Seahawks’ Tre Flowers endures, flourishes — and honors a needy boy from his hometown
This week, Tre Flowers is playing against the Rams.
He’s playing for Bryce Wisdom.
Wisdom is a student and football player at Judson High School in Converse, Texas, outside San Antonio. That’s where Flowers played a half-dozen years ago. Bryce was supposed to be playing his junior season at Judson this fall, after the triumphant end of his chemotherapy for kidney cancer.
He found out in September he had another tumor. The cancer had spread to his liver.
There is an movement online, #brycestrong, and a gofundme.com site dedicated to helping finance the teen’s latest fight.
Wednesday, across the country from Bryce’s fight, Flowers showed off his custom-designed game cleats he will be wearing Sunday night. It’s part of the NFL’s annual week-14 “My Cause My Cleats” event. Flowers will be showing off his shoes inside the Los Angeles Coliseum when he and his Seahawks (10-2) play at the Rams (7-5).
League-wide, players will be wearing special cleats in games to honor and raise awareness for causes of their choice.
Flowers’ cause is Bryce. A national-television audience will see #brycestrong on the inside of Flowers’ white-and-orange high-top cleats. They will see a drawing of Bryce’s smiling face on the outside of Flowers’ left cleat. On the outside of the right shoe: a depiction of Bryce’s back wearing his football jersey, number 39.
“It’s a hometown kid. He’s in treatment right now for cancer,” Flowers said, behind Bryce’s shoes on a table.
“Just trying to keep his spirits up. Just trying to do everything I can to help him be happy and his family and whatnot.”
Asked how he knows Bryce, Flowers described his suburban hometown of about 18,000, “Friday Night Lights” and “All the Right Moves.”
“I don’t know if you have seen in the movies, high school football, but this school is one of those movies,” Flowers said. “My school is one of those things where we’re ‘homegrown.’
“We all feel like we’re a family in our community.”
Bryce’s boots are going to be in a starring role in L.A.
Flowers is blooming in Seattle.
A draft-choice project in 2018, he is flourishing in the second year of his football life as a cornerback—at the second-hardest position in pro football, besides quarterback.
At 6 feet 3, he’d been a safety at Oklahoma State and at Judson High. But coach Pete Carroll, a former defensive backs coach, loves his Seahawks cornerbacks to be tall and to have long arms with a unique aggressiveness on both the ball and opposing receivers. By NFL rules, corners must do that without contacting the receiver beyond 5 yards from the line of scrimmage.
Flowers had all the traits Carroll loves. So the Seahawks drafted him in the spring of 2018, to replace the sent-away Richard Sherman as Shaquill Griffin’s partner at starting cornerback in Seattle.
Flowers adapted quickly to Carroll’s step-kick technique that requires cornerbacks to step at receivers on the line at the snap then turn and step with them in tight coverage.
How quickly? He was starting by week one of his rookie season.
The position switch was no big deal to Flowers.
He’d been through far more trying challenges.
Flowers was a redshirt sophomore for undefeated and fourth-ranked Oklahoma State in late November 2015. He was preparing for a top-10 showdown with Baylor. Two days before the game, just as his parents were readying for their regular drive from Converse home to Stillwater to see their son play again, his father, Rodney Flowers, had his bones and his life shattered.
Driving his motorcycle on his way home from work as an MRI technician, a car suddenly pulled out in front of Flowers’ father. The force of his impact with the car catapulted him off the bike through the air. As detailed in a 2016 story in The Oklahoman, Rodney Flowers broke his leg and ankle, dislocated a shoulder, had severe injuries to his abdomen and bladder and completely ruined his pelvis.
The Oklahoman reported doctors put him in a medically induced coma. Doctors initially gave him a 50-50 chance of survival.
Instead of getting what had become a weekly call from his dad that he and his mother were on their way to see him play, Tre got an urgent call from his mother, Crystal.
His mother told him his father had been in a bad accident. Flowers could hear responding police officers talking to his aunt over the phone. He didn’t need to be home to know how serious the situation was. He could hear it in his mother’s voice.
Mom told him not to come home, because it’s an 8-1/2-hour drive from Stillwater to San Antonio. So he spent an interminable night in Stillwater. He credits his Oklahoma State position coach, Tim Duffie, for racing to him and staying with him all that night.
