Bears rookie Colston Loveland: urban cowboy or urban legend?

GOODING, Idaho — Colston Loveland, American cowboy. Cattleman. Bulldogger. Buckaroo.

No sooner did Loveland arrive on the scene in April as the Bears’ first-round pick, at No. 10 overall, than a picture was painted of the 6-6, 241-pound, national-title-winning Michigan tight end as a quintessential wrangler lassoed from the pages of a Larry McMurtry novel. Newt Dobbs, meet Snake Cole.

The picture wasn’t exactly inaccurate, especially from the point of view of a place like Chicago, which has as much to do with alligator wrestling and reef surfing as it does with cattle farming and ranching. Loveland, 21, has spent hundreds of hours branding cattle, trod countless miles putting up or pulling down barbed-wire fences, lived and toiled on family farms and dabbled at the edges of rodeoing.

But if we’re going to be serious about getting to know this enticing Bears newcomer, a potential star on the field, we ought to at least try to take the unvarnished truth into account. Because once the season arrives, all it’s going to be about is football, anyway — good or bad, boom or bust, legend or letdown. What’s the use in exaggerating the rest of his story?

“I think some people like to gas it a lot, but I’m not a cowboy compared to a lot of my friends and buddies and cousins I grew up with,” Loveland told the Sun-Times during an approximately weeklong trip home in late June. “These guys do it every day. That’s what they do. They ranch, they rodeo. They take that serious. There’s definitely levels to it.”

Loveland lived as an elementary schooler in Bliss, population right around 300, where his maternal grandparents, cattle farmers, had 640 acres. By 2016, Loveland, his parents and his two brothers were in neighboring Hagerman, which has nearly 1,000 residents and, like Bliss, overlooks the Snake River and the spectacular canyon through which it slithers. Yet the Loveland boys, including eldest Cayden, a former NAIA wide receiver, went to school from then on in Gooding, a city of 3,700 or so 20 miles away with, among other advantages, sports programs a tad more robust than those closer to home.

Gooding also was home to Jay Faulkner, who has been misidentified in previous stories as Loveland’s uncle because that’s how Loveland refers to him. Faulkner is a cousin of Loveland’s maternal grandfather, Tom Faulkner, for the record. As a middle schooler and a high schooler, Loveland often slept at Jay and wife Becky’s farm, which was five minutes from campus in Gooding. Their son Cody was thick as thieves with Cayden and Colston. An actual nephew, Cooper Pavkov, was Colston’s classmate and best friend and always in the picture, too.

“Colston is so comfortable in this environment, around his people,” said Becky, alongside Jay in the room that held Loveland’s draft-night watch party — 120 people strong — and where the rookie took a life-changing phone call from Bears general manager Ryan Poles. “He’s not arrogant or full of himself. He’s just a common kid.”

But in that house, he’s barely a common cowboy. As a reporter visited, one Faulkner son was off getting an MRI exam on a knee injured in a rodeo. Cody was off rodeoing in Reno, Nevada. Meanwhile, hanging out in the kitchen with the Faulkners’ daughter was her boyfriend, Jesse Brown, who just so happens to be one of the very top rodeo professionals in the world. Pavkov, who rodeos at Montana Western University — you bet your boots it’s a varsity sport — heard about the scene and had to laugh.

“When Colston says everyone he grew up with is better, that’s true,” Pavkov said. “We grew up doing the same things — we always rode together — but when somebody just does it in their pastime, like with anything else, you’re going to separate from them. Just like Colston separated from the rest of us in football.”

Like the rest, though, Loveland put in hard hours each spring and winter — often with some Gooding football teammates in tow — branding cattle for Jay where they were calved in the desert-like conditions of Bliss and wrestling with all that barbed wire before and after their yearly relocation to the cool of the Sawtooth Mountains an hour north near Fairfield.

“Colston was a quick study in everything he did,” Faulkner said. “It was no problem for him to jump in. You tell him once, he understood it. You never worried about him in any aspect.”

Scouting reports such as that one are part of why the Bears took Loveland. Oh, and by the way: When they did take him, television cameras captured him at the center of a scene so striking, it got social media buzzing instantly. Giant deer heads were mounted to the surrounding walls. Steer horns as wide as a barn door, too. Was he a Loveland or a Dutton family scion in “Yellowstone”? The truth, though, is that in person, the room that held the Loveland draft party is smaller and less dramatic than it appeared on TV. A pool table that normally takes up much of the room had to be pushed against a wall that night to make room for the closest family and friends, who squeezed in at money time while the remaining 90 or so guests monitored the proceedings from an outdoor setup.

Not that anything was wrong with that whatsoever. It was a glorious night for Loveland, for his people and for Idaho. That’s just a fact.

