to tell the story of Pete Carroll"?

MONTE BURKE: That particular part of Pete Carroll's coaching life was so interesting to me. I think it was a singular era. You have got this guy who came into coaching with a very unconventional philosophy and background. He grew up in the Summer of Love in the Bay Area. He studied psychology and Far Eastern mysticism. He was very much a player's coach, which back then was a pejorative term.

And it had not worked for him in the NFL. He had two head coaching jobs, got fired by the Jets, fired by the Patriots, and then spent a year out of football. USC was equally downtrodden at that time -- it had not been nationally relevant for about two decades leading up to his hiring. He was either the third or fourth choice, depending on who you talk to. I found it really interesting: here is a man who came to this place that was desperate to win, and he was equally desperate. He had younger guys who were more impressionable than pros, and certainly more captive -- back then they had to stay three or four years, nothing like now. It was a great proving ground to see whether his philosophy worked. His philosophy is very different from Nick Saban's and Bill Belichick's. He was the good cop. He was the player's coach.

And if you look at the era as a contained whole, it is such a nice nine years. You have the build with Palmer and Polamalu. Then you get the two championships in a row. Then you have that great USC-Texas game, which is still the most-watched national title game ever, and USC comes within six inches of LenDale White falling forward for three in a row -- an unprecedented three in a row. Then you had the slight stumbles of 2006, 2007, and 2008. And then it all comes crashing down in 2009, with the scandal at the end.

So the era had a nice narrative arc. And then you throw in the fact that there were no NFL teams in LA at the time. They started to win, and celebrities love winners. All of a sudden you had the Fonz and Arnold and Snoop Dogg and Will Ferrell -- not just at games, but going to practices. It became this huge vibe that Carroll created, which was a great strength and could, in the end, have been their Achilles heel as well. And the whole thing lasted exactly as long as the actual Trojan War, which, as a reading geek, I thought was pretty cool. It was a singular thing. It will never happen again. It never happened before. It felt like a cool thing to document.

CHRIS HUSTON: The record was 97 and 18 overall, 82 and 8 during that specifically dominant seven-year stretch from 2002 to 2008 -- a bell curve with the outlier seasons of six and six at the start and nine and four at the end. Pete Carroll and USC dominated the first decade of the 21st century the way Alabama dominated the second decade, the way Florida State and Nebraska dominated the 1990s, and Miami really dominated the 1980s. Given all that -- Bear Bryant, Barry Switzer in the 1970s, Bobby Bowden and Tom Osborne in the 1980s and 1990s, and Nick Saban after Pete Carroll -- for some reason, people do not put Pete Carroll's name among the all-time greats the way you might expect. He won a Super Bowl, almost won a second, dominated a decade at the college level. And somehow he is not on the short list. Why?

MONTE BURKE: I agree with you -- he probably should be. He had the historical accident of being around at the same time as the man considered the greatest college coach of all time in Nick Saban and the man considered the best NFL coach of all time in Bill Belichick. And they all left their teams at roughly the same time. He got lost in the wash. Everybody was talking about Belichick and Saban, especially because of their earlier connection.

But I also think it has something to do with the way he did it. Toward the end of his tenure at USC, things that could sound like psychobabble started coming out of his mouth. He was very West Coast about it, and Boston and New York writers used to love calling him flaky. But you have to look at the full picture: he goes to the Seahawks and does extremely well there too. He is one of only three coaches to win a national title and a Super Bowl. He came within six inches of three consecutive college titles, and then within one play of back-to-back Super Bowls. He was close to being in the GOAT conversation. I think he is certainly top ten to twelve, maybe top fifteen. He is up there.

CHRIS HUSTON: He could have been Saban before Saban if a few things had gone right at USC.

