“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.”

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…

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— 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)