SAN CLEMENTE – Outside of Sam Clemente – er, San Clemente – they’re talking about Sam Darnold’s long and winding route to the Super Bowl as an epic comeback story.
To the rest of the world, it reads like receipts season. A massive I-told-you-so to all his haters and doubters and, yes, his former NFL employers, all four of them in the previous seven seasons.
But not to Darnold: “It doesn’t really come down to that for me,” he told reporters who’d been itching to tell a story of vindication on his behalf in the run up to Super Bowl LX on Sunday at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.
“It’s always just been about putting in hard work,” said the beach dude who will become the first former USC quarterback — and, yes, the first Tritons product — to start in the big game.
All this spectacular success in Seattle? At home, in Southern California’s Spanish Village by the Sea, the 28-year-old isn’t riding some incredible redemption arc; it’s Sam Darnold being Sam Darnold. Quietly going about his business, making them all proud.
It’s almost as if the magnitude of his journeyman-to-paragon turnaround doesn’t even register.
That’s the sense I got when I stopped by San Clemente’s sole high school this week to ask the football players chasing in Darnold’s footsteps – and passing large banners of him on their way to classes or weight training – about him. It’s what I heard again when I popped in at Jerry’s Barber Shop just off El Camino Real and saw everyone’s eyes light up when I asked if any of them knew anything about Sam Darnold.
“Just a hard-working kid who let his game do the talking,” his high school football coach Jaime Ortiz said.
“He’s really nice,” said Jackson Ortiz, a junior linebacker and the coach’s son, who, like his two older siblings, has a Darnold jersey for every team he’s played on. “Like, really nice. Remember-your-name nice.”
“Pretty quiet, always the best athlete of the group – and there were some good athletes,” said John Hauser, whose son, Dylan, played basketball with Darnold for years as kids. “But he wasn’t cocky.”
“Just a quiet young man who was super athletic,” said Greg Wire, who remains the Tritons football team’s equipment manager, as he was when Darnold was there, doing so much to rejuvenate the program. “Just a really quiet kid.”
Certainly they’ve been following along as the quiet kid went on after setting school season records for passing yards, passing touchdowns, completions and total yards (3,770) and leading the Tritons to the CIF-SS championship game as a senior.
They were watching when he led the USC Trojans to victory in the 2017 Rose Bowl, and when he got drafted No. 3 overall by the New York Jets, celebrating not at a nightclub but in a hotel lobby with family, friends, former coaches and about 15 pizzas – the big man on USC’s campus one moment, a baby in NFL terms at 20, the next.
They followed along as he tried to make it work in a J-E-T-S organization that was a certifiable M-E-S-S, 13-25 in his three-year tenure. And then during a tough 8-9 stint in two seasons with the Carolina Panthers.
They saw his season backing up Brock Purdy with the San Francisco 49ers. And when he got the call to start again only after Minnesota Vikings’ rookie quarterback J.J. McCarthy went down with a season-ending knee injury ahead of the 2024 season, during which Darnold won 14 games but not his final two, in Week 18 and in the Vikings’ wild-card playoff contest.
San Clemente saw him cast aside again, this time for the unproven, untested McCarthy, before Darnold signed in Seattle, where the sun finally came out. In the past few months, his San Clemente supports saw him pass for more than 4,000 yards, and lead the Seahawks to a 14-3 regular-season record and their fourth Super Bowl berth, and first since 2015.
Oh, they’re excited in San Clemente to see Darnold on that Super Bowl stage, pinching themselves that one of their own has reached this pinnacle of American sport.
But to his oldest fans, all of it has been a success story. A legend can grow, but there had to be the legend to begin with. And the NFL was not going to humble someone who was already known as the most humble guy.
So, for sure, they’re going to be glued to the game in San Clemente, at watch parties or at home with their families, thrilled and maybe a little nervous. No one’s forecasting a day at the beach for Darnold, but everyone in town expects a comfortable Seahawks win.
And none of it will change how his hometown feels about him.
It doesn’t matter to them how many games he’ll end up winning – and he’s won 30, so far, in the past two seasons with two teams, something no other NFL quarterback has.
