It takes guts to be a full-time gunner in the NFL, the same sort of courage it might take to routinely dangle your feet in the turbid waters off of New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
“The town where I grew up, it’s still to this day the shark-bite capital of the world,” 49ers running back Raheem Mostert noted on Sunday after practice. “We would go out there and surf and they’d bite on people and stuff. They were usually just small sharks. But they’d mistake us for food.”
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Like a lot of NFL players, Mostert’s teenage years were spent playing football, running track and lifting weights. But because his house was a 15-minute walk from the beach in what is perhaps Florida’s top surf town, he had a couple of less common activities — surfing and skateboarding — on his athletic résumé. And he was talented enough at both to fetch a contract offer from surf and skate company Billabong when he was still in high school.
Mostert, now 26, said he and his buddies never officially participated in the events Billabong or other groups held in town. Instead, they’d watch and do their own thing on the side.
“I’d be out there surfing or skateboarding on my own, not really trying to make a scene or anything,” Mostert recalled. “And this guy came up to me and wanted to offer me a contract. He was intrigued, basically.”
The contract would have allowed Mostert to take part in events across the country, to be part of the circuit of competitions. It also would have put a level of change in his pocket that 17-years-olds from New Smyrna Beach rarely see.
Mostert, however, had grander plans. Two years later, he became the first person in his family to attend — and later graduate from — a four-year university when he went off to Purdue on a football scholarship. The speedy Mostert left the school as its all-time record holder with 2,289 kickoff return yards.
His NFL career, which began in 2015 with the Eagles, mostly has been built on his special teams ability as well. Last season, Mostert had only six carries for the 49ers but served as the team’s gunner — which entails running down the field on punt-coverage at breakneck speed and zeroing in on the return man — and was its leader in special teams tackles.
This week, his role is a bit different. Mostert promises to get plenty of opportunities not just as a ballcarrier, but as the 49ers’ primary running back.
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That’s because the first two players at the position went down with injuries in recent days — starter Jerick McKinnon to a calf strain that knocked him out of Sunday’s practice, and his backup, Matt Breida, to a separated shoulder early in Thursday’s preseason win over the Dallas Cowboys.
Mostert was the next 49ers running back in the game after Breida, and he finished with a game-high 57 rushing yards and averaged 7.1 yards per carry. The stat line wasn’t all good, however. Though he insists he was down when the ball came loose in the scrum of a tackle, officials ruled that he lost a fumble in the third quarter, something he also did last year in one of his few offensive snaps for the 49ers.
“I just can’t leave it to the refs,” he said.
As for his surf-and-skate background, Mostert pointed to a number of parallels to football. Both require exquisite balance and tolerance for physical contact, whether it’s being delivered by a 235-pound linebacker or a wrought-iron railing in a New Smyrna Beach park.
You also have to be able to process a lot of moving parts in an instant.
“You’re in a wave and at that moment you want to make a decision whether you want to do a trick — flare up, do a nice trick and land — or just ride the wave out,” he said. “That’s the same thing with football: there are a lot of different angles. Sometimes, you have to split two defenders. Sometimes, you don’t want to go out of bounds because you can get an extra three or four yards. So you plant a foot and head up field.”
The various sports also demand a certain level of courage. In 2008, when Mostert was a high school sophomore and was in the water almost every weekend, there were 24 shark bites recorded in Volusia County, where New Smyrna Beach is located.
“It’s the same thing in football — you try not to think about it,” Mostert said. “We get concussions, injuries. I mean, you just go out there and play. And that’s kind of like the same mentality you have to have with surfing. You have to go out there and have fun.”
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Mostert said he hadn’t been surfing since he left New Smyrna Beach eight years ago. But he had a chance when he went to Hawaii in the spring for teammate DeForest Buckner’s wedding.
“It came back to me,” he said. “I had to take a couple of extra steps because my body had to get adjusted. But the long board is a lot easier than a surfboard.”
— Reported from Santa Clara
(Top photo: Joe Robbins/Getty Images)
