George Kittle isn't letting the coronavirus pandemic slow him down this offseason. The San Francisco 49ers tight end is on a mission. He has a "Legendary Revenge Tour" to prepare for, after all.
Kittle doesn't want to call the heartbreaking Super Bowl defeat in February "motivation." He does, however, admit that there is a hunger in him and his teammates to right that wrong. Kittle can see it in their faces. Not face-to-face, of course. They can't get together just yet.
The NFL has extended the virtual offseason through at least the end of the month. Kittle notices that hunger to get back on the football field when watching his teammates through team-organized Zoom calls.
"As a leader on the team, I check in on my guys," Kittle told Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated. "I know the tight ends are doing really well, I know our offensive guys are doing well. And we have a lot of hungry guys on defense that are training as hard as they possibly can. I think our team's gonna come back really well from this. ... I'm just ready to play football again."
Kittle was more prepared for this pandemic and stay-at-home orders than most NFL players. In the garage of his Nashville home is a full-fledged home gym that has left his teammates, and even some coaches who couldn't figure out how he got set up so fast, jealous. Before COVID-19 severely crippled the US, Kittle was keeping a close eye on what was going on overseas. He and his wife were planning a trip to Italy, and they saw the writing on the walls.
Why not prepare for the worst?
So that's what Kittle did. He ordered everything he could get his hands on just before shortages became commonplace.
"We had a lot of guys on the team building their own gyms," Kittle said, "whether it was their basements, or their patios outside, some of us using our garages."
Kittle's was the best, though—probably by far. It became a competition, and the tight end was clearly the winner with the envy of the team sitting in his garage, forcing his cars to sit in the driveway. And it isn't likely going anywhere, even after the situation in the country eases up.
"Oh, it's got the most character to it," Kittle said of his masterpiece. "I got the nice rubber floors. We keep it clean. We treat like it's our real gym. It's fun, too. Our whole family gets to use it. We had to put everything together. And mine's 100% used for a gym—other people have other things in it. And we're adding mirrors to it too, because you gotta flex a little bit."
Click here to read Breer's entire feature over at Sports Illustrated.