Nick Lowery: What Football, Failure, and Mental Toughness Teach Us About Life

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Ross Kaminsky: Thanks to Guy Benson and the whole team for allowing me to fill in once again. I’m Ross Kaminsky, coming to you from Denver. Thanks for your company. Great to spend a little time with you.

I wanted to mention the Denver thing in particular because of my next guest. I’ll just mention one of the many bits of heartbreak that he has created for some of us: September 20, 1993. The Kansas City Chiefs beat the Denver Broncos 15-7, and all 15 Kansas City points were scored by my guest, Nick Lowery, one of the greatest kickers in NFL history, despite being a Kansas City Chief. Sorry for my sarcasm, Nick, but you know I’m a Broncos fan.

Nick Lowery: So, you already–if I hadn’t played in Kansas City, my family–my father was from a family of cowboys from Livermore, Colorado. So I would have loved to play there. But a guy named John Elway broke our hearts, too.

That game is so fervently in my memory because Huey Lewis, who was very close friends with Joe Montana, was standing next to the kicking net. After I kicked a 52-yarder, my fourth field goal in the first half, and we’re up 12-0, he grabs me and goes, “Man, this is fun for you, isn’t it?” I’m like, “Hell yeah, this is fun.” So, a good memory. Thank you.

Ross Kaminsky: Dude, how do you remember? Do you remember lots of games with that level of detail, or did that one really stand out to you for a reason?

Nick Lowery: Well, I mean, it stood out because I scored all our points, and we were shutting out the great John Elway until the last 30 seconds of the game, on national TV on Monday night. And a guy named Joe Montana–I mean, it’s like having a rock star, underscored by having Huey Lewis standing next to me on the sidelines.

But it was a great year for us. We almost made it to the Super Bowl, and we had implacable enemies in the Broncos because of a guy named John Elway.

Ross Kaminsky: And let me do a more proper introduction. Nick Lowery, former NFL placekicker. Played on a couple of teams, but most famous for his incredible years as a Kansas City Chief. All kinds of records, accuracy records–just absolutely an amazing player.

And the author now of a new book called Naked and Alone with 80,000 People: From 11 NFL Rejections to Hall of Fame Glory. It is a wonderful, fascinating book that has a great blend of football and life lessons, and I encourage everyone to read it, buy it.

I want to talk about lots of stuff with you, Nick, in the time that we have, but I just gotta start with one thing: played tennis with Andre Agassi?

Nick Lowery: I did. I played a lot of tennis. My brother was a teaching tennis pro, and I did an exhibition with Andre Agassi and Ivan Lendl, who gave me sawdust. He loved to keep sawdust in his pocket.

We did an exhibition, and I was intramural champion at Dartmouth. I actually won the U.S. Open Celebrity Arthur Ashe Day three times in doubles, because when you’re training, you’re doing weightlifting, you’re running, you’re kicking, but tennis helps you get to a different level of fitness.

So I’m playing with him in the warm-ups, and he’s really good-looking, long hair, he’s like 19 years old, and he is hitting it back harder and harder because he didn’t expect it from me.

And the next year I played with Chris Evert, and Martina Navratilova–I had a big crush on Chris Evert. So, good stuff.

Ross Kaminsky: Were you good enough to win a game or even a couple of points against Andre Agassi?

Nick Lowery: Oh gosh, I don’t want anybody to quote me saying that, but let’s just say that I could rally and look pretty good in rallying with him.

Ross Kaminsky: Are you one of these guys who’s just a great athlete in lots of different sports?

Nick Lowery: I was the kind of guy where it was not natural. I just worked hard at it, and I loved it.

And tennis, like kicking, is about the mental side. It’s about–I mean, the guys that are the best, including Andre Agassi, he would admit in his book, right? He revitalized his attitude. He’d been burned out by childhood intensity and training, and he had to really rededicate to why he was actually playing.

I think Steffi Graf came into his life as well, but he went from the top to the bottom and then back to the top. And it was all about his mental fitness. It was about his ability to focus and to bring that focus functionally as an athlete when it really mattered most.

You look at Rod Laver, you look at all the great players today, at Djokovic, et cetera. They are mentally incredibly tough. And that’s what I admire about tennis players, and it definitely teaches us as athletes in other sports about the importance of that.

One of the missing things in a lot of teams is they can’t put four quarters together, because collectively, to be focused in this ADD world is very difficult.

Ross Kaminsky: Mm-hmm. No doubt. And you know, I don’t know how old your kids are. Well, I don’t know if you even have kids, but my kids are 18 and 20.

