In mid-December 2014, a 15-year-old quarterback prospect trained under his father’s watchful eye at Ewa Beach Park in Honolulu. The Prospect threw passes, zagged around orange cones and sprinted in the best kind of winter—sunny, warm, cloudless; waves completing the ocean breeze soundtrack to his exacting football toiling.
No one seemed to notice the prospect who threw left-handed, tight spirals sailing in every direction. If anyone did notice, none of the onlookers approached. The park was nearly empty. The kid was known—but not yet in Alabama, the NFL or across the world.
The Prospect’s aims had morphed from dreams into his current reality; in part, because of the player he most idolized in childhood, the quarterback at the nearby football local powerhouse who graduated in 2010. That superstar provided both inspiration and a blueprint.
By the winter of 2014, The Prospect was a sophomore and starting at the same Saint Louis High School, a 20-minute drive east on Interstate HI-1 from Ewa Beach. In two years, recruiting services would elevate him to the top of their lists ranking college prospects. In three years, he would start for Alabama, where he played, famously, as a true freshman.
Saint Louis made such visions realistic. That’s why The Prospect went there in the first place. The Crusaders, then under longtime coach Vinny Passas, produced elite signal-callers so often they’d become part of the local export economy. Among them: Darnell Arceneaux (Utah), Jason Gesser (Washington State), Timmy Chang (University of Hawai’i) and Jeremy Higgins (Utah State). Passas whispered to his quarterbacks, developing them into passers who could see beyond their island and the outdated barriers that often limited their recruiting prospects.
The Prospect followed The Idol’s career closely—because he knew him, because The Idol had become his mentor and because The Idol’s career presented an ideal blueprint for his own. Something like: Major college football, at the highest levels, served as a launch point into the NFL.
The Idol had shone for Oregon, another powerhouse—a team that dominated for so long that his scholarship offer to become a Duck had marked another step in the continued evolution of the Saint Louis QB factory. The Prospect, some had already begun to whisper, possessed an even higher ceiling. And, on this week in December 2014, The Idol would find out if he’d won the Heisman Trophy, while Saint Louis would host a viewing party in the high school’s auditorium, and The Prospect would watch from the front row, considering his future.
Funny how football works, how everything connects.
The Idol: Marcus Mariota.
The Prospect: Tua Tagovailoa.
Marcus Mariota won the Heisman Trophy in 2014 after an impressive campaign at Oregon.
Marcus Mariota won the Heisman Trophy in 2014 after an impressive campaign at Oregon. / Brad Penner-Imagn Images
After that unremarkable training session at the park near the ocean on the island that produced tropical fruit, macadamia nuts and elite quarterbacks, Tua and his father, Galu, sat down on a wooden bench at the same park. Waves lapped against the shore, metronomic in consistency. Birds circled overhead.
I found the tape of this interview last weekend.
On it, Tua says, “Saint Louis is amazing. I always wanted to play there. I wanted to play for Coach Passas, sir. I looked up to Marcus, sir.”
I didn’t remember that interaction, let alone that week, until Tua Tagovailoa sat before reporters in Miami in mid-November. He began discussing Mariota and their relationship, ties that long ago solidified into the kinds of bonds that can never be broken. He sounded soulful, almost, or wistful for that time period.
“I was a big fan of him, still am; the person that he is outside of the player, and just happy for his success,” Tagovailoa said. “[He has] been going through ebbs and flows throughout years and teams, but if you get to know the kind of person he is, the playing and whatnot is second.”
It hit, right then, with the force of an uppercut to an unsuspecting jaw. Here we were, everybody from that week, almost 12 years later. The plan had been enacted, more or less. Mariota did play at the highest levels of Division I and springboarded into the NFL. Tagovailoa did earn a scholarship to Alabama, where he won a national championship by relieving Jalen Hurts at halftime of the title game in that luminous freshman season. The Dolphins did draft him fifth in the 2020 NFL draft.
It was true and staggering all at once. One high school on the island of Oʻahu really did produce two quarterbacks who sometimes started on the same NFL Sunday. What are the odds? Infinitesimal. Historic, even.
What stood out in Tagovailoa’s answer this November wasn’t that, though. It was the last part, the part that made his comments soulful. There’s a lot to unspool in one specific phrase: “ebbs and flows.” Tagovailoa seemed to understand all that had unfolded over the past 12 years. All, in this instance, meaning virtually everything that could have happened … did.
There was his seesawing in college alongside Hurts. His injuries while starring for the Crimson Tide. And his five-plus seasons of uneven professional football—two growing campaigns to open his career, then a resurgence under Mike McDaniel when McDaniel became Miami’s coach in early 2022, then more injuries, then a stark decline (’24) and, this season, a bottoming out.