MONTE BURKE: Absolutely. And he kind of laid a blueprint for Saban. Saban locked down his area in the South and then started poaching -- Minkah Fitzpatrick from New Jersey, Bryce Young from California. Carroll had already done that. He locked down LA and California in particular, and then with the help of Lane Kiffin and other great recruiters started pulling great players out of Florida and New Jersey. He was the blueprint that Saban followed.

CHRIS HUSTON: So before we get into more details about Pete Carroll's time at USC -- why did Saban succeed in becoming the Nick Saban of college football? Six titles at Alabama. Pete very plausibly could have won three, four, maybe even five titles at USC. What was the difference? Was Saban just that much more disciplined?

MONTE BURKE: I think discipline had something to do with it, and just relentless drive. He had the 24-hour rule -- whether you lost or won a national championship, you had 24 hours to mourn or celebrate, and then onto the next season. Carroll, to me, seemed a little fidgety. He was always moving, always wanting to do something a little different. He had that curiosity -- about life, about psychology, about Far Eastern mysticism. He kind of wanted to reinvent himself a number of times.

Not to compare him to Tiger Woods, but Tiger got bored at certain points in his prime and would just redo his swing for no reason other than to challenge himself. I think there was also a little ego involved. Carroll started with great assistants in Ed Orgeron and Norm Chow, but they began to leave the program because Pete kind of wanted to see if he could do it himself. And as it turned out, that was a little bit harder without those guys. A lot of it comes down to wanting to keep raising the bar and getting a little bored -- like he just wanted to make it a little harder somehow.

CHRIS HUSTON: The three Heisman winners: Carson Palmer, Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush. Leinart and Bush were back to back. Jason White won in 2003, sandwiched between Palmer and Leinart. Palmer was the guy who got the whole thing started, yet he was a Hackett recruit and a bit of a reclamation project. He broke his collarbone in the third game of his true sophomore season, redshirted, and that enabled him to play two years with Carroll and Norm Chow. Was it really just a matter of the ball bouncing the right way to get things started?

MONTE BURKE: I think there is a lot of validity to that. Carroll also had trouble with the existing setup -- Paul Hackett and Hue Jackson as offensive coordinator back then. Apparently Hackett's playbook was like four worn volumes, and Chow just shrunk it down. Chow probably does not get enough credit. He had been the quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator at BYU and had developed Jim McMahon, Steve Young, Ty Detmer, and Robbie Bosco -- he was there when BYU won the national title. He was just a quarterback whisperer. He knew how to get the best out of these guys.

And Carson was an incredible athlete. Everyone on that team who was there with Palmer will tell you he was just extraordinary. Chow said if you wanted a video of what a perfect quarterback looks like, you would just do five minutes of Carson Palmer. Being there for two years with Chow and under Carroll, while Carroll recruited extremely well and the Hackett-era guys were already motivated to win -- it all just aligned perfectly. Interestingly, Sanchez later became sort of the first guy to say after one season, "I'm ready." That extra time really benefited Carson Palmer.

CHRIS HUSTON: Carroll walked into LA with Carson Palmer, Troy Polamalu, and a commitment from Matt Leinart who had already committed to Paul Hackett. Could Pete Carroll have done this anywhere else?

MONTE BURKE: He almost got the UNC job during his year off between being fired by the Patriots and being hired by USC. That would have been fascinating. Being out West was huge for Pete. The Northeast is still kind of puritanical -- people are very rigid, the press and media there in particular. But USC also had the name and the helmet and the whole deal, so Hackett had actually recruited pretty well. Getting Polamalu and Carson Palmer -- those were really good pieces. Team building is a bit of a mystery to me now. It seems like if you have got a big donor these days, that is the most important thing.

CHRIS HUSTON: Carson Palmer wins the Heisman in 2002. What did Pete say about that season? How did it change the equation for what USC could become?

MONTE BURKE: That was the catalyst for all of it. By the end of Carson's last year they were the best team in the nation. And Carson had this wistful speech at the end of the Orange Bowl where he said he was jealous of the guys still there, because they were going to win national championships. He could not have been more right. It brought attention to what was going on out there. That was when OJ Simpson showed up at a practice during that bowl week -- you might even remember this.

