Every year the call didn’t come, the tears would.

So would the disbelief. The anger. The nights of lost sleep.

For Andre Rison it was like a knife in the side, his annual rejection from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Hadn’t he done enough? Wasn’t he one of the best of his era? He came to dwell on the disrespect, convinced he belonged, convinced there had to be some reason why he wasn’t getting in.

“There’s nothing Jerry Rice could do that I couldn’t,” Rison has said more than once over the years.

Deep down, he believes that.

But Rice has the records, the gold jacket resting on his shoulders, the GOAT chain dangling from his neck. Rison has the notoriety that lingers after a chaotic career, then fades. Maybe this was payback, he figured. Maybe it was punishment. He played loud. He lived loud. Andre “Bad Moon” Rison was the NFL’s most outspoken receiver before the NFL was awash in outspoken receivers.

That’s gotta be it, he kept telling himself as the years passed and the call from Canton never came. It wasn’t football — it couldn’t just be football. It was everything else.

It had to be.

Still, the man wasn’t about to apologize. Not for the climb and not for the fall. Not for lashing out at coaches, quarterbacks, even an entire city. Not for brawling with Deion Sanders at the 20-yard line of the Georgia Dome. Not for the touchdown dances that earned him racist letters from fans. Not for dating the pop star who burned down his mansion. Not for partying with Tupac.

Not for any of the baggage that trailed him for most of his seven-city, 11-year NFL odyssey.

This man was never going to fit neatly into a box.

“When I played,” Rison says now, “the thinking was, if you was African-American, then you could only be great at one thing: football. That was it.

“I said, leave that lane for somebody else.”

His ambitions ran deeper. He was one of the first pro athletes to fuse sports and hip-hop — “I changed the culture,” Rison boasts. He started record labels. He opened businesses. He carried his community with him.

The ride was rocky, littered with mistakes. The arrests. The drama. The millions he burned through — Rison once bought a Ferrari Testarossa without knowing the sticker price and admits to owning 34 different Mercedes-Benzes over the years. A night out in his younger days set him back $15,000.

He courted the spotlight even when it was the last thing he needed. When a reporter once asked if he was the Dennis Rodman of the NFL, Rison nodded, taking it as a compliment.

In some ways, he was ahead of his time. Before Keyshawn Johnson was screaming “Give me the damn ball!” and Terrell Owens was doing crunches in his driveway for the TV cameras and Chad Johnson was slipping on a homemade Hall of Fame jacket on the sideline, Rison was blowing up the tired old narrative that said receivers need only run their routes, catch the ball and keep quiet.

Three decades later, the 57-year-old is asked if the tumult that often trailed him ever got in the way of football. Rison scoffs. He’s offended. This is a man who once bought a T-shirt that read, “When God made me, he was just showing off.”

“You remember when Michael Jordan went gambling the night before a playoff game and everyone killed him for it, and the next night he lit their ass up?” Rison asks. “Ain’t no distractions when you different. Mike’s different. I’m different. I been different.

“This is Bad Moon we’re talking about.”

It was ESPN’s Chris Berman who tapped him with the nickname, inspired by the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit. In 1989, at the tail end of Rison’s rookie year with the Colts, he was pulled over for driving 128 miles per hour in a 55-mph zone. He told the cops he was only going 95.

I see the bad moon a-rising

I see trouble on the way

“The nickname changed my life forever,” Rison wrote in his book, “Wide Open.” For better or worse, he came to embrace it, getting “Bad Moon Rison” tattooed on his bicep.

The song was right: trouble followed. But so did a scintillating career.

Rison played with a fire first lit on the hardscrabble streets of Flint, Mich., where, as a high school star, a local mobster — Rison calls him Mafia Sal — would slip him wads of cash from time to time, urging him to pick a particular college and sign with a particular agent. Rison says he ignored him. He was going to make it his way.

He did. At Michigan State, he played basketball, made All-Big Ten in track and field and was an All-American wide receiver. “Could’ve made $3 million a year in NIL deals today,” Rison says. A first-round pick of the Colts in 1989, he finished second in Offensive Rookie of the Year voting to Barry Sanders. The Colts missed the playoffs by a game. The future felt bright, and Rison was one of the biggest reasons why.

He was gone a few months later, shipped to Atlanta in a trade that gave the Colts the chance to draft quarterback Jeff George first overall. Rison was crushed. His teammates were, too.

“Heartbroken,” says former Colts linebacker Jeff Herrod. “He had some Marvin Harrison in him. Without Rison, our team went in the craps.”

In Atlanta, Rison grew into one of the best wideouts in the game, earning four straight trips to the Pro Bowl. At 6-feet, 188 pounds, he was undersized but unafraid, lethal between the numbers, quick as a cat. “Nobody could separate like he could,” says his coach with the Falcons, Jerry Glanville. “He had the best change-of-direction I’ve ever seen.”

