That speed on the field again was familiar and yet captivating. No. 57 zipping across the grass of Levi’s Stadium. A flash of red. Like running into an old friend for the first time in a while.
Is that … ?
He zipped past linebacker Dee Winters, who was headed for the same target, and swallowed up Los Angeles Rams running back Kyren Williams in Week 15. That violence on the field again was familiar, a tangible ferociousness, vivid like a jarring memory.
That was Dre Greenlaw.
The same San Francisco 49ers linebacker who the world watched bouncing on the sidelines in the second quarter of the Super Bowl in Las Vegas last February, eager to get back in the game, then buckling as he ran onto the field.
On Dec. 12, he was back — 305 days after his left Achilles snapped in the first half of the biggest game of his life — resembling the same menacing linebacker. He never doubted he’d make it back from the injury. Never. He remained certain he’d return to being an All-Pro-caliber linebacker.
His return was short-lived. It lasted 34 snaps over two games, including four in a loss at Miami the following week before getting pulled due to nagging knee and calf soreness — concerning, considering it’s the same leg as his repaired Achilles. The 49ers have been eliminated from postseason contention, so risking future injury wasn’t necessary. But Greenlaw found some validation in those 34 snaps. The 49ers defense was markedly better with him on the field. He looked every bit impactful in what proved to be a flash. He validated his internal belief that he’d come back the same player.
The repairing of his Achilles was his ninth surgery. Physical pain is a conquest Greenlaw has mastered. Even the worst pain he’s felt goes away over time and can be diminished with analgesics. Overcoming is but a matter of endurance. The will to withstand. If he can touch the scar, he knows he can conquer it.
Dre Greenlaw gets carted off the field after the Achilles injury he suffered during Super Bowl LVIII in February. It’d be 305 days before he played again. (Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
The scars he can’t touch are tougher to manage. The emotional ones beneath the skin, hidden from view. Where he can’t see their gnarliness, can’t feel if they’re still tender, can’t know exactly where to apply the salve.
Greenlaw knows both kinds of pain. It’s the emotional pain that drives him through the physical. The scars inside mold his exterior.
The answer to how Greenlaw made his way back, how he instantly looked spectacular in his return, is found in those hidden scars. All that’s taken to endure them. His quest to heal them.
A torn Achilles is nothing compared to the terror of being alone in this world.
It’s not completely over, his return. The question of health lingers over this offseason. Greenlaw played just three games in 2021, totaled 36 games including playoffs the next two seasons, and will finish with two games played this season. He’s due a new contract this offseason, but his return ending prematurely leaves at least some uncertainty about the 49ers re-signing him and how much money he will command.
But in the grand scheme of Greenlaw, that’s a featherweight problem. Solvable by his same reliable motivations.
He’s 27 years old now. He’s made millions of dollars. But the hurt of a traumatizing childhood still drives him. The haunts of foster care, the struggles of a dysfunctional family, the grip of poverty — Greenlaw’s been fighting these impediments for most of his life.
Every day he defeats them. With his positive spirit. With his transparent honesty. With his relentless pursuit to unite his people and stave off loneliness.
“I wanted to play football, and I wanted to do it so I could bring my family together,” Greenlaw said. “I used to cry in foster care every night. I prayed for that every night. And that’s what I play for every night.”
The Achilles tendon is the strongest and thickest in the human body, a bundle of mini ropes made of collagen fibers connecting the calf to the heel bone. It’s capable of withstanding force upwards of eight times a person’s weight. For professional athletes, it can handle even more. So when the Achilles pops, it’s enough to crumble a mountain of muscles such as the 6-foot, 230-pound Greenlaw.
The surgery to fix it uses sutures to unify the detached tendon. The sutures are critical. They bear the stress of reconciliation. They unify so healing can happen. The better the suture, the better the outcome.
Greenlaw’s sutures, those binding the Achilles of one of the NFL’s best linebackers, are the latest technology. FiberWire, a patented brand of sutures, is made of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene and polyester. They’re anchored to the bone of his heel. They’re considered the most durable. They’re built to handle the demands of an Achilles.
As explained by orthopedic surgeon Dr. Nirav Pandya, a professor at UC San Francisco who serves as director of sports medicine for Benioff Children’s Hospital, the traditional technique to repair a torn Achilles was to sew the ends together and let the tendon heal. Then the rehabilitation could start.
“Which limited how quickly you could start doing rehab since the sutures were not strong enough to really hold up to any stress,” Dr. Pandya said. “With these newer techniques, you can push rehab early since the sutures are much stronger and less invasive. They can hold the repaired Achilles together while doing more aggressive rehabilitation early on, so you don’t deal with all the muscle atrophy, weakness and stiffness.”
