Sports
Inside the mind — and tattoos — of 49ers’ George Kittle, one of the NFL’s most interesting players
“Howdy!” George Kittle says as he steps onto the podium on Nov. 24 in Green Bay, Wisc.
It’s how he begins every news conference, and this time he seems disappointed when no one says howdy back.
But it doesn’t seem like a howdy type of moment. The San Francisco 49ers have just lost 38-10 to the Packers, which has been interpreted as the death blow to their season. Everyone else is gloomy. Fred Warner calls the game “probably the worst I’ve been a part of.” Deebo Samuel Sr. doesn’t even talk to reporters afterward. The day is cold, the mood funereal.
Except for Kittle. In a game full of lousy statistics, he finishes with 82 receiving yards and the team’s only touchdown. And afterward, the irrepressible tight end refuses to give in to the gathering darkness.
“No, why would it?” Kittle said when asked if the awful outing erodes his optimism about making the playoffs. “It’s definitely an uphill grind. But we get to see what we’re made of. And I’m looking forward to that.”
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The season has followed a similar script. The 49ers’ 2024 campaign will be known as one in which their stars, so radiant the year prior, were obscured by thick, unrelenting clouds. The exception again is Kittle, who at 31 is their oldest offensive weapon but leads them in receiving yards and touchdowns. With three games to go, he ranks third among NFL tight ends in receiving yards and is poised to surpass 1,000 yards for the second straight year and the fourth time in his career.
Longtime friend Trent Taylor thinks Kittle’s mentality — no one in the NFL is having a better time than Kittle — is tied to his success. There’s power in all those howdys.
“While he’s out here working his tail off, he also knows how to have fun with it,” Taylor, a 49ers receiver, said. “And the guys who don’t know how to have fun with it, those are the guys who burn out. I think that’s why he’s been so good for such a long time.”
The George Kittle who arrived at 49ers headquarters along with Taylor in 2017 — both were fifth-round picks — looked nothing like today’s version.
“I was fatter,” noted Kittle, who today weighs 243 pounds but had risen as high as 265. “In college they told me I had to weigh a lot more. I drank eight protein shakes a day. Don’t ever do that.”
He also had close-cropped hair, no facial hair and no visible tattoos. Today, he’s bearded and his blond hair is long. He dramatically whips his head back to get it out of his face before putting on his helmet.
And there’s ink everywhere.
Kittle explains he has a good-guy arm and a bad-guy arm and then ticks off each tat. The right arm and hand include Hobbes, the fun-loving tiger from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Master Chief, the stoic protagonist in the Halo video games, and Godzilla.
“Godzilla’s a good guy,” he insisted.
The bad-guy arm includes Venom and the Joker, a tattoo he got on the eve of his 2019 wedding (to the chagrin of then-fiancee, Claire) and is a persona Kittle often adopts on game days.
“His dark place is the Joker mentality — where he’s giggling out there and kind of making light of everything,” Taylor said. “When George is out there goofing off, that’s when he’s ready to go to war.”
And he’s just getting started. Kittle says he’s planning a three-headed tattoo for the bad-guy arm, then launches into a two-minute explanation of what he’s contemplating. He’s like a 6-year-old going over his Christmas list. One head might be Sauron, the ultimate bad guy in “Lord of the Rings.” Sauron has always been a personal favorite. Another might be a dark figure from a cartoon called “Samurai Jack.” And the third?
“Have you ever seen the movie ‘Puss in Boots’?” he asks. “The second one, ‘The Last Wish’? It’s fantastic — significantly better than the first. Huge fan of it. There’s a character in the second one. And it’s a gray wolf and he’s known as Death. And he’s coming for Puss in Boots. And his character in the movie — it’s just fantastic.”
(Courtesy of San Francisco 49ers)
What 31-year-old professional football player gets giddy over a Puss in Boots tattoo?
For a glimpse of what’s swirling inside Kittle’s ever-active mind — and to figure out the origin of his tattoos — you have to go to the 335-acre farm in Lockridge, Iowa, where he grew up.
Calvin and Hobbes, the blond kid and tiger who go on all sorts of adventures together? That sounds an awful lot like Kittle and his sister, Emma, who is three years older.
Their dad, Bruce, would read to them every night before bed. And it wasn’t “The Hungry Caterpillar.” Instead, he’d pick up “Lord of the Rings,” even when George was really little, lighting up his boyhood brain with stories of giant spiders, great falls into the abyss and taking on armies of blood-thirsty orcs.
“My dad had a great story-telling voice,” George said. “He could change his voice enough to where 4-year-old me thought he was watching a movie. I loved it.”