There wasn’t a cornerback in football who scared him, and after every catch, Rison welcomed the contact that came his way. He was once walloped so hard in a game that Glanville wondered for a solid minute if he’d ever get up. “I thought he could be dead,” the coach remembers. But Rison always came back for more.

“I’d like to think I was one of the greatest to go over the middle,” he says. “If not the greatest.”

There was a swagger to his game, a style that fit the Falcons and a city coming into its own. Atlanta was becoming a hotbed of hip-hop, and Rison — along with Deion Sanders, his teammate and the league’s best defensive back — were two of the biggest catalysts. The pair became the faces of the hungry upstart.

And they did it different.

“We football players were told we couldn’t get no endorsements, those were for the basketball and baseball players,” Rison says. “They said we couldn’t get commercials, we couldn’t get involved with music. Deion and I didn’t listen.”

They signed with Nike. They starred in commercials. They popped up in MC Hammer’s music videos. They spoke their minds to the media, consequences be damned.

And they backed it up on Sundays.

GO DEEPER

Is the Deion Sanders way working at Colorado? It depends which way you look at it

By 1993, Rison had more catches in his first five seasons than any receiver in history. Glanville’s rule was simple: Whenever the Falcons advanced inside the red zone, get the ball to No. 80. Period. “I’d tell my QBs, ‘I don’t care if he busts a route and you don’t know where the hell he’s going, just find Rison,’” the coach says. “He’d run over the entire defense to get in the end zone.”

The numbers piled up. The wins didn’t. Sanders bolted for San Francisco before the 1994 season and put on a show a few months later in his return to the Georgia Dome, throwing punches at Rison — punches Rison returned — before taking an interception back 93 yards and high-stepping into the end zone.

Rison was gone a year later, signing a five-year $17 million deal with the Browns, at the time the richest ever for a wide receiver. But he never lived up to it. He showed up to training camp out of shape, grew frustrated with the scheme and clashed with coach Bill Belichick.

Late that year, while rumors of the Browns’ move to Baltimore swirled, Rison lashed out at the fans after a loss to Green Bay in which he was repeatedly booed. “Baltimore here we come,” were his infamous words in front of the TV cameras. Rison says in the weeks that followed, he received death threats. Most in Cleveland never forgave him.

Rison flamed out in Jacksonville after failing to mesh with quarterback Mark Brunell, whom Rison took shots at in the media after his exit. A few months later, he was helping the Packers win Super Bowl XXXI, snagging a 54-yard touchdown from Brett Favre on the team’s second offensive snap. It was so loud in the New Orleans Superdome that night that Rison couldn’t even hear Favre’s audible at the line of scrimmage. No matter. He snuck behind the defense and went untouched for the score.

He was a world champion.

Andre Rison takes a reception in for a score during the Packers’ Super Bowl XXXI victory at the Superdome. (Brian Bahr, Peter Brouillet / Getty Images)

In the days leading up to the game, he ran into Belichick before practice. “Hey pipsqueak,” the coach blurted out, “why didn’t you play like this for me?” Rison’s response: “Because you didn’t have an offensive coordinator.” Both laughed.

In Kansas City, Rison earned a fifth Pro Bowl nod and a new nickname, “Spiderman,” for his acrobatic catches in the end zone. But his time in the league was winding down, and after spending the 2000 season with the Raiders, Rison was out. One last triumph came in 2004 when he helped the Toronto Argonauts to a CFL Grey Cup.

Football was finished. Nothing in Rison’s life was about to get any easier.

After his girlfriend burned down his house, Rison hopped on his motorcycle, sped out of his subdivision and considered killing himself.

“I can’t take it!” he screamed.

The rain poured.

“All I had to do was wiggle the bike, just one good time, and I was headed straight into the median,” he wrote in “Wide Open.” “It would all be over in an instant.”

The relationship was volatile, the drama unending. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes — one-third of the Grammy-winning group TLC — had returned to Rison’s Atlanta home one night in June 1994 and found him with another woman. She collected dozens of pairs of his shoes, piled them up in the bathtub, then lit them on fire.

His $2 million mansion was torched. The incident made national news. Lopes was charged with first-degree arson.

The scene Rison has never been able to push from his mind: seeing Lopes climb into a car and drive off with Tupac Shakur, a close friend of his at the time — Shakur actually filmed his music video with MC Breed, “Gotta get mine,” at one of Rison’s homes.

A week later, Rison was holding Lopes’ hand during her court hearing. They planned to marry until she was killed in a car accident in Honduras in 2002.

By then Rison’s NFL career was over. He stumbled trying to find what was next. His estimated $19 million in career earnings? Mostly gone. “Some guys had a gambling problem,” Rison said in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, “Broke.” “Well, I had a spending problem.” Over the years, in addition to the 34 Benzes, he bought 14 BMWs, several Ferraris and too many trucks to count. He claims to have spent over $1 million on jewelry. He once lent a friend $30,000 to open a frozen drink café, then never saw a penny of profit.

