Sam McGuffie: Viral Texas high school football star turned Olympic bobsledder

Lake Placid played host to Sam McGuffie's first time down a real bobsled track. He'd shown promise pushing a wheeled practice sled and had seen others taken the plunge. Finally, it was his time. It'd be a "joyride," he thought, like an icy-white, tubed water slide reminiscent of those carefree, idle summers at the pool back in sweaty Houston, right? "It’s nothing like that. It’s the polar opposite of that. It’s violent," McGuffie said. "It’s like being put in a garbage can and kicked down a flight of stairs for a minute straight." He felt nauseated and unsure on his feet after his first trip down the track, like he'd just survived a car crash. McGuffie knew his next step. Do it again. [caption id="attachment_36979" align="alignright" width="350"] Photo by Molly Choma[/caption] "I brought my barf bag with me," he said.  Less than three years after his first ride down the ice, he'll represent the United States at the Winter Olympics this February in PyeongChang, South Korea. And spare the skepticism. He's not a publicity stunt. "For his size, he’s one of the best we’ve got," said coach Brian Shimer, who competed in five Winter Olympics and earned a bronze medal in 2002, cementing his status as an American bobsledding legend. "He’s probably our top push athlete. That's why he's there." The track never got any more tranquil for McGuffie, but no one in his new sport may be better equipped to handle a bumpy ride. -- No number of gold medals will knock McGuffie's high school mixtape off the first page of his Google results. The one-time Cypress Fair star went viral before going viral was an aspiration for anyone who uploads a video onto YouTube. "People still bring it up," McGuffie said. "That’s probably how I’ll be remembered until I die--just jumping over people." The full, grainy, 30-minute version of McGuffie's gripping exhibition of juking, hurdling and pure, straight-line speed isn't readily available. And good luck finding the original upload anywhere on the internet. But McGuffie's mixtape, first uploaded to YouTube back in the site's wobbly, toddling days in February 2007, lives on in snippets and short clips on any site that hosts video. It turned him into one of the first Internet legends, right alongside dramatic chipmunk, sneezing panda, "Charlie bit me" and "Chocolate Rain." One undersized running back from Texas was doing things people had never seen on a football field. IT made him larger than life. Before long, his notoriety followed suit, along with several million views. "Back when Myspace was a big thing, it was on Tom’s profile, in his bio," McGuffie said. He ran for 3,121 yards and 44 scores as a junior, backing up an eye-popping highlight tape with numbers that proved the highlights were the norm, not cherrypicked outliers. By the end of his career at Cy-Fair, he'd become a four-star recruit and a consensus national top 10 running back, signing with Rich Rodriguez and Michigan over USC, Notre Dame and Texas A&M. [caption id="attachment_36984" align="alignleft" width="350"] Courtesy Rice Athletics[/caption] Ten months, 661 total yards, four touchdowns and three concussions later, he was transferring back home to Houston to play for David Bailiff at Rice. He scored nine times and amassed 1,267 yards from scrimmage in 2010, his first season on the field. The Owls used him as a receiver/running back hybrid, allowing him to showcase his quickness in the open field on bubble screens and outside runs. Injuries cost him most of his 2011 season, limiting him in the first five games and keeping him off the field in the final five. In 2012, he moved to receiver full-time and caught 54 passes, helping the Owls make a bowl game for the first time since 2008. His speed made him an intriguing NFL prospect, but his modest production and injury history gave pro scouts pause. He went undrafted and after bouncing around with brief stops in Oakland, Arizona and New England, over the next year tried his luck up north in Canada in the CFL. Winnipeg released him after just one season and, his football career met an unofficial end. [caption id="attachment_36985" align="alignright" width="350"] Courtesy Rice Athletics[/caption] However, he'd also established himself as a star track athlete in both Houston and Ann Arbor. One of his coaches at Rice, Casey Thom, was a Nebraska grad and pointed out a famed Husker, Curt Tomasevicz, had traded in his face mask for a visor and won a gold medal in 2010 as a bobsledder. He saw a similar physique in his former hurdler and sprinter and a frustration over a football career on life support. He did it," Thom told McGuffie. "Shoot, I think you could do it." So McGuffie decided to try. One of Tomasevicz's teammates in the four-man sled at the 2010 Games, the late Steven Holcomb, took McGuffie under his wing and shared the sled with him on McGuffie's memorable first time down a track. Shimer caught wind of McGuffie's intention and quickly came across the infamous McGuffie mixtape. He'd been teammates with Herschel Walker at the 1992 Games, but the ex-NFL running back left the sport almost as quickly as he'd joined it. Could McGuffie have similar success and pair it with an earnest commitment to the sport? McGuffie's relationship with the bobsledding had barely established itself as an acquaintance before USA Bobsled enlisted him to come to Lake Placid for the sport's rookie camp. He planned to fly standby on a buddy pass, but he was a no-show when the 15-20 other participants arrived. Day 2 and Day 3 arrived. McGuffie didn't. "We’re teaching technique and how to push because they have an evaluation competition at the end of the week," Shimer said.  