Chris Kluwe

Halfway through my 44-minute conversation with Chris Kluwe, I realized we were spending as much time discussing storytelling as we were sports.

That’s not what I expected as I prepared to interview the former All-Pro punter who made a career booming kicks on his way into the Minnesota Vikings’ record books.

But Kluwe, I quickly learn, is much more than an athlete. He’s an avid video gamer, having held a top-three rating for his guild in World of Warcraft. He once played bass in a rock band called Tripping Icarus. He’s an author of three books, including one titled Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities.

And so, as our conversation spans from sports to writing to activism, I find that Kluwe speaks as passionately about crafting a great story as he does about what makes a great punt. 

On a punt: “The primary thing that makes a great punt is your drop. That’s 90 percent whether your punt is going to be good or not because your foot is going to go wherever the ball is. Unfortunately, with punting, your ball has to be in a very specific place and in a very specific orientation in order to hit a high-hangtime, far-spiral punt. The challenge becomes, ‘How do I drop this ball in the exact right spot every time?’” 

On a great story: “A lot of it is depth. Characters should feel human. They should feel like they have competing motivations. Even the villains should feel believable; they’re not just being bad for the sake of being bad. They’re motivated to do something and they honestly believe what they’re doing is the right thing to do. There are very, very few people who wake up and say, ‘I’m going to be a villain.’ No, they wake up and they’ve convinced themselves through whichever manner that they’re the hero, that they’re right and their actions are justified. I think that’s a very human element that transfers both well in literature as well as real life.”

There’s a cast of characters who fit the bill, but we’ve already discussed Breaking Bad and I offer up Walter White as an example, the genius high school chemistry teacher who’s diagnosed with cancer and devolves into a meth kingpin, and who’s arguably one of the most complex characters in television history.

“You really sympathize with him — he’s trying to provide for his family,” Kluwe says. “But he’s a monster.” 

Kluwe considers himself both a nerd and a jock. Yes, he’s aware of the dichotomy for those of us who grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, where football players hung bookworms from flagpoles by their underwear. But he’s living proof the two can coexist. When he suited up on the field, he was gonna do everything to kick your ass. But off the field, his mind focused on anything but sports.

Take, for instance, his most epic jock moment. He was a junior in high school, staring down a 60-yard field goal in a pressure-packed playoff game with three seconds left, his team down three points. The opposing coach used his final two timeouts to try and ice Kluwe, a way to rattle him and get in his head. Undeterred, Kluwe drilled the kick, sending the game to overtime, where his team clinched the win. 

Yet he has an equally epic nerd moment that, admittedly, isn’t as exciting as nailing a pressure-filled field goal to force overtime, but one in which he’s equally proud. It’s his books that share a bookshelf with the authors he admires: Ian Banks, Terry Pratchett, or the godfather of modern science fiction, William Gibson.  

“I’m a human being. We’re multifaceted — there’s no one single thing that defines us,” Kluwe says from his Huntington Beach home. “It’s something I try to tell young athletes, ‘Hey, make sure you have other stuff beyond your sport, because at a certain point — no matter how good you are — you’re gonna have to stop playing. That’s just the reality of it.”

Kluwe has long balanced the jock-nerd persona. He played baseball and soccer growing up in Seal Beach, California, not far from his current home in Huntington Beach. He excelled in both, so much so that he figured he could play either sport in college. Away from the field, though, Kluwe saved the virtual world as alien slayer Duke Nukem and trolled online message boards at a time when the internet was the Wild West. 

“I would say that was the crucible in which I was forged,” he jokes.

As gifted as Kluwe was at soccer and baseball, he didn’t know the first thing about football. All he knew as a freshman entering high school was that he needed to sign up for a fall sport. Otherwise, he’d be relegated to dreaded P.E. class. It was either cross country or football — and Kluwe hates running.

Turns out he was equally talented at kicking a football as a soccer ball. By his junior year, his coach sat him down for a heart-to-heart talk. If he worked hard, if he obsessed over his drop, if he dedicated himself to the sport, he stood a chance at playing in the NFL. That was news to Kluwe, who figured if he was gonna make it to the pros, he’d be running on a pitch or fielding balls on a diamond. But football…? Turns out punting meant he wouldn’t have to run or tackle or risk serious bodily injury.

“That sounds like the best job ever,” Kluwe laughs, thinking back. And he buckled down. “I am going to practice my drop over and over and over, even though it’s mind-numbingly boring, because I got to get it perfect.”

Kluwe wasn’t a household name in the NFL, unlike former teammate Randy Moss or Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. But he was beloved by fans in Minnesota and known to his coaches as a team player who put the Vikings’ needs over his personal aspirations. While Kluwe might have been envious of other punters in the league who boomed kicks, like  former Houston Texan Shane Lechler, he focused on kicking balls with less distance and more hang time because, as his coach told him, “Our coverage team sucks.”  

Still, Kluwe has mostly fond memories of his eight seasons in Minnesota.

