The multiple personalities of Michael Pittman Jr.

Michael Pittman Jr. slides into his locker stall before a game and holds tight to one last sliver of the man he wants to be.

He plays a game on his iPhone with troops storming towers. He has to play until he wins. Then the music can begin.

An 11-song playlist will take him to warmups. It's heavy on Casting Crowns, with soft acoustics and piano accompaniment and lyrics about finding a greater purpose and chasing everlasting life. The second track is titled, "Who am I?"

When the music stops, he straps up a white helmet with a blue horseshoe logo and allows the metamorphosis to begin.

“I want the person I’m going up against to feel all of the pain it took me to get to that point,” Pittman Jr. said of the man he becomes. “I’m not out here trying to injure nobody, because that’s just stupid, but I want them to feel the hurt when they’re playing me.

“I want them after that game or that practice to say, ‘Oh shit, I just went up against Pitt.’”

The punishment can come on any play. He could go up over you with his 6-foot-4 frame and 36.5-inch vertical for a jump-ball dunk.

He could fire across the middle to crack your linebacker on a run block.

Or he could run a block in training camp and see his own safety take it too far. That happened in August between him and Rodney McLeod, a 32-year-old safety pushing a new roster. Pittman Jr. started throwing closed-fisted punches at a a teammate with a helmet on.

They made up later on.

"It's that alter-ego. You need that," McLeod said. "You need a guy who when he gets between these white lines, he’s all in. He’s doing whatever it takes to win."

Pittman Jr. grew up around these white lines as the son of Michael Pittman Sr., an 11-year NFL running back who can finish the sentence for you:

If a fight were to break out involving the Colts…

“It’s Michael Jr.,” he’ll say.

Yet Pittman Jr. is the man teammates join on all-day fishing trips and vacations to Hawaii. He’s the guy in the YouTube videos with his wife and daughter, geeking out over a new onesie or playing with a hairless cat named Booger.

“He is as nice of a gentleman off the field as you'll ever meet: He loves to live life, whether it was shark fishing, spear fishing, being a great boyfriend and now being a great husband, just a sweetheart of a person,” former USC coach Clay Helton said. “And then you see this creature on the field. It’s Jekyl and Hyde. He wants to rip your heart and soul and then physically beat you.”

It's by design.

“I’ve kind of created two personalities to where the guy that I am on Sunday during the game is different than when I’m not in football,” Pittman Jr. said. “I don’t want to be that guy when I’m with my wife and my daughter, so I’ve created a way to lock into that person so that he’s mean, he’s nasty, he doesn’t feel pain, he wants to go after you, he wants to hurt you, he doesn’t want to injure you but he wants to hurt you.”

“It’s weird. I can talk about it almost like it’s a whole other person.”

Just 25 and in his third season, Pittman Jr. is already the Colts' No. 1 receiver. Last year, he broke 1,000 yards, or more than 600 more than any other Colts player.

He could be among the next to sign in a mega wide receiver contract, joining names like Deebo Samuel and Terry McLaurin and Davante Adams and Christian Kirk. Soon enough, dollar signs will place a value on That Guy, so he stares into defensive backs like the rent is due.

“I can see that switch flip,” said Colts wide receiver Dezmon Patmon, who lives with the Pittman family in the offseason. “That fire just goes in his eyes. Nothing is really stopping him.”

Except one thing, perhaps.

He cares about three people more than he ever will love That Guy: his wife, Kianna; his 1-year-old daughter, Mila; and the father and man he gets to be with them.

He can think of only one way to have it all: by becoming two different people.

He’s a 25-year-old chasing the impossible. Or is he?

'Just be you'

Pittman Jr. has absorbed the highs and lows of this sport since before he could talk, or at least before he found the strength to.

He was 4 years old in the stands at Buccaneers training camp in 2002, the year his dad signed to be a starting running back and finished with a Super Bowl trophy and a float in a parade.

“I just put a football in his hands,” Pittman Sr. said, “and he never put it down.”

Pittman Jr. was the older of two boys. He wanted to be just like his dad, a player former teammates called the most jacked running back they ever saw. He watched his highlights and wore his jersey number, stiff-arming make believe defenders in the backyard.

That play time became the way to talk and make friends. The normal way was hard for a kid with a speech impediment. Forming words was hard, and sentences harder, when they'd get lodged somewhere deep within.

In his preschool years, he mostly didn’t try. He’d tug at his dad’s leg and point to whatever he wanted or needed, like a drink or a toy or a hug. His father let him know it was all right by faking his own speech issue, but he fell silent when his son would come home and tell about the insults kids threw at him that day.

He came to a football field to talk, the way he always pictured his dad doing with a lowered shoulder in the hole. Anger and enthusiasm swirled in a young boy who loved nature and its animals, from dogs and cats to turtles and sharks, an ecosystem he longed for a place in.

Put that ball in the arms of Pittman Sr.'s son and send him through the hole against fifth graders, and natural selection soon took its course. As he grew into his grandfather's 6-foot-4 genes, running over kids became easier, then too easy.

