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Frank Gore played in the NFL for a thousand years. And soon his son is set to make his league debut

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Frank Gore Sr. is known to all football fans 

Frank Gore Sr. is known to all football fans as one of the most important longtime early running backs in NFL history. Frank Gore Jr. earns his own honors as a second-year running back at the University of Southern Mississippi. The two of them share the same name, playing position and more.

One evening this past summer, Frank Gore missed his second practice. For a future Hall of Fame member whose career is built on grueling workouts, it was an unexpected decision. It was as if a worker bee had suddenly decided to fend off a swarm and sunbathe on tulip petals instead of working. Traditionally, every morning of the offseason began with a workout in the company of the other NFL running backs in the neighborhood. Gore, however, always stood out from the crowd of his peers, holding an individual practice session at sunset in the evenings at a stadium near his home in south Florida. Therein lay his secret weapon that helped him be head and shoulders above the competition. "I know the contenders for my spot don't do that," he said.


By going against his own habits that day, the 38-year-old free agent thus acknowledged the near end of his soccer career. Why drive your body to exhaustion when that aforementioned body would soon be confined to the couch? But refusing to practice was not only a small act of laziness, but also a test of sorts for the only partner Gore allowed to perform coordination exercises and push a loaded practice sled beside him in these secret workouts. The outcome of the test filled Frank Sr. with parental pride. Frank Jr. went to the park on South Flamingo Road and trained alone, despite the chance he was given to beat the buck.

"It was at that moment that I realized he understood the severity of the road to success that lay before him," Frank Sr. said.

Junior Frank Gore gets along with his father just as most of his peers do. Even though he is now 19 and a sophomore at university, having grown up in a world of unlimited meal plans and pizza at 1 a.m., Junior continues to receive messages from his father admonishing him to stick to healthy eating habits. Their mutual desire for superiority is vividly expressed in every aspect of their lives, from basketball battles in the park with a bunch of incomprehensible judging decisions ("He's always cheating. Every miss he makes is my foul," Junior says) to heated arguments about who was the best player as a teenager. ("Here the answer is obvious. I could have turned pro right out of high school," echoes his son, Senior).

How many kids can boast of seeing Frank

How many kids can boast of seeing Frank the Tank reach another career milestone in person: a touchdown in three different decades, third in league history in carries (3,735) and total yards (16,000), first among early-rounders in games played (241)? But Frank Jr. is also trying to keep up with his father. Last year, he led the Golden Eagles with 708 yards per carry and shared first place in the nation in dropped grabs per carry. In seven games this season, he already has 443 takeaways and 160 yards on receptions.

Frank Sr. is still a free agent

Frank Sr. is still a free agent, splitting his free time between soccer and boxing practice. The Mounties likely aren't destined to become the first father-son pair to play together in the NFL. "I hope he continues to play at the university next year. So I'm not sure I can wait that long," Senior said. Still, their paths are interconnected: a father wrapping up his career is passing the baton to a son continuing the family's history in soccer, or as both Gore are used to calling it, "the business."

No one knows what the future holds for Frank Jr. But whether it's a long career in the NFL or any other life path, the lessons he learned from his father will stay with him forever, and he keeps them in his heart as carefully as he custodians the ball after a tab from the quarterback. "He's my father, my mentor, my coach, my best friend, my everything," is how Junior describes his relationship with his father.

Up! Seth! Hut!

Those three words were always the signal for a stunt during parties. A trick that everyone loved. While the adults were chatting at the dinner table, Frank Sr. would suddenly get into a quarterback pose, standing behind the center, and Frank Jr., who had only recently learned to walk, would assume the starting running position, get an invisible tab from his father, and run at full speed to the imaginary first try line.

Frank Jr. was born in March 2002, two months after Frank Sr. won the national championship with the University of Miami. It was clear from an early age that he was destined to follow in the footsteps of his older namesake. At age three, he began joining his older cousins' matches on the front lawn. Almost all of the matches ended in defeat, but no one saw a tear from Junior. He played his first organized game at four, and three years later scored seven touchdowns in a game for the Coral Gabels Panthers - four on offense and three on defense.

Of the basic skills of the game, Frank Sr. then taught his son only how to throw and catch the ball and how to get the tab properly. "I wanted him to have a normal childhood. I didn't want him to be forced to play soccer just because I love the sport," Sr. said. Still, Junior followed closely the career of his father, who overcame two torn anterior cruciate ligaments in college to be selected by San Francisco in the third round of the 2005 draft. "We were playing on the road. I would come home and he would always ask me about the game," Senior says.

Frank Jr. lived most of his childhood in Miami with his mother. Shasta Smith left Frank Sr. but his son always visited his father during the season when possible. The younger man didn't like hanging out in the players' box or splashing around in the team pool. "All I did was watch practice. I wasn't interested in anything else," Jr. recounted. He never fell for the stars, even when he met Michael Crabtree, his second-favorite player in the entire NFL after his father. The boy's sharp mind, however, posed another problem for his father. "I always had to keep him under control so he wouldn't say anything unnecessary to the other guys like, 'You can't play,' or something like that," Frank Sr. said.

Together, father and son have experienced all the ups and downs of a soccer career. The best memory for Sr. remains his 9-year-old son sitting on his lap during a press conference after beating the Falcons in the 2012 NFC Finals. In that game, Gore Sr. scored two touchdowns. Jr.'s most vivid memory, though, is of him and his stepbrothers Ricardo and Demetrious sobbing after his father's team's loss to Baltimore in the '47 Super Bowl. "I was absolutely heartbroken at the time," Jr. recounted.

