“You’ve eaten raccoons bigger than him!” one of the Ford guys calls out. It’s a strange comment, but Prescott doesn’t react.

As the quarterback moves in for a closer look, it occurs to the rest of the men in the group that raccoons are mostly nocturnal. And if it’s up and moving during the day, it might be rabid. And if anyone walks away from this golf course with rabies today, it definitely cannot be Dak Prescott.

By the time the group catches up to him, he’s only a few feet from the raccoon, and he’s feeding it salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Each time he tosses a chip, the raccoon picks it up and devours it, and Prescott smiles like a little boy.

T- shirt by John Elliott / Watch by Gucci

As the Cowboys were racking up victories last year—at one point they won 11 games in a row—Prescott’s overcoming-adversity creation story became a kind of echoing lore: He grew up in a trailer, the youngest of three boys living with a single mother, Peggy, who managed a truck stop. Prescott remembers that even though they didn’t always have enough money to pay the electricity bill, his mother would still take care of the neighborhood kids who were having trouble at home. “We could probably count on two or three hands how many of my friends and my brothers’ friends call her Mom,” he tells me.

He learned to play football in a field near the trailer park, taught by his elder brothers, and by the time he was in high school, he was cut like an Olympic sprinter. (He’s six feet two, 238 pounds now.) Football was always a part of the family’s life. Peggy, a voracious fan of the game, became a fixture in the bleachers at Haughton High School, cheering on all three of her sons.

Prescott was a freshman at Mississippi State when Peggy was diagnosed with colon cancer. She didn’t tell him at first, his brothers have said, because she knew how hard he would take it. After he found out, he would come back home on holidays and long weekends to be with his mother.

When she died, in November 2013, during his sophomore year at Mississippi State, he flew home and missed two practices, but he didn’t miss the next game. He went on that year to lead the Bulldogs to their first-ever number one national ranking. His performance on the field in the midst of tragedy made him a hero on campus.

He’s used his new platform with the Cowboys to advocate for cancer research, teaming up with the Ready Raise Rise campaign to support developments in immuno-oncology. During the run-up to the playoffs last year, Prescott talked about his mother frequently. He says he can hear her voice when he’s not training hard enough, and it’s because of her that he’s not worried about success changing him. “I know what she would say: ‘Get your head out of your ass.’ ”

Prescott tells me that although he grew up a Cowboys fan, one of the most memorable games he ever watched was the Monday Night Football game Brett Favre and the Packers played the day after Favre’s father died. Prescott remembers his mom telling him at some point that if that ever happened to her, she wanted him to do the same thing.

“Let me be your story,” she told him. “All the greats have one.”

As they progress around the course, Prescott and the other golfers stop and sample the goodies at the different sponsor tents. At one hole, there’s a big Ford truck, tricked out with the Cowboys logo. The Ford guys know Prescott drives an Escalade, and they’d all like to get him to switch brands. Prescott, who now has a dip of tobacco behind his lower lip, says he likes the idea of driving a big Ford King Ranch series. There are promises to talk about it later.

At one point