‘Every kid in this state wants to be him’

IT’S AN HOUR-AND-A-HALF DRIVE from the heart of Gooding County to the nearest Nevada border town of Jackpot; two hours to Snowville, Utah; four to Alpine, Wyoming, the southern end of the Snake River Canyon; just over three to Monida, Montana; a little over two to cross the Snake into Oregon; five-plus to Walla Walla, Washington; and a full 10 — looping around tens of thousands of square miles of national forest — to the 45-mile border Idaho shares with British Columbia. The Gem State directly connects with all those places, an awfully busy-sounding existence for a land of sagebrush, tumbleweed and far-flung souls.

This is football wilderness, too, which explains why young players and fans of all ages are as excited as they are about the first Idahoan to be drafted in Round 1 since linebacker Leighton Vander Esch went from Boise State to the Cowboys in 2018. There also were the Bears and Boise State’s Shea McClellin at No. 19 in 2012, but no need to spend any more time recounting that misstep.

“Every kid in this state wants to be him,” said Cam Andersen, who was Loveland’s coach for four seasons at Gooding.

That was evident in Pocatello, where the No. 80 Loveland wore in the Idaho All-State Game for eighth-graders in 2017 was retired before this year’s game — in which little brother Cash played wide receiver — at Idaho State University. Loveland made time for all the players on the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade teams, not to mention many of their siblings and parents, posing for pictures, slapping shoulder pads, wrapping his meaty arms and enormous hands around scrawny shoulders and being fully present in the sort of heartfelt manner that can’t be faked.

A couple of days later, back in the southern part of the state that sprung him, a visitor could get a stronger sense of the extent to which Loveland is revered. On his high school field, he hosted a two-hour camp for ages 6 through 16. Carefree tykes, ambitious high schoolers and players in between sold the thing out in 15 minutes, and Loveland moved joyfully in the middle of it all, lofting passes — left-handed, because his right shoulder is recovering from January surgery — in one mini-game after another as official quarterback.

When it ended, the campers surrounded Loveland at midfield and chanted his name. Then he told them:

“Stay in the moment. Keep doing you. Whatever you love, just keep doing that. Uplift others around you. Be a good person, and you’ll go really far in life. As far as athletics go, whatever sport you’re into, if that’s something you really want to take seriously, if you want to get to that next level, you’ve got to do more than everyone. What you’re doing right now isn’t enough. Put your head down and go to work, because all of you can do that.”

And then he went into the Gooding gym — for another two hours — to sign autographs for and take pictures with any kids who missed out on the camp but still wanted to see him. And there were scores of them. It was Loveland’s own idea to accommodate them.

“I love his heart,” said Rachel Faulkner, his mom, who did heavy lifting behind the scenes in helping him pull off a wonderful day without a noticeable hitch. “He’s got a good heart, a great heart.”

Cash was one of the campers, maybe the proudest one.

“He’s a great big brother, a great role model,” Cash said. “He’s always so nice to other people. I always look up to him. He shows me how to be a great person, and he’s taught me well.”

In a quiet moment in Pocatello, Loveland shared a viewpoint on broader society.

“There’s a lot of hate in this world,” he said. “I think the main thing is — and I know everyone’s got their own thing with faith — but if you just trust in God, read the Good Book and just be a good person, try to influence others in positive ways, that’s the best thing you can do. Just try to uplift others. That’s how I was raised, how I was taught growing up. That’s some wisdom I would give. Be nice all the time. Be a guy you’d want to be around.”

Coming of age in these parts, Loveland “always wanted to go explore,” which led him to Michigan for college ball rather than someplace in the West. But the more he sees, and the bigger and better in his sport that he becomes, the feeling that he’s carrying Idaho along for the journey only grows.

“I take tons of pride in being from Idaho,” he said. “I always say we get overlooked with football and as far as athletics go. The support from Idaho ever since I got to Michigan has been great. I want to do everything I can to give back. I want to take everyone with me. It’s a great place.”

Tom Faulkner, clad in a Bears T-shirt, couldn’t suppress a grin during the camp at Gooding, a school of nearly 400 with a bare-bones football stadium abutting a horse field and across the street from a yard full of goats. Cash and two other of Faulkner’s young grandsons were among the campers, and there was Colston, almost larger than life, only 21 and already having achieved so much.

“A lot of pride,” Faulkner said. “So much pride. It’s very unusual, and it’s very exciting.”

Faulkner has tickets to three 2025 Bears games, including the opener against the Vikings. It seems all those closest to Loveland — family, best buddies, high school coaches — will be at Soldier Field that Monday night. From afar, so many others will be fervently watching.

‘He is a freak. A freak!’

LOVELAND’S MOTHER CALLS HIM — ahem — the F-word.

“He is a freak. A freak!” said Rachel Faulkner, who lives in Dillon, Montana. “He’s always had the muscles. You look at his dad and I, I don’t know where he got it.”

