"You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain." -- Miyamoto Musashi
For Luke Felix-Fualalo, the right tackle of the Hawai'i Rainbow Warriors, those words have become a metaphor for his entire life. What might very well be the most interesting life to be found in all of college football.
He is an international citizen. He is philosophical, spending his time between football and graduate studies dissecting the works of the Japanese masters, especially those of Miyamoto Musashi, perhaps the greatest swordsman to ever handle a blade, and he always handled two. The lineman who was named for Luke Skywalker has veins that course not with the Force, but rather an athletically charged DNA that feels as if it were plucked from some mystical branch that grows on that very mountaintop.
And woe be to the poor soul who tries to take one path -- the blind side path -- with a bead on sacking Warriors quarterback Brayden Schager. Because No. 72 is a mountain himself. The bedrock upon which the Hawai'i football program hopes to stand on for one more season as it continues to climb toward regaining its former heights.
For young Luke -- full name Luke Sione Felix-Fualalo (pronounced foo-a-lah-lo) -- the Australian-raised son of a former Tongan national rugby player (aka, football with no pads and few rules) and a New Zealand national netball athlete (think basketball with no backboards and weird rules), and the cousin of New Zealand's Strongest Man, growing up on the west central coast of Australia, paths to mountaintops were not metaphors. They were very real and very common, as he and his two older brothers scrambled their way up rainforest hillsides, slipping over water-slicked rocks and vegetation to ultimately stand atop bushland waterfalls ... and jump.
"You climb up there and you inch out to the edge," Felix-Fualalo explained Tuesday, having just finished the second practice of the first game week of the season, a Week 0 visit to the islands from Delaware State. "When you get to the edge of the cliff, you just have to not think about it. Jump out. Know where the rocks are. Let it rip."
So, how high of a mountain are we talking about?
"Not too high. You get too high and the water starts to hurt."
Dude, you're 6-7 and weigh 310 pounds.
"If anything," Hawai'i head coach Timmy Chang said, laughing, "it's the water that's going to be hurting. Just ask some of the defensive linemen who have tried to dive into Luke."
"With water as the basis, the spirit becomes like water. Water adopts the shape of its receptacle. It is sometimes a trickle and sometimes a wild sea." -- Musashi
Denise Felix had her boys in the water at an early age. Nathaniel, Ezra and Luke, evenly spread out in age, were swimming nearly as soon as they could walk. Denise was a swimmer too, standing 6-foot-1, with broad shoulders, both literally and figuratively. She and Daniel Fualalo met in New Zealand, the club rugby player and the netballer. But by the time the boys were growing up, it was pretty much just Denise and the boys.
The oldest, Nathaniel, was the runt of the litter. He's 6-5.
"Yeah, mealtime could get a little intense," Luke said with a chuckle, speaking of Sunday roasts of pork and lamb. "Mom was a nurse and was gone for a lot of different shifts, so she would leave Crock Pots full, cooking all day. When the lid came off, none of it lasted long."
So, fights?
"Not when we got older. When everyone is 6-foot-something you can't fight or everything ends up broken."
The boys' maternal grandparents helped raise them. Both came to New Zealand in the 1960s, when tens of thousands of Polynesians arrived from seemingly every point in the Pacific. They worked hard, played rugby hard and followed generations that were and are packed with very large, very strong humans. As in, the strongest humans on the planet. Back home, Luke's younger paternal half-brother, Ethan, is just hitting his teen years and the family is bracing itself for puberty. "He's going to be a tree," Luke said. "A big tree."
But to be the biggest tree in the family forest, it's going to have to be a helluva growth spurt.
"Have you seen my cousin, Colm Woulfe-Felix?" Luke said of the three-time winner of the title New Zealand's Strongest Man and a competitor in the World's Strongest Man event, who checks in at a scant 6-5, 397 pounds and has pulled trucks, thrown iron barrels and deadlifted 900 pounds. "Sometimes he'd come over for dinner at my grandparents' house. Grandma would give him three whole pizzas and he'd just grab them in those big hands and just chomp them all down all at once."
Luke played rugby at age 5, even though the age requirement was 6. He was just too big to tell no. He played soccer too. He was so much larger than his teammates that he played goalie, if for no other reason than he filled up the frame of the goal.
"As a child he was a cheeky boy with the cheekiest smile and I would only get to see him periodically over the years, as we grew up in separate countries," Woulfe-Felix, aka the Wolfman, said. "I remember seeing him in his teen years and noting how thoughtful and insightful he was when we were playing video games. He had a much deeper understanding of the mechanics behind the game and he destroyed me, despite me being the confident adult and him a young teenager.
"Then one of the last times we caught up, he had grown into a giant. He's a badass combination of brains and brawn, making him a terror on the field."
