who was equally respected by his football coaches and
his math teachers.
Lowe came to realize he didn’t always have to be so
serious. In Martinek, his opposite—a bro, quick with
jokes, who made allies easily and rarely stressed—he
saw what life might be like if he unwound a little. Still,
“Keanon was like the dad of the group,” says his older
sister, Alisa Depp. When Alisa dropped out of college,
it was Keanon, still in high school, imploring her to
keep out of trouble, to not get pregnant.
Faced with his pick of pretty much any big-time
West Coast school, Lowe accepted a scholarship at
Oregon, where he endured Kelly’s early challenges—
“You will never play a
f------ down,” he screamed
early on, after Keanon
missed a voluntary work-
out—and rose to meet
the coach’s notoriously
exacting standards. He
embraced the former mili-
tary instructors who paced
the Ducks through Navy
SEALs workouts, sprinting
between drills as Oregon
built the fastest offense
in college football and
climbed the national rank-
ings. Meanwhile, Lowe
befriended blue-chippers,
like quarterback Marcus
Mariota, and hung out
with the walk-ons, chan-
neling his inner, looser
Martinek.
Lowe scratched his way
into a role on the kickoff coverage team, then at re-
ceiver, then, before his senior year, he was chosen by
his teammates to be a captain. He’d travel around the
state on open weekends to watch his old friends play
in college—Forrest at Division III Linfield, Martinek
at Portland State—then go back to emulating them
off the field at UO. And it worked. Ayele Adika, a run-
ning back alongside Lowe for five years, remembers
he “could move people’s hearts and [they] followed
him.” Lowe, says Kelly, “transcended all classes, all
races, all socioeconomic backgrounds; he just fit in.”
Kelly taught his players that “pressure is what you
feel when you don’t know what you’re doing.” He told
them to never flinch, and when he left in 2013 to coach
the NFL’s Eagles he promised he would always try toand eventually he found it down the hall, where a sub-
stitute teacher was in charge. Lowe asked the sub about
Granados-Diaz, an 18-year-old senior, when the door
opened and a mop-haired kid in glasses and a black
trench coat burst in, setting off screams from the students.
Angel Granados-Diaz—the same kid from the bath-
room; the same teenager Lowe had been sent to retrieve—
stood within arm’s reach. And he was carrying a shotgun.
KEANON LOWE grew up in the Portland suburb
of Gresham, eight miles west of Parkrose, across
the Willamette River. He was a mild-mannered and
observant boy, someone who looked for responsibilities
to shoulder and always
watched over everybody
else. When Jennifer Lowe
gave birth to another son,
Trey, it was Keanon who
held her hand through
labor. He was seven.
Over the years Jennifer
adopted a family motto to
explain to her kids why,
for example, money was
sometimes tight. Or why
their father, Kevin, moved
out around the time
Keanon was nine. (Keanon
would reconnect with his
father in high school.) You
are where you’re supposed
to be, she’d say. And for
Keanon that often meant
on a football field. While
Jennifer “worked her a--
off”—Keanon’s words—as
an accountant for a software company to pay private
school tuition, Keanon started in 2006 at Jesuit High,
near Nike’s headquarters, where he met Dominique
Forrest and Taylor Martinek, who would become two
of his best friends.
The trio bonded instantly, and between sleepovers
they transformed the Crusaders into a gridiron force.
Forrest and Martinek were the hard-hitting lineback-
ers. Lowe was the receiver–running back who scored
what seemed like a million times. When their careers
culminated in the 2009 Class 6A state championship
game and Lowe racked up six TDs in a losing effort,
recruiters salivated. Among them: Oregon coach Chip
Kelly, who visited Jesuit and found not just a 5' 9" of-
fensive threat with elite speed and sure hands but one
LOWE BALLED
Keanon rose
to Kelly’s high
standards first
with the Ducks,
then with the
Niners (in red).Kelly taught his
players that
“pressure is what
you feel when you
don’t know what
you’re doing.”
He told them never
to flinch. “He taught
me to act and not
think,” says Lowe.PRE
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