The partying caught up to him. Rison’s inner circle ballooned to 20, 30, even 40 people. He paid for everything. He remembers lying in bed after a night out with $10,000 in cash sprawled out on the floor, $5,000 tucked in his pocket and $7,500 more stashed in his coat. He spread himself too thin. Eventually, the money ran out.

“Everybody used to say, and still does, that all Dre ever did away from the game was give, give, give,” Rison says. He says he picked it up from his grandmother back in Flint, who’d welcome strangers into her house on Christmas just so she could cook them a warm meal.

A coach left him with a warning early in his career, words Rison never forgot: “You keep messing up, and one day I’m gonna pull up in my shiny white Cadillac and ask, ‘Hey Dre, how about a wash?’”

Rison pledged he wouldn’t let that happen.

It never did. But his finances were a mess. His legal issues piled up — over the years, he’s been arrested for felony theft and disorderly conduct, and in 2022 he was charged with failing to pay child support. (Rison has four sons.) He avoided jail time by pleading down. Finally, he filed for bankruptcy.

He started coaching. He opened a business training young athletes. Then he met the woman who would offer him the type of stability he’d always needed. He helped her beat breast cancer, and together, they’re raising four daughters in his home state of Michigan.

Her name? Lisa Lopez.

He feels the remnants of all those trips over the middle every morning when he wakes up.

Rison says he has Arthritis in 18 different places. He has bone spurs in his neck. He’s had his jaw dislocated, his teeth knocked out, all 10 of his fingers broken at one point or another.

“You have to learn how to deal with depression,” Rison says, “and how to fight it.”

And he had to learn to move on, to stop obsessing over the Hall of Fame. He’s been a finalist several times, and for years, the rejection ate at him. He’d watch cornerbacks he used to embarrass make it in, and he’d steam. He’d tell a reporter he was “the best receiver to ever play the game” and vow to start his own Hall of Fame, Canton be damned. He’d belittle Rice’s gaudy numbers, claiming they were merely a product of him playing with Joe Montana and Steve Young.

What would he have done, Rison asked, if he’d played with one of those QBs instead of Chris Miller and Bobby Hebert?

Rison’s old teammate, Herrod, has wondered the same thing. “Put Andre Rison on the Cowboys or 49ers back in the day and it would’ve been a whole different story,” he says.

Rison believes that to his core. When he grabbed a photo with Randy Moss a few years back, this was the caption he wrote: “THE TWO GREATEST OF ALL TIME IN MY EYES.” When he was inducted into Michigan State’s Hall of Fame in 2022, Rison began his speech with this: “I never dreamed of being in the MSU Hall of Fame, but I always dreamed of being in the damn NFL Hall of Fame.”

It’s tormented him for years. It probably always will.

The numbers aren’t there, not after the offensive eruption of the 2000s, when 1,200-yard receiving seasons became routine. Rison currently sits 22nd all-time in touchdowns (84), tied for 48th in career catches (743) and 52nd in yards (10,205).

His chance at Canton came and went. He says he’s let it go. He says the bitterness is gone. He says he’s done losing sleep over it. He knows what he did on the field.

And if the way he did it — the hip-hop connections and the partying, the rapper girlfriend and the off-the-field headlines — cost him in the voters’ eyes, fine. Rison paved a path, he says, that athletes have been following ever since. That’s a different kind of legacy.

“I opened doors,” Rison says. “Everybody wasn’t willing to indulge in entertainment and hip-hop back then. When my teammates were on the golf course, I was meeting with Sony Records.”

These days, he pours himself into his passions. He wrote “Wide Open” and produced a movie about his life by the same name. He was recently promoted to interim head coach at University Liggett, a high school outside of Detroit. He shuttles his daughters to school and practices. He popped up on “Celebrity Family Feud” and announced the Falcons’ second-round pick at the draft in April.

“I’m living an even better life off the field than when I played,” Rison says. “I’d always prefer the way it went. And I damn sure wouldn’t change anything about where I’m at right now.”

Rison claims — along with Sanders, his close friend and the coach at Colorado — that both “are just as relevant as we were when we played.” Sanders, perhaps the most controversial figure in college football, might even be more relevant. Bad Moon Rison sees himself in the same vein, even if he’s the only one who still does.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Al Bello / Allsport, Otto Greule / Allsport, Robert Seale / Sporting News/Icon SMI)

From Bob, Barclay and Bill Plager to Brian, Rich and Ron Sutter, the St. Louis Blues are no strangers to having brothers on their roster.

In July, they added another family tree to their franchise history, making a trade with the Ottawa Senators for forward Mathieu Joseph, 27, and then signing free-agent defenseman Pierre-Olivier Joseph, 25, his brother.

As with all siblings, they have great reverence for one another, but there’s also the expected rivalry.

Plenty of examples of both popped up when the Joseph brothers sat down with The Athletic for an hour-long Zoom call recently.