Mariota ebbed and flowed even more than Tagovailoa ever has. Now in his 11th NFL season, he has played for five franchises. He has spent a considerable amount of time as both a backup and a starter, while enduring numerous injuries. He began every season except Tagovailoa’s resurgent 2022 as a backup since Tagovailoa entered the league in ’20. Pundits affixed both with the dreaded “bust,” as those ebbs and flows did precisely that.
And yet, the football gods decided: Two paths so winding as to resemble two mazes from which there is no realistic escape, would intertwine once more in the 2025 NFL season. Washington would host Miami on a Sunday in November. Mariota spent last season as the Commanders’ backup quarterback. Tagovailoa remained in Miami both years. At this season’s outset, the Hawaiian-born stars understood they would at least share the same field.
Stakes then heightened: As the season wore on, for both teams, it became plausible to wonder if either would start or even play in Week 11. But as that particular contest drew nearer, Tagovailoa remained Miami’s starter, while Mariota stepped in for Jayden Daniels, who was continuously plagued by injuries (the latest, an elbow he dislocated in Week 9 against the Seahawks).
Which meant The Prospect and The Idol would start, against each other, on a football Sunday this fall. And not in the nation’s capital but, as part of the NFL’s ongoing international efforts, in Madrid. What … a … world.
The Dolphins improved to 4–7 after defeating the Commanders in Madrid.
The Dolphins improved to 4–7 after defeating the Commanders in Madrid. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
The game was held at Bernabéu Stadium, the home of the soccer juggernaut Real Madrid. It marked the first time an NFL game was staged in Spain. The halftime show even featured Daddy Yankee and the Argentine producer Bizarrap, in front of a sold-out crowd of nearly 79,000 Spaniards.
The game, like Tagovailoa and Mariota’s careers, wasn’t smooth. It featured setbacks. The term hard-fought applies. Mistakes, both made them. But underneath the surface read of this game, the same theme both have carried throughout their careers—knocked down but never out—continued, too.
Like in the third quarter, when Mariota threw one attempt away while scrambling in his own end zone. He landed awkwardly and returned to the sideline, where medical personnel evaluated him for a concussion. He came back from what he called a “stinger” afterward. Always does.
The final statistics didn’t point to any greatness from either Polynesian signal-caller who played in Spain last Sunday. Mariota ran for 49 yards—44 came after the medical evaluation on a single play—completed 20 of 30 passes and threw for 213 yards, one touchdown and one interception.
Tagovailoa compiled statistics even more meager than his idol’s line. He didn’t gain any rushing yards, while completing 14 of 20 attempts, for 171 yards, no touchdowns and no picks. Just as Mariota rose once more, this time from another (albeit short-lived) injury, Tagovailoa did the same amid a statistically milquetoast day.
Both teams turned the ball over in the fourth quarter—and at the opposing team’s 1-yard-line, no less. Mariota’s worst play, that interception, came on the very first offensive play in overtime, which gave Miami and Tagovailoa the field position it needed for the Riley Patterson field goal that won the game.
Isn’t that the same moxie, tenacity and resolve that defines these two NFL careers? Not perfect. Not exactly as planned. But that fight.
The Commanders have now dropped six consecutive games. The Dolphins, improbably, have won two straight. Both will enter their bye in Week 12.
“All these trials and tribulations that we’re going through, ultimately, [are] going to build us better, and we just have to take it on the chin,” Mariota said after Sunday’s game. “We’re not where we want to be, but the only way that we can dig ourselves out of it is learning from these mistakes and learning from these games.”
That’s them, in one answer, halfway across the world, from the quarterback who lost in especially brutal fashion.
They met briefly afterward. Only Tagovailoa was asked about their interaction. He declined to share details but lauded Mariota as a mentor and guidepost. Mariota, Tua said, dispensed even more wisdom at that moment.
This recalled that long-ago week spent on O‘ahu in December 2014. I watched Mariota win the Heisman Trophy from inside the auditorium at Saint Louis. Tagovailoa sat right next to me. While I spoke with Passas about Mariota’s greatness at the school, Tagovailoa came back inside. He thanked me for interviewing him, a career first. I hadn’t yet been moved onto the NFL at Sports Illustrated. But I told him our paths would cross again.
“I’ll do whatever I can to earn it,” he said, meaning his own cover story, which I wrote, while he was at Alabama, in 2018.
Paths did cross, in ways nobody at Saint Louis that week would ever have been able to predict. They wound and twisted and turned until they produced a distinct slice of NFL history, with a Polynesian twist—and that slice, in and of itself, ideally showed not that quarterbacks from Hawai‘i can play in the NFL. Both proved that years ago. No, this slice showed that two men from Hawai‘i can play quarterback, get what they want but not really, and still get up, with uncommon grace and humanity.
More NFL on Sports Illustrated