ATTALLA, Ala. — As a teenager, Freddie Kitchens drove a crimson-colored pickup truck (of course he did), and he drove it fast. Everything was a competition, which meant everything was also a race.
Kitchens and his friends would race from summer workouts to the golf course, from the golf course to baseball practice, from school to football practice and from football practice to the Kitchenses’ house, where his father cooked his locally famous chili on Thursday nights.
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“Freddie always lived in the fast lane,” said Raymond Farmer, Kitchens’ second high school football coach. “And he ain’t changed a bit.”
Before Kitchens drove his truck two hours down I-59 to the University of Alabama, and more than 25 years before he ever had to worry about snow affecting his drive to work in Cleveland, he zipped along Route 77 in a sports-crazed corner of a sports-crazed state. That’s Alabama Route 77, which takes you through small towns in the hills of Northeast Alabama, past the big churches and bigger high school football stadiums. It takes you through Attalla, population 5,827, and directly to Etowah High School, where Kitchens was a three-sport standout and Alabama’s Mr. Football in 1992.
(Photo credit: Zac Jackson / The Athletic)In Attalla, most everybody knows everybody else. And most everybody knew both Freddie Kitchens and the late Freddie Kitchens Sr. They remember how proud the father was of his son, how he never missed a practice or a game despite working 12-hour shifts in the local Goodyear plant, and how his father would tell people that his son was going to be the quarterback at Etowah long before young Freddie ever got to high school.
Now that he’s the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, the tales of a young Freddie get a little taller. It’s not that Kitchens was ever 10 feet tall and bulletproof, but he apparently threw fastballs so fast that opposing batters couldn’t see them. He threw a football so hard that he nearly ripped his top receiver’s finger off during one practice, and as his high school career wound down, college football coaches from across the country frequently visited those practices.
Former coaches and teammates remember him now as a natural leader, an intense competitor and the Friday night hero who ran for the winning touchdown in a six-overtime state playoff game in 1991. Local legends are born on those nights, and Kitchens is definitely that. But his fast track to the big office in Cleveland mostly reminded folks who are still here that Kitchens was always one of the boys, drove a pickup like his father did and has always maintained close relationships with both the cities that raised him and the people who knew him long before he pursued a coaching career.
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Kitchens grew up just on the Gadsden side of the Gadsden/Attalla line, right down the road from a steel mill. He’s been gone for decades now, but he still sounds (mostly) like he’s from Gadsden. Last week, he was formally and fancily introduced as coach of the Browns. Last weekend, he went out in the driveway and shoveled the snow himself after Cleveland got hit with a monster blizzard.
“Around here, even the businessmen have callouses,” joked David Rose, Kitchens’ high school teammate and longtime friend. “My daddy worked in the coal mine and at the steel mill. Freddie’s daddy worked in the Goodyear plant. When we grew up, just about everybody’s daddy worked at the mill or at Goodyear, and just about everybody was into sports.”
(Photo credit: Zac Jackson / The Athletic)As kids from this part of the state generally do, Kitchens chose Alabama over dozens of other scholarship offers. In his time at Alabama in the mid-1990s, he played under two head coaches and four offensive coordinators. And if that’s not enough of a link to an NFL organization that’s been searching for the right quarterback and the right coach since the year Kitchens moved to Glenville, W.Va., to give this coaching thing a shot, check out this story.
In 2001, Kitchens landed his first full-time college assistant’s gig at the University of North Texas. During the next season, he did a phone interview with a reporter who’d covered him since his Alabama days, and they talked about Kitchens finding a career path and a comfort level with the game he always loved the most. At the time, Alabama had been through a Browns-like carousel of change, and the writer joked that if he stuck with coaching, Kitchens might end up as head coach back at his alma mater down the road, say possibly in 2015.
“No, 2019,” Kitchens cracked.
Maybe the guy who wore tattered T-shirts to his college interview sessions and had to learn all those different offenses was always sort of training to wear that gaudy orange hoodie and run the offense he ran at the end of the 2018 season with the Browns. Kitchens has talked about Cleveland being a lot like where he grew up, how seeing the smokestacks along the highway on his drive to work brings back memories of his childhood and feeling the passion of Northeast Ohio football fans reminds him of home.
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In Kitchens’ first year as an assistant at Arizona, the Cardinals went to the Super Bowl. Not long after they won the NFC Championship Game, Rose called Kitchens to leave a congratulatory message. He knew his buddy would be busy, but he wanted to share his excitement. Later that night, Kitchens called back. He was his usual humble and caring self, more interested in talking about the Etowah Blue Devils than the Arizona Cardinals.