You’ll learn a lot more about them, including which numbers they’ll be wearing this season and why. And you’ll also pick up on the fact they can hardly contain their excitement about this opportunity.

So sit back and enjoy our chat with the newest Blues brothers!

Note: The conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Jeremy: It’s really nice to meet you guys! Thanks for doing this! So where are you? What city? Whose house?

Mathieu: We’re in Brossard (Quebec, Canada). We’ve lived together in the summer for about three years now, and we’ve enjoyed it.

Pierre-Olivier: In the past, we’d only see each other for three months the whole year in the summer, so we were like, “We might as well stay together.” But now, I feel like we’re going to get our own places if we’re going to see each other all the time, haha!

Jeremy: I was going to ask about that. What are your living arrangements going to be like in St. Louis?

Pierre-Olivier: We’re going to live together. We’ve talked to a couple guys about renting their house. I played with Chad Ruhwedel in Pittsburgh and his wife is from St. Louis, so they have a house there, but Kasperi Kapanen is living there now. So no luck so far, but we’ll keep looking.

Jeremy: What have you heard about St. Louis?

Mathieu: I played with Brady Tkachuk in Ottawa and we actually went to his place in St. Louis for dinner last year, so I got to see a little bit of the area. Brady loves going back when he can, and honestly, every guy we’ve been talking to with the Blues loves playing there. I remember my first game in St. Louis. I was impressed with the song the crowd sings in the third period …

Jeremy: Country Roads?

Mathieu: Yeah, that’s it! I thought that was pretty cool the first time I saw it. I can tell the fans love their team, love the organization and love the city, so I’m definitely excited to be part of the community.

Jeremy: OK, Pierre … should I call you Pierre?

Mathieu: Never! Haha! It’s just P.O.

Pierre-Olivier: Actually, I got to the point where I don’t even care anymore.

Jeremy: Well P.O., tell me something good about living with your brother and something annoying.

Pierre-Olivier: Where do I start on the last one? No, it’s been good. He’s someone that I’ve been looking up to for so long. We work out together, we’re on the ice together, we’re on the golf course together. Everything we do is pretty much together. So it’s not really living with my brother, it’s living with my best buddy. He knows me by heart. He knows when to give me some motivation, and he knows when to give me some space.

Mathieu: I do get annoying, though. I talk too much, so sometimes I’ll say something and he doesn’t want to talk. I’ll just give him a face like “I get it.” But no, it’s been so easy. We don’t get on each other’s nerves very often and we share responsibility very well in the house. He’s a great cook!

Jeremy: P.O., what do you cook?

Pierre-Olivier: Anything and everything. Honestly, it just depends on what we have in the fridge. My crepes are something that I usually cook for us on Sunday. I do barbecue. Actually, Matt’s been pretty good this summer helping out on the barbecue side of the game.

Mathieu: I’ve been learning barbecue this year …

Pierre-Olivier: It’s nice not to be the only one cooking.

Jeremy: So growing up, did you guys ever play on the same team, and did you ever dream about playing on the same NHL team one day?

Pierre-Olivier: Back then, playing on the same team at any level wasn’t possible because of our ages. So every year, it was just trying to get to the next level.

Mathieu: I remember being mad one year in junior hockey. I was playing with the Saint John Sea Dogs in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. That was P.O.’s junior hockey draft year, and he was projected to go in the second or third round. He wasn’t taken in the second round, so when the third round rolled around, I’m like, “Saint John is going to pick him up and we’re going to play together.” But Saint John picked someone else, and then in the fifth round, he got picked by Charlottetown. I was super happy for him, but I remember being disappointed that Saint John didn’t draft him. That was the first time where I thought maybe we had a chance to play with one another. But then when we both got drafted in the NHL, we were like, “Wow, that would be cool if we could find a place that we could play together.”

Pierre-Olivier: We were even thinking about the possibility of it happening at the end of our careers in Europe, when we’re 37, 38 years old, haha!

Jeremy: So Mathieu got drafted by the Tampa Bay Lightning in the fourth round of the 2015 NHL Draft, and then won a Stanley Cup in 2021. P.O., what was it like watching that?

Pierre-Olivier: Yeah, it was a little bit of a s— show because of COVID. We were quarantining in Montreal and the next thing you know Mathieu is going into the Stanley Cup Final against Montreal. Tampa was up three games to one and headed back home for Game 5, and our parents couldn’t go because of work. They asked me if I wanted to go and I said, “Yeah!” But I remember there was a tropical storm in Tampa and flights were getting canceled. The only one available was from Montreal to L.A., then L.A. to Orlando (Fla.), and then drive 2 ½ hours to Tampa. I left at 6:30 p.m. and I got to Matt’s place at 10 a.m. the next day. I slept all day long, but then I had the chance to see him win the Cup. I had the chills, and that was a life memory that’s never going away. But at the same time, I was mad at him that he won it right in my face.

Mathieu: Hopefully we win it together one day!