Dre Greenlaw and Dee Winters tackle the Rams’ Kyren Williams on Dec. 12, in Greenlaw’s return from injury. Soreness in parts of the repaired leg led to an abrupt end to his season. (Kelley L Cox / Imagn Images)
It’s a fitting metaphor for Greenlaw. As a football player, he is an ultimate disruptor. It’s where he releases the animosity and bitterness, preventing it from metastasizing to his personality. He’s been groomed by life to become what he is now. A suture of the toughest kind.
Purpose. It’s the best explanation for why he still can exude warmth. Why people just enjoy being around him.
“Dre’s got a big heart and he wears it on his sleeve,” said 49ers All-Pro linebacker Fred Warner, Greenlaw’s good friend and brother in offense disruption. “I don’t even know how he smiles. That’s the crazy part. The guy’s been through a lot. But that’s why I respect him so much, because of how he carries himself. He’s made of the right stuff. He’s a different cat.”
Greenlaw earned the right to be callous. He’s felt the embrace of isolation. He’s known the depths of vulnerability. For the young Greenlaw, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was like climbing Kilimanjaro.
But the same resilience that powered the Conway, Ark., native through yet another injury has long been at work preserving the best parts of him.
Before his heart could be hardened, before the cold world had its way with his life, Greenlaw was filled with warmth. The kind poverty forces a family to protect.
“As long as we had each other, it was good,” he said. “I remember when we would go out with our family. To, like, a gathering or a reunion. It was a good time. We were deep. About 40 of us. We’d go to my aunt’s house. Everybody out there drinking, the kids in one section. You know, just having a good time. Those were the best memories.”
Once drugs grabbed hold of his family, it exacerbated already desperate circumstances. As Greenlaw explains it, his grandmother developed an opioid addiction after an injury. The matriarch’s struggles trickled down. His mother followed suit on drugs.
His blended family included his mother and her five children, including Greenlaw. And “my dad’s got five, six kids of his own, too.”
The instability continued when the Arkansas Department of Human Services revoked custody from Greenlaw’s mom, Lyra. His older brother, 13 at the time, moved to Virginia with an aunt. His sister went to live with her biological father, as did his two younger brothers, who shared the same dad.
Then 8 years old, Greenlaw moved in with his maternal grandfather. He calls him Paw-Paw. He was a concrete figure in the family, stable and consistent. A hard worker known for his kindness. He was a manager at Home Depot for years. Further proof it’s a small world: Greenlaw would come to learn that one 49ers teammate knew his grandfather. George Odum, a backup safety and special teams guru, played his college ball at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. During the pandemic, the Tennessee native took a job at Home Depot to make ends meet. He worked for Greenlaw’s grandfather.
“He was like an old school guy, by the book,” Odum said. “This was before I even knew Dre. One of my best friends, she knows Dre’s whole family and would tell me a little bit. Just hearing what he’d been through when he was younger … it kind of shows you what God does for you and how you never know what role people will fill.”
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This is the part of his story where Greenlaw gets a bit embarrassed. Not so much the station where he was in life, but how he responded. The man he’s become isn’t proud of who he was back then.
His lack of resources produced desperation. His broken home produced bouts with anger. He was a boy. One whose mind and body were absorbing traumas he couldn’t comprehend. Under that paradigm, his petty thievery and fighting and general malcontent behavior would be considered a common outcome. An appropriate response to deprivation.
“I was the worst,” he said. “(I) was bad. I was the baddest one.”
A smile breaks across his face as he shakes his head. It’s a look that says, “You don’t even know.”
Just before the sixth grade, he had to move in with his father, his wife and children. He had to leave Paw-Paw’s care after he was sent to the state’s juvenile detention center for a brief stint.
“I was being bad,” Greenlaw said. “I told you I was bad. My grandpa couldn’t take care of me.”
Living with his dad, Greenlaw had three of his brothers with him. He wasn’t exactly welcomed by his stepmother, for reasons he doesn’t dispute. But he would eventually be out of there, too, as he said his father lost parental rights.
“That’s when I got split up and went to foster care.”
The adversities foster care children face are well documented. Greenlaw, the only of his siblings who lived in foster care, toured quite a few homes in Arkansas before being adopted by one of the coaches at Fayetteville High School, setting him on the path that would lead to the NFL.
But while life in foster care gave Greenlaw an excuse to tap out on life, it produced a resolve. Reflection happened in foster care. The commitment to be better happened in foster care.