CHRIS HUSTON: I was actually at that practice. I was looking one way, turned around, and I see OJ's hand in front of me, and out of reflex I said, "Hey, how ya doing?" I remember driving with Pete and my boss, Tim Tessalone, back to the hotel -- Pete's like, "So how do you think this is going to play?" We had a lot of phone calls at USC Sports Information for a few days after that.

MONTE BURKE: Yeah, it was an awkward situation -- he had already been through the whole trial. They handled it about as well as they could. I remember talking to one of the players and he said, "Yeah, it was really odd that OJ was there, but it meant we had made it. We were big-time enough for people like OJ to come." And they really had. All of a sudden you had this West Coast team and people were thinking, "Wait -- what is going on? This is not the SEC, this is not Oklahoma, this is not Penn State. USC might be back." And they were. Pretty cool.

CHRIS HUSTON: After that Orange Bowl win over Iowa in January 2003, there really did seem to be this exuberance -- almost a sense that the players had begun to master the college game.

MONTE BURKE: Yeah. Thirty-four wins in a row. Will we ever see that again? That stat alone blows my mind. Back then, that is what you had to do. It was such a fine line -- if you lost once, you were done. The 2008 USC team lost just once and did not come close to the national title game, even though they were probably the best team in the country. After that run, there was this confidence that came not just from the players but from the coaches too.

The one big question going into 2003 was: who is going to be the quarterback? Matt Cassel had a really good chance -- they actually thought Cassel was probably going to be the one. They also had another guy, Brandon Hance, a scrambler who had actually been in the lead until he came down with meningitis or some illness and missed a lot of practice. Leinart was not necessarily the number one guy. It came down to the last few practices, and Norm Chow said: "This is our guy." Leinart was very different from Palmer. He was not a big, imposing guy, not a prototypical-looking quarterback. He was a lefty. Did not throw it as hard. But ball placement turned out to be excellent, and he turned out to be a great leader -- though you do not really know that until you put the guy in a game. Then he goes down to Auburn in 80-degree heat, where the defensive linemen are licking their chops, and he plays really well. First pass ever as a starter: a touchdown.

CHRIS HUSTON: He was a gamer. I remember that spring competition -- he did not really separate himself from the other guys. It was a fine difference between him and Cassel. They also brought in John David Booty in the fall, a kid who had skipped his senior year of high school. USC started to get an embarrassment of riches. At one point they had twelve running backs -- ten of them five-stars and two four-stars.

MONTE BURKE: Right. Pat Ruel -- who was a great interview for this book, very candid about everything -- said that was ridiculous. You need a bell cow or two. They were trying to feed all these guys so they would not transfer. And these five-stars come in to USC without a chip on their shoulder -- no pain to draw from, no foundation. Saban's genius was somehow manufacturing that chip even after back-to-back titles. Making it bigger. What Saban did, which was so unnatural, was maintain a dynasty -- we had never really seen it done before for that long. There is a chapter in the book called "Surviving Greatness." Saban did it, so we know it can be done. But he is a lot like Tiger Woods -- a unique individual who probably will not come around again.

For those USC teams, having players still connected to that early pain was essential. Once that generation turns over, every dynasty becomes decadent in a weird way. Five-star recruits come in swaggering, thinking that putting on the helmet with the Trojan on the side is enough. But you are everyone's Super Bowl from that point on. Vanderbilt stormed the field against Alabama two years ago. It is a big deal.

CHRIS HUSTON: Matt Leinart comes in, takes over, has a great first year as a starter. The Trojans win the split national title. Then in 2003, the Trojans get what they considered a BCS snub. Now they have a real chip on their shoulder going into 2004, with the slogan "Leave No Doubt." Most teams manufacture a chip. But the real ones latch onto something genuine.