But that failed San Francisco trip to the Lombardi Trophy did inspire him. "From that moment on, I knew what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be like and what it would all cost me," Frank Jr. said. There was just one catch: for the first 13 years of his career (10 at San Francisco and three at the Colts), Frank Sr. had little involvement in raising his son. "The price of my long career was a lot of my son's games that I wasn't at," Sr. regrets. Then, in 2018, Gore signed a one-year contract with Miami and returned home for the first time in his professional career. "I was over the moon. I was able to watch Junior play live on a regular basis," Senior said.

Until then, Gore Sr. had only been able to watch his son from afar and was impressed with the reviews, especially about Frank Jr. becoming the school's team leader in 10th grade. "I watched slices of his games and was pleasantly surprised at how dominant he was over his opponents, especially near the end of the season. There were some older guys on the team at his position, but in the last four or five games the coach didn't want to take Frank off the field at all. That's when I realized it was time to fully immerse Junior in my world," Frank Sr. said.

That's how Frank Jr. got to know "the business." He would get up at 6 a.m. to practice with Leshon McCoy, Devan Singletary and other famous NFL players. "I wanted him to be around these guys and understand that he's just like them. Keep it up and you can be better than them," he told his son. Next on the program was strength training, and in the evenings that "secret" second workout. "By that point I had gained over 14,000 yards and I didn't have to work my ass off in the second workout. I could just relax, get a check every two weeks and mentor some freshman. But my son had to see the drive to be the best, so I kept working," Frank Sr. said.

The results of this approach became apparent in late summer 2018. On that day, Frank Sr. was able to watch his son's match in person for the first time in years, and he was as nervous as if he were going to be on the field himself at the crucial moment. Until that moment, he knew about his son's potential only from the clips of the video, the summer trainings and from the words of the coaches. Those were not the most reliable sources for his father. However, at the very beginning of the match, all skepticism instantly faded. With his first carry, Jr. destroyed North Miami Beach's defense.

"That's when it dawned on me that all the hard work hadn't gone in vain," Senior recalled.

Will Hall immediately noticed something wasn't right. It was early September, and two days earlier the Southern Mississippi players had committed four losses and lost to South Alabama in the season opener. The coach was about to begin "debriefing" when four freshmen players walked into the classroom, joking with each other. The marching attracted the attention of the sophomore sitting in the front row next to the door, and by the time the team session started, emotion had taken over Frank Gore Jr. "He was sobbing profusely. Later, I asked him to hold back and asked him what was wrong. And he said: "There are guys on the team who don't care about anything, but it shouldn't be like that," Hall recounted.

Frank Jr.'s loyalty to his cause is expressed in a cascade of different ways. During practice, he scurries around the stadium like a mentally unstable kid at recess, managing to work on his ball-defense skills one more time in between drills or fetch water for linebackers. After practice, he rushes to coach Jordy Joseph's office to break down video of the game. The coach doesn't even make it to his office and the office is already empty with only a note waiting for him, "Gizzy was here." "He wants to know the quarterback's pass protection scheme, the receivers' routes. Why we chose this out scheme and not that one, and what led us to that decision. He's just obsessed with soccer," Hall said.

Junior owes his approach to his father, but that's not their only similarity. "We're a lot alike. I'm just a little bit bigger," Frank Sr. states, being three centimeters taller than his son and eight pounds heavier. The biggest difference in his father's and son's delivery styles is the mobility of Junior, who also played quarterback in his high school days. But the takeaways in which the runner's greatest weapon is power, and on which his father built his career, are no stranger to Junior, either, and he's getting better every day at that aspect of the game.

Frank Jr. is ready to write his own life story. Even when the Golden Eagles get a day off, he continues to wake up at 6 a.m. "Habits have made me who I am today," he stated. In training together, he is no longer inferior to his father in anything, and in some ways, he even surpasses him. Last November, both Gore carried the ball to the scoring zone in the same week: the senior with the Jets and the junior in the game against UTSA. However, the family palm remained with Junior at that point, as it was the second touchdown of the season for him and the first for Senior.

Junior's "education," however, does not end there. This season, Frank Sr. attended a game in which the Golden Eagles crushed Grambling State 37-0. In that game, Jr. gained 162 yards on 21 carries, including a 51-yard run into the end zone midway through the third quarter. "Took you long enough," his father told him. The next morning, they parsed the video of the match together, with Senior pointing out the rough edges in his takeout style to his son.

In addition to boxing promoters, a couple of NFL teams have been interested in Frank Sr.'s services in recent weeks. But he continues to catch up as a father, coaching the soccer team of his five- and eleven-year-olds, or going off to Wisconsin to visit his son Ricardo Hallman, a freshman cornerback for the Badgers and half-brother to Frank Jr. He's much happier as a father than as a player clinging by hook or by crook to a spot in the lineup.

"I can still play. But it's my decision and I'm happy with it," Frank Sr. said.

His father's love for Frank Jr. is expressed in a dozen daily messages. In most of them, he is told off for a meal plan that includes too many McDonald's products. In addition to them also come quotes from the Bible, reminders to thank the team cafeteria staff and plenty of motivational admonitions pushing him to keep getting better. "Along the way you have to beat everyone who says you can't do something. That fact should spur you on," Senior recalled one of the messages to his son.

Despite his father's predictions, Frank Jr. has not yet given up on a dream in which two generations of Gore will play together in the NFL. "It would be a gift from above for me. Hopefully we'll play against each other, I'll win and I'll be reminded of it for the rest of my life," Jr. said.

And if the elder Frank Gore wins?

"Then I won't talk to him for a long time. Probably until next summer."

 


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