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It took Kodie Stringer more than 10 years to say the words.

I'm not a football player.

The son of the NFL's most tragic figure is a rising senior at Atlanta's Grady High School. He is 6-foot-3, weighs 340 pounds and so closely resembles his late father that family friends burst into tears when they see him. A world of opportunity and a storybook narrative lies gilded before him, but Korey Stringer's only child is respectfully divesting himself from the world his father left behind.

"I've been playing football since I was 6 years old," Kodie, 17, said over the phone recently. "And throughout those years, people always told me football was in my blood. To be honest, I find that whole idea to be false. You have your parents' traits, but it's up to you what you do with it. I'm not taking anything away from people who play football and love it. I just don't. It's not everything to me. You can't make a life out of football if you don't love it."

This is a story about football, loss and true love, the dogma a young man and his mother have wrestled since Aug. 1, 2001. On that day, Korey Stringer died from complications of heat stroke following a Minnesota Vikings training camp practice. Beyond tragic, his death was senseless; fatal heat stroke is 100 percent preventable. In their grief, his widow and son soon packed up and moved to Atlanta to cope, heal and find their place in the world.

Kodie Stringer doesn't plan on playing football beyond high school. Courtesy Stringer family

You might have followed the journey of Kelci Stringer, who settled a decade's worth of litigation and in 2010 formed the Korey Stringer Institute for prevention of sudden death in sports. The foundation, based at the University of Connecticut, works to educate athletic trainers and promote healthy protocols -- especially in the heat of August football practices around the country.

"What happened to Korey," she said, "it just never should have happened. That's the thing that gets me to this day."

That core message informs not only her foundation work, but her parenting of Kodie, as well. Despite her legal wrangling with the Vikings, the NFL and its equipment manufacturers, Kelci never rejected the game itself. She inferred Kodie's ambivalence from an early age, but she hoped that ferrying him through a life of football would provide a connection to his father and experiences outside of his comfort zone.

"I wanted him not to be afraid," she said. "To be doing something every day that took his dad away, and no one knows why it had to happen, I can only imagine what could be going on inside his head. I witnessed early on as a parent that this is where his comfort zone ended.

"He's a little like Korey. He's got charm and personality, and he's a good young man with good manners. That will get you 50 percent of the way there. But he can be a little lazy. Korey was that way, too. To me, sports can get you the rest of the way. It gives you a sense of what can happen when you really work for something."

I visited the Stringers on a summer day in 2006, finding cases of water stacked in every nook of their home. Kelci described herself then as the ubiquitous football team mom, reminding children during every practice to hydrate and demanding that coaches provide ample time for cooling down. But already, Kodie -- 8 years old at the time -- had demonstrated a peculiar reaction.

Instead of tackling an opponent during a game, he would wrap and hold to prevent the player from falling. Whenever a game was on television, he would stare at the ceiling until someone changed the channel.

"It's not that it was terribly, painfully boring or anything," Kodie said. "It's just never been that interesting to me. I would always be like, 'Let's just get this game over with and keep it moving.'"

Korey Stringer, the Minnesota Vikings' first-round pick in 1995, died of complications from heat stroke at the age of 27. Scott Halleran/Allsport

He continued playing, he said, because "I didn't want to be rude" to anyone who thought that someone of his size and apparent potential should be playing. He watches one game on television per year: the Super Bowl. It was not until this summer -- "I was just sitting alone late at night, thinking," he said -- that he finally made the decision.

His senior season at Grady would be his final year in the game. He would eschew any opportunities to play in college, even at a Division II school, and pursue a life as an artist, probably on an American campus but possibly overseas.

"Football has always put everything else on the back burner," he said. "Now is the time to do what's most important to me. When I first started high school, I thought I wanted to be an actor, but I couldn't do the classes and try out for things because I was practicing for football. So I feel like I already missed out on that dream. I was able to do my art stuff on the weekend, and that's where I am now."

Kelci has encouraged him to reconsider.

"I look at how sports leverages resources and contacts," she said. "Even if he doesn't want to be a professional football player, why not get himself a scholarship and let them pay for his art degree? But his view of it is a little more bleak than most."

Kodie, it turns out, is ready to make a clean break. He was stunned recently when an Atlanta pizza delivery man recognized him as Korey Stringer's son simply by looking at him when he opened the door. The same thing happened during a trip this spring through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Unprompted, a man checking baggage revealed how sad he was when Korey died.

To be fair, there are no major football programs racing to sign him up. Kodie is not on the national recruiting radar, but he is confident he could vault there with a more purposeful senior season.

"Everyone says, 'Go to college and play football,'" he said. "I don't want the free, easy way. I want to do it the hard way, and do it for myself. Maybe it's not true, but it feels like the cheap and easy way. People say, 'Well, [actors] Terry Crews and Dwayne Johnson eventually achieved their true dreams through football.' But I don't want to wait until I get to 30 years old to do something I love. I want to do it now."

"He's a little like Korey," Kelci Stringer says of her son, Kodie. "He's got charm and personality." Courtesy Korey Stringer Institute

It would be easy to assume this is all about getting out of his father's shadow, about finding a life in which random pizza guys don't remind him of tragedy. But he insists the connection doesn't bother him. In fact, Kodie is committed to working with his mother to expand KSI's programs. Kelci said she was staggered by how calm and productive he was in KSI's heat tent assisting medical professionals at the 2014 Falmouth (Massachusetts) Road Race.

"That was the first time, for either one of us, that we had seen heat stroke up close and personal," she said. "We saw presumably what Korey went through. I freaked out and just stood in a corner and watched. Kodie was running all over the place, helping people.

"What really broke me down is seeing how efficient it was and how calm the nurses and doctors were, knowing that everything was under control. It was very, very painful for me because it was like, 'Korey could have been saved, too.' But I feel like Kodie saw that, and he took it better than I did, and I feel like this mission is going to move to great places with him growing along with us."

Yes, Kodie Stringer has found a way to honor his father and burnish his legacy. It just won't be as a football player. He'll do it his own way, which, if you knew Korey at all, sounds just about right.