PHOENIX — He walked into US Airways Center like a prize fighter on his way to the ring. The flash bulbs popped, fans rose to their feet and cameramen stumbled over each other trying to get a good shot of Marshawn Lynch.
Wearing an Africa medallion and silver-rimed sunglasses, the Seahawks running back took his seat at the podium during media day.
Lynch looked down at the microphone the way a dog looks at a hydrant.
"I'm just here so I don't get fined," Lynch said. "So y'all can sit here and ask me all the questions y'all want to. I'm going to answer with the same answer, so y'all can shoot if you please."
Then Beast Mode went into repeat mode.
"I'm just here so I won't get fined," Lynch said 29 times over five minutes before excusing himself.
Lynch, who was fined $100,000 by the NFL for not speaking to the media last season, could've been docked $500,000 Tuesday for not showing up, according to an ESPN report.
Even Deion Sanders, working for the NFL Network, got stoned on three questions. Prime Time, meet Mime Time. It wasn't much different than a year ago when Lynch showed up with a hood pulled over his head and said: "I'm just 'bout that action, Boss."
It's possible that no player will have a bigger impact in Super Bowl XLIX than Lynch, who led the NFL with 17 touchdowns (13 rushing and four receiving) while rushing for 1,306 yards. In the NFC Championship Game, he spurred a comeback from a 12-point deficit in the final five minutes with a career-high 157 rushing yards.
"He is a very unique guy and he's got his own way of looking at things and he's also a very private person too," Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said of Lynch. "That's why the media thing is as it is. I've said this before, that there's a great deal spoken in his silence as well."
As his Seahawks teammates and coaches will tell you, there is beauty in the Beast.
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To understand Lynch, you have to walk maybe seven blocks in his shoes where he grew up in a rough neighborhood in Oakland. That's the distance Lynch would travel to see his cousin, former Bucs quarterback Josh Johnson.
Those seven blocks are where gangs, violence and drugs waited to swallow kids like Lynch, who rarely was allowed to leave the chain-link fenced-in yard of the home he shared with his single mother, Delisa, who worked two jobs to raise Marshawn and his three siblings.
Lynch's trust in people eroded after his father, Maurice Sapp, disappeared from his life when he was only 11.
"If you rockin' with me cause you're just a solid individual, then we're rockin,' " Lynch explained during an interview for ESPN's E60. "But if you got a motive or something, I am going to probably see right through that."
Football was his way out. Lynch became a high-school phenom at Oakland Tech and chose to go to California in Berkeley because it was only 20 minutes from home. To nobody's surprise, Lynch suffered from the separation when he was drafted 12th overall by the Bills in 2007. Lynch rushed for more than 1,000 yards in each of his first two seasons. But several scrapes with the law — he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor involving a hit-and-run in Buffalo in 2008 and to a misdemeanor gun charge in Culver City, Calif., in 2009 — prompted his trade to Seattle for a fourth-round pick in 2010.
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Explore all your optionsAll the while, Lynch and Johnson worked hard in their Family First foundation to raise money for kids in the Oakland neighborhood for football camps and other events.
That's what stung about Lynch's arrest around 3 a.m. on July 15, 2012, for suspicion of driving under the influence. About 600 kids were waiting at his camp while Lynch was in jail, something he had to tell them when he showed up later that afternoon.
"He'll bring a kid to practice, with or without the Seahawks' permission, kids that would never otherwise be able to go, and he does that out of the kindness of his heart," cornerback Richard Sherman said. "He goes and speaks to every kid individually. I think that's the kind of person he really is."
Lynch is smart, as evidenced by a 3.2 GPA as a social welfare major at Cal. In fact, he's cashing in on his reputation as a mediaphobe. On Monday, Skittles released a mock news conference starring Lynch that already has more than 1.2 million views on YouTube.
"It's disheartening the way they judge him and the way they ridicule him because the people that know him and know his heart and have spoken to him and understand him as a person and a player, you know how contrary the reports are to who he really is," Sherman said. "He's a great mentor, he's a great person, he's a great friend, he's a great brother, he's a great father figure to a lot of people in the community, honestly. He does a lot of things nobody will ever see, nobody will ever hear about them."