Oak Park — Devin Gardner has four Emmy Awards and just signed a three-year extension with FOX as a college football game analyst, a young, up-and-coming television star working alongside veteran broadcaster Tim Brando.
The former Michigan quarterback and captain could be doing a lot of other things during the offseason, but most mornings, he’s either at David H. Shepherd Park or at his home gym working with young elementary and high school quarterback and receiver talent eager to learn from his coaching and conditioning training.
This isn’t for everyone, certainly not for the player with a casual interest in pursuing the sport. The kids learn that when they’re faced with a daunting hill by the park’s baseball diamond. There, they sprint up and down the, run on angles and, standing on the side of the hill, catch passes. The hill is the great toughness separator. You’re either in or you’re out. It’s not forgiving. Nor is Gardner.
“You understand it’s difficult, right?” Gardner yells at them while they’re sprinting up and down the hill. “Attack it!”
Then there’s the hands-on coaching from Gardner, who works with the players on their footwork, reading routes and defenses and avoiding the rush as he plays the role of pass rusher getting in their faces, forcing them to make split-second decisions with the ball.
“I didn’t have this exact type of thing (growing up),” said Gardner, who played at Michigan from 2010-2014 and then four years professionally across the NFL, Japan’s X-League, and the Canadian Football League. “I didn’t have one specific person that had been through what I was trying to become, but I did have a lot of different mentors, men who helped me with having no father. My older brother, everybody kind of pouring into me. My favorite quote is, ‘Service to others is the rent you pay for the room here on Earth,’ and so, for me, this is me paying my rent getting a chance to help others and serve others, because social work is where I kind of cut my teeth in college, and I always knew that I wanted to help others.”
Gardner didn’t set out to create what is now known as, “The Young Go Getters” — during his Michigan playing days he and roommate Jarrod Wilson used to call themselves go-getters, so the name seemed perfect. It happened organically about a decade ago when he saw young Dante Moore, who played at Detroit King and now is the Oregon starting quarterback and a projected first-round NFL Draft pick, unable to forge a path as a quarterback.
“I’m just seeing this kid kind of walking around and people not being very kind to him,” said Gardner, who annually works the prestigious Elite 11 quarterback camp. “I want to see what he’s got. I put him through a workout, he’s throwing, he’s doing these things, and he wasn’t perfect, but I can see there’s something in him. I was like, ‘I think I want to help him out,’ and I helped him, and then Dequan Finn and Ahlon Mitchell, whose grandfather was my very first coach.
“It started with those three kids, and then from there, just started to build out. And then Austin Mitchell (now 15 at Harper Woods) came along. He was 7 years old. Didn’t like how he was being treated on his team, so it’s like, ‘Well, I guess I’ll teach him how to play.’ His grandfather was my pastor. So that’s how I started with little, little kids. Now you build out this group of kids, and it’s been amazing for me.”
Gardner has had a lasting effect on Moore, who mentions him often during interviews, as he did at the recent Big Ten Media Days.
“Devin Gardner was someone that took me under his wing and trained me all my life as a quarterback, a quarterback coming from Detroit, Black quarterback, and it was just great,” Moore said. “I learned a lot from him.”
Teaching toughness
This is about paying it forward, and Gardner foots the bill.
“Since I’ve been with FOX, I’ve gotten to a place where I can just do this all the time, and they don’t have to pay,” Gardner, 34, said. “It’s been really good to be able to give back and transform the future of the game of football. But not only that, just humans in general. You see so many people that are playing sports and they think it’s just all about becoming a pro, and it’s not really about that. It’s about becoming a pro in life. And I learned that through college and all those different things.”
Throughout the summer and even during the winter, Gardner will work with about two dozen young athletes. He meets with them every day during the offseason, although the number each day varies. Conditioning and weight training are as vital as throwing reps and instruction.
“My kids are extremely tough,” he said. “They don’t complain about hard work. Everything here is earned, and when we work out, it is hard. Suffering is important. Shared suffering. Understanding that, ‘Hey, I’m not the only one going through this, and I need to help others if I have a little extra juice.’ These kids are a little different.”
To the players, Gardner is just, “Dev.” They know he played at Michigan and that he’s on television, but they recognize him for his coaching and the work ethic he instills. Braylon Burnside, 18, who played receiver at Utica Eisenhower and is now on the Grand Valley State roster, started working with Gardner when he was in eighth grade. He would make the 45-minute drive for the training and by the time football camp started at school, Burnside felt way ahead.
“You see what we do,” Burnside said after a workout. “When we go into camp, we’re in condition. We’re not tired. We’re machines. We know how to be tired. Everybody’s gonna be tired. It’s just what you do when you’re tired when you tell yourself, ‘Don’t quit.’”
Gardner is a great leader, 11-year-old Musa El-Mubarak, a sixth-grader at McCollough Elementary in Dearborn said. He appreciates how Gardner simplifies the game to make it easier to grasp, and he enjoys the conditioning challenge.
“I always feel prepared,” El-Mubarak said. “I feel like ahead of everybody else. When we’re doing film, I always know what to do and know what is going on in the games.”
Mitchell, 15, is a quarterback at Harper Woods. After training with Gardner for years, he has found the game has slowed down. He’s patient, understands what he’s seeing from defenses and can make the right decisions.
“I personally think that he’s the best doing it,” Mitchell said of Gardner. “He doesn’t do it for himself like I feel a lot of people do it for themselves. He really does it because he wants us to be the best that we can be.”