MONTE BURKE: Those players were genuinely angry. Even though they had gotten a championship, they were angry. They deserved to play LSU that year -- that would have been a great battle. They were still climbing the hill. And I would say perfection came for them -- the word made flesh, as I put it in the book -- really in the Oklahoma game and then the title game. They were just unstoppable at that point.

Then, going back to what we were talking about: okay, you have gotten to the mountaintop. What do you do now? Everybody is coming for you. And that is the moment when Pete decides to change things up. Unintentionally, Orgeron leaves for a new job. And then Pete decides to break up the offensive triumvirate -- basically tells Norm Chow to leave and hands the reins to two young guys, Kiffin and Sarkisian, who were in their late twenties at the time.

CHRIS HUSTON: It must have been a little bewildering to veteran coaches like Orgeron and Chow -- "What are we doing? We have got this great thing going. Let's just keep doing it." And Carroll is like, "No -- let's try it this way."

MONTE BURKE: You can see why he might have been confident -- he still had Leinart coming back, still had Reggie Bush and LenDale White in the backfield, a great wide receiver group, great people on defense. But here is your chance to do something no one has ever done in the modern era -- win three in a row. And instead you are handing it to two guys in their late twenties. Eddie was gone anyway, but still. I did ask Pete about it, and he demurred. But later, when I asked him a different question, he said, "I made some mistakes with some assistants" -- very candid about losing good assistants and failing to replace them with equal or better talent. And this is something you watch happen at the end of every great dynasty. It becomes harder and harder to hire quality assistants as time goes on.

CHRIS HUSTON: What was the most surprising thing you learned talking to Pete about the ascent period -- 2002 to 2004?

MONTE BURKE: I keep coming back to the ownership that guys like Omar Nazel took -- a defensive lineman who did not end up playing in the NFL. The ownership those guys felt: "These are my dogs, this is my team." Omar did not even like Pete, but he was like, "I am going to do this almost to prove Pete wrong." That cohort of players who had been under Hackett, who had really felt that pain, and used it as motivation -- even if they did not warm to Pete personally -- was just remarkable to me.

And this was also the beginning of the celebrity influx. Will Ferrell shows up. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book: after the 2004 season, Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush are on billboards all over LA. Ferrell asks Leinart out to lunch after practice one day. They are sitting there at lunch, and a student comes up and says, "Mr. Leinart, can I have your autograph?" -- does not even look at Ferrell. Matt Leinart's autograph. There are tons of little stories like that in the book.

CHRIS HUSTON: To be fair, Ferrell would come by practice looking like a homeless guy half the time. Very scruffy. I remember taking the bus to the stadiums and they would play Old School on the bus. Pete just loved that movie.

MONTE BURKE: Old School was right around that time. A hilarious movie -- and that is when Ferrell really took off too.

CHRIS HUSTON: Pete Carroll and Will Ferrell were kind of joined at the hip during that period. So we go into 2005 -- the flaming comet, the supernova -- one of the most interesting seasons in college football history. Not only for how it finished, but for its implications going forward. You started to see the read option, Vince Young making Pete Carroll's 4-3 under defense look vulnerable. And it was all pre-social media, so the heat generated by that season was authentic -- real engagement, in newspapers, fans chasing these guys in airports. And they still almost pulled it off. Did they underachieve that year, or did they overachieve given everything going on?

MONTE BURKE: I think given how hard it is to stay on that mountaintop, they probably did exactly what they were going to do -- neither underachieved nor overachieved. Reggie Bush particularly, and Matt Leinart, were as famous at that point as or more famous than some of the celebrities coming to watch them. I went through old issues of People, Us Weekly, early TMZ -- "Matt Leinart spotted with Paris Hilton at Nobu." Crazy. Imagine carrying all of that as a college kid and then going, "Okay, now we have got to play Oregon State."