Eventually, Pittman Sr. told him: You’re too tall to play running back. By the late 2000s, wide receiver had become the better life anyway, a way to play football without so much pain.

“I was a good running back," Michael Pittman Jr. said. "I just looked at him like, ‘This guy doesn’t know anything. My dad had played running back for 11 years, but he doesn’t know football. I shrugged it off.”

His dad dug deeper.

“’I know you like wearing No. 32 because your dad wore it,’” Pittman Sr. recalls of the conversation. “’Why don’t you step out on your own? Just change your number and everything and be Michael Pittman Jr. Even though you carry my name, make this all about you and just be you.

“’One day, you’re going to be known as one of the best receivers in all of the country. Trust me.’”

Family ties: NFL draft features plenty of prospects whose fathers were standouts in league

The older Pittman Sr. decided to transition both sons to wide receiver together. Michael Jr. would need to show the way for Mycah, who was two years younger.

They went to a park in Valencia, Calif., to train. The two sons played wide receiver, and Pittman Sr. played defensive back. He was just two years removed from playing in the league.

“I used to bully him. Just bully him," Pittman Sr. said. "I wanted to see him perform through his emotions."

It worked, producing two PAC-12 wide receivers, with Michael Jr. playing at USC and Mycah playing for Oregon and later transferring to Florida State.

As Michael Jr. grew as a football player, suddenly the bullies wanted to be his friends. He was winning now, and confidence fueled through all parts of his life, including speech therapy, where he learned to slow down and trust his own thoughts. Talking helped, so his voice grew louder. He began to smile more.

And then he met a girl.

'It feels like we've been married for years'

Her name was Kianna, a fellow ninth-grader at Valencia. She asked him to come over one day, and when she wasn’t looking he snuck into her room and locked the door. He pulled out a Build-a-Bear and wrote a note on her mirror asking her to be his girlfriend, only to realize he'd locked himself in her room.

Years later, as the relationship would thrive through Pittman Jr.’s moves to Oaks Christian High School to USC and then to the Colts, they’d keep that bear and call it April as a testament to the month they met. The battery eventually died, leaving it without a voice, a metaphor for the Micheal Pittman Jr. she met before the touchdowns and fame.

“We’ve been married since August,” Kianna said last fall during a YouTube Q&A, “but it feels like we’ve been married for years.”

They first moved in together at an apartment at USC, where she worked two jobs and went to school and he played football on a stipend. They saved up to go to Hawaii and Costa Rica, and they began to discuss a family. With his father's career as a road map, football felt like a route to it all.

After giving up the running back dream, he decided to play like one out wide at receiver. He'd snare a pass across the middle and immediately become a runner, going head-up on defenders and trying to plow for extra yards.

It finally blew up at Oaks Christian, a private school west of Los Angeles where his father sent him to receive coaching from an NFL veteran. As a senior, Michael Jr. caught 81 catches for 1,990 yards and 24 touchdowns.

His final game was the best he’s ever played. Against Bishop Amat, he racked up 16 catches for 356 yards and scored five touchdowns, including a 99-yarder. His team lost 61-40, but That Guy was starting to thrive.

“It's like seven Mosses. They would literally put a safety over top of him every single play and it made no difference,” said Brandon Perdue, his quarterback who followed him to USC. “I kept thinking he wouldn’t be able to do that at the next level, but each time he got to the next level, he just continued to be dominant.”

He cultivated some of the meanness on the field as a safety and linebacker. At USC, buried on the depth chart behind future NFL receivers like Robert Woods, Marquis Lee and JuJu Smith-Schuster, he found that rush on special teams, where he blocked a punt and forced a fumble.

Like in high school, Pittman Jr. finished at USC with his most dominant season. In 2019, he racked up 101 catches for 1,275 yards and 11 touchdowns to finish in the top three of the Biletnikoff Award for the nation’s top wide receiver. The other finalists were Ja’Marr Chase and CeeDee Lamb.

But his USC career was not just beaches and touchdown celebrations. The Trojans won 21 games his first two seasons but went 13-12 his final two years, as he became the star.

Ever since he posted a five-touchdown game in high school and lost, he would punish himself for any plays he didn’t make. He began to live in a box he and his father created, the one without limitations. Losing became hard, especially to his younger brother.

In his second-to-last college game, USC was hosting Oregon, and Michael Jr. caught a touchdown but had just 37 yards. Oregon rolled USC 56-24, with Mycah catching the Ducks’ final touchdown from 35 yards out.

After the game, Pittman Sr. and his parents went down on the field for a family photo and found Mycah, standing alone. He never saw Michael Jr. in the handshake line. His older brother just disappeared and never saw his grandparents that weekend.

“’This is the most disappointed I have been in you ever,’” his father told him.

His son had taken all the lessons he could remember from his football career except the most essential one. This was always about being a family -- for two men who shared a name, two brothers who shared a father and the game that brought them closer together in the park.

In his own father's words, Pittman Jr. felt what he had inflicted so well on defensive backs.

He felt another man's pain.