“David, let me ask you about something that’s been bothering me,” Kitchens said to Rose. “How in the hell did y’all lose to Fort Payne this year?”
The whole blue-collar to no-collar thing fits Kitchens well. He’s joked that he knows he doesn’t look like a quarterback and said he originally wore what’s become his signature orange “Dawg Pound” hoodie mostly because an equipment manager hung it in his locker.
“He knew I wasn’t afraid to look like a pumpkin,” Kitchens said.
But he was a quarterback and a darn good one. By all accounts, a young Freddie Kitchens had a cannon for an arm and a competitive spirit that made him a standout baseball and football player. Compared with most kids his age, he was bigger, stronger and fast — well, he was fast enough.
“With no training at all, he could go out and run a 4.8 in the 40-yard dash,” Farmer said. “And with training, he wasn’t gonna break a 4.8, but he was an athlete. And a good kid. He was raised tough.”
Like Kitchens, Toderick Malone went from Etowah to the University of Alabama. Malone caught his first college touchdown pass from Kitchens, and they started in the 1993 Alabama-Auburn game against their former high school quarterback, Patrick Nix. Nix was Etowah’s quarterback when Kitchens was a sophomore, making Kitchens an unconventional but effective wide receiver before he had a clear path to his best position.
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“Freddie could catch,” Malone said. “He was an athlete. He could do anything. In baseball, guys couldn’t catch up with the gas he was throwing. In basketball, Freddie was the big bruiser. He’d push people around. He’d get the rebound and put it back up.”
When the Browns formally introduced Kitchens as their new head coach last week, general manager John Dorsey described Kitchens as “a guy who’s dedicated his whole life to football.” The late Freddie Kitchens Sr. made sure of that.
From coaching him with the Mountain Rams youth football team in Gadsden to later being there to watch him coach in the Super Bowl, Kitchens Sr. was always involved with his son. Always coaching, always pushing, always beaming.
“Freddie’s daddy was a character,” said Larry Means, who’s now serving in his second stint as the mayor of Attalla. “He was devoted to his kids and to all kids in sports, really. He was tough on Freddie but he was so proud of him, too. Everybody around here knew Freddie Sr., and he made sure everyone knew about his son.”
(Photo credit: Zac Jackson / The Athletic)Family came first in Etowah County. In many cases, football wasn’t far behind. Farmer almost didn’t take the head coaching job at Etowah when it opened ahead of Kitchens’ senior year “because I wasn’t sure I wanted my kids to hear the abuse I was going to take if we didn’t win.” Farmer always saw Kitchens as a coach, chuckles at Kitchens’ stories of being chewed out by Bill Parcells and calls his former quarterback’s rise in the coaching world “special” but not surprising.
“Freddie is a player’s coach,” Farmer said. “I think one of the first things he did up there in Cleveland was get all the players together and ask, ‘What do we do best? What are you comfortable doing?’ So what you saw on Sundays was a bunch of different stuff, but I think it was just dressing on a simple thought. Do what works. It takes courage to not be the smartest guy in the room and just find what works.”
Folks in Northeast Alabama don’t realize just how popular Kitchens is in Cleveland after his offense became the Browns’ best in 30 years. But they know they’ve become Browns fans themselves.
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“We’re sitting here telling all those old stories, and you keep hearing ‘best friends,’ ” Rose said. “I’d say there are 12-15 of us who all call each other ‘best friends.’ Some are still around, a lot of them have moved away and it’s been a long time since we were all running around town. I don’t know if Freddie stays in touch with everybody, but he cares. When I lost my mom a few years back, he was one of the first to call.”
If you thought some of Kitchens’ December play calls were aggressive, check out his elementary school career goals.
“When we were real young, Freddie and I had this idea we were gonna go pro,” Rose said. “We were gonna go to L.A. We were gonna have all these women and go win the Super Bowl. We thought we had it all figured out.”
Around Alabama, most kids dream of winning the Iron Bowl. Rose’s older brother played at the University of Alabama in the late 1980s and Kitchens tagged along with the family to a game.
“I think from that moment he always kind of saw himself wanting to play there,” David Rose said. “We walked all the way around the stadium, and on the way home, he talked about how someday he was going to play there. He never stopped talking about it, actually. ”
Alabama ultimately won out over Georgia in Kitchens’ recruitment, but Washington State was the first to come down Route 77 for an up-close look. Then-Cougars coach Mike Price visited Etowah during sanctioned spring football, and on what was an intentionally pass-heavy day for Kitchens, Farmer remembers Price watching from the sideline, clearly impressed.