But the triumph in the Bush Push game -- everybody had that game circled. Charlie Weis, coaching Notre Dame that year, had the whole season pointed at that game. They pulled out all the stops: grew the grass four or five inches, the USC buses got rocked and had bottles thrown at them, they moved the pep rally from the basketball auditorium to the stadium, had Rudy there, had Joe Montana there, had a guy dressed like Jesus. The green jersey thing before the game. They literally pulled out all the stops and nearly won.

After that Notre Dame game, Matt Leinart -- who scored on the Bush Push -- was sitting in the locker room just weeping. Not because he was happy. It was the pressure of that season. And then, as several people who were there admitted -- including Lane Kiffin -- Norm Chow's approach was not conservative, but he loved to grind you down -- five yards, seven yards, slant, whatever. Kiffin and Sarkisian were like little kids who got a sports car. They put a ton of pressure on Leinart and a ton of pressure on Reggie Bush, leaning hard on their stars. Add that to being the talk of LA and the talk of the nation, and you start to see the strain.

CHRIS HUSTON: And the Texas game -- they could have won that. The ill-advised Reggie Bush lateral in the first half, recovered by Texas -- they might have blown Texas out otherwise.

MONTE BURKE: Once USC got rolling like that, other teams just cried uncle. That lateral was a huge turning point. Even in the fourth quarter, when Dwayne Jarrett caught the touchdown to put them up by twelve, it looked like it might be over.

CHRIS HUSTON: A couple of Texas defenders ran into each other, both crumpled on the turf. It just looked symbolic -- TKO, TKO. These things come down to little things that could go one way or the other. What did Pete say about how that year ended up?

MONTE BURKE: It was mainly about the defensive calls at the end. He basically called the defense himself on those last two plays and used the exact same call both times -- it worked on third down, did not work on fourth. He was very reflective about that, because losing that game the way they did made it almost impossible to survive greatness, as I call it. He had never talked about it publicly before. A lot of my interviews with him were done at his fishing cabin in Washington state, and he was unusually reflective -- sitting down, quiet, not the usual bouncing-off-the-walls Pete. At one point his voice cracked, like he was on the verge of tears. And losing that game was, in a weird way, the beginning of the end.

They had a shot in 2006, a shot in 2007, a great shot in 2008. They were still great. But I felt like Pete's mind started working differently after that -- like they were all the way back at the bottom of the mountain, and he did not quite find the same way back up.

CHRIS HUSTON: There was not the same magic. Matt Leinart did not have Carson Palmer's physical tools, but he was a gamer. He found a way to get things done at an incredibly efficient, high level. And then the recruiting machine became so prolific that it started creating its own problems.

MONTE BURKE: Pat Ruel said that having twelve running backs was ridiculous. You need a bell cow or two. These five-stars come in to USC without a chip on their shoulder. Saban's genius was somehow manufacturing that chip even after back-to-back titles. Pete was a different kind of guy -- he had other interests, he read broadly, thought about things beyond football.

And I actually think Pete is more influential than we give him credit for. The game has shifted. What was unconventional when he did it is not unconventional now. "Player's coach" is not the pejorative term it used to be. Mike Tomlin is a player's coach. Sports psychology is everywhere now. Everybody uses it. Whether or not coaches are studying The Inner Game of Tennis, those principles have seeped into the game. Pete was the first coach who really proved that approach could work -- at USC and then in the pros. We just do not put his name to it.

CHRIS HUSTON: Who do you think is the closest college coach to Pete Carroll, in style or energy?

MONTE BURKE: I am racking my brain. Dabo Swinney comes across as Saban-like in some ways but is super personable and funny. Lane Kiffin is fascinating -- his three mentors are all defensive guys: Nick Saban, his father Monte Kiffin who helped develop the Tampa 2, and Pete Carroll, who was also a defensive guy. And Lane became this offensive genius. He has got elements of all those guys. Maybe Lane. Who do you have?

