Projo Sports Blog

By Kent Babb
The Kansas City Star

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The big man clinks the fork against his plate and chews through a piece of fried alligator. Rudy Niswanger is sitting on the outdoor patio of a Cajun restaurant in Leawood, Kan., and his mind is on the book he's been carrying around all week.

It's been with him at home, stealing hours from Niswanger's life during his first season as the Chiefs' starting center. It was with him this week at practice, tucked deep in his locker at the team's practice facility.

And here it is now, sitting on the corner of the lunch table. It's about fear, he tells you, clinking the fork again. It's about doubt and the physical and chemical things fear does to your body-and the impossible act of trying to ignore those things.

"One of the basics of it that I've got so far is that we're afraid of things we shouldn't be. We over-hype so much," Niswanger says, tapping his fingers on the hardcover. "His line of thinking is the head and gut theory. Basically, it's the idea that when you first react to something ..."

He'll be talking about this for a while. He's halfway through the book, The Science of Fear , and it's got him thinking. And talking.

In the meantime, here are a few things you should know about Niswanger: He's a Louisiana kid with a blue-collar background, a 305-pound body, and if you ever have the occasion to share a plate of alligator with the man, you'll find he has the sharpest mind in the Chiefs' locker room.

"... and on top of that, I've learned that fear drives consumption," he's saying. "If you can get someone to be afraid of something, you can get them to ..."

He graduated LSU with a 4.0 grade-point average in part because an academic adviser bet him he couldn't. Stuffed that kinesiology degree in a shoebox somewhere while he chased his dream of playing in the NFL, a dream even Niswanger's father doubted would take flight. And if it didn't, Rudy Niswanger took the Medical College Admission Test anyway, just to see if his mind had the chops to be a doctor. It came back with a 33 in little gray type, a composite score achieved by only about 10 percent of people who take the MCAT.

"... sometimes the way that we adjust to our first gut reactions is completely wrong," he says, "but we still do it. I don't know what that says about ..."

He's talking now about how thoughts can be manipulated. About Gandhi . About perception and how human minds naturally adjust to the information they're given. He explains a study in which subjects were assigned to guess Gandhi's age when he died. Those who were asked if he was older than 9 years old, guessed he was 49. Others were asked if Gandhi was younger than 200, and those subjects guessed he was 81.

Niswanger is smiling, waving his arms, talking loud-and to heck with the rest of the alligator.

"... you just figure out that whichever number your gut first latches onto," he says, "you adjust down or up off of that. As much as you try, you can't get it out of your head. It makes perfect sense!"

Get all that?

Niswanger takes a breath and leans back in his chair, adjusting that big body and trying to make it comfortable. Then it dawns on him. Not everyone thinks like him. Not everyone finds this stuff interesting. Not everyone can.

He leans forward and grabs the fork.

"I don't want everybody to think that because I'm into this stuff," he says, "I'm some kind of a freak."

Not a freak. Just different.

Niswanger sat in a study hall at LSU, trying to pry his eyelids open. It was 9 p.m., the time he liked to ease that big body into bed. He's a man who appreciates sleep. And this woman at the front of the classroom didn't understand that? And his football scholarship required him to be here, from 8 to 10 , four nights a week?

No. Niswanger had an idea. He approached Karla Lemoine, Niswanger's adviser his freshman year, and told her that if he made straight A's his first semester, he wouldn't have to spend his evenings here.

Here was a 300-pound football player in the pre-med program, a schedule packed with biology and chemistry classes, and he's talking about acing them all. Sure, she told him. She'll take that bet.

"Yeah," Lemoine says now, "that was not the norm, OK?"

So Niswanger did it; he made A's in all those classes and wanted to keep the train moving. He liked the feeling of that perfect report card, so he decided he'd do it again in the spring. Then the summer. And you know what? Why not do it all four years and see where that road takes him?

Besides, football was a dream and maybe a long shot. Being a doctor had been a goal since he took that anatomy and physiology class at Ouachita Christian High School in Monroe, La. It was there that Niswanger started being pulled in different directions, his mind pulling him toward medicine and his overgrown body pulling him toward football.