“If Freddie hadn’t already sold himself on film, he did that day,” Farmer said. “Freddie was on his game. He could throw it soft, and he could throw it through the wall. He threw some beauties. After the practice coach Price asked me, ‘So, what kind of car would Freddie’s daddy like to drive?’ He was kidding, I think.”
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Today, Todd Lamberth is the athletic director at Gadsden High School. He jokes that in the early 1990s he was “the best backup quarterback in the state of Alabama. It’s just that nobody knew it because Freddie was so dang good.”
Lamberth moved to receiver, and during that six-overtime Etowah playoff win in 1991, Lamberth caught one of Kitchens’ five touchdown passes. Calling his own number, the guy who now calls the plays for the Browns scored the winning touchdown on a 3-yard rush to seal a 69-63 victory.
“It was a dive play,” Farmer said of the game-winner. “He faked to the fullback and went around the end. The linebacker came up and Freddie just kind of ran right through him.”
Though that game stands out for many reasons, Lamberth says it sums up their childhood. They were always playing some sport, always competing and generally ended up with Kitchens playing the hero.
“Toderick scored most of the touchdowns, but Freddie always had the ball in his hands in the big moments,” Lamberth said. “Competition is all we knew. Freddie was always a leader, always kind of a coach on the field. So many times, in every sport, he just willed our team to win.
“He’s always been a football guy. This is college football country, and I was more of a baseball guy. I couldn’t tell you who’s in the AFC and who’s in the NFC, but Freddie knew and followed all that stuff. We played ‘Tecmo Bowl’ on the old Nintendo. I didn’t want to play because I wasn’t good at video games, and I hated losing to him at anything. So he’d make me a deal. I could be Bo Jackson’s team and he’d be one of the worst teams. And he’d still smoke me.”
Because everything was a competition, everything was also a race. Kitchens, Lamberth and their other buddies would race from morning throwing sessions to the golf course, where they’d compete like they were in the Masters. They’d race to someone’s house for a night of video games or card games, then race back to practice in the morning.
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“I’d study the shortcuts,” Lamberth said. “And if I won using a shortcut, it was a guarantee Freddie would take that way the next time.”
“Tecmo Bowl” Bo Jackson was unstoppable. Little League Freddie Kitchens was unhittable.
Long before he threw a football so hard that Toderick Malone almost lost a finger trying to catch it, Kitchens threw a baseball past him. And for many years, he threw lots of baseballs past lots of batters across Alabama.
“At first I thought Freddie was gonna get drafted in baseball,” Malone said. “He had that rocket arm. He was probably throwing 80 mph at 12 years old, and in high school, I know he threw in the 90s. But past that, I knew coaching was in his pedigree. My mom always said that Freddie was going to be a coach. I’d be mad that we lost or frustrated because I was getting double-teamed and she’d tell me to knock off the whining, that I should just listen to Freddie.
“She’d say, ‘I like the way Freddie orchestrates things. He’s teaching out there. You gotta listen to Freddie. He knows what he’s talking about.’ ”
Kitchens brought both major college football coaches and Major League Baseball scouts to Etowah in the early 1990s. He also played baseball at Alabama before suffering a torn pectoral and walking away from baseball until his football career was over. In his five years at Alabama, Kitchens played in 36 games. He threw for more than 4,600 yards and had 30 career touchdown passes.
Bruce Arians was the offensive coordinator for Kitchens’ last college season. Nearly 20 years before Arians became head coach of the Cardinals and kept Kitchens on his staff, his nickname for Kitchens was “Thick.” Opposing fans — and sometimes angry Alabama fans — called him much worse.
“I think looking back now, Freddie handling all the change and not having his (college) career go the way we all thought it would go probably made him a better coach,” Farmer said. “It don’t matter now, but it just seems like all that change kept him from really ever getting comfortable and reaching his potential.”
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After graduating from Alabama, Kitchens stayed in Tuscaloosa. He sold cars during the week and washed FedEx trucks on the weekends. Listening to Alabama games on the radio while washing trucks made Kitchens think, not about the glory days or missed opportunities, but about his future.
“I knew I couldn’t live without football,” he said.
In 1999, he landed an entry-level coaching job at Division II Glenville State. The next year, he served as a graduate assistant under Nick Saban at LSU. He then coached three years at North Texas and two at Mississippi State before becoming tight ends coach on Bill Parcells’ staff with the Dallas Cowboys in 2006.
When Kitchens was at North Texas and headed home for a game against his alma mater, longtime Alabama sportswriter Mark Edwards had reached out to him about doing a story on his coaching career. They talked on the phone, and they reminisced, and they talked about Kitchens continuing on a coaching ascent. Edwards remembers Kitchens shrugging off all the coaching changes during his Alabama career as possible preparation for a coaching career.