The next day, the kids would live out the adventures — leaping off bales of hay, chasing rabbits and sidestepping the snakes and spiders that lived in the old barn. Emma said it was as if she and her brother grew up in a different time.
“Growing up on a farm with horses — when you think about ‘Lord of the Rings’ and those stories and the Riders of Rohan? They’re on horseback,” she said. “There was just so much relatability where we felt like we could be one of the nine on these quests. For us, the magic of the storybooks felt very real.”
George Kittle’s imagination came to life on his family farm in Iowa with his sister, Emma, and cousin Henry Krieger, who later played football at Iowa with George and had a brief NFL career. (Courtesy of Jan Kreiger)
The farm was a place where the kids’ imaginations could run wild and where they could test themselves.
Emma remembered an episode when George was 8 and was helping with a young pony named Jack. The ponies had a mean streak and were particularly nasty that day. Emma and their mom, Jan Krieger, watched the scene unfold.
“Jack kicked up and just about smoked George right in the face,” she recalled. “I think he might have clipped his shoulder a little bit. And it scared us really bad and it was like, ‘Get him out of the ring!’”
George, who was all wobbly legs and elbows at the time, didn’t let Jack be the lord of the ring that day.
“You could see the rage bubbling up,” Emma said. “And he went in there to show him who’s boss. He didn’t say that, but he flung the gate open, marched in, grabbed the harness and told Jack, ‘We’re not going to be that way.’ I just remember Mom and I were freaking out.”
There were other books — the “Harry Potter” series, for instance — mixed in, but “Lord of the Rings” was the go-to, the one that stuck. Bruce thinks he probably read the trilogy aloud three times, nearly 1.5 million words total.
“By the third time, George was like, ‘Dad, skip ahead to the battle of Helm’s Deep!’” he said.
The bedtime stories sparked George’s love of books. He listens to audio versions to and from work and always has a stack — Sherlock Holmes mysteries, crime thrillers and especially sci-fi and adventure series — on his bedside table. “Lord of the Rings” also frames how he sees life and certainly how he views an NFL season, which also revolves around a powerful ring. It’s no wonder Kittle is the NFL’s biggest character. He sees himself as a character in a 17-chapter adventure tale.
But which one? Who was his favorite growing up?
“I should say Smeagol just to mess with him and give you a dark article,” Emma said with a laugh.
She and Bruce agreed that Aragorn, the virtuous leader played in the film series by Viggo Mortensen and also known as Strider in the books, probably was George’s favorite and a role model.
“But,” Bruce said, “it’s hard not to be in the camp of the Hobbits, too. Because so many people discount them because they’re smaller.”
Bruce, a former Iowa offensive lineman who coached George when he was little, noted his son was “super gangly” as a boy.
“There was a long time when he looked like a baby deer,” he said. “You know, a lot of legs.”
George Kittle and his older sister, Emma, developed a love for books thanks to the nightly readings from their father, Bruce. (Courtesy of Jan Kreiger)
And no one thought George was anything special coming out of Iowa, either. The 49ers only caught onto him after zeroing in on his buddy, Hawkeye quarterback C.J. Beathard, whom they drafted in the third round.
“George being a later-round draft choice — I think there was a little bit of Hobbitt-esque leaning,” Bruce said. “Like, ‘I’ve got a lot more power and gifts than you might imagine.’”
George conceded that those guesses are correct.
“I mean, Strider’s hard to beat,” he said.
But he added he also has an appreciation for Sauron, the all-seeing antagonist, and for bad guys in general. It’s why he has so many bad-guy tattoos, which he uses to channel dark energy on game days. After all, sweet, whimsical, hilarious Hobbes — who’s an excellent approximation of every-day-life George — isn’t the ideal persona when your job is cutting down 235-pound linebackers on run plays.
“It’s not all the time,” George said. “But there are times when you want it to be a little bit of chaos and laugh at life like the Joker, and there are times when you need to be as serious as possible and do things to get the job done like Master Chief. There’s also time to breathe fire like Godzilla. There’s certain energy I can pull from these things. I like seeing them and I just kind of channel it when I look at them.”
Taylor admits he used to think it was strange when he would cross paths with Kittle before games and the tight end would be muttering to himself as he morphed into one of his Sunday characters. Then he realized everyone was going through their own transformations.
“Everyone’s doing this weird stuff before the game,” Taylor said. “And it’s like, ‘Who am I to judge?’ We’ve all got to be a little bit crazy to play this game of football.”
