The Secret of SAUCE

The young cornerstone of the suddenly talent-rich ! Jets is more than a classic showboat, shutdown corner. Sauce Gardner is a positive force everywhere he goes, in football and in life

- CONOR ORR

There are quiet moments, like midnight waves, when it seems like Sauce Gardner recedes and Ahmad Gardner comes to the forefront.

Take the day last year, during a starlit season that ended with a Defensive Rookie of the Year award, when Gardner found himself outside a row of designer stores in downtown Manhattan with a brick of cash in his pocket. Gardner doesn't like to use credit cards, so wherever he goes he always arrives with a predetermined amount of spending money.

He locked eyes with an unhoused person on the street and, though the man didn't ask him for anything, Ahmad palmed $1,000 with his goalie-glove-sized hand and gave it away. The man cried. Gardner, who went home without buying anything, says it was the third time he did something like that, in the third state, in a year. His former coach at Cincinnati remembers hearing about Gardner, during his junior season, leaning out of his car and handing an unhoused man $500 because they used to talk when Gardner passed him near campus.

Gardner says he is deep in thought during these moments, about his purpose and why God would have led him here, on this particular day, on this particular street, with a stack of hundreds resting in his coat. "Sometimes I'm just fighting battles with myself, like, you don't need to do this for this person," he says. "It's harder [to say no to] people I don't know. Autographs, for instance. They have to pull me [away] because I just keep signing. I keep seeing [fans'] expressions. I don't ever want it to stop."

Gardner prefers to go by Sauce, the nickname a peewee football coach gave him when he was 6. Today, Sauce wears diamond grills in his teeth, helps deliver Aaron Rodgers to New York and burns Packers cheese heads on his YouTube channel. There is already a documentary in production about his life. "That's what it is on the field," he says of his nickname.