What moves them isn’t how well he moves the ball – and in the Seahawks’ 31-27 victory over the Rams on Jan. 25, Darnold moved it good, throwing for 346 yards and three touchdowns.
They love him for him, whether they got to know him while they gave him rides to and from practice like John Hauser, or if they watched him grow up, like his San Clemente basketball coach Marc Popovich, from a “roly-poly” elementary school camper to the best basketball player he’d coach.
What the current crop of Tritons football players told me they’ll remember about Darnold won’t be his big arm or his play-action capabilities. And it isn’t the NFL QB’s fortune and fame — $100 million-plus earnings and an anticipated audience Sunday of more than 120 million viewers — they find alluring.
These young men said they like his style, in that they dig how deftly Darnold deflects credit: “He always gives credit to his team, and that’s definitely a good trait,” said Collin Soboleski, a junior linebacker.
They’re taking their cues from his composure, the way he models that next-play mentality every time he throws a pick — which he’s known to do, his 14 interceptions this season were third-most in the NFL. “He doesn’t let it get into his head,” said Blake Miller, a junior defensive back.
For Darnold, who was once a “really, really good” basketball rebounder, Popovich recalled – “in the Kevin Love or Wes Unseld mode” – the concept of rebounding on the football field is not so different. There’s great value in giving yourself another shot in a sport that rewards risk-taking.
“A long time ago,” Jaime Ortiz said, “I learned that it’s like having a brand new Ferrari. You give [Darnold] the keys and let him drive it. He may ding it, it may have little dents, but once that thing gets in the straightaway and goes, it goes.”
It’s a skill, being able to get back up to speed after a few — or many — dings and dents. Or, better, learning from them, in-game or in the long game, as Darnold has. Starting, actually, in high school.
At San Clemente, Darnold missed most of his junior season, typically a showcase for college prospects, with a broken foot. And before that, he patiently waited his turn to play quarterback by making plays instead at linebacker and receiver.
“He’s an old soul, a hard-working kid; he just wanted to go compete and do the best he could to help the team win,” Jaime Ortiz said. “His parents did a great job raising him, credit to them.”
Dad Mike and Mom Chris – respectively, a plumber and former middle school P.E. teacher-turned-San Clemente flag football assistant coach – might be more popular around town than Sam is. They’re friendly fixtures still at San Clemente High sporting events that are such a major part of the fabric of a town that has only the one team to root for – and that shows up, en masse.
The football coach said 6,000 people were at Thalassa Stadium on Nov. 29 for the Tritons’ Southern Section Division 2 title game against Los Alamitos. And, he remembers 20,000 people coming out to party along a parade route after they won the 2016 Division 1-A state championship.
Current Tritons QB Preston Beck has fond memories of his parents pulling him out of elementary school early to go watch the football team march in the annual Homecoming Parade. “It’s as close to Texas football as you’re gonna find in California,” Coach Ortiz said.
San Clemente is happy to celebrate its wins. But its residents also show up to support, to comfort, to hold.
“Our mantra is ‘One Town, One Team,’ and it’s not a hashtag, it’s a way of life here,” Jaime Ortiz said. “I’ve had numerous times where a player has lost a parent, or when we lost [former San Clemente and UCLA football player] Nick Pasquale tragically … the way this city wraps their arms around those families through thick and thin, it’s why I’ve been here for 26 years.
“And it’s been the same with Sam, he’s had some lumps along his way, and the city has always been very supportive of him. That’s something you’re not gonna find other places, that support through thick and thin.”
So, no, said the equipment manager Wire, he wouldn’t have predicted Darnold would be the starting quarterback in a Super Bowl. But he can’t say he’s surprised either.
“This is just a small part of it,” Wire said. “But I can’t say I wouldn’t have thought he had the resilience, just because of the support here and his family. … I always felt like he would hang in there.”
Just putting his head down, putting in the hard work.
RELATED
Sam Darnold: From San Clemente High to Super Bowl quarterback
Alexander: Seahawks’ Sam Darnold shuts up his critics – and makes history