This is not to suggest that Mahomes did not take advantage any of the perks offered to a Super Bowl winning megastar. For example, on the day the Chiefs displayed their Super Bowl trophy for Kansas City, Post Malone was playing in town. What better way to extend the party? “We don’t buy tickets,” says Mahomes. “But once we win the Super Bowl, we’re like, ‘Can we get a suite?’ ” (They could.)
The rapper invited the quarterback to pass a quick hello before the show. The courteous Mahomes brought a t-shirt “as thanks for inviting us.” As Mahomes and his teammate Travis Kelce evaluated the scene behind the scenes, Post challenged the two of them to a friendly game of beer pong. (“I guess he loves beer pong,” says Mahomes. And Bud Light. “That’s his thing.”)
Post’s invitation was wrong. Mahomes and Kelce are the most effective duo of quarterbacks in the NFL, and they’re apparently capable of doing as much damage on a sad-looking folding table at a concert or on the field on Sundays. Although Mahomes described his beer pong game that night as simply good, he told me that Kelce had been “unconscious”. When I asked him about it, Kelce said, “I don’t know if I’ve been that hot on the ping pong table in my life.”
As the pair bounced back from a series of quick wins, Post Malone, wearing her new Patrick Mahomes T-shirt, red as Solo’s mugs on the table, grew increasingly nervous. (In an email, the rapper admitted to me that he is a “fairly competitive beer pong player”). Post tried to change partners. He played with a friend. Then another. He joined Swae Lee, who had joined Post on the tour.
After nine or ten games, Post is interrupted by his manager. It is time, they told him, to go on stage. But Post fires him. You need to win a game. Finally, around game 14 or 15, Post decides he needs to increase the stakes. He hands Mahomes and Kelce a piece of paper, and asks them to write their signatures, and promises to tattoo the autographs on his body, you know, permanently, if they can hit him again. Dilly dilly!
Surely you know how this ends: the post loses. “He literally has a tattoo artist in the room,“Remember Mahomes, who sounds alarmed even in hindsight.” I’m like, ‘Dude, you don’t really have to get a tattoo of our autographs.’ “And certainly, by now, you know it too: Post Malone is a man of his word, and he gets his new tattoo backstage, right after the show, inking on himself a wavy autograph from Patrick Mahomes that appears to have been written by someone who had been drinking all day to get tattooed on someone who had been drinking all day. When asking Mahomes about that epic day, I set the over / under to 20 beers, to which he replied: “Road finished, “but added that he doesn’t” know how many full beers I drank, because half the beers were in my clothes. “For his part, Post Malone told me that he “Think” It is the only tattoo that ended up on his body as a result of a lost bet.
Fans of rival teams might be disappointed that Mahomes hasn’t spent this offseason on the typical victory lap: doing press, flirting with famous people, perfecting his beer pong game. Of course not. He has been judicious with his time, even compared to a year ago. He told me that the last offseason, having won the MVP, he had gone too far, saying yes to “all these things I wanted to do, but I didn’t think I would have a chance to do it.” He said he ended up burning in commercials, banquets, and appearances. Now isolation has given Mahomes what he really wanted most: time. At his post-Super Bowl press conference, after winning the world’s biggest sports competition at age 24 and thus earning the right to say something outrageous, Mahomes summed up, in rather sober terms, the perspective that seemed to explain his absurdly quick rise to the top: “I believe in maximizing every day.”
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