University of Georgia Athletics
Quick Chat Cade Mays
August 22, 2019 | Football, The Frierson Files
By John Frierson
Staff Writer
Sitting and talking to Georgia offensive lineman Cade Mays after practice Tuesday, a thought occurred: What does someone like Mays, a 6-foot-6 and 318-pound sophomore, do when he needs a basic piece of clothing like a new sweater?
Mays, who started seven games last season and earned Freshman All-America and Freshman All-SEC honors, is a big man from a family of big men in Knoxville, Tenn. His dad, Kevin, was an All-SEC lineman for Tennessee in 1994, and Mays' younger brother also is a lineman.
During a Quick Chat, Mays talked about going through a lot of food at the family dinner table, shopping for clothes when you're his size, tearing it up at baseball when he was 12 and much more. Here's some of what he had to say:
Frierson: I know your dad was a big football player, you're a big football player and your younger brother is a big football player, so my question is: what is dinnertime like at the Mays house? There has to be an extraordinary amount of food on the table.
Mays: Oh, yes, it's a lot of food. I'm trying to think, we were having spaghetti one night and my mom, she cooked four pounds of hamburger meat, maybe.
Frierson: Take me back to the last Christmas lunch or dinner, whatever the big meal that day is for you guys.
Mays: There's a big ole prime rib, a big bone-in prime rib that my dad cooks in the oven. My mom, she'll make the homemade mashed potatoes with cheese in them and all that good stuff. Green beans, macaroni, some rolls — my grandmom, she'll come over and she'll bring pies. It's everything you can eat and it's good.
Frierson: That's a lot of big bodies to feed.
Mays: My baby brother probably eats more than anybody. I've got a 4-year-old little brother and for breakfast he'll eat six eggs and six pieces of bacon.
Frierson: So he's going to be the biggest Mays in the family?
Mays: I think so, that's what the doctors are saying.
Frierson: What movie have you seen more than any other?
Mays: "Step Brothers" is definitely my go-to. All Will Ferrell movies, but I love "Step Brothers."
Frierson: That's one of those movies that seems to be on cable 24 hours a day.
Mays: Oh, yeah, it's always on TBS, always.
Frierson: If you could go anywhere in the world on somebody else's dime, where would you like to go and who would you take with you?
Mays: Bora Bora.
Frierson: You're the second person today to say that. There was a women's soccer played I done one of these with, Jessie Denney, and she said Bora Bora.
Mays: How many people do I get to take with me?
Frierson: This is all hypothetical so let's say up to 10 counting you.
Mays: I'd definitely take my mom, my brothers, my dad and my girlfriend, and go spend a week in Bora Bora. ... That's my dream vacation spot.
Frierson: How much of your success as a player is a result of your dad's coaching, in the backyard or the living room, just teaching you the little things that only somebody like your dad that's done it a high level could teach you?
Mays: A lot, I think he definitely made me the player that I am today. He coached me from the like I was 6 or 7 years old until I went to high school and he was constantly trying to perfect little stuff when I was young, like stepping and getting your head in the right spot and your hands and leverage.
All that stuff that's taught at a higher level, he was teaching me when I was young. Also, I think he just taught me how to play hard and play through the whistle and love the game and enjoy doing those things.
Frierson: You can travel back in time 100 years or you can travel forward in time 100 years, which do you choose?
Mays: I'm going back. I want to hop on a horse, I definitely want to hop on a horse.
Frierson: You've got to go further back than 100 years now to get to the time when everyone was riding horses. To go back to the Old West, that's like 200 years ago.
Mays: That's definitely where I want to go, the wild, wild West. That would definitely be better than going 100 years into the future. I want to go back to when there weren't any cell phones. I'd be a gold miner or something.
Frierson: What's the most creative thing you do, or something creative you wish you could do?
Mays: People that I sing in front of tell me that I can sing, but I'm super picky, I will only sing in front of a select three or four people. They say I can sing but I don't know.