“I think he was always kind of built for coaching,” Edwards said. “When I was on the Alabama beat, I remember Freddie as someone who was smart, got along with people and was comfortable in his own skin. He was really confident for a young person dealing with a lot of pressure. And frankly, it was a tough time for Alabama. At the time there was no sign that a Nick Saban was going to come along and stabilize the program, let alone get it near the level he has.”
Edwards said he and Kitchens were “totally joking” about Kitchens someday returning to Tuscaloosa as head coach, and “just carrying on the joke” when Kitchens said during a conversation 17 years ago that he might be ready for a head-coaching job by 2019. Last week, in the first month of 2019, Edwards was sitting in his office when he ran across a wire picture of Kitchens being formally introduced as head coach of the Cleveland Browns.
“When I saw him wearing the ballcap with the suit, I chuckled,” Edwards said. “That’s the most Freddie Kitchens thing ever.”
A few years back, the Arizona Cardinals played in Atlanta and Kitchens showed up to a state playoff game to watch Tucker High School, where Malone is now an assistant coach. Kitchens addressed the team before the game and caught up with Malone for a round of laughs and memories about their days on the field at Etowah and Alabama.
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Last month, Malone was watching a Browns game when he saw Jarvis Landry take an inside handoff on a wing-T type of play and take off for a big gain.
“Now, the last thing I’m trying to say is that Freddie Kitchens is stealing plays from some high school team in Georgia,” Malone said. “But the way (Landry) kind of hid outside the tackle while they faked to the halfback, that looked a whole lot like one of our plays. And one thing I know about Freddie is that he’s always working.”
Malone can’t say with any certainty that Kitchens was borrowing offensive concepts that night, but he proudly speaks of some less-fortunate kids in the Tucker High program who later got a box of gloves and other gear sent to them by Kitchens.
“Freddie cares about other people and wants the best for kids,” Malone said. “He’s just like his dad. His dad treated everyone the same. If you were out there acting up he was gonna give you the business, but if you were on board you were always welcome at his house or on his team. Everyone was family.
“Freddie’s dad drove this old red truck. He was involved in everything sports-wise, and he’d put anybody who wanted to play in the back of that truck like, ‘Get in, we’re going to practice.’ And a lot of kids hopped in.”
(Photo credit: Zac Jackson / The Athletic)Before his death in 2015, Freddie Sr. worked almost year-round on the Freddie Kitchens Football Camp, a free event the younger Kitchens started not long after the end of his college career. Malone was involved. So were more of their former teammates from Etowah and Alabama. The local grocery store fed the campers. Local businesses pitched in, too, as Kitchens returned from wherever he was coaching to either Attalla or Gadsden to host as many as 300 kids for the single-day event.
“For a long time, he reached a lot of kids with that camp,” Mayor Means said. “I think one reason the camp ended (last year) was that Freddie misses his daddy and it’s not the same. The camp was his daddy’s baby, but it meant a lot to Freddie, too. He told me once if they had one kid show up or 250, that was OK. He just wanted to give back.
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“Freddie didn’t have the money to go to those bigger camps when he was growing up, so he was bringing something really special to kids just like him. And right here. Ain’t no telling how much of his own money he spent over the years on the camp. He didn’t worry about it.”
Said Malone: “His dad was a big part of the camp. I think the other reason we stopped is we got old and some of the kids don’t know us anymore. It’s time for someone else to do it. But the kids loved it. We’d have over 300 kids and Freddie would feed them, talk to them, coach ’em up. I don’t care if he meets you one time. He has a way of making people feel special and getting the best out of them.”
In a letter he penned last spring to announce the end of the camp, Kitchens wrote of fondly remembering his football and baseball games as far back as elementary school and of idolizing local high school football stars when he was a child.
“I felt like I was living in the greatest place on earth,” he wrote.
From playing for the Mountain Rams — coached by his dad, of course — to coaching on national TV next season against the Rams, Kitchens has come a long way. All without forgetting where he came from.
“If Cleveland is like everybody says it is, it’s the perfect spot for Freddie,” Rose said. “I was always the middle linebacker in high school. Freddie a couple times would come up to me and almost beg me: ‘Trade me. Just let me run in (at linebacker) for a play or two and tee off on somebody.’ I told him he was crazy, that coach was gonna grab both of us by the neck if I let him go in for me.
“He kept asking for two years. He’s a four-star recruit at quarterback and he wants to run in and play linebacker. But that was his mentality. So that’s what Cleveland is getting as coach. An incredible person, a quarterback, but a good ol’ boy with a linebacker’s mentality.”
(Top photo: Freddie Kitchens at Alabama in 1996: Craig Jones / Getty Images)
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