‘Coach, I can’t play anymore’: Kenneth Walker III’s rise from peril to stardom

Arrowhead Stadium is some 500 miles from Kenneth Walker III’s high school in Arlington, Tennessee, which is located about 30 miles from Memphis. Its capacity is around 70,000 more than the 3,700-seat football stadium in the town of about 14,000.

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Not much connects the scenes.

Just the same, on Monday night a coach who’d witnessed Walker’s origin story from little league through middle school and Arlington High was struck by deja vu.

When Walker bounced out of a fourth and 1 scrum and bolted 60 yards for a touchdown in the Chiefs’ 31-10 trouncing of Denver, all at once the astounding was entirely familiar.

“It was crazy: He did the same stuff in high school,” said Adam Sykes, the head coach at Arlington when Walker was playing there and now its offensive coordinator.

That same “little jump cut” he could break away with back in the day, Sykes marveled, he somehow can pull off in the NFL.

Not to mention any number of other moves that have infused the Chiefs with a dimension they haven’t enjoyed in years.

That’s made for an exhilarating first impression and a potentially stunning complement to quarterback Patrick Mahomes as the Chiefs prepare to take on the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday night at Arrowhead Stadium.

“It’s amazing to watch,” Sykes said Wednesday in a phone interview with The Star, calling Walker’s rise to stardom “super surreal” and “super, super special.”

And not simply because Walker by all signs remains as humble and understated as he was back in high school.

By then, he already was over maybe the showiest thing he ever did: In junior high, he earned the nickname “Thundershoes” because his mom bought him cleats that lit up with every step.

By high school, though, Walker was so determined to blend in that you’d never have known he was the star football player if you passed him in a school hallway or elsewhere.

At least from his studiously soft-spoken demeanor and what Chiefs teammates say about him, it seems evident that Walker has remained unspoiled by remarkable success since then.

That includes finishing sixth in the 2021 Heisman Trophy voting when he was playing for Michigan State and being named MVP of Super Bowl LX for Seattle before the Chiefs signed him in the offseason.

But what really makes Walker’s story all the more surreal-special are the twists that made his football future appear dubious.

Especially the frightening episode late in his junior year of high school that left his very future itself at least fleetingly in doubt and threatened to end his football career.

“Everything I went through is a part of my journey,” Walker told The Star on Thursday.

‘Not any more’

Nothing he went through was more scary than this.

Long after midnight in the spring of 2018, Sykes got a jarring text from Walker.

“‘Coach, I can’t play anymore,’” Sykes recalled it saying.

Suddenly struggling mightily to breathe, Walker had been taken to the emergency room by his mother, Shaunteshia Brown, and would be hospitalized for days.

As she put it in a Michigan State All-Access video in 2021, this was the doctor’s response when she told him her son played football: “Not any more.”

Tests ultimately showed blood clots in both lungs, which was described as a life-threatening pulmonary embolism in a National Blood Clot Alliance article on Walker.

It would later be learned, Sykes recalled, Walker previously had experienced some chest pains but shrugged them off assuming it was just something to be toughed out.

With his health and career in jeopardy, though, a second opinion led to Walker being prescribed blood thinners. He learned to administer himself injections twice a day for three months, something that on Thursday he called “kind of hard” at first but that he promptly got used to. He’s had no issues since then, he added.

In those first weeks and months, though, it was impossible to know how it would play out.

Football practices, which could lead to bleeding, were out of the question during that span.

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But Walker soon was in the best shape of his life through non-contact training with his father, who had begun putting him through demanding workouts by the time he was 4 years old and somehow ratcheted it all up even more that summer.

“Grown men didn’t want to do the workouts I was putting him through,” his father told The Detroit News during a 2021 visit to Walker’s hometown.

That relationship and dynamic is another story for another time. But safe to say it was vital in those months that led to Walker being medically cleared shortly before his senior season.

Sykes still was hesitant to play Walker out of concern for his future health. But he trusted in what the doctors, family and Walker prescribed: He could, in fact, play again.

Motivated by being overlooked

Walker promptly punctuated that with 10 touchdowns in his first two games, foreshadowing what we’ve come to see at Michigan State, with the Seahawks and now the Chiefs.

While he wasn’t as fast overall then as the guy who ran the 40 in 4.38 seconds at the NFL Combine, Sykes says what’s exactly the same now as then is that his first 10 yards “are as fast as anybody I’ve ever seen.”

To say nothing of how and why he can slalom back and forth through defenders with the dexterity of an Olympic skier.

“Some people don’t like to say it because it’s a cliche, but he had an ‘it’ factor where he could just feel where a tackler is coming from and make a cut,” Sykes said. “When you’re watching on film, it’s like, ‘How did he even sense that person there?’ Because you can’t see him.

“You can still see that now.”

Somehow, though, major-college recruiters couldn’t see it then.

Despite his obvious burst, vision, agility, speed and overall talent … despite rushing for 1,403 yards and 27 touchdowns even as he missed three games his senior year with an ankle injury … Walker for a long while was unrecruited by any Power Five schools.

“It definitely motivated me,” Walker said, smiling and adding, “But I don’t really think about it too much now.”

According to Lansing State Journal research while Walker was at Michigan State, the 3-star recruit was rated the 2,163rd-best overall player in the 2019 class and the 143rd-best running back.

That’s why he wasn’t being recruited by Southeastern Conference powerhouses and instead was being courted by the lower-profile likes of Eastern Kentucky, Mercer, Old Dominion, Southeast Missouri State and Western Illinois.

And that’s why he initially committed to Kent State before Wake Forest came in on him late. He spent two years there before transferring to Michigan State.

To this day, Sykes calls the overlooking of Walker “the million-dollar question” and doesn’t quite understand it.

One thing he heard a lot from recruiters from the most prominent programs was that “they really like” Walker, “but we got our guy.”

No one ever explicitly suggested the blood clots had been a factor in their evaluations.

If they had scrutinized that, though, they might have had a more illuminating perspective on Walker through his response to it.

That includes his gratitude to and support of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, where he was treated. Along with Chiefs guard Trey Smith, who had his own harrowing encounter with blood clots, he has lent his name to a “Stop The Clot” awareness campaign.

Most of all, they might have seen how that episode left him taking nothing for granted, being grateful for every day and all the more determined to fulfill his NFL dreams.

The very stuff that connects those days to these, which somehow look very much the same even as it amazes in an entirely new way.

This story was originally published September 18, 2026 at 6:45 AM with the headline “‘Coach, I can’t play anymore’: Kenneth Walker III’s rise from peril to stardom.”

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