Frierson: What do you sing in front of them, a country song? I can see you being able to do that pretty well.
Mays: A little Luke Combs, a little Garth Brooks. That's really the only artistic thing I can do; I can't really draw, I'm not very good at art.
Frierson: Among the offensive linemen, who's the funniest guy?
Mays: I'd Solomon (Kindley). Just in meetings and on the field, he just jokes around and he really brings a smile to our room every single day. He's coming in smiling and he's got something funny to say. He gives off a radiant energy.
Frierson: Not to make too big a thing about you being a big guy but say you need a new sweater, how big a pain is it for you to go get yourself a new sweater?
Mays: It definitely is a pain. If I need a new sweater I probably just dig in the closet and hope to find another one. I don't really have that many clothes, I just kind of stick to the basics because it's such a pain to find clothes and it's so expensive.
Frierson: Where is the most interesting place that sports have taken you, where you've gotten to see a part of the country that you otherwise may not have?
Mays: The coolest place that sports have taken me would definitely be Cooperstown, N.Y. I went there for baseball (the 2011 American Youth Baseball Hall of Fame Invitational) when I was 12 and my team ended up winning the tournament out of something like 109 teams. I broke the record for most hits, I went 38-for-40 with like 46 RBIs, I want to say, and 16 home runs.
I was two off the home run record and I broke the hit record and the RBI record. I don't know if I still have those records but I broke them. [Editor's note: Those records, sadly, no longer stand.]
Frierson: Okay, we're going to have to dig deeper into this.
Mays: [Laughs.] Growing up I played travel ball and in that tournament we were playing teams from, like, Puerto Rico and all over. Travel baseball was my love growing up, I loved baseball; I wasn't really big on football until I got to high school. But growing up I always wanted to play professional baseball.
Frierson: What was your position?
Mays: First — I played first, third, pitched, batted clean-up. Honestly, I was better at baseball than I was at football my whole life growing up. I was a stud at baseball, I was killing the ball.
Frierson: Were you just way bigger than everyone else?
Mays: Not really. I don't know what it was but I could just hit the baseball.
Frierson: If you went to a batting cage now, could you light it up?
Mays: I can't tell you about now but I probably got a little bit of it still in me.
Frierson: How come we haven't heard about this? We've all heard about Jake Fromm and his Little League World Series experience, but I don't think many people know about this.
Mays: I don't know, that's a good question. You better dig, you better find out. You can't show anybody my picture though. You're going to be like, how was this kid even remotely good at baseball.
[Mays then grabs his phone and shows me his team headshot from that season. He's a big kid with a big smile and a lot of hair. You didn't hear it from me, but it doesn't take too much Google expertise to find the photo online.]
Frierson: You were pretty big already at that point, and look at all that hair.
Mays: Oh, yeah, I was stylin'. I repeated the eighth grade, not because I failed it but because my parents wanted to hold me back, I was really young. Me and my little brother both did it.
I went through eighth grade the first time, went through it the second time, ... and after my first one I think I was like 5-8 and I hit 6-4 my second eighth-grade year.
Frierson: Good grief.
Mays: Yeah, I grew a lot.
Frierson: So you left baseball at the peak of your powers and focused on football?
Mays: I did; I'd say it was a pretty good move. I don't know, though, with the way they're paying in baseball now.
Frierson: Last one, in a perfect world, what are you doing 15 years from now?
Mays: I'm retired from the League (NFL) and I've got me a ranch in Colorado; that's my dream, I want to own a huge ranch in the mountains of Colorado, on a lake. Not in the mountains but with a mountain view on a big lake, no neighbors.
I want to have some horses, some cows, a couple of kids running around, and I want to hunt, I want to hunt a lot.
(This Q&A was lightly edited for length and clarity.)
John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men's Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files. He's also on Twitter: @FriersonFiles and @ITAHallofFame.