And the younger one is exactly what you would think of someone who just graduated from high school in terms of spending a lot of time gaming, and I think doesn’t have much attention span. And he just started college, and I hope he can get it together fast enough.

Nick Lowery: Yeah. I would say there are books about ADD, and I think a valid theory is Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo–ADD. You know what? It took 17 years to paint the 130 reliefs at the Sistine Chapel. I think he knew how to focus.

It’s different. I think it should be called Attention Intensity Syndrome, because the people sitting in front of those games, they love the intensity. They just get bored really easily.

They often are great surgeons, great doctors, great attorneys, great artists in general, but they have to reteach their brain about how to bring it in a disciplined way to have a disciplined career.

Ross Kaminsky: We are talking with Nick Lowery, his wonderful new book, Naked and Alone with 80,000 People: From 11 NFL Rejections to Hall of Fame Glory. And as I said before, and as you’ll understand quickly when you read the book, a lot of it is about football, and a lot of it is not about football. A lot of it is about things other than football.

So, we spent a bunch of time here talking sports. I want to quote a paragraph to you from your own book that really just jumped out at me, and I would like you to elaborate on it a little bit.

And leave it to a Dartmouth guy to drop a deus ex machina on us.

Oh, by the way, you said that Dartmouth wasn’t great at football. Dude, I went to Columbia, and we never beat you, so…

Nick Lowery: I don’t know when I said Dartmouth wasn’t great at football. We were always in second place.

And superb the last few years, my friend. The late, great Buddy Teevens–we have reasserted the greatness of Dartmouth football.

There you go. All right, not applying to the last decade.

Ross Kaminsky: Very good. Okay, here’s the quote:

“There is no Greek deus ex machina straining at the last minute to save our heroes in a scripted, staged, dramatic drama. No cavalry riding into a gentle orange marmalade sunset. No Luke Skywalker dropping the perfect weapon into the Death Star. We are the Death Star.”

Wow, Nick. Elaborate, please.

Nick Lowery: Wow. Well, you read the book–at least some important parts of it.

You know, in the end, if you follow some of the great people in mental health and what used to be called mental illness, Abraham Maslow being one of my heroes in self-actualization, in the end, we have to do that very difficult tightrope to accept that everything we’ve ever done or experienced is our own fault.

And that goes against so much of our culture today. So you go through this sort of weaning period, this purgatory, when you do that. It feels awful. All those stupid things I did or happened to me that I’d love to say were not my fault, and you couldn’t really say directly were my fault.

But once you do the work, you are now in your own psychological, mental, and spiritual driver’s seat. And suddenly you get the credit for all the good things you do.

In the end, all the stupid things we did in our lives add up to who we are today. And all we can do is learn from them. And what a word I use a lot more than intelligence, which is wisdom. Wisdom meaning being able to critically think and make better choices.

And that’s really what we’re missing in education today: the most important thing is to be able to weed through tons of misinformation in an age of AI, where stuff looks so real and often is without any substance whatsoever, and identify the critical core value and make the critical choice.

Ross Kaminsky:
You were involved and have been for a long time in many projects aimed at helping people–all different kinds of people. There’s Native American stuff, other things for young people, just a huge range of things.

Why is that so important to you? Not every former NFL star goes out with an intention of making his life’s whole mission–and not just a side project–but making the rest of your life’s mission helping people. Why?

Nick Lowery: I find it so incredibly serendipitous that before the show, you had a quote from John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

I grew up at a school, Potomac School, where Michael and David Kennedy, Bobby’s sons, were in seventh and ninth grade when I was in eighth grade. My father was very senior CIA and cried when Kennedy was killed.

I grew up next door. Think of this, Ross. I mean, what are the chances? In 1962, at 6803 Hampshire Road in McLean, Virginia, five minutes from the CIA and Potomac School where we went, the next-door neighbor moving in that very day was Bobby Kennedy’s best friend and John F. Kennedy’s friend, Byron “Whizzer” White, the legendary two-time NFL rushing champion, Rhodes Scholar, who led the NFL in rushing the same year he finished number one at Yale Law School.

And now he was beginning his first of 31 years as a swing voter, if you will, someone who is never predictable, very powerful intellect, for the Supreme Court.

And that spoils you. I would readily say that I grew up entitled, privileged–to use those clichés today–but it’s what you do for it and with it.

And being surrounded by great mentors and loving the idea to stand up for the underdogs, whether it’s Native Americans who have had every single treaty broken, and the kids that have to deal with growing up without a sense of cultural integration between their historic culture and this modern culture, how difficult that can be, whether it’s with the homeless that I work with today, Champions for the Homeless.