This is pretty awesome. 💙

Mathieu and Pierre-Olivier Joseph are now both members of the @StLouisBlues! pic.twitter.com/gGCsNRPcIj

— NHL (@NHL) July 3, 2024

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Jeremy: So Mathieu, P.O. got drafted by the Arizona Coyotes in the first round of the 2017 NHL Draft and then traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2019 in the Phil Kessel deal. How much have you been pulling for him?

Mathieu: I was probably more happy that he got drafted than when I got drafted. When he got to the NHL, I was trying to help him out with some things. With me being a forward and him being a defenseman, it was easy to talk about our game because what a forward sees and what a defenseman sees are different perspectives.

Pierre-Olivier: We got the NHL app a few years ago and we watch each other’s games when we can. But sometimes with the app, the state you’re in doesn’t allow you to watch his game …

Mathieu: Or we’d be playing at the same time. I guess it’ll be easier to watch his games this year, ha! But no, it’s been fun to follow each other’s careers. I’ve had some ups and downs that he’s helped me with, and I’ve helped him, too.

Jeremy: What’s something specific that you helped each other with during your career?

Mathieu: For me, the hardest part of the NHL is that it’s such a routine. It’s the same day every day. So if it’s not going well, it’s the same day that’s not going well. We both are guys that don’t really take life too seriously. We’re here to have fun, but sometimes I get away from that. I’ve had some downs that I felt like I couldn’t get out of and P.O. always has the right words. I always say he’s a really good therapist because all our friends ask him for advice because he’s such a good listener.

Pierre-Olivier: For me, sometimes I’m too careless in what I do, and he knows what I’m capable (of). He’s always there to remind me and push me. It might be lifting a little bit two pounds heavier in the gym that pushes me to be a more competitive person. That’s something I’ve learned a lot from him.

Mathieu: I’ve got to say, too, he’s a very generous guy and thinks about a lot of people before him. In this league, you want to be a good teammate and feel like you’re family. But selfishly, you also have to think a little bit about yourself — how I perform and how I need to be better. Sometimes P.O. forgets about that part, being too unselfish. I tell him, “You’ve got to shoot the puck.” Like I said, you don’t want to bother other teammates.

Pierre-Olivier: But at the same time, it bothers people that I’m not being more selfish.

Mathieu: Exactly! So sometimes I have to remind him, “I know you’re a good guy, but you’ve got to think about how you want to play well.” That’s going to build confidence and help everything else.

Jeremy: So where and when was the first NHL game that you played against each other?

Mathieu: It was in Pittsburgh last year.

Pierre-Olivier: Once the game started, it was Pittsburgh against Ottawa and not us against each other. But I could constantly hear him talking and talking …

Mathieu: He didn’t answer me once …

Pierre-Olivier: Because I know how he is. He’s just trying to get into my head. Playing tennis back when we were 12 years old, it was the same thing — just yapping.

Jeremy: Tell me about the high-sticking penalty in that game. P.O., you hit Mathieu with your stick, but you also got yourself, and you both went to the penalty box. What happened?

Pierre-Olivier: I saw him coming, but when I tried to get out of the way, I hit him in the face and then hit myself. We turned around and the referee saw both of us with our hands in our face. I was bleeding, but I didn’t want the ref to see that because then they would have reviewed it and they would have taken away the penalty on Mathieu. When I went into the penalty box, my towel was completely full of blood, but I had to hide it. He was a little mad.

Mathieu: It was so funny!

Jeremy: The reaction of your parents (Frantzi and France Joseph), who were at the game, was priceless. What did you think when you saw the video?

Pierre-Olivier: It was funny. The camera was perfectly on them at the right moment and it showed their personality. They know it’s part of the game, so as long as we’re not dropping the gloves, they know how competitive we are.

Nothing like mom and dad watching on as the Joseph brothers take high sticking penalties against each other. 😂 pic.twitter.com/UVyqWEjNDU

— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) January 21, 2023

Jeremy: What’s it been like for your parents to watch you go through this journey together?

Mathieu: It’s been pretty cool. They get asked all the time, “Did you know your two kids were going to play in the NHL?” No, they just wanted us to work as hard as we could.

Pierre-Olivier: I remember they sat us down one time and said, “If you guys are going to play at a competitive level, we are ready to help you, but are you ready to do it for yourselves?”

Mathieu: They said, “We’re not going to push you guys to do it. But if you’re giving us 50 percent, then we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to spend that much money on it. You’re wasting time, and we would like for you to do something else.” I remember my mom asking P.O. when he got drafted to the NHL, “Do you still like hockey?” I’m like, “He just got drafted 23rd overall!”

Pierre-Olivier: I’m like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I like it.”

Jeremy: So Mathieu, you were traded to the Blues on July 2, and then P.O. signed with the team on July 3. How did all of this go down behind the scenes?

Pierre-Olivier: I started talking to different teams on July 1 and St. Louis was one of them. Then on July 2, we were sitting on the couch watching tennis on TV and Matt got a text from Ottawa telling him to call them.