'It can be a lot on you'

That Guy is making an appearance again, and you can hear him from down a concrete hallway in the Colts facility. Pittman Jr.'s voice is like a trash-talking train on the tracks, gaining steam as he he shouts out scores as sand bags land like body bags on a wooden cornhole board.

He's squaring off with Patmon, a fellow receiver who lives with him in the offseason. Patmon says he’s the best cornhole player in the locker room, so Pittman Jr. takes dead aim in front of the team.

Moments later, Michael Jr. is doing a post-game victory talk in front of cameras. Feet away, Patmon is slumped in a locker stall. He’s asked who won.

“You already know," he says quietly, "or you wouldn’t be asking."

The Colts receiving corps has been discovering these two personalities in real time. He came in quiet, but they grew to appreciate a trash-talking receiver who smacked face masks, balled his fists and drove linebackers into the ground, who sometimes played other games that way.

Now, they’re always hanging out with the wide-smiled kid with the booming voice who takes them on his 23-foot fishing boat, texts them for 9 p.m. trips to hunt Coyotes and is always bringing little Mila around.

The hard part for them is figuring out how.

“I want to do it exactly like Pitt," Patmon said. "I want to go out there and have that fire in you and just be able to out-physical and muscle up dudes."

Alec Pierce follows his every move in practice, following a path for a similar body type. But he's asked if the emotional switch can be learned or is something innate, and he pauses.

“I don’t know,” Pierce said. “That’s a good question.”

Colts wide receivers are all 25 years or younger, a Build-A-Bear room of size and speed and smarts. But only one of them has put it together for a big season so far, and he wants to lead them. That means having an appropriate dial on That Guy all the time.

“I always told him, ‘Son, don’t be that arrogant, knucklehead kid who puts your teammates down because you’re good," Pittman Sr. said. "Be that kid who uplifts those guys who don’t have the confidence you have. Make them feel important and a part of the team. In the end, they’ll thank you for that.’”

Last year, he was ejected from a game last year against the Patriots for shoving a player as the guy was ripping Pittman Jr.'s helmet off.

One day at practice early this season, he pulled his quad and had to miss a game.

"I'm here to find some way to try to throttle that down," wide receivers coach Reggie Wayne said. "I haven't succeeded yet."

Wayne, of course, understands the internal drive to be great. He ranks second in Colts history with 14,345 yards and 82 touchdowns.

“It can be a lot on you,” Wayne said. “There can be times where you go home and you feel like you need another set of paychecks, but it also shows that your teammates and everybody have faith in you to be able to take a room and go out there and lead, not only by talk, but also by example.”

Every season, Pittman Jr. writes out goals on a sheet and by midseason laminates them to hang in his locker. This year's are still a secret, but he said they're all increases on last year's of 100 catches, 1,300 yards, All-Pro and a Super Bowl ring, goals he fell a little short of.

“Michael Jr. is just like me, except a better version of me," Pittman Sr. said. "Michael is living the life that he’s been wishing for and hoping for. I know that big contract is coming soon. Man, I just can’t wait for that.”

The contract could be the next step to set the Pittman family up for life. But the final step is the hardest yet.

Defenses are bracketing him, trying to force the ball elsewhere. He's expected to create and produce at the same time.

Pittman Jr. has been broadcasting the dad, husband and goofball version in YouTube videos with Kianna for four years. It started as a way for a college couple to make money, but it became a measure of the man beneath the mask.

Slipping into those pads is about returning to that quiet boy getting thrown to the ground in the park. That kid wanted to be like his father and wanted to make his brother want to be like him. Nostalgia and memory run white hot in the Pittman family.

"I have to meditate to get out of it," he said.

The YouTube videos have become a secret string.

“It’s become easier to be that guy," Pittman Jr. said one day after practice. "Every single year, it just gets easier.”

He shared the idea of a YouTube channel with Parris Campbell, who has been fighting his own battle of balance with two kids under the age of 5 while rehabbing injuries as a second-round pick. Campbell launched a documentary called "Kickin' It With the Campbells," which places a spotlight on his family and their journey at home.

Watch: Michael Pittman Jr. on YouTube

“When you walk out the door, you have an agenda, and when you walk back in to your family, you have an agenda,” said Campbell, who is the team's starting slot receiver again. “Those two people can’t exist in the same space. It’s hard.”

But sometimes, they come close.

After a testy joint practice with Dan Campbell's Detroit Lions, Kianna brought Mila onto the field. Michael Jr. pulled the helmet off and grabbed the tiny hand of a little girl in a pink outfit with pigtails. Then they walked over to where Patmon was doing a radio interview.

“There he is! It’s Uncle Dez!” Pittman Jr. said in a soft and soothing voice. “Do you want to say hi?”

She climbed up on Patmon's shoulders, then back down to the grass, and Pittman Jr. grabbed her hand and pulled her up against his knee pad. He can't stop smiling. There's a few emotions and personalities mixing inside of him now, like words lodged deep in the heart.

Contact Colts insider Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: The multiple personalities of Michael Pittman Jr.