Telander: In tiny Gooding, Idaho, football and farm work made Chicago Bears Colston Loveland NFL-ready

GOODING, Idaho - The place where you grow up can shape you as surely as a chisel shapes wood. If you grew up in Gooding, Idaho, you’d be shaped by it. Chicago Bears first-round draft pick Colston Loveland most assuredly was.

Driving here from Boise—110 miles southeast over foothills and steppes and endless vistas filled with spring-blooming tumbleweed (Russian thistle and the like)--is a journey into another world. It’s not that this isn’t America, since there are McDonalds and fueling stations and rest areas every so often along the 80-mph speed limit straightaway.  

It’s that out here toward the Utah/Wyoming border under a blazing sun, where humans thin out and the sky widens you can feel the harshness of the land, the loneliness of it, the toughness it must require to make a go of it in these parts.

"They don’t wake up and watch TV here," says Jonas Brady, 43, a UPS driver from Twin Falls, stopping off at the Sinclair gas station in Gooding. "They have their fun, but man, they work. The toughness is next level."

Loveland, the Bears surprise pick at No. 10 overall, the first tight end taken in the draft, grew up across from his maternal grandfather’s farm, down a winding, shoulder-less, two-lane blacktop a mile or so off Route 46. In high school he worked at his uncle’s farm and his grandfather’s place, baling hay, doing heavy chores, dealing with cattle. Next level stuff.

"During his high school career he’d get up at six in the morning and he’d go brand cows and then come home, take a nap, and then go play a football game," his dad Chad Loveland has said.

When Jim Harbaugh came to Gooding to recruit Loveland to Michigan, the coach was so impressed with the young man and the place that he spent the night at Grandpa’s house, blanketed on the living room couch, as legend has it, before joining Loveland in the morning for a weight training workout. At any rate, Harbaugh’s visit cemented the deal for Loveland to become a Wolverine, win a national championship, and ultimately be drafted before his senior year in college.

You watch Loveland in game film and you see an athlete who is tall and solid (6'5", 248 lbs.), with long arms, easy movements, and those great wide receiver hands every quarterback covets. Loveland’s hands are indeed big—10 inches from thumb to pinkie—and soft—he reaches out and grabs the ball like a basketball player. But his hands are also tough as barbwire, which he handled on the ranch.

It sounds unlikely to say a person can be made stronger in one activity from success in another—ranch work to football, say—but the parallel comes from the philosophy, the labor, the want-to that each demands. Quite simply: If you worked your butt off and accepted pain in one, you can work your butt off and accept pain in the other.

"Very blue collar, get to work, get it done," is how 21-year old Loveland has described his background, the background of Gooding (pop. 3,800) itself. 

The town was founded in 1908 by Frank R. Gooding, a local sheep rancher and U.S. Senator (hence the "Senators" nickname for Gooding High School teams), and you have to remember this place is not near anything. Until you get out along the rivers or near a farmhouse or into the distant valleys receding into the mountains, there aren’t even any trees.

Main Street is basically Route 46 barreling through town. Before you arrive you see fields with hay bales stacked two stories high. Cows and steers congregate.

There are a pair of Mexican restaurants in the worn-down town, also Mulligan’s Bar and Zeppe’s Pizza & Subs. At the corner of Idaho Street and 5th Avenue West is the Brockman Family Chiropractic. That place must be handy for strained backs and necks from ranch work and football.

"Football is everything here," agrees Nick Carter, 32, a lifelong Gooding resident and a mechanic at the local Les Schwab tire center. "We all love it. We all support each other. 'Friday Night Lights' are everything."

And yet Gooding High (enrollment: 375) has produced but one next level player in memory: Colston Loveland. With a current school enrollment of 375, it’s not hard to see why. Consider that Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill. has three times that amount in its freshman class.

"Gooding was nothing, a joke for us," says UPS guy Brady, who played for Twin Falls High School back when it was one of the largest 5A schools in the state.

"It’s astonishing for a kid from this little town to be a first round pick in the NFL. I mean, astonishing."

And yet, it happened. It’s happening. Loveland just signed a four-year guaranteed $26.64 million contract with the Bears, including a $16 million signing bonus. And according to old coach Harbaugh, that’s a steal. We won’t mention that Loveland missed the NFL combine and still can’t practice because of right shoulder surgery. He’s young; he’ll heal.

"He’s a really, really, really, really great kid," Harbaugh said in an online interview after the draft. "Smart pick by the Chicago Bears. They are getting a really great football player." Any more "really’s" and you figure the Bears maybe signed the pope.

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If you drive 20 minutes farther east out of Gooding on Route 26 to Shoshone, then head north for 56 miles on Route 75 into the Sawtooth National Forest in the Bitterroot Range of the Rocky Mountains, you’ll hit the gorgeous ski resort town of Sun Valley. Just know that Sun Valley, with its rich folks and winter Olympic training sites is to Gooding as French pastry is to a slice of wheat bread.

Both are the right choice at times. The Bears know which one they need now. As the "Welcome to Gooding" sign says in a weed-strewn field as you enter town, below and next to the image of a tractor, a hay wagon and a cow: "GATEWAY TO A GOOD LIFE."

The Bears want ranch life to lead the way.

Dig deeper:

Want to know more about Colston Loveland? Take a look at recent Fox 32 Sports coverage about the Bears top draft pick!

• Colston Loveland's top priority: Takeaways from the first day of Chicago Bears Rookie Minicamp
• How Colston Loveland grew from branding calves into a refuse-to-lose tight end the Chicago Bears needed
• Who is Colston Loveland? 5 things to know about the Chicago Bears first-round pick
• Why the Chicago Bears tabbed Colston Loveland - not Tyler Warren - to complete their TE room
• Chicago Bears select Colston Loveland with No. 10 overall pick in 2025 NFL Draft

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