Mathieu: I knew I was getting traded way before then, though.

Pierre-Olivier: But he didn’t know it was going to be St. Louis. So he’s got the phone on speaker and they tell him it’s the Blues. Well, he knew I was talking to St. Louis, too, so he gave me a little wink. So I talked to my agent and told him that it would be special playing with Mathieu and whatever offer was on the table from the Blues, I would just take it. My agent asked me about pushing it a little bit, but I told him that the chance I had was not going to happen often. So in a matter of 30 seconds, I was with Pittsburgh and he was with Ottawa, and the next thing you know we’re both in St. Louis.

Mathieu: We gave each other a big hug! Then we called our parents and said, “Sit down together, we’ve got something to tell you!” My dad was super happy, and my mom had a little bit of tears, knowing they won’t have two opposite jerseys now.

Jeremy: So what was that like, Mathieu, knowing that P.O. picked the Blues to make it happen?

Mathieu: To even know there was a possibility, I was so excited. I was pinching myself, like, “Oh my gosh, this is actually happening.”

Pierre-Olivier: Last week, the Blues sent us some new gear. We had two practices that day, and it was cool when we put both of our bags in the trunk and they were both “St. Louis Blues.” We love the colors already, and it’s fun to see Mathieu in the same logo as me.

The Blues have signed Pierre-Olivier Joseph to a one-year contract. #stlblues

DETAILS ➡️ https://t.co/DD5z20juMC pic.twitter.com/rR6cGA41tK

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— St. Louis Blues (@StLouisBlues) July 3, 2024

Mathieu: No one knows yet, but we’ve actually picked our numbers.

Jeremy: Can we break some news here?

Mathieu: Of course! Our family number is No. 7 because our dad wore No. 7 his entire life. So I picked 71.

Pierre-Olivier: I went with the double seven, No. 77.

Jeremy: Nice! When you get your last name stitched on the back of both jerseys, are you going to get “Joseph” or your first initial and Joseph?

Mathieu: That’s a good question! He’s saying, “Are you going to have M. Joseph and P.O. Joseph?” When there’s two names that are the same on the team, you have the option. Like the Sedins wore “H. Sedin” and “D. Sedin.”

Pierre-Olivier: That’s true! I didn’t even think about that.

(Editor’s note: After this interview, the Blues announced that the brothers will both wear just “Joseph” on their jerseys this season. 

Jeremy: OK, I want to tell Blues fans what kind of players they’re getting in you guys. P.O., tell me about Mathieu, and vice versa.

Pierre-Olivier: They’re getting a fast skater, a competitive player, a guy who loves to play defensively, but I know he’s talented enough to put points on the board. But mainly a guy, they’re getting someone who plays with passion and plays for his teammates. He has a lot of character and that definitely helps the people around him work harder and become better players.

Mathieu: One of his biggest assets, his hockey IQ, is above average. He has good instinct offensively, and when he has confidence, he’s extremely fast and super dangerous on the ice. He’s an extremely smart player and how he outsmarts the opponent was annoying when I was playing against him. He’s also been very well-liked everywhere he’s been, and he brings tons of positivity around the room.

Jeremy: So when I’m watching practice and there’s an intense battle in the corner, am I going to know right away who it is without looking at the numbers?

Mathieu: 100 percent!

Pierre-Olivier: If we’re on different teams in camp, it’s going to be a compete level that’s as high as possible. It’s been that way since I was born. It’s going to be a continuation of pushing each other on and off the ice.

Mathieu: I’m so excited to have someone work with me on my game before and after practice. To be able to do it with my brother, it’s going to help each other for sure.

Jeremy: Does it seem real yet?

Pierre-Olivier: It’s a dream! I don’t think we’ll really comprehend it until we’re on the same ice together and being in front of the fans in St. Louis.

Mathieu: Hopefully we can help the Blues be a competitive team with our performance and our personalities. I told my dad, “Hopefully we can have a good season and enjoy it in St. Louis and play a couple of years there!”

(Photo of Mathieu Joseph with the Senators and Pierre-Olivier Joseph with the Penguins in January 2023: Joe Sargent / NHLI via Getty Images)

LA GRANGE PARK, Ill. — The father of the Minnesota Vikings’ quarterback of the future slides over, swipes at his phone and leans over to offer up a picture.

“How great is this?” Jim McCarthy asks.

The image shows a kid with shaggy blond hair wearing an oversized Iowa State football jersey. He might have been 85 pounds soaking wet. Frankly, J.J. looks like a pipsqueak.

“Wild, right?”

What’s actually wild is how normal this all feels. The family’s fluffy dogs, Hubert and Blue, are fenced off in the kitchen and barking. J.J.’s mother, Megan, a project manager for a staffing firm, is downstairs taking work calls on her laptop. It’s a mid-July morning about 15 miles from downtown Chicago. NFL training camps are approaching. And if it weren’t for Jim’s gray hoodie with tiny purple and gold print, you’d have no idea a member of this household played high school football, much less was the Vikings’ first-round pick.

