NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- In the NFL, if a player doesn't say he hates to lose, he's an outlier.

It's practically a mandatory claim. It's not enough to be competitive. You need to be ultra-competitive. You need to hate to lose worse than all the other guys hate to lose.

It's certainly a trait attached to Marcus Mariota, the Tennessee Titans second-year quarterback who will lead his team against Minnesota Sunday at Nissan Stadium.

Outside of football, how does Mariota's competitive urge manifest itself?

Friends say he habitually plays just about anything -- golf, cards, table tennis -- until he wins.

"Marcus is hyper-competitive and he hates losing," said trainer Ryan Flaherty, who worked with Mariota in two offseasons. "I don't just mean in football games. If I beat him in a round of golf, which I beat him most of the time -- ha ha -- he won't forget about it and he'll make you play him again and again and again until he can beat you.

"And that doesn't just go for golf, he will do that with ping pong too. He is a vicious competitor. So if you want to get under his skin, beat him. But if you do he will hunt you down until he beats you. I know that might seem pretty obvious and you'll say most guys are like that. But he is next level."

"Anything I am doing, I want to win, I want to be the best at it," Marcus Mariota said. "It doesn't matter if it's cards, doesn't matter if I am racing home from dinner or something, I just want to be the first to do it." Joe Robbins/Getty Images

Mariota's friends have his pattern down.

"He will definitely teach you how to play the game then once you learn, it's on," said Bronson Yim, who played with Mariota in high school and at Oregon. "Even if it is a game that Marcus just learned, he wants to learn all of the ins and outs so that he can keep up and then before you know it, he's better than you."

In the spring, Mariota spoke of losing at golf to the Titans new center, Ben Jones.

What kind of quarterback loses to a lineman at golf, many of us wondered?

Jones quickly turned it around and said Mariota was being modest about his game.

Mariota's golfed, too, with tight end Phillip Supernaw, including on a trip to Oregon that also included two of Mariota's teammates from Oregon: Jeff Lockie and Hroniss Grasu, who is now with the Bears.

"He's the sandbagger of all sandbaggers," Supernaw said. "He actually tied me one time. He's in the learning stages, but he's got a really good swing. I think he's had some lessons, I don't know if he'll admit that.

"He said he shoots over 100, but it'll always be in the high 80s, low 90s pretty consistently. When he's asking for strokes, oh my God, it's a ton. He'll try to make me give him at least 10 strokes probably. At least. He can play really bad, but he can play really well. If he plays really well the 10 is more than enough. At any time he can par five holes in a row. He's a decent golfer."

During that golf trip, Mariota and the gang also played a lot of Sevens, and some other games he knows from home.

"Hawaiian people have all these card games, I guess it's a big thing in Hawaii," Supernaw said. "He teaches me all the card games, then he beats me at them until I kind of learn. He doesn't take losing at card games very well.

"He's going to keep playing until he wins. Then it's time to go to bed."

In football, Mariota won't be able to keep playing until he wins.

An NFL week can be long after a loss, and he learned that after playing in nine of them in his rookie season. In three years as Oregon's starting quarterback he lost only five times. In one year as the starter at St. Louis School in Honolulu, Hawaii, before that, he lost once.

"He's not an always outwardly competitive guy, but he's got an internal fire that he hates to lose," Titans general manager Jon Robinson said. "He's won a lot of football games over his career collegiately, then to have what happened last year happen, there is certainly a lot of motivation

Robinson sees Mariots'a competitiveness at practice, in relatively subtle body-language.

"When he comes out of a series in practice it's a fist pump, excited about what happened," he said. "If it's a bad play, it's gritting his teeth and snapping his chin strap off violently, like he let one get away."

Mariota is super easy-going. It's hard to picture him visibly mad beyond that chin-strap tug.

A devious grin is easier to imagine, especially as he talks about trying to be the first one home from dinner.

"Anything I am doing, I want to win, I want to be the best at it," he said. "It doesn't matter if it's cards, doesn't matter if I am racing home from dinner or something, I just want to be the first to do it.

"That's just kind of my mentality. That's been my mentality for a long time. It's kind of the way I was raised."