23 AND ME

You know about the elite power, speed and skill that helped MYLES GARRETT become the NFL's new single-season sack king. But it also took some big dreams—and a little self-doubt—to establish football’s new magic number

- by GREG BISHOP photograph by KOHJIRO KINNO

HOW IT STARTED ...

Garrett's pursuit of the sack record began the way it ended: with a takedown of Burrow (a pair of them, actually) in Week 1.

MYLES GARRETT had a dream five months ago. He has a lot of those, hundreds of dreams that descend nightly, random and pointed and pointless and inspirational and pure fantasy. Garrett remembers his dreams, too, which makes him a High Dream Recaller. HDRs, research says, display higher brain activity, tend to daydream and enjoy fantasy worlds, are creative and more open to experiences. That’s him. Myles Garrett, The Dreamer.

This dream: He’s outside a hotel where he has never stayed, in a beautiful, wintry landscape; his girlfriend, snowboarder Chloe Kim, two-time Olympic gold medalist, is talking to him, but standing in front of him, her back turned.

Garrett describes this in Los Angeles on Jan. 20. He’s less than 48 hours removed from a flight from Switzerland to LAX. And he’s describing how the moment in that dream, which he hadn’t considered since the morning after, had happened IRL three or four days earlier, exactly as envisioned.

“I [get] déjà vu a whole bunch,” he says. “Or, I guess, I [dreamed] it, and it’s hard for me to recall that moment. Until it happens.”

On the night of Jan. 3, the Browns’ defensive end nodded off in Cincinnati, on the eve of the final game of the season. He was sitting on 22 sacks, a half sack behind the NFL single-season record since the stat was officially recognized four decades ago. Another one and he'd have more than any pass rusher ever to lock eyes on a quarterback and grunt like it's time for dinner.