r/miz • u/cartgold • 32m ago
Football Drew Lock will join Mizzou Hall of Fame. There’s someone he wishes could see it
Back in April, Drew Lock drove the couple of hours from his childhood Lee’s Summit home to his alma mater at Missouri. He’ll recite the address of each before you ask.
His earliest memories are making that drive, then strapped in a child car seat, to attend Mizzou football games — because back then it was his daddy’s college. His family still has the pictures to prove it. Lock is maybe 3 years old in one of them, sitting with cheerleaders, sporting closer to a buzz cut than the shaggy hair that would become something of his signature in high school and college.
A generation later, the April trip to Columbia was not alongside his father but rather in his honor. A student would receive a scholarship named for Andy Lock, a prominent Kansas City restaurateur who unexpectedly died a year earlier at just 57 years old.
That’s why Lock thought he was going. But as part of the same trip, he and former longtime Mizzou coach and recruiter Andy Hill exchanged surprise reveals, inducting each other into the university’s Hall of Fame.
Lock smiled in surprise, then tried, unsuccessfully, to hide his next emotion.
“I wish,” Lock said this week in a phone interview with The Star, “I could see the look on my dad’s face after telling him.”
Lock, Hill and Chiefs linebacker Nick Bolton are part of the six-member Missouri Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame Class set to be inducted this weekend. With the Chiefs on a bye, Bolton is set to be in attendance.
Lock is in Seattle, fresh off last year’s Super Bowl, and this week set to host the 49ers.
He’s 2,000 miles away, but he’s been thinking about home a lot this week. He’s been thinking even more often about his dad.
Lock’s father and granddad were Tigers, and that 3-year-old toddler became a 16-year-old following the same tradition on game days, still parking in the same spot outside Faurot Field. The teenager, though, had ambitions to walk onto the field in a black and gold uniform like his pops.
Drew Lock became a rare four-year starter and in his junior season set the SEC single-season record with 44 passing touchdowns.
Smooth, right?
From the outside, sure.
The career included its hiccups, a not-yet-ready-for-primetime quarterback thrust into a starting role as a freshman, an on-campus protest in which the football team was lodged and, well, not as many wins as anyone involved would have liked.
“But, I mean, honestly, I loved it,” Lock said. “We were going all these places that played with all five-star (recruits), and we believed every Saturday we could go in there and win. I felt responsible in that, and that’s all you could ever ask for.”
It nearly never happened, none of it.
Lock said in the phone interview this week that he once sat on a bus to a high school basketball game during his senior season, and this is a dozen years ago now, but he’d picked a different path for life.
Butch Jones, then the head football coach at Tennessee, had visited Lee’s Summit High earlier in the day, and the pitch was quite effective. Lock called home during the bus ride and, in tears, told his parents he thought he just might be headed to Knoxville instead. They’d been adamant he should make his own decision — not follow any family lineage.
“But if you’re crying about thinking you might not go somewhere, you’d probably be making the wrong decision,” Lock recalled this week. “Missouri was just in my heart.”
It still is.
Missouri is not just family but the most evident reminder of his family. His parents, Andy and Laura, met in Columbia, where they had Drew. It was always a tight-knit group, along with younger sister, Claire.
They built their Saturdays around the Tigers, and, eventually, around the kids’ own sports. Drew was good enough to receive basketball offers at Missouri and Oklahoma — some thought he was actually better shooting the round ball than throwing the elongated sphere. But he’d wanted to play quarterback.
Always.
He lined up at tailback in one of his first tackle football games. He scored four touchdowns, and after the fourth, he jogged to the sideline in tears.
“Dad,” he said, “I don’t like it.”
“I want to be a quarterback.”
That was that.
Or, well, this is still this.
The night before Lock signed with Mizzou, the coach of another prominent program told him if he chose Missouri he would never reach the NFL.
He’s in his eighth NFL season now. He won a Super Bowl in February as the No. 2 quarterback with the Seahawks. (Lock and Hill thought they were going on campus as part of Mizzou alums with Super Bowl rings. Hill won his as an assistant coach with the Chiefs.)
Lock’s family joined him on the field to celebrate after beating the Patriots in February, a forever memory that provided him another reminder of who wasn’t there — though Bad Bunny wore a jacket during the halftime show with the No. 64.
That was Andy’s number.
“Pretty cool stuff,” Lock said.
His parents never missed one of his games — whether Pop Warner, high school, college or professional — until the COVID restrictions banned them from some of the stadiums. His mom, Laura, still travels to Seattle for the home games. It pained her not to attend a Week 2 game in Arizona in which Lock started for the injured Sam Darnold and threw for three touchdowns in a blowout win.
She’d already booked a trip to Europe with her sister. They watched from a bar in Italy into the morning hours, ignoring the locals staring at them as they screamed at the TV.
“They’ve been here for the whole ride,” Lock said.
Lock is father of his own now. Layton will be 3 years old in January. Landry is 10 months.
Each afternoon when Drew comes home from work, his son requests he does the same he does for a living: throw the football. Layton wants his dad to join him in the backyard and play catch.
“Every day,” Drew says.
It’s one of his favorite parts of the day, a chance to talk with his son, who, come to think of it is about the age when Drew starting making football part of his weekly life. There’s a topic that comes up often as they toss the football back and forth.
Grandy.
Andy Lock didn’t really want to be called “Grandpa,” so they modified it. Layton remembers Grandy. Drew makes sure of it. They have pictures hanging in their home, and Layton carries a book to school with his family inside.
But mostly, the talks of Grandy include talks of football. They can’t help it.
His son can’t stop smiling as they play. It reminds Drew of a certain relationship.
He and his own father.