“The rest of my life, I will always have love for Coach Duffie,” Flowers told the Oklahoma State Athletics’ website in 2016.
The next day, Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy solved the issue of Flowers’ long drive home. He and his staff checked with compliance officers and ensured it was permitted by the NCAA, then they arranged to put Flowers on a private jet to fly home to Texas.
By 8 a.m. that Friday, a son was seeing a father in a way no one should.
Tre broke down when he arrived at the hospital. He saw his father in his critical state and his mother devastated.
“It was hard, seeing my mom like that, seeing my family like that,” Flowers told OSU Athletics, fighting back tears eight months later. “Words won’t describe it.
“(Football) was the furthest thing from my mind.”
Yet after that Friday in Texas, his mother encouraged Tre to play in the following day’s game back in Stillwater. He broke up a pass and was all over the field against Baylor. Oklahoma State lost the game — but gained a ton of respect for its defensive back and his heart.
The feeling was mutual.
Tre’s dad’s condition stabilized while his son was playing that day, but he stayed in the coma for a month. When his dad came out of the coma, he watched replays of Tre’s games he missed. He told his son he couldn’t believe Tre played so well given the circumstances, especially against Baylor.
His father eventually left in-patient hospital care but was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and needed more surgeries. He’s been working through those the last couple years, as his son finished off an All-Big 12 season in 2017 for the Cowboys.
Last season in 15 games as a Seahawks rookie, Flowers knocked down six passes. He forced three fumbles. He recovered two fumbles and had 67 tackles.
But he didn’t have an interception. That was his big critique of his debut season.
He’s triple-corrected that deficiency this season.
Flowers got his third interception in 12 games Monday night, in the fourth quarter of Seattle’s win over Minnesota. He tapped Kirk Cousins’ pass to himself along the sideline as he was falling down in coverage. Flowers’ remarkable grab was among the huge defensive plays that sparked the Seahawks’ 24 unanswered points in their 37-30 win.
That victory has Seattle in first place in the NFC West, currently holding the second playoff seed in the NFC. If they beat L.A. Sunday, the Seahawks will clinch a playoff spot.
“He’s really doing well. He’s playing better,” Carroll said. “He’s playing more complete a game. And his mentality is really strong and he’s really believing in himself.
“It’s such a difficult position to play out there, and particularly for a guy that doesn’t have it in his history. He’s really grown into his own. He’s such a beautiful athlete and he’s such a good competitor, and he’s a tough guy.
“It’s great to see him coming through and making it.”
Flowers made his latest standout play while sick. Really sick.
“He puked in the garbage can, in between plays, one time in 7-on-7, or something like that,” Carroll said of practices last week.
“A little too graphic?”
Um...
Flowers lost 12 pounds in a matter of days. He didn’t have Thanksgiving dinner until Sunday, three days later.
“Leftovers,” he said, grumbling.
Get this: During practices last week he was wearing a surgical mask, to prevent his teammates from getting ill. Seven others got sick anyway, including top wide receiver Tyler Lockett.
“It was pretty crazy,” he said. “They tried to send me home. I wasn’t taking that for an answer. I had to put on the doctor mask. Then I looked I was going to die out here.
“I’m glad all of that is over with. We’re trying to get back to normal.”
Standout play is what’s been normal for Flowers in his second season at cornerback. His defensive coordinator sees positives even in Flowers’ mistakes.
The latest was the pass-interference penalty Flowers got in the fourth quarter Monday when he shoved Minnesota’s Stefon Diggs 30 yards down the field without looking back at the ball.
“Well, you’ve watched him over the two years. He’s certainly worked his tail off,” coach Ken Norton Jr. said Wednesday. “He’s always improving. He’s going to make his mistakes, and then he’s going to learn from his mistakes. I think we all get better by our failures and our mistakes.
“He’s certainly gotten better every single time has gone out. You see the development and the confidence that he has. His ability to really hone in and master his technique and to challenge and compete. I think that his mindset and his body and his frame allow him to grow as a player.
“He’s becoming a really good football player before our eyes.”
This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 7:19 AM.
