San José (United States) (AFP) – How do you top winning the Super Bowl and being named MVP of American football’s biggest game? If you’re Cooper Kupp, you try to win another with your childhood team. Wide receiver Kupp, who hails from Washington state, joined the Seattle Seahawks last March, after he was released by the Los Angeles Rams. The Seahawks play the New England Patriots in Sunday’s NFL championship decider. Now, he hopes to use the experience of his triumph with the Rams to help win silverware and pay back the club that created countless treasured memories for him as a kid.
“When I was really young, I was a huge Seahawks fan, until I found out that bedtime was when the game ended…then I just became an overtime fan,” he told AFP. “But I have a lot of memories. Every Sunday, we’d get up and go to church, come home, dad would make nachos or something, and we’d throw the Seahawks on,” said Kupp, with a nostalgic smile. Now, “I get to be a part of that for some kids that are right where I was, in the shoes that I was in.”
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– ‘Force multiplier’ –
If the Seahawks win against the Patriots on Sunday, it will be redemption for their 2015 Super Bowl loss to the same opponents. Two years later Kupp — a third-generation NFL star, following his offensive lineman grandfather and quarterback father into professional football — was drafted in the third round by the Rams. He moved with his high-school sweetheart wife Anna to California, where they raised their three sons.
“Uprooting” his family last year back to a state that “our boys had never experienced before” was not easy, particularly with his Rams career “not ending in a great place,” Kupp told reporters. That blow was softened by getting to play against the Rams three times this season — including the NFC Championship game last month. The Seahawks defeated the Rams 31-27 to reach the Super Bowl, thanks to a 13-yard touchdown pass caught by… Kupp.
“To see him make plays in the Championship game, when stakes are highest, was really special,” said Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald, who leapt at the chance to sign Kupp last post-season. “What better player to bring in early than Cooper Kupp? Man, he’s just…I use the term ‘force multiplier.'”
– ‘Same game’ –
For Kupp, the chance to win a second Super Bowl with the Seahawks — and create new memories for the next generation of Seattle fans — would be “super cool.” Back in 2022, Kupp was named Super Bowl MVP after a championship-winning performance for the Rams against the Cincinnati Bengals that included plucking the winning touchdown with less than two minutes remaining. Kupp’s game-winning touchdown was all the more remarkable given that on a previous play moments earlier, he had been flattened by a brutal helmet-to-helmet hit.
And it was a Hollywood-style moment of redemption for Kupp, who three years earlier had missed another Super Bowl after suffering a knee injury. Reaching an NFL championship decider “never loses its luster,” Kupp said Tuesday, even now as a 32-year-old veteran who younger teammates are turning to for advice on handling the enormity of the Super Bowl stage. His guidance for them? “It’s a big game because of what everyone else says it is, right? But it’s still the same game…the football is the same size,” he explained. “Understand that once the game starts, it’s gonna feel it’s like any other game you played in your life.”
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