Niswanger had always been smart, and he'd always been big. He'd sit around his grandmother's house, polishing off an endless meal and then examining a chicken leg, comparing the bones with what he'd seen in his books.

He also never missed breakfast in those days, and by Niswanger's 10 a.m. break at Ouachita, he was hungry again. He'd hang around and a couple hours before lunch, eat a peanut butter sandwich or three.

"He had to refuel," says Niswanger's older brother, Fritz.

Niswanger needed all the fuel he could get his senior year of college . The NFL draft was looming, and the market in 2006 wasn't great for interior linemen. Niswanger was smart enough to know that. So was his father, Joe, who owns a company that repairs military vehicles.

"Just objectively," Joe Niswanger says, "I didn't think his chances were very good. But I had to remind myself that everything that Rudy has tried to do, he's achieved. He's failed at nothing. So I had to believe it was possible."

Rudy Niswanger took the MCAT and was accepted into LSU's medical school. He had a backup plan if football wasn't in his future. And for a while, it didn't look like it would be. The draft came and went, and Niswanger's phone didn't ring. He wasn't offered a free-agent deal. Several teams called late in the spring and offered him a tryout. He accepted a tryout with the Chiefs. One shot. One day. Nothing more.

"I was a guy they send up here on a plane ticket, and good luck to you," he says. "All the signed guys and draft picks get big duffel bags filled with Chiefs stuff, and I've just got my laundry bag with a gray shirt and a pair of shorts in it."

When Niswanger made the team, he convinced LSU to defer his enrollment in medical school, until his football career took off or didn't. But he had to give it a chance, even if that meant deferring medical school so long it never happens.

Yes, he's considered that. The longer Niswanger plays football, the less likely he'll become a doctor. He's doing some figuring now, thinking out loud and figuring that if he plays 10 years, adding school and residencies and internships, he'd be 49 by the time he could become a doctor. Niswanger has a 4 -month-old daughter now, and he wants more children. Who's to say he'll have the time at that age to do what one friend does, an orthopedic doctor who works 110 hours per week? Niswanger learned a long time ago that he wasn't cut out for those hours.

Besides, there's something about this game he's not ready to let go of. The camaraderie of a packed locker room, the thrill of a kickoff, and the feeling he gets when the offensive line plays in unison. The money isn't bad, either. And the way Niswanger looks at it, he's not exactly wasting his smarts.

"It's one thing to know the playbook and know the plays," he says. "It's another when you've got 90,000 screaming; you get out and make some calls in about three seconds; all of a sudden the defense moves to a different front and you've got to change those calls, then they start slanting and moving, and you have to adjust to it like-that.

"That's intelligence."

Niswanger reaches for his fourth piece of garlic bread and pops half of it into his mouth. It takes work being a football player, and part of him wonders what life would have been like if he hadn't made the Chiefs.

He would have been in his third year of medical school, and he certainly would have been thinner. Niswanger says his ideal playing weight is somewhere between 304 and 307 pounds. He says if he didn't have to keep his weight up, he probably would weigh less than 250 pounds.

"My body doesn't want to be 304 to 307," he says.

But it is, so pass the bread. It's part of the job, he says, and he has to sometimes remind himself to eat so that he stays near that ideal weight. He has no idea how many calories he consumes each day.

Niswanger also has the curse of knowledge, of knowing that carrying nearly 60 pounds of extra weight and colliding with other 300-pounders at full speed isn't good for the body he read about at Ouachita Christian High.

"I've heard the statistics," he says. "But it's a lot of fun. You grow up doing it. How many people can say they get paid to play a kid's game?"

Niswanger says he doesn't know if he'll ever become a doctor. Or if he'll ever return to school to make good on the other thing that makes him extraordinary, the mind that might not reach its full potential as long as he's working to make certain his body does.

For now, Niswanger is a football player. He's a football player who likes to read and think critically and ask questions. He says it's OK if that makes him different.

By now, he says, he's used to it.

"That's fine," Niswanger says. "If football hadn't worked out, hey, that's the whole reason I studied and took care of business in college, so I wouldn't be thinking, 'Oh, what am I going to do now?' All I have is football; what am I going to do now?

"I'm just going to play as long as they let me."

 Tags  Kansas City Chiefs Rudy Niswanger

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