Gardner likes to have fun, and the kids see that side of him in person and when he’s working college games on television, but he takes seriously shaping these young men and preparing them not only for football but for the real world.
He grew up in the Detroit projects, the Smith Homes on Evergreen and Linden in the Brightmoor neighborhood. His mother raised four kids on her own. They eventually moved to the East side, but that, he said, wasn’t much of an improvement.
“You’re growing up and understanding that sacrifice had to be made,” Gardner said. “I had to learn about sacrifice. It was kind of envy seeing other kids with their dads at practice, and everybody’s so invested in them, and it’s just like that kind of builds a fire in you of I want to make sure that I can be everything I can be without anyone. I don’t need anyone.
“But I did have a bunch of coaches and mentors that really helped me out that took the place of that father figure, so I almost got a little more than others because I didn’t have a father. So now I’ve got like 15 dads that are all helping me in different walks of my life, and it was really important for me growing up.”
Gardner was a talented athlete, who had a short-lived stay at U-D Jesuit.
“Man, people have no idea. I was miserable,” he said. “UD was the worst experience of my life. But the experience there, personally, taught me a lot. It made me very aware of my surroundings, understanding being in a diverse situation, because I’d never been around someone of another race. You go to U-D, it’s so diverse, but it was an awful experience for me coming from the projects.
“I’m getting in trouble. I think I got the record for JUGs, (Justice Under God detentions). It was a terrible experience, but it was a needed experience, and it was a great experience that really set me up to when I’m in my first semester at Michigan. I can get all A’s because I know the type of diligence I need to put forward when it comes to my studies, and also I understand how to deal with the diversity that is the University of Michigan.”
He would finish his high school career at Inkster and then headed to Michigan to play quarterback. In 2012 he switched to receiver so he could see the field and he 2013 he was the starting quarterback. Gardner was a captain in 2014.
‘The genuine article’
Gardner always seemed destined for a television career. Clearly, he knows the game, but he’s charming and effervescent and works hard at his craft. On Monday after calling a game, he meets with Jeff Byle, the vice president of business development at FOX, and they go over his work. Like the kids he coaches who want to get better and improve, that’s also Gardner’s goal in television.
In fact, he believes working with the kids and explaining the game to them in simplified terms has helped him on television when he’s dissecting a play for viewers who likely aren’t coaches and probably didn’t play. Gardner has learned to talk about the game in a concise way for the vast majority and keeps things light and entertaining while also educating.
He is paired with sports broadcasting veteran Tim Brando, 70, a 42-year veteran in sports television who spent 21 seasons on CBS and FOX partnered with Spencer Tillman. He sees his job not only to handle the play-by-play, but also to be a mentor for Gardner. Brando looked up to Curt Gowdy and Verne Lundquist, and as he and Gardner head into their third season together partnered on FOX, he wants to help his career just as he was helped.
The two have an easy, on-air rapport, and it’s clear they share a strong mutual respect.
“Devin is really, really easy to like, and he’s really the genuine article,” Brando said. “What you see is what you get. He’s clearly hardworking, came from a tough background, a big-city kid that got bounced around. He had to go through a lot of hard knocks in his youth, but he came out on the other end as a giver rather than a taker, and that just may be the greatest compliment I can give him.”
As Gardner gives back to the community with his football training, Brando also is paying it forward in the business, a pillar of sports broadcasting working with Gardner who pushes every day to improve on air.
“It’s been great,” Gardner said of working with Brando. “Everybody knows his voice. He’s been around for a long time, as he reminds me all the time. He was the first person to do GameDay, and that’s a long time ago and one of the biggest shows in the history of sport. He’s a veteran in in his game, and not only does help me, but I also help him. He’s expressed to me how he feels like he’s rejuvenated his career. He’s youthful again.
“It’s fun learning from him and understanding how guys who have done it for a long time operate and kind of navigate that and still remain myself because we are very different. He is 70, I’m 34. He’s a White guy that grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, in the projects. We are polar opposites coming from different worlds. However, when the game is on, everybody believes that we’re the same. We’re a team, and we’re working together, and we love each other. That’s the goal, and that’s what we’ve been able to do.”
The two visited during FOX meetings last week, and Gardner handed Brando a card. Brando said he teared up reading that his young partner credits him for giving of himself for their success.
“As much as I’ve done in that regard, he does more with young players in football than I’ve ever done,” Brando said of Gardner. “I’d like to think that I’m at the top of the heap when it comes to pouring into others in my profession, but I certainly haven’t been able to affect kids and as many aspiring athletes in my entire career as he would in one offseason. He’s nonstop in that regard. I think it’s what moves him the most. It’s what he has the most passion for.
“I think the broadcasting is a beautiful tool for him moving forward. But without that constant work with the kids that he does every day in Detroit, and in the summer with Elite 11 and all the other camps that he’s a part of, that’s what gives him the fuel and the passion that comes out over the air in a very genuine way every Saturday. I guess what I’m saying is, without that part of him as a human being, I don’t know that he would ever be as compelling on television as he is. One hand washes the other with that for him.”
For Gardner, it’s about being grateful for his opportunities and helping young Detroit kids, through hard work, reach for theirs.
achengelis@detroitnews.com
@chengelis
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: For Devin Gardner, rising star on TV, work with kids a reminder of where he started
Reporting by Angelique S. Chengelis, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Angelique S. Chengelis, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