There are no framed jerseys adorning the walls. No football photos lining the entryway. There is a kitchen table and a living room and this cluttered screened-in deck. And that’s where Jim, who is in sales for a waste management company, is slouching comfortably like he’s drinking beers with his buddies.

He’s replaying the night that led to the Iowa State picture when the phone buzzes with a Twitter notification:

Sources: Minnesota Vikings No. 10 overall pick J.J. McCarthy is signing a four-year, fully-guaranteed contract worth $21.85 million that includes a $12.71 million signing bonus and a fifth-year team option. pic.twitter.com/Cc9CE8A4nj

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) July 19, 2024

I show Jim my phone.

“What’s this?” He asks, leaning in to take a look. “Oh! OK.”

“Did you know this was happening?”

“Not at all. Great!”

“You … didn’t … even … know?”

“Had zero idea!”

A few minutes later, Megan slides open the door to the screened-in deck and says she’s going to run some errands.

“Did you see J signed?” Jim asks.

“Huh?” Megan replies.

“J signed his contract,” Jim says.

“Seriously?” Megan asks. “He doesn’t give us a heads up on anything!”

Jim laughs, then shrugs and says: “That’s how we are.”

The family did not fly to Minnesota for J.J.’s introductory news conference. Jim has yet to meet Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell. When asked what he thinks about J.J. potentially sitting behind veteran Sam Darnold to start the season, the father talks like his son works in finance.

“If you want a promotion in life, do something to earn it,” Jim says. “It’s a career. At the end of the day, it’s a job where you have to perform in order to get promotions. So guess what? Go f—ing perform, or find another job.”

All of this might sound like the McCarthy parents are a tad removed from their son’s success. But it’s actually the opposite. As a family, they decided a long time ago that space and normalcy would allow their kid to be … well, a kid.

Thanks for having me @IowaStateFB @ISUMattCampbell @JimHofher @CoachGolesh @CoachDHoodjer @CoachJGordo @EDGYTIM @AlexHalsted @NxtLevelAtx pic.twitter.com/VR7A6YgMCq

— J.J. McCarthy (@jjmccarthy09) March 25, 2018

J.J. McCarthy’s first private quarterbacks coach stands up from his seat atop some metal bleachers to mimic a throw.

“So, he moves like this,” Greg Holcomb says, reenacting a rollout to the left.

He flips his hips and simulates a sidearm sling.

“And we were, like, ‘What?!’” Holcomb says incredulously. “That was right here. When he was still so young.”

“Right here” is a ho-hum turf field at Doerhoefer Park about 10 miles from the McCarthys’ home. This is where, after one of their first sessions, with the sun setting, and Megan waiting at the car, Holcomb told J.J.: “Dude, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a seventh-grader throw the football as smoothly and naturally and effortlessly as you.”

Time blurred from there. Jim took J.J. to a camp at North Central College in Naperville, Ill.; J.J. threw; Iowa State coaches approached J.J.; Jim texted Holcomb what was happening; Holcomb replied excitedly; the Iowa State coaches invited J.J. to a camp; Holcomb told Jim that they’d offer him; Cyclones head coach Matt Campbell watched J.J. throw the next week, then offered him; J.J. called Holcomb to tell him; and Holcomb responded: “You got an offer didn’t you; I f—ing knew it.” That’s when they took the picture that Jim still has.

The offer, and an ensuing growth spurt, pushed J.J.’s recruitment into hyperdrive. Holcomb’s business boomed because local parents knew he was J.J.’s coach. While Holcomb managed the influx of trainees, he wondered how J.J. was navigating the notoriety. One weekend, Urban Meyer was walking around Ohio Stadium with his arm around J.J. to sell him on Ohio State. The next, Joe Burrow was calling to pitch J.J. on LSU. Social media feeds were filled with support and hatred from so many different fan bases. Mailboxes filled with hand-written letters. A phone call from a coach here, a text to respond to there.

All at once, J.J. was trying to win games for Nazareth Academy on Friday nights, impress college coaches on Saturdays, do homework on Sundays and be a kid during the week. Jim, Megan, J.J.’s sisters, Caitlin and Morgan, and his now fiancée, Katya Kuropas, tried to help him manage it. Once new Ohio State coach Ryan Day shocked the family during an in-person meeting when he said the school did not have the offer that Meyer once promised, Megan urged J.J. to visit Michigan. Though J.J.’s appreciation for Iowa State’s initial belief remained — Jim even says, “We still love Matt Campbell” — there was something about Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh’s belief in the young quarterback that made J.J. fall in love.

It was there, during J.J.’s freshman season in Ann Arbor, that J.J. decided he needed his parents not in a management role but as support.

“I just want you guys,” he told his parents then, “to be Mom and Dad.”

Jim McCarthy is still on the screened-in deck in the backyard and he’s showing different pictures.

