Katy, Texas, population 16,500, lies 48 kilometres, a 31-minute drive, down the I-10W from the smack-dab centre of Houston.
The town slogan is: Small Town Charm with Big City Convenience.
Listed on its Wikipedia web page as notable people hailing from its boundaries are Cincinnati Bengals QB Andy Dalton, Winnipeg Jets defenceman Tyler Myers, Academy Award-winning actress Renée Zellwegger.
Oh, and Bo Levi Mitchell.
“Man, Katy as a kid …,’’ the CFL’s reigning MOP is reflecting. “Just a great place to grow up.
“Soon as school’s over, you head over to a friend’s place, going from house-to-house, playing games, jump in the pool.
“There’s a bayou in the back. It had a metal pipe running through it, so we’d always walk over that and head over to Los Cucos, the Mexican spot everybody goes to.
“When you cross that pipe, you’re in what we call the ‘cuts,’ the ghetto part of town. One of our teammates lived there. We had two guys, they were best friends – Brian Rowe and Terrence Frederick.
“Terence Frederick – he’s a corner in Winnipeg right now, was in the NFL awhile – was from the ‘cuts.’ He made it out. Brian was from a more affluent neighbourhood. But it was so cool to see those two guys together, always connected, all the time.
“That’s what made our team successful. That feeling: We’re all in this together. We all love each other. We’re all brothers.”
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Now 27, coming off the finest personal season of his career, Mitchell has embraced Calgary in all ways possible. He lives here year-round, but he’s still, in many ways, a Katy kid at heart.
Whatever he’s accomplished in the game, and that’s plenty to date – the NCAA Division I FCS National Championship at Eastern Washington, the 2014 Grey Cup title and game MVP, those 5,235 yards he amassed a year ago in his Most Outstanding Player turn in Red and White – had its genesis in that football-mad city a 31-minute drive outside Houston.
Weekends at the 9,800-seat Rhodes Stadium, playing in front of crowds of 12,000 plus, more factoring in shoulder-to-shoulder standing room for rival games.
“That environment,’’ says Mitchell, “shaped me. Sounds cliche, I know, but it’s a big, big reason why I’m here playing the CFL.”
In Katy, all of Texas, of course, football is akin to church. To wear the Katy High School Tigers’ uniform, the equivalent of donning holy vestments. And to play quarterback for the Katy High School Tigers, well . . . that bordered on the celestial. Still does.
“Oh, man, it really was Friday Night Lights,’’ muses Mitchell. “Maybe not as much as it used to be because in my time, there were only four high schools and now there are seven. Richer neighbourhoods, nicer neighbourhoods means more athletes go to those schools now.
“But back then, Katy (High) was the end-all.
“Old-Town Katy shut down when we played. All kinds of signs, in store windows, everywhere . . . Good Luck, Boys!
“I mean, you were a local celebrity.
“You’d get pulled over by cops, maybe driving a little too fast, and it’d be like: ‘Okay. Slow down, fellas. Just get ’em this weekend.’
“It was … crazy. Honestly. Until you leave, you don’t realize what’s going on around you as you’re growing up.
“It’s spectacular, the love you get from people as a high-school football player there.
“But you’ve got to be careful. I had guys in high school who were a lot better than me, couldn’t handle the attention, and drifted away. Now they’re stuck back in Old Town Katy, working a tire job and talking about the good old days.
“The ‘Boobie’ Miles thing? Man, it’s true.”
(‘Boobie’ Miles being a star Texas High School tailback, destined for gridiron greatness, whose life went off the rails, and his story is immortalized in the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger, and the subsequent 2004 movie).
“The day you walk into Katy High School as a senior, you’re expected to win the state championship. That kind of expectation and responsibility stays with you.”
Bo Levi Mitchell
Thing is, baseball, not football, was initially the first choice in the Mitchell household.
Bo’s dad, known to all as Mitch, loved the game and his kids did, too, until Bo’s older brother Cory went out for the football team.
But the switch, from four bases to four downs, made perfect sense.
“The football stadium,’’ says Mitch, “is a quarter-mile away from the house. If I go out on a Friday night, I can hear the noise and see the lights from the game.”
Once his son Bo got involved in the game, he was hooked.
“Confident?’’ laughs his dad. “By that, are you asking: ‘Was Bo cocky?’ Yeah, he was a cocky kid. A confident, cocky kid. Sometimes that bothered me because that can rub people the wrong way.
“But I think his brothers kept him grounded. They made sure he didn’t drink, never got in trouble. They wanted to make sure Bo didn’t go down the wrong path.
“I wouldn’t say he was the most popular kid in school, by any means, but his teammates always gravitated to him.”
That air of quiet authority marked his ascent. Even the prospect of waiting in the wings and having to follow a school legend in Dalton couldn’t deter Mitchell’s path.
Last season, Bo Levi Mitchell added a Most Outstanding Player honour to his mantel (Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)
“When he got out of junior high, we had two choices of high schools: Either Katy or Morton Ranch, a brand new high school,’’ recalls Mitch. “I remember telling Bo I thought it’d be better for him to go to Morton Ranch as the new kid on the block and as the starting quarterback. Go to Katy and he’d be backing up Andy Dalton for a couple years.
“Well, he thought about it a couple days and says: ‘Dad, I think I’m going to Katy.’
“A great decision.”
