Von Miller is one of the very best players in football, with one of the very richest contracts in football. He has endorsement deals, a Super Bowl MVP, a flatulence problem, and a healthy trolling habit. What we’re saying is, he contains multitudes. But perhaps nobody realized just how much there is to the man behind those big eyeglasses and the number 58.
Among the revelations of a profile of Miller in The Ringer — his obsession with the Superman roller coaster at Magic Mountain theme park, his determination to become a chicken farming magnate — nothing beats the anecdote right at the top of the piece, wherein Miller lays out his Youtube-assisted ideas for how humans will evolve into the future:
“In the next 5,000 years there won’t be any more freckles or red hair,” says Denver Broncos linebacker Von Miller. “That’s the way humans are evolving.” Miller is sitting in Venice, California, during an offseason in which he’s become one of the most famous athletes in America. He’s stopped dealing himself cards so that he can focus fully on recounting a particularly juicy internet deep dive that led him to a batch of information he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about.
“We will all eventually be bald, too,” he adds, removing his hat and rubbing the thin layer of hair atop his head. “We lose hair because it helps us cool our brains faster. The smarter we get, the less hair we need, because our brains need to be cool. Also, we will lose another toe. We will have four toes.”
[…]
“It’s not like I’ll be around for this,” the Super Bowl MVP says of a freckle-less, four-toed future. “But I think it’s dope.”
There’s not much more we can say to his vision of a future containing what sounds like either the future people from South Park or just the Simpsons, other than “Sure, okay Von.” But at least, unlike other Youtube rabbit holers, Von regards all this pseudo-information with a sense of wonder and openness, rather than paranoia and yelling, as we’ve come to expect. Keep being you, Von.
(Via The Ringer)