In sports, of course, “freak” connotes innate physical advantages, which, to some extent, Loveland has had from the beginning. His maternal great-grandfathers were college teammates at Idaho, matter of fact, so there’s football in his blood.

A factor not to be overlooked, according to Chad Loveland, was his son’s congenital need to show anyone who ever told him he couldn’t do something — sports-related or not — they were wrong. Chad, who lives in Gooding and is remarried, remains convinced that need compelled 9-year-old Colston to wipe out on Soldier Mountain, part of the Sawtooth range, only to watch his snowboard disappear into the great beyond. Colston had wanted a leash for his board, but a man in the equipment rental shed waved off the eager lad, assuring him he wouldn’t need one.

“The guy was like, ‘There’s no chance your feet will come out of those bindings,’ ” Chad recalled. “Second run down the hill, wrecked so hard his feet came out and he lost the board into the trees. Had to get a ride down the rest of the way.”

In fourth grade, Loveland wanted to play tackle football, but kids his age weren’t allowed to play tackle in Gooding. Hagerman, on the other hand, needed numbers just to field a team in a tackle league for fifth- and sixth-graders, so Loveland — not that much larger than most his age back then — signed up there.

“Colston was something,” Tom Faulkner recalled. “He was juking these older boys, breaking tackles, moving up the field. He was always really strong.”

When Loveland dominated at the eighth-grade All-State Game, he was 5-11, 170, certainly not big enough to gawk at. That same summer, though, incoming freshmen toured Gooding, and when Joey Zubizarreta, who teaches weightlifting at the school, caught a glimpse of a future Bear giving a machine a quick try, he said out loud, “Whoa.”

As a freshman, Loveland played two games on Gooding’s junior-varsity squad before coaches told Andersen they had nothing more to offer the boy — he needed to move up. It was all varsity from there.

But it wasn’t until the summer before his sophomore season when Loveland fully stepped onto his football path by — to put it in the terms he’d later use with his campers — beginning to do more than everyone else. He went to Zubizarreta and said the summer training regimen the rest of the team was following wasn’t enough for him, not even close. Zubizarreta, a former college athlete, threw everything he could think of at Loveland.

“Squats, power cleans, bench, hip flexors, hamstrings, lunges,” Zubizarreta said. “He did the hard things every day and never had a bad day in here. Even your hardest workers have bad days, but he never had a bad day.”

As a junior, Loveland, by now 6-5 and pushing 230, took Zubizarreta’s class twice a day — power lifts in the morning, auxiliary exercises in the afternoon, even in-season — and that’s not all. He was Zubizarreta’s teacher’s aid. He even cajoled non-athlete friends into taking the class and did all he could to fire them up to do their best.

“Colston is one of the most humble people,” Zubizarreta said, “but he carries this aura with him. People just want to be around him, and they want to be better because of him.”

When then-Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh was on a recruiting visit, Zubizarreta received a 1 a.m. text from Loveland that said, hilariously, “Jimmy wants to get swole in the morning.” Hours later, the three threw some weight around together at Gooding.

As a senior, Loveland was ridiculously good on the field. Andersen effectively made him an assistant coach by putting him in charge of tight-end drills. In a game against Kimberly for the conference championship, Loveland played five positions, catching a touchdown pass, running and throwing for TDs and picking off a pass. He even had a completion to offensive lineman Pavkov, who made an epic run after the catch, barreling over defenders, in a blowout win. No one loved that play more than Loveland.

“He was such a good leader and wanted to bring out the best in everybody,” Pavkov said. “He led by example. You watched how he worked, and you wanted to help him even though it was like watching a man play against boys. You could just look on the field and immediately pick out with your eye: ‘He doesn’t belong.’ ”

Loveland left Gooding a semester early to enroll at Michigan, where he did well enough to become a first-round pick, quite a feat in itself. Sherrone Moore, Harbaugh’s successor, says Loveland would’ve been a team captain as a junior if not for the program’s seniors-only rule. Leading up to the draft, Andersen promised several NFL teams that Loveland checked every imaginable box, not the least of which was being a “great human.”

As Loveland was still a high schooler turning into something special, Zubizarreta predicted to him often that he would make it all the way and play for — yep — the Bears. Then again, Zubizarreta happened to be such a Bears fan that he had an Urlacher jersey and a dog named Briggs. How about that?

Chad Loveland always rooted for the Broncos, seemingly a more natural preference for an Idahoan.

“I’ve got a new favorite team now,” he said.

And Pavkov?

“I was a Packers fan growing up,” he said. “Man, I want to be there when the Bears play at Lambeau Field. I do have a new Bears jersey.”

A No. 84, with “Loveland” across the back.

This is Bears country now.