He finds a photo of what J.J. calls his “GOAT book,” a journal where J.J. jots down inspirational messages.

“Look at this: Brady, the mindset of a champion … Michael Jordan’s 10 rules of success … Kobe Bryant … This was all in high school. This is how he thinks … Muhammad Ali.”

He scrolls again through the photos on his phone.

“Here’s something a lot of people don’t know about him …”

When J.J. was still just a junior in high school, Megan installed a massive whiteboard in his room. Each week, he filled it with dry-erase marker ink, breaking down his opponents. He jotted down the defense’s primary coverages. He singled out defenders he could attack.

Jim showed the image of J.J.’s whiteboard ahead of the 2019 state championship game against Mount Carmel. Notes were scribbled all over the board: On trips, that corner takes the receiver vertical … Easily their worst cover corner … Call McDaniels.

“That was (a reminder) for him to call Ben McDaniels (the former quarterbacks coach at Michigan), who recruited him,” Jim says.

“So what happened in that game? We lost,” Jim says. “It was hailing sideways. All right, so he comes home and obviously, he’s pissed. The next morning, he wakes up and goes, ‘I’ve got to go for a run.’ It’s 6 a.m. He leaves. I go into his room. The whole whiteboard has changed.”

Jim swipes the phone and shows an image straight out of “A Beautiful Mind.” An NFL logo is drawn beautifully in the middle of the whiteboard. At the top, in bold, is the score of the game: 37-13. There are phrases and quotes everywhere.

This s— is not easy … What are you willing to do? … Dreams would not be dreams if they were easy … Overrated … Don’t bounce around in the pocket … Two hands on the ball … How bad do you want it?

Look what we found on the street posts on 31st Street in LGP. @jjmccarthy09 pic.twitter.com/Jf9BdCKi8p

— Nazareth Academy Football (@FootballNaz) April 1, 2024

The next photo in Jim’s phone is another telling image. Written in scraggly handwriting on a sheet of loose-leaf paper is the message: One goal: Be the greatest f—ing quarterback to ever come through here. 

J.J. taped that on the wall of his freshman dorm room in Ann Arbor. As for Tom Brady?

“We always talked, like, if your friends aren’t laughing at your goals, you never set them high enough,” Jim says.

J.J. went on to become one of the most accomplished Michigan quarterbacks ever. He beat Day’s Ohio State team three times, putting away his usual eye black so Day could see him directly. As Michigan tore its way toward a national championship, Jim and Megan mostly kept out of the spotlight. The only responsibility Jim assumed — at J.J.’s directive — was dropping off checks at local children’s hospitals in the city of each team Michigan played.

This all sounds so advanced, so beyond his years — almost a professional mindset at such an early age. How do parents instill in a child that type of big-picture view? What parenting strategies inspire this type of awareness? What is it like to see a child so committed to achieving his goals?

In a roundabout way, I asked this of Jim.

“His life has been on fast-forward,” Jim says, “and he’s managed it well. But he’s still a young kid. I want him to make mistakes. There’s still so much for him to learn. He’s still a 21-year-old kid.”

Good times as Megan & Jim McCarthy share the morning with ⁦@tomhouse⁩. pic.twitter.com/0k1W1Ibjj2

— Todd J. Anson (@TJA4Michigan) December 31, 2022

Years ago, before the fame came, Holcomb asked J.J. to babysit his son Sam.

J.J. jumped at the opportunity. He showed up with Katya, and together they shouldered the responsibility. J.J.’s best work? Whipping up some grilled cheese sandwiches.

“Sam thought they were the best he’d ever had,” Holcomb says, “just because J.J. made them.”

Had a blast watching Sammy Holcomb and the Tiny Mite Patriots DOMINATE today 49-0! @NxtLevelAtx @QBCoachHolc pic.twitter.com/oumGSz5a8c

— J.J. McCarthy (@jjmccarthy09) October 28, 2018

Years later, Sam is now in seventh grade. And, funnily enough, not only does he play quarterback, but he is considered the best in the country at his age.

Michigan became the first school to offer him about a month ago. Jim informed J.J. of the news, and J.J. immediately sent Sam a direct message.

Holcomb has a screenshot of it.

“Congrats, fam,” Holcomb says, reading J.J.’s words aloud. “Well deserved because of all the work that you already put in. But I’m here to tell you that you’re not even getting started yet and haven’t even scratched the surface of your potential. I’ll love you for life, but please, if you can promise me one thing, continue to work your balls off until you hang the cleats up. Let me know if you ever need anything.

“Just the beginning.”

Buried in that last phrase is a message for Holcomb, too. It’s the beginning of a well-trodden parenting arc.

Jim is one of the few who can relate to Holcomb’s situation, so Holcomb has begun to ask for advice. The overall theme in Jim’s responses? Be a dad, not an overbearing manager or coach. And if the kid loves this — like, really loves it — there’s no telling what he might be able to accomplish.

(Top photo: Nick Wosika / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)