Day 4 comes. McGuffie was still MIA. "We hear he’s sleeping in an airport somewhere," Shimer said. [caption id="attachment_36980" align="alignleft" width="350"] Photo by Molly Choma[/caption] During a phone call the next day, McGuffie apologizes, and resigns himself to missing the camp. A U.S. Bobsled assistant asked Shimer for his advice. He answered with four words.  "Just get him here." McGuffie arrived the day before the team push competition. Shimer showed him some basic techniques, but was intent on keeping his instructions simple in the beginning, so he demonstrated and told McGuffie to duplicate what he saw. "Just be an athlete," Shimer remembers telling him. The next day, the camp assembled for the initial competition. "He hadn’t practiced except for that one day," Shimer said. "He finished second. He was just an athlete. We knew this kid was going to be something special."  Shimer arranged for McGuffie to remain in Lake Placid for the next few weeks to continue his training. By October, just a couple months after first camp that summer, McGuffie was introduced as an official member of the USA Bobsled National Team. "Playing running back is all explosive movements," McGuffie said, "and that’s what bobsledding is."  From the first time someone mentioned the sport to him, McGuffie set his aim at competing in the Olympics. Now, at his first opportunity, he's doing it. [caption id="attachment_36981" align="alignright" width="350"] Photo by Molly Choma[/caption] He's already collected five medals at the World Cup, including a pair of golds. Shimer has designs on McGuffie driving eventually, but for now, he's found a role as the brakeman in both the two and four-man events in PyeongChang. He's in the back of the sled and bent over, flattened like a pancake. With no visual aids, he's forced to study the track and know every curve just as well as his driver, Codie Bascue. "If you don’t know the track, you won’t know when to pull the brakes and you will go flying off the track," McGuffie said.  When a run's finished, McGuffie's left taking stock of the new bruises that magically appear on his arms and legs, thanks to the "herky-jerky" nature of any trip from the top of a hill to the bottom. It's all in a day's work as he builds a new legacy and chases a new goal in a new sport in a new climate, one he didn't love in his days at Michigan. He's added weight, checking in at around 210 pounds now. He played football at closer to 190 pounds. "There’s a lot of big, fast, strong guys who can’t push a bobsled," McGuffie said. "Some people can." So why has McGuffie cemented his spot as one of the sport's rising stars? "Man, if I could answer that question," Shimer said, trailing off. "I don’t know. I guess it’s hard to say other than he’s a natural athlete. He has body awareness, knows how to apply pressure to the sled. He doesn’t think a lot about it. He reacts."  Shimer said McGuffie compares favorably to Walker, but instead of hanging up his spikes after a year like Walker did after competing in the 1992 Games, McGuffie has leaned into his new sport and has seen steady improvement over the three years since he began. [caption id="attachment_36982" align="alignleft" width="350"] Photo by Molly Choma[/caption] "He gets the whole picture now. He knows how important it is for the pilot to have trust in him," Shimer said. "He’s one of the leaders now. The guys look to him when he steps on a sled. The other guys that are on the team, he’s the guy they want to push with. He’s the guy they want to be with. They know if he’s on the sled, they’re going to look good on the sled. He made that name for himself, especially this year with some really outstanding performances." Of course, slicing off your fingertips in a bobsled accident and trying to get back on the track to push later that day has a way of ingratiating an athlete to his teammates, too. That happened in Austria in February 2016. While unloading a 400-pound sled, his fingers got pinned on a sharp steel loading deck, slicing them vertically. "That was pretty gruesome. I’ve never seen it that bad. I’ve seen guys jam a finger. This was--I couldn’t believe it. I just said don’t look at your hand," Shimer said. "He took it like a champ." It cost him a few of the pads on his fingertips--and time away from training. But he didn't break any bones or suffer any long-term damage. And all his fingernails are still intact. "There’s so many nerves on the tips of your fingers. When you damage them like that, you have to start grabbing stuff in a different way and getting a feel for stuff again. But they’re alright now. It feels like the bone’s really close to the skin now," McGuffie said.  McGuffie has spent much of the last few months training in Germany and Austria, around 5,000 miles away from the Games' home in South Korea. His circuitous journey to the Olympics has felt far longer. "There’s been so many changes in my life, from where I’ve been to where I’m going," McGuffie said. "It's been a crazy ride." The medal stand next month could be just the next step. The Americans won't be favored to win any event, but a medal will be in reach for McGuffie in both events. Bascue, who'll be driving in both events, will have to overcome inexperience vs. drivers from the German, Canadian and Latvian teams. "They have big starts. Bigger than Cody’s ever had. But now he’s got McGuffie," Shimer said, "and McGuffie puts him in contention." 

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