The level of professionalism of the junior high and high school programs in the state, Mitchell is quick to point out, laid the groundwork for subsequent success in college and now in the CFL.
“First off,’’ says Pat Dowling, Mitchell’s mentor and QB coach at Katy High, “our programs are staffed very well. Not only do they have good numbers of coaches, the quality is high. That being said, the programs are very well structured, practices are very well planned out, game preparation is very thorough.
“Our players are all subject to meetings, video sessions, technical review, game-plan introduction. All that sort of thing.
“I’m not criticizing any other area but let’s say he grew up . . . somewhere else. Maybe there his coaches would be volunteers rather than full-time and they wouldn’t have athletic periods during the day. Maybe if he showed up to practice after school, went through practice, that was about it. Or didn’t have much of an off-season regimen to speak of.
“In Katy, all across the state, all that is just football routine.”
Dowling arrived to tutor the QBs at Katy High following Mitchell’s freshman season.
“The first time I got around him, you saw a couple different Bo’s. One, a bit undisciplined – and I’mnot using that as a negative way, not in a personal way – just in a young-guy kind of way.
“But I also saw a Bo who had that little bit of an edge. And the kids around him responded to him. He wasn’t a physically imposing guy at the time. In fact, he was kind of . . . meagre looking. Not real big. You didn’t look at him and say: ‘Man, that is a powerhouse kid!’
“But he just had that ability to draw in the others, the ones his age, around him. They responded to him.
“As a coach, you’ve gotta kind of keep your eyes and ears open to identify those kids. It’s a trait you can’t coach. You can cultivate it but either a kid has it or he hasn’t.
“Bo had it.”
While football notoriety fed into a teenager’s ego, football players, even the elite ones, found out quickly that school mattered.
Mitchell remembers being in Grade 8 and the coach telling him that he was being considered for a bump-up from the B to the A Team.
“I’m like: ‘Man, that is awesome. I deserve this. I’ve worked my ass off.’ And then the guy shakes his head, says: ‘No, we were thinking of moving you up to A Team.’
“Then he shows me my report card. I failed.
“So I had to sit out for six weeks. That was tough. But you get humbled. You get taught at a young age that school comes first. That’s big in Katy.
“So I had to get past that ‘typical jock,’ blowing off homework and goofing around phase.
“Everything you do, the threat is maybe losing football. And that teaches us discipline. A very pro environment in that way. My brother, one picture on Facebook taken at a party and he got kicked off the team.
“The day you walk into Katy High School as a senior, you’re expected to win the state championship.
“That kind of expectation and responsibility stays with you.”
The culmination of Mitchell’s Katy High days arrived in his senior year, at the 2007 5A Division II state championship game. A crowd of over 54,000 in the Alamodome in San Antonio had gathered for Katy vs. Pflugerville Packers.
The Tigers were spotless 15-0 at the time. Still, Pflugerville was a heavy favourite.
“They had three 1,000-yard tailbacks,’’ recalls Mitchell. “Three! These big, tall, bruising backs and we’re like: ‘Gawd-damn! How are we going to stop these guys?!’
“I remember being down 7-0. We’re on, like, the 45-50-yard line and I think there’s seven or eight seconds left in the half. And our coach (Gary Joseph), smart guy, conservative guy, says we’re going to punt the ball and just worry about the next half.
“I’m like: ‘Ah, no, coach I can get it there.’ And I remember sidestepping a guy, throwing the Hail Mary, it tips up in the air and lands in the hands of our receiver.
“And then it was like: ‘OK, cool. We’re good.’ After that, everybody started to calm down.”
Katy went on to win 28-7 and finish unbeaten, Mitchell passing for 2,451 yards and 37 touchdowns with only four interceptions on the season.
Mitchell dons the front of the newspaper after guiding Katy to its fifth state football championship (Stampeders.com)
His career path would then take him to SMU and Eastern Washington before arriving here to as insurance for Drew Tate and Kevin Glenn.
The rest, you know.
“We still text from time to time,’’ says Dowling. “Not as often as I’d like. I know he’s very busy. I know he’s got a lot going on.
“I also know he’s embraced Calgary. In conversations I’ve had with him, he loves it there. Loves the people. He loves playing in the CFL. And that’s very genuine. It’s not a show, not just because that’s what people want to hear.
“I think he’s truly grateful for the opportunity the CFL and Calgary gave him.”
Mitchell, of course, is a married man now, husband to Madison, and dad to newborn Ele. At the height of his profession, reaching the peak of his powers and setting off in search of a second Grey Cup ring, very much the polished professional.
Part of him, though, can’t help but still be that quiet-authority kid marshalling his pals, heading over to a friend’s after school, going from house-to-house, playing games, jumping in the pool or maybe walking over the metal pipe running through the bayou out back, on the way to Los Cucos, the Mexican spot everybody still goes to.
That’s how you get to here. From there.
“Katy? I miss the passion of the entire city for football,’’ says Mitchell. “Here, that same sort of passion is channeled into hockey. Obviously I wish it was more tailored towards our game. But I understand it. Hockey is Canada’s game.
“And that’s great.
“I miss friends and family. But I’m not really a homebody so, after 21 years, you’re kinda ready to get out. A high school reunion would be nice, though, to go back, see a lot of familiar faces and tell all the old stories one last time.
“We feel very much at home here in Calgary.
“But Katy, as I said, I owe it so much.”
