WARNER ROBINS, GA. — JAKE FROMM HUNCHES over a to-go box filled with tacos, inhaling his lunch with a ferocity usually reserved for a nature documentary. He’s running late, and he hates that. He has a schedule, designed daily to squeeze as much into 24 hours as possible, and every delay is a practice rep or a lift session or, worse, a fish he’s not getting.
Today’s delay is partially his fault. The taco place is popular, and he went at noon. Truth is though, it probably wouldn’t have mattered much. Fromm can’t go anywhere in his hometown without hordes surrounding him. His friend and former UGA roommate, Tony Locey, remembers going Christmas shopping with Fromm at a Bass Pro Shops last year. There was a Santa positioned in the middle of the store, a line of kids waiting for a picture with the big man. In walks Fromm, and suddenly Santa is redundant. Here’s their Christmas wish, in the flesh.
“A hundred kids just run over to Jake,” Locey said.
So yeah, there were some photo requests at the taco place and a bunch of questions about Georgia and plenty of, “Hey, Jake, we gonna get it done this year?”
Fromm’s polite. Exceedingly polite, actually. If there’s one thing everyone says about Georgia‘s star QB, it’s that he’s got the perfect country boy manners. Plus, he gets it. Heck, 10 years ago, he’d have thrown Santa over in a heartbeat for a chance to meet a Georgia player. He’s as much a Bulldogs fan as any of these kids at Bass Pro Shops or middle-aged dads on their lunch break. He was just born with a cannon on his right shoulder, so he gets to live out the same dream the rest of these guys gave up on long ago.
After the tacos, Fromm mixes up a protein shake. He’s 6-foot-2, 220 pounds of pure athlete, and he’s got to fuel the machine. Still, he can never quite get that shake right. He has cycled through hundreds of recipes, and hunting for the perfect mix is a ritual now. And if there’s another thing everyone says about Fromm, it’s that he’s relentless about getting things just right. His offensive coordinator, James Coley, got a text the other day. Fromm was studying the day’s practice script and somebody had spelled the name of a play wrong. “Coach,” the text said, “there’s only one ‘P’ in Apollo.”
Fromm’s got a busy day from here, too. He’s going hunting in a bit. Then he’s heading out to the fishing hole — a top-secret location, so don’t bother asking. Then he’ll be doing more hunting, this time in the dark. Back in high school, he’d sit out on a boat in the large retention pond in his neighborhood, catching frogs in the middle of the night with a spear and a spotlight. In a perfect world, he’d never come inside, and if there’s one thing everyone who’s ever heard the name Jake Fromm knows about him, it’s that he loves the outdoors.
So this is his day: A workout, a rushed lunch, a mediocre protein shake, hunting and fishing and hunting again. He’s a simple guy, who loves simple things, but he wants to devour those things, to jam as much of what he loves — family, fishing, football — into a lifetime.
“He always acts like he’s going to miss out on something,” said Bill Haskins, Fromm’s grandfather. “He’s basically like someone who’s only got a year left, and he’s trying to get everything in the world out of it.”
It’s an apt metaphor for the quarterback who’ll get his third — and likely last — crack at carrying his team back to the mountaintop in 2019. And it’s the perfect origin story, isn’t it? The Chosen One, the hero who’ll save everyone, who’ll do the impossible — he always starts out as just a normal guy.
FROMM WAS MAYBE 6 or 7, and a new sports collectibles shop had opened up in Macon. He heard they had a good stock of Georgia gear, so he asked Haskins for a ride. Sure enough, the place was full of red and black, and Fromm was enraptured. He made his rounds, touching jerseys and shirts and hats. And then he saw it — a Georgia helmet, signed by Herschel Walker. It cost $500.
But granddad loved the boy, and the boy loved Georgia, and so the helmet is still sitting in Fromm’s bedroom, one of his most cherished possessions.
It’s been 39 years since Georgia celebrated a national championship, back when Walker was a freshman and Jimmy Carter was president and the Bulldogs’ QB needed to complete just one pass to go down in the history books. In the four decades since, the fan base fumed as Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer dominated at Florida. Cam Newton won a natty for rival Auburn. Heck, even Georgia Tech‘s got one since UGA last celebrated college football supremacy. The Georgia faithful suffered through Ray Goff, lived and died with Mark Richt, watched as David Greene and Matthew Stafford and Aaron Murray came and went without winning it all.
Leave a Reply