As Los Angeles Chargers fans know, Justin Herbert’s career has been about proving others wrong. For his entire career, the quarterback has played second fiddle to Patrick Mahomes, been subjected to unfair impatience as the team struggles to make a deep playoff run, and faced doubters every step of the way.
Herbert is known for taking much of it in stride, but there is one recent interaction with a teammate that has lived rent-free in his head.
Herbert revealed in an interview with YouTuber Anna Cramling that one loss to his teammate Rashawn Slater ‘last year’ has lit a fire under him.
Even nearly 12 months later, he is still looking to improve. Herbert told the story in detail, beginning with his experience during his mid-September trip to visit the Carolina Panthers in Week 2 of the 2024 season.
“This past year, we went on a team trip to Carolina and… stayed there for the week, and we had a bunch of board games and one of our players, Rashawn Slater, who plays left tackle and does a great job from the other defenses.”
“We were playing… and he beat me really badly. [He] was like, ‘I don’t want to play you again. I feel bad.’ Kinda disrespectful to me and I was like, ‘Okay, so now I know what I’m going to do and I got to spend the next year preparing and getting better so I can beat him.'”
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Justin Herbert revealed he had been spending extra time learning the game and now appears to have enrolled the chess YouTuber to help him.
Slater now has every reason to tighten up his chess game at the risk of suffering a disastrous loss to the quarterback, it seems. The revelation means one huge positive for the Chargers.
Justin Herbert’s Desire For Revenge Exactly What Chargers Should Want
Justin Herbert’s hopeful comeback reveals a quiet yearning to be indomitable at everything, not just football. This reveals the depth of his seemingly pre-programmed desire to be the best.
It pushed him to get better at chess and signals a burning desire to be the best at football, which is exactly what the personality type the Chargers should have looked for in the 2020 NFL Draft.
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Some of the best sports athletes of all time can become competitive about the smallest games. Michael Jordan famously would make up a game as simple as trying to bounce a quarter closest to the wall and turn it into an exhausting marathon until he won.
Tom Brady, the most accomplished quarterback in NFL history, was the NFL’s face of competitive fire.
Justin Herbert has that quality as well. Perhaps Slater and Herbert can have a rematch on the first anniversary of his sobering defeat to see if his hard work has paid off. Then, Herbert would have the opportunity to decline a future rematch on account of “feeling bad.”