Now, yes. But in the beginning, the giant's only knowledge of American football came from what he saw on TV or even movies, especially "The Blind Side." He didn't put on a helmet until he was 17 and admits the transition was more difficult than he anticipated.
"In rugby, you just put on a jersey and then run around and hit someone. As long as you know the base rules, there's no really underlying technique," he said. "But with football, you really need to know the positions, the rules, the specific technique for your game, how the game works. When I first started football, I didn't even know the difference between offense and defense."
He picked it up quickly enough that it led to a move to California, where he played one year at L.A.'s Cathedral High School and spent his senior year at prep powerhouse Mater Dei in Santa Ana, where he became a three-star national recruit and landed a scholarship to Utah.
"There is timing in the whole life of the warrior, in his thriving and declining, in his harmony and discord. ... All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this." -- Musashi
In 2019, Felix-Fualalo saw action in one game as a Ute before he was redshirted. In 2020, amid the unavoidable mental strain of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the following season, he saw some action on special teams. That was it. Meanwhile, Utah was rocked by two player deaths in nine months, former high school teammates Ty Jordan and Aaron Lowe, both lost to shootings.
"I wasn't in the brightest of places. I was in a dark place," Felix-Fualalo said, mirroring his social media feeds at the time, which weaved the excitement of Utah's Pac-12 title and first-ever Rose Bowl appearance in January 2022 with reality-check posts about the importance of maintaining one's mental health.
As soon as the season was done, so was he, leaving Salt Lake City without football and without a plan. Then the call came from Hawai'i. It was Timmy Chang, the living Hawai'i football folk hero who as quarterback led the team to some of its greatest moments during an NCAA record-smashing five-year tenure at the start of this century. Chang was being called home to save a program that was skidding, coming off a pair of losing seasons and forced to abandon Aloha Stadium because the once-legendary venue had fallen into such disrepair.
"What you sell here is culture, one like nowhere else, not just in college football, but in the world," Chang, 42, said as he prepared for his third season opener at the helm of his alma mater. "You can find a family, you can learn football, and you can do it in paradise. And this place doesn't care if you feel lost. This island, it fixes people."
Felix-Fualalo needed fixing.
"Today is victory over yourself of yesterday. Tomorrow is your victory over lesser men." -- Musashi
In the beginning, those first spring practice steps in Hawai'i, the big man struggled. He questioned everything, from the placement of his feet to the use of his arms. He found his mind too easily slipping back to the struggles of Utah, and even his youth.
"But if you were really watching him closely, and we all were, then you could see those small steps forward," Chang said of a 2022 season that began with a demoralizing 0-3 start of lopsided losses and ended with a record of 3-10. "Then, in 2023, when we could all see this program turning a corner, when we reached five wins and won three of our last five, a big part of that was that Luke was playing like we all knew he could."
He started 11 of 13 games and in 491 pass blocking plays, he allowed only one sack. That's why Chang is looking to Felix-Fualalo to anchor a bowl-or-bust season that could carry Hawai'i football back to prominence. It's why his name has popped up on several All-Mountain West preseason team listings and watch lists, and why NFL scouts will be booking trips to Honolulu this fall.
"And you know what we'll tell them about?" Chang, who spent two seasons in the NFL, said. "Football, yes, of course. But we will also make sure they know Luke, as you called him, the most interesting man in football."
The Luke who is so polite and thoughtful that he is frequently asked by Chang's staff to lead the tours when Hawai'i recruits and their families visit campus. The Luke who steps out of his calm, almost still voice -- not to mention his comfort zone -- to stand in front of his teammates to share his life story with the hope of bonding the room under one rainbow and perhaps help them find a little of the peace that he has tapped from the island. The Luke who hones that peace daily, spending more and more time increasingly immersed in Japanese culture, from manga comics and music to his repetitive studies of Musashi's most enduring works, "The Five Rings" and "Dokkōdō," or "The Path to Aloneness."
"There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself." -- Musashi
It should be no surprise that, like his mother, Felix-Fualalo loves "Star Wars." Because it should also be no surprise that when George Lucas created his galaxy of Jedi and the Force, he did so having been inspired by the teachings of the samurai. When Miyamoto Musashi wrote of "The Way" some 400 years ago, he became the primary maker of the mindset that has been utilized throughout the centuries since, whether it be by generals of armies, CEO of corporations, destroyers of Death Stars or Hawai'i Rainbow Warriors seeking to protect their quarterback from any would-be trench runners.
"I asked my mom, 'Why did you call me Luke?'" he recalled. "She told me that originally, she was going for Bible names. My two older brothers are Nathaniel and Ezra, OK? She saw Luke in the Bible, but she knew, well, that's also Luke Skywalker. So that goes hand in hand as well. And the rest is kind of history. The beginning of my story."
The story of the most interesting man in college football.