The tale of Aragorn, Frodo and Sam also lends itself well to what the 49ers are going through now. The trilogy is about faith and sacrifice, grittiness and resilience and maintaining the course even in the face of overwhelming odds. It’s also heavy in veneration for those who fought before you.
“It means showing up even when you’re (6-8) and it’s not looking great,” Bruce said. “Because the game knows. You don’t want to create bad football karma.”
Which was why there was a tense “howdy” when George took the podium after their most recent game. The 12-6 loss to the Los Angeles Rams all but eliminated the 49ers from the playoffs and, on top of that, it was marked by a teammate, De’Vondre Campbell Sr., quitting midway through the contest.
George Kittle, normally so chipper during post-game press conferences, was anything but following De’Vondre Campbell’s unexpected exit Thursday. Look who Kittle was wearing/channeling…
[image or embed]
— Matt Barrows (@mattbarrows.bsky.social) December 15, 2024 at 10:25 AM
With no Sauron on his arm — yet — Kittle wore the “Lord of Rings” baddie on the front of his T-shirt instead, then channeled some rarely seen postgame energy.
“Whatever his decision was, it wasn’t for this organization, it wasn’t for this team,” Kittle said. “And that’s on him. I’m not very happy about it. I wish I would’ve heard about it on the field, but I didn’t.”
This year, the path seems blocked for Kittle and his companions. They’re two games back in the division with no edge in tiebreakers. It’s very unlikely they will finally find the magical ring this season.
But while it might be the end of this particular book, the Kittles are certain there’s more to the story. And they know the darkness will only make the light seem that much brighter. That is, it’s no time to be glum.
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful ride,” Bruce said. “Yes, it’s tumultuous, but what avenue of life isn’t? So quit moping and go f—ing do it.”
(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb: The Athletic; photos: Michael Owens and Brooke Sutton / Getty Images)
Sports
Jon Jones requests UFC release after Dana White says legend was ‘never’ considered him for White House card
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Mixed martial arts legend Jon Jones ended his retirement from UFC simply because he wanted a spot on the “Freedom 250” fight card at the White House in June.
But, when UFC CEO Dana White announced the card during UFC 326 this past weekend, Jones wasn’t among the fighters. As a result, he has requested a release from his UFC contract.
White was candid when asked about Jones following the UFC 326 card.
Jon Jones of the United States of America reacts after his TKO victory against Stipe Miocic of the United States of America in the UFC heavyweight championship fight during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 16, 2024 in New York City. ((Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images))
“Never, ever, ever, which I told you guys a hundred thousands times, was Jon Jones ever even remotely in my mind to fight at the White House,” White explained, per CBS Sports. “Some guy with Meta Glasses filmed him talking about his hips – that his hips are so bad. And I don’t know if you guys saw that flag football game where he can barely run. Jon Jones retired because of his hips. He’s got arthritis in his hips. Apparently, doctors say he should have a hip replacement.”
White added that “the Jon Jones thing is bulls—,” saying that he texted the fighter’s lawyer saying he would never be on the White House card despite Jones saying he was in negotiations for it.
UFC ANNOUNCES CARD FOR WHITE HOUSE EVENT
The Meta Glasses incident White is referring to came from a viral video, where Jones, unaware he was being filmed, discussed issues with his hips to a fan.
On Monday, Jones composed a thorough response to White’s comments about him and the White House Card. He previously posted and deleted social media explanations, but Monday’s appeared to be his final statement on the matter.
UFC President Dana White speaks after UFC Fight Night at Toyota Center on Feb. 21, 2026. (Troy Taormina/Imagn Images)
“Yes, I have arthritis in my hip and it’s painful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t fight,” Jones, who retired a heavyweight champion in 2025, said. “So let me get this straight, if I had accepted the lowball offer, suddenly my hip would be fine and I’d be on the White House card? That doesn’t make sense. I even received stem cell treatment last week to get ready for the White House card, and training camp was scheduled to start today. I was preparing to be ready.
“I understand business deals fall through sometimes, but going out publicly and saying things that aren’t true isn’t right. After everything I’ve given to the UFC, the years, the title defenses, the fights, hearing that I’m ‘done’ is disappointing. Especially when as recently as Friday UFC was calling me trying to get me on that White House card for a much lower number.”
Jones finished his statement by saying he “respectfully” asks to be released from his UFC contract.
Jon Jones enters the ring before facing Stipe Miocic in the UFC heavyweight championship fight during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 2024 in New York City, New York. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC)
“No more spins, no more games. Thank you to the real fans who know what’s up,” he wrote.
The UFC did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Fox News Digital.