There was the 2009 NFC Championship game against the New Orleans Saints when he booted a high, hanging kick to Reggie Bush, who didn’t signal for a fair catch as the Vikings’ gunner, Eric Frampton, sprinted down the field and demolished Bush, forcing a fumble that the Vikings recovered at the 9-yard line. (“And then, I think, two plays later we fumbled it,” he says. “That was the theme of the game.” Sure enough, the Vikings lost 31-28 in overtime.)

There was a game against the Kansas City Chiefs where he booted the longest kick of his career, a missile over the head of the return man that bounced off the turf and shot like a cannonball through the end zone and into the padded retaining wall with a loud thud.

“It was like, ‘Oh man, if only we were punting from the 1-yard line,” he says.  

The relationship between team and punter frayed in his later years. Kluwe started speaking out against a proposed state law banning gay marriage in Minnesota. Despite his coaches’ attempts to sway him, Kluwe says, he refused to stop speaking out for what he views as a basic human right.

“I don’t think states should be enshrining discrimination into their constitutions,” Kluwe says today. “I don’t think that’s what America is supposed to be about.”

It wasn’t the first time Kluwe spoke out against injustice. In 2012, months before his release, Kluwe wrote a letter to a then-Maryland state delegate, Emmett C. Burns, who called out Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo for supporting a Maryland proposal that would allow same-sex marriage. In his letter to Burns, Kluwe said the law wouldn’t turn him into a “lustful cockmonster” and scolded Burns for his “vitriolic hatred and bigotry.” 

Kluwe was ultimately released from the Vikings in 2013, ending a run in which he set eight team records. In an article written for Deadspin, I Was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot, Kluwe detailed the harassment he says he endured from the coaches who tried to silence him.

“It's my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of 2012, that I was fired by Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn't agree with the cause I was working for, and two cowards, Leslie Frazier and Rick Spielman, both of whom knew I was a good punter and would remain a good punter for the foreseeable future, as my numbers over my eight-year career had shown,” Kluwe wrote, calling out special teams coach Priefer, head coach Frazier, and general manager Spielman. “One of the main coaching points I've heard throughout my entire life is, ‘How you respond to difficult situations defines your character,’ and I think it's a good saying. I also think it applies to more than just the players.”

After his release, Kluwe felt he had plenty left in his leg — at least another five or six years, he says — but no NFL teams called, and he sank away into a forced retirement back home in California.

If there’s a running trend in today’s NFL, it’s players exiled for protesting causes deemed risky by the league — causes that split the fanbase or scare advertisers and their precious pool of money that has helped grow the league into one of the largest sports leagues in the world. 

Think Colin Kapernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback who led the team to the Super Bowl in 2012 and to the NFC Championship the following year. Kaepernick then famously kneeled during the national anthem during the 2016 season, protesting a history of racial injustice and police brutality in America and sparking a national debate. A free agent after the 2016 season, Kaepernick went unsigned and remains out of the league today. 

To his credit, Kluwe holds no resentment toward his forced retirement. Instead, he spent more time with his kids, played more video games, wrote a couple of books and lived a relatively quiet life in the self-proclaimed surfing capital of America — Huntington Beach.

“Do I wish there would have been more? Yeah, of course,” he says today. “I wish there was more. I don’t think you talk to anyone who doesn’t have regrets about things they might have done. But at the same time, I was like, ‘Okay, no I can be a stay-at-home dad.’”

Kluwe’s otherwise silent retreat into retirement erupted in recent weeks after he was arrested protesting a plaque the city council had designed commemorating the city library’s 50th anniversary. The plaque included a central theme championed by President Donald Trump during his two terms: Make America Great Again, or MAGA. 

In a speech before council members voted, Kluwe said: “MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands for resegregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children. MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti democracy, and, most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is.”

Kluwe finished his minute-long speech saying, “I will now engage in the time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience.” He then walked away from the podium, stepped before the council, and was carried away by three police officers. He was later charged with disrupting an assembly.

Headlines flooded the news of his arrest. By now, Kluwe is accustomed to the backlash he receives from the far-right for speaking his mind. That’s not saying he welcomes it, but he has a way of turning it into a positive. Once, he was doxed and people flooded his home with pizzas. One person sent a dildo, which he autographed, auctioned off, and donated the $700 to charity.

“For me it’s always been like, ‘Okay, you’re trying to silence my voice. That’s just gonna make me want to speak louder,’” Kluwe says. “And I’m going to find ways to turn what you think is a threat into something that helps people.

“I learned that from being an inveterate online troll in the World of Warcraft. You know, if you lash out, try threatening back or stuff, it just encourages people; it makes them want to do more because they know they’re getting a reaction. But if you can disarm them with humor as well as making other people see how ridiculous they look, then most of them have enough sense of shame to be like, ‘Well, crap, this isn’t working. I’m gonna go try to find someone else.’” 

Kluwe will continue speaking out. He only has himself to answer to these days — no coaches attempting to dissuade him from speaking against what he calls fundamental human rights. And the negativity is just part of the deal, though he wishes his voice didn’t stand out above the rest.

Meanwhile, he finds time to carve out space to tune out the world, spending time with his family, working on his next book, or immersing himself in the next great video game.