“Dre’s got a big heart and he wears it on his sleeve,” says 49ers teammate Fred Warner, a three-time All-Pro. “I don’t even know how he smiles. That’s the crazy part.” (Kyle Terada / USA Today)
By this point in his life, Greenlaw had already known so much trouble. He was in alternative school by the fifth grade. He fought a lot. He was suspended a lot. He was ripe for peer pressure, easy to goad into wrongdoing.
He could assuredly feel the angst his presence caused, the readiness to condemn him. Undoubtedly, those dark nights in strange beds, staring at foreign ceilings, produced the kind of questions that rattle an adolescent’s psyche.
When the rage melted into psychological pain, Greenlaw pointed at himself. He was strong for his age. Always. The neighborhood knew about him. His family members knew him as eager to get their back. In the event he ran into some foster kids trying him, it took one punch for people to leave him alone.
But growing with his physical fortitude was his mental.
“I had to learn how to not get angry,” Greenlaw said. “You know, you get angry so fast. You gotta learn how to control it. You can jeopardize relationships, you can jeopardize so many things just by an instance of flashing.”
The covenant Greenlaw made with himself was anchored in his desire to not push people away. Alongside his temper has always been kindness. Right next to his delinquency resided an indisputable congeniality.
Greenlaw was always likable. He knew if he leaned into that part of him, it would keep him out of trouble.
But most of all, it would solve the one reality haunting him. The one thing that terrified him to his core. That could only truly be quenched by the love of family.
Being alone.
“Yeah, for sure,” he said. “That was it.”
What’s a throbbing sensation in a ligament, a sharp sting in a joint, when you know the hollowness of isolation? What’s a grueling rehab of stretched tendons and burning muscles when you’ve felt the shackles of rage?
Missing the second half of a Super Bowl, knowing he may have been the difference in preventing the 25-22 overtime heartbreak, seems tortuous. Having a 34-snap return before being shut down for the season on the heels of contract negotiations seems unfortunate. But it’s manageable when you know the torture of a child missing his family.
Greenlaw has been built for these professional challenges.
“I feel like if I wanted to be a doctor after football, I could do that,” Greenlaw said. “Just because I have survived so much stuff, anything I put my mind to I can do it. I’ve got to want to do it first. But if I want to do it, I can do anything.”
The thing he wanted to do most was play football. And football would be the way to get his family back.
That’s why an Achilles injury is light work. Greenlaw already defeated bitterness and anger, low self-esteem and desperation. And pulled his family together.
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Greenlaw is the new hub of his people. His fame, his wealth, his will elevated him to patriarchal status. It doesn’t look so traditional. They aren’t some Christmas movie with matching sweaters and board games. They’re spread all over. But still held together by old Ke’Aundre, his full given name.
His mother lives at his home in Texas, taking care of the house as she fights to keep her sobriety. His siblings all have access to him. One of his brothers, Jacolby Criswell, plays quarterback at North Carolina. He will even check in on his dad despite his limited role in Greenlaw’s life.
His loyalty is an anchor in the lives of others. Because when you’ve got Dre on your side, you’ve got Dre. The same elements make him beloved in the 49ers locker room.
“I love having him,” Nick Bosa said. “He’s probably my favorite teammate to ever play with, college and pros.”
Oddly enough, having accomplished the goal of reuniting his family has introduced him to a different kind of loneliness.
He isn’t alone. He has his own family now. His fiancée, Mikaela Gallagher, and their toddler son, Kamari, make sure isolation never touches him again.
But the burden of holding a family together can feel lonely. Few can comprehend why he works so hard to hold his people together, especially when the efforts aren’t always reciprocated. How he swallows his generosity being taken for granted.
“I’ve also learned how to be by myself,” he said. “Very much, growing up, I never wanted to be alone. And then as I got older and I started realizing that once I got to where I wanted to get, a lot of things I was striving for and wishing for don’t necessarily love you back. I’m wishing the best for everybody else, and everybody else is doing their own s—. So I’m doing this and this and that to get everybody here and doing this for everybody. And ain’t nobody doing it for me.”
Sometimes, Greenlaw said, he gets into these emotional battles. Wondering if he’s doing the right thing by helping. Wondering if the goodness of his intentions is enough of a reward.
He’s resolved to simply follow his heart, and he made a promise to himself when he was a teen.
He would take all the negative energy poured into his life, from being “hurt a million times before,” and use it to fuel his violence on the field. He’d become a great football player and get his family.
It made him a great linebacker, and he’s convinced it will again. It helped him escape the fate of his circumstances. It fashioned him a conqueror at his core. Most importantly, it positioned him as the sutures holding his family together. Thick. Strong. Durable. The sutures are critical.
(Top photo of Dre Greenlaw before the Dec. 12 game against the Rams that marked his return after a 305-day injury absence: Brooke Sutton / Getty Images)