Jones is considered one of the best UFC fighters of all time, owning a 28-1-1 record, which includes his last bout with Stipe Miocic, knocking him out to take the heavyweight title belt. He is also a two-time light heavyweight champion.
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Sports
With U.S. at war with Iran, political upheaval could engulf World Cup
Twelve days ago the U.S., a World Cup host country, launched a full-scale bombing campaign against Iran, a country that has qualified to play in the tournament. That’s never happened before.
Five days later, that same World Cup host began military operations inside the borders of Ecuador, another World Cup qualifier, half a world away. That’s never happened before either.
With the tournament scheduled to kick off in three months, those events have soccer scholar Jonathan Wilson questioning whether it’s wise for the World Cup to go on at all.
“It seems to me, for each passing day, it’s less and less likely that the World Cup can happen,” he said.
That take seems unduly alarmist said David Goldblatt, a British sportswriter and sociologist who is a visiting professor at Pitzer College in Claremont. Anything short of a full-scale war inside the U.S. would not be enough to pull the plug on the tournament now, he said. Especially with FIFA expecting revenues of as much as $11 billion.
“I mean, it’s not a good look,” Goldblatt conceded. “And certainly when set against FIFA’s official pronouncements on its role in encouraging world peace and cosmopolitan celebrations of a universal humanity, none of that sits terribly easily.
“But in terms of actually running the World Cup, I don’t think it’s going to make very much difference at all.”
However, with the Trump administration open to engaging in more international conflicts, there’s little doubt this World Cup, the largest and most complex in history, will also be the most political in history as well.
Complicating things further is the fact the current conflict in the Middle East hasn’t been limited to just the U.S. and Iran. Iranian missiles have hit both Qatar and Saudi Arabia, among other countries, and Jordan has fired on U.S. assets.
Those three countries are World Cup qualifiers as well.
The fate of a soccer tournament pales in importance to the death and destruction the conflagration in the Middle East has produced, of course. But the need for unity is the very reason there’s a World Cup in the first place.
When French soccer administrator Jules Rimet founded the tournament 96 years ago, he believed soccer could be a tool for international peace. And in the early years of the tournament, Rimet, FIFA’s longest-serving president and a talented diplomat, was able to limit the impact of geopolitics on the World Cup, watering down Mussolini’s influence on the 1934 World Cup, for example, and steering the 1938 tournament away from Hitler’s Germany.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino has taken a far different approach, courting President Donald Trump’s support despite his growing number of global conflicts.
A week before bombs began falling on Iran, Infantino appeared at the inaugural meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace wearing a red cap with ‘USA’ on the front and the numbers ‘45-47’ — a reference to Trump’s non-consecutive presidencies. That act was so blatantly partisan, IOC president Kirsty Coventry said her organization would investigate whether Infantino, an IOC member, breached the terms of the group’s charter, which requires members to act independent of political interests.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino holds up a USA hat as he attends the inaugural meeting for the Board of Peace at the Institute of Peace in Washington on Feb. 19.
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
“Infantino has absolutely breached every FIFA protocol on neutrality,” said Wilson, author of “The Power and Glory: The History of the World Cup.”
“Absolute neutrality is always impossible and not desirable, but it has clearly gone way, way, way beyond. The peace prize looked grotesque at the time. It looks even worse now. And I can’t see how the future will look kindly on Infantino. I think Infantino has to some extent legitimized Trump.”
This is hardly new behavior from Infantino, who had close relationships with Vladimir Putin ahead of the 2018 tournament played in Russia and Qatar’s leaders ahead of the 2022 tournament despite their well-known human rights violations.
The list of countries Infantino is asking to overlook poor relations with the country hosting the majority of World Cup games this summer is growing.
Consider that Denmark, which administers Greenland, an autonomous territory Trump has also threatened to invade, can qualify for the tournament in a European playoff that will take place later this month. Then there’s World Cup qualifiers Haiti, Ivory Coast and Senegal, who aren’t at war with the U.S. but whose citizens have been banned from entering the country to cheer for their teams. That completely contradicts a promise from Infantino, who said “everybody will be welcome” at the 2026 World Cup.
“If I had a crystal ball I could tell you now what is going to happen,” Heimo Schirgi, the World Cup chief operating officer for FIFA, said Monday. “But obviously the situation is developing. It’s changing day by day and we are monitoring closely. [But] the World Cup will go on right? The World Cup is too big and we hope that everyone can participate that has qualified.”
Goldblatt, the Pitzer professor, said Infantino’s action are understandable since he has few cards to play against Trump.
President Trump speaks as he receives the FIFA Peace Prize as FIFA president Gianni Infantino applauds on Dec. 5 the Kennedy Center in Washington.
(Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
“What’s Infantino going to do? What levers can you pull?” he asked. “You can threaten to take it away. That’s not happening. Moral admonishment? Who’s going to take that from FIFA? It is a farcical idea that anybody thinks that the president of FIFA has any kind of collective moral authority or any role as a spokesperson for the progressive part of the world.
“They may fantasize that this is the case. But it is morally and politically absurd that any of us should expect that of these people. So if you are Infantino and that is the case, you know what works with Trump? What works is flattery. So of course he’s gone down that path.”
The games, Goldblatt said, will go on even if bombs are still falling. And that may not be an entirely bad thing.
“Football’s a great distraction. That’s partly why it’s so popular,” he said. “It will be virtually impossible, if the war continues, for that not to be a central element of like, the meaning and the purpose of what we’re all doing here.
“How we’ll feel and what it will look like, I don’t know. It will be very strange. Football is unpredictable and extraordinary. Something will happen that will warm our souls.”
⚽ You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.
Sports
Australia grants asylum to 5 Iranian women’s soccer players amid Iran conflict
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Australia granted asylum to five players from the Iranian women’s soccer team who were visiting for a tournament when the U.S.-Israeli attacks against Iran began.
Australian federal police officers on Tuesday transported the five women from their hotel in Gold Coast, Australia, to a “safe location” after they made asylum requests to meet with Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke and to finalize the processing of their humanitarian visas.
“Last night I was able to tell five women from the Iranian Women’s Soccer team that they are welcome to stay in Australia, to be safe and have a home here,” Burke said on X.
The move comes after the team refused to sing the Iranian anthem before their first Women’s Asian Cup match early last week against South Korea, although they later sang and saluted the anthem in two subsequent matches, including ahead of their final match, when they were eliminated by the Philippines.
IRANIAN WOMEN’S SOCCER FANS SHOW SUPPORT FOR TRUMP AS TEAM APPEARS TO PIVOT ON NATIONAL ANTHEM STANCE
Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke poses with five Iranian women soccer players who have been granted asylum in Australia, Tuesday, March 10, 2026. (Australia Ministry of Home Affairs)
“I don’t want to begin to imagine how difficult that decision is for each of the individual women, but certainly last night it was joy, it was relief,” Burke told reporters after signing the documents. “People were very excited about embarking on a life in Australia.”
The five women said they were happy for their names and pictures to be published, according to Burke, who emphasized that the players wanted to make clear that they were not political activists.
The Iranian team arrived in Australia for the tournament before the war against Iran began on Feb. 28.
After the team was eliminated from the tournament over the weekend, they faced potentially returning to a country still under bombardment. The team’s head coach, Marziyeh Jafari, said on Sunday the players “want to come back to Iran as soon as we can.”
An official squad list named 26 players, as well as Jafari and other coaches.
While only five players were granted asylum, Burke said the offer was given to everyone on the team.
IRAN FLAG REMOVED FROM PARALYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY AFTER SOLE ATHLETE WITHDRAWS OVER TRAVEL SAFETY CONCERNS
Iran players during their national anthem ahead of the Women’s Asian Cup soccer match between Iran and the Philippines in Robina, Australia, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (Dave Hunt/AAPImage via AP)
“These women are tremendously popular in Australia, but we realize they are in a terribly difficult situation with the decisions that they’re making,” Burke said. “The opportunity will continue to be there for them to talk to Australian officials if they wish to.”
It remains unclear when the remaining players will leave Australia.
“Australians have been moved by the plight of these brave women,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters. “They’re safe here and they should feel at home here.”
“They then had to consider that and do it in a way that did not present any danger to them or to their families and friends back home in Iran,” he continued.
The asylum offer came after U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday called on Australia to grant asylum to any team member who wanted it.
Trump had blasted Australia on social media, saying Australia was “making a terrible humanitarian mistake” by allowing the team to be “forced back to Iran, where they will most likely be killed.”
Supporters react towards a bus transporting Iranian woman players following their Women’s Asian Cup soccer match against the Philippines on the Gold Coast, Australia, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (Dave Hunt/AAP Image via AP)
“The U.S. will take them if you won’t,” Trump said, despite his administration’s efforts to limit the number of immigrants in the U.S. who can receive asylum for political purposes.
Just hours later, Trump praised Albanese in another post.
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“He’s on it! Five have already been taken care of, and the rest are on their way,” Trump wrote.
Albanese said Trump had called him for “a very positive conversation,” about the issue. The prime minister said he explained “the action that we’d undertaken over the previous 48 hours” to support the women.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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