CHRIS HUSTON: Two guys. Steve Sarkisian -- of all the guys in the Carroll coaching tree, probably the most like Pete personality-wise, in terms of being able to relate to people, being empathic, sensing the vibe of a room. And then PJ Fleck, who also has a little bit of that -- some people call it a gimmick or a shtick.

MONTE BURKE: Maybe Matt Campbell, maybe Kyle Whittingham. Pete was just such a -- the cameras are funny when you go back and rewatch those games. From beginning to end, the camera cannot take its eyes off Pete Carroll. Sometimes you do not even know who the opposing coach is. He is like an actor -- furrowed brow, always talking. He goes over to the referee and talks a little smack, gives the ref a pat on the butt. He was a showman. The camera always found Nick Saban because he was always snarling, and they wanted to catch him grabbing someone's face mask. It captured Pete Carroll for a completely different reason: he looked like he was having fun. And making it fun is another thing that has seeped in from Pete Carroll to this new era.

CHRIS HUSTON: Especially with the NIL stuff now. You want these kids to have a good time, or they are going to go somewhere else.

MONTE BURKE: Exactly.

CHRIS HUSTON: What is Pete's superpower?

MONTE BURKE: Making it fun. I cannot tell you how many players -- I would bet between a dozen and two dozen -- told me, without me really asking, that what Pete did during those USC years was make the game fun again. It was fun when they first started playing shirts and skins in the backyard. Fun in middle school. A little less fun in high school, and a lot less fun toward the end of their high school career -- coaches yelling and berating them. Then they come to USC and here is a guy pulling pranks, goofing off, trying to jump over the pile on a fourth-down play. He tried to do an Eddie Vedder crowd-surf and no one caught him -- he landed flat on his back. When your coach is doing that and having fun, you cannot help but catch it.

So it was that -- and this ability to create and corral the vibe and make it work for them. I talked to a couple of high school kids on recruiting visits who had just been to Alabama, Tennessee, and Penn State, and then came out to USC, and Snoop Dogg comes over and gives them a high five. They are like, "I am going to USC." Or they went out that night to all the great restaurants and clubs.

Another thing about Pete: his use of psychology was always purposeful. Leinart used to call him "Sneaky Pete." He was not just being fun for fun's sake -- it was fun with a reason. He would take the players to the beach, watch beach volleyball, then come back and start practicing. That seemed like fun, but it was really about how you shift gears suddenly and refocus. He was always using psychology to get his philosophy across. "Manipulating" is a strong word, but he was channeling that energy toward his goals. Fun and the use of psychology -- those would be his superpowers.

CHRIS HUSTON: And it was refreshing to the national media. He may have had his own shtick, his own cliches, but they were new cliches on the sports media landscape. He was not going to say the same things in a halftime interview -- he was going to say it a different way, and it was going to be more interesting.

MONTE BURKE: Absolutely. As a reporter, you feed off the energy of the person you are interviewing. We would sit down and he would start laid back. But at some point he would jump up, his voice would go up, he would get really fired up -- and you cannot help but get fired up with him. He is just bringing this energy. And I love his halftime interviews. They are so funny because all the other coaches are saying the same canned things. He is always like, "I hope you are having a good time! Go Trojans!" -- and then he sprints off. He was just a complete character.

CHRIS HUSTON: One of a kind. And this is a one-of-a-kind book -- for USC fans, college football fans, and Heisman fans who want a close-up, granular look at a really important era in the modern game. I think this era set the stage for where we are now, for good and ill. Monte Burke, thanks for coming on the Heisman Trophy Podcast. Thanks for sharing your views and insights on one of the great coaches in college football history -- a coach of three Heisman winners in four years. That may never happen again.

MONTE BURKE: Don't think so.

CHRIS HUSTON: We will talk to you soon. Cheers.

MONTE BURKE: Thanks for having me.

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