Putting a face on the homeless, to me, I think all of us find the greatest satisfaction when we can see and feel how we’ve helped somebody else connect to their purpose, connect to the fact that they are seen, they’re worthy. Somebody cares about that. They’re no longer hidden in the shadows of the American dream.

Ross Kaminsky: Do you have any Native American heritage?

Nick Lowery: You know, I always felt that way with the family of cowboys in Colorado and, spiritually, certainly, absolutely meeting with wonderful people that just are so, I think, grounded in a way that could benefit all of us.

But I did a DNA test, and I’m 17% Scandinavian, 80% English and Scottish, and 3% African from Cameroon and Congo.

So my NFL brothers, I tell them, “Don’t hate it, play it, man. I got some blood.”

Ross Kaminsky: Nick Lowery’s new book is Naked and Alone with 80,000 People: From 11 NFL Rejections to Hall of Fame Glory. I’m going to allow listeners to just go buy and read the book to read about the impact of the NFL rejections on Nick, because it’s an incredible story in its own right.

And we’ve got just maybe a minute and a half here. And I want to just come back to football. Actually, there’s two things I want to do.

One, we talked about helping people and how much you are doing with that and with the new book. Just, could you please mention the companion app, the mental health app that you’ve got going on?

Nick Lowery: So Blue Cloud X is a wonderful company, and Blue Cloud and I, we’ve created the Nick Lowery Companion App.

Seventy-five percent of the population can’t either afford or are comfortable talking about their issues. We have exponential increases in suicides for freshmen. One in five people will experience mental health, one in 20 serious mental health.

It’s something that is sort of being unlearned by this instant gratification with our phones, where it’s both God and the devil in one.

And the companion app allows five questions that were developed by Dr. Peter Wehmeyer from the University of Heidelberg over 15 years. Tested against the other five top mental health surveys and found to be equally good in helping people be aware of their issues, monitor and create a baseline, so that they have someone within their app telling them and suggesting for them ways to direct their focus and their soul, if you will, so that they stay away from the sort of myopic focus that people fall into in depression and ultimately in suicide.

So we’re very excited. You can just Google “Nick Lowery Companion App.” It’s free, most importantly.

And we’re working with the military, because we’d love to have, just like a concussion baseline, Ross, imagine every sailor, every soldier, every airman, every Marine, from the day they start in the military, they have a baseline that follows them so that we know what their PTSD might be, their suicidal ideation.

Those are the things that are happening right now in the carrier group led by the USS Lincoln in the Middle East. Those guys have been stuck out there for almost 300 days, and we want to help people feel like there’s hope, that people care about them enough to give them something in their pocket that’s always there to direct their focus in something positive and productive.

Ross Kaminsky: Remarkable. So folks, yes, you can Google, or whatever your search of choice is, Nick Lowery–and that’s L-O-W-E-R-Y–Companion App. And it’s just a fabulous project.

And I want to just end with a quick football thing. Oh, can I tell you just a very, very quick thing, Nick?

So I was at Columbia in those years in the mid-’80s where Columbia set the record for the most losses in Division I, all the Ivy part of Division I history. And they allowed anybody to try out.

And I’m a five-foot-nine Jew who played basketball in high school. But I went out for the football team and, nominally, I was on the team as a wide receiver, but I was basically practice squad.

I just got to tell you, it was the best thing I did in college. And the football players I met, who I never would have met otherwise, were the best people I met in college. And I don’t really consider myself a football player; that was just an incredible thing. You don’t need to–

Nick Lowery: You know, I think sports teach us to be human, right? To be in touch with failure, to be in touch with pain, and to be in touch with our teammates and be a good teammate.

I’m so moved to hear that about your experience.

Ross Kaminsky: Just wonderful. Last, very quick thing. I think I saw this right on your stats page. I think that in what you had–a 16-year career, something like that–I think you maybe only had two field-goal attempts blocked in your whole career, and they were both in one season, maybe ’93 or something. How do you go a career with two blocks?

Nick Lowery: Getting the ball up very quickly. And that’s something that people don’t realize. It’s not just being accurate. You have to get it over in 20 feet, 12 feet high, over some very large people paid five bucks or more to block your kick and eat you if they could.

So it is definitely something that teaches you to create your own office, if you will, mentally–the sort of sacred office around yourself where no one can invade your space in terms of that sanctuary of clarity, of purpose, and also a level of empathy for other people, because we’re all human beings, all of us going through our stuff.

Ross Kaminsky: Nick Lowery’s book, Naked and Alone with 80,000 People. Wonderful to talk to you, Nick, despite the Broncos-Chiefs thing. Thanks for your time.

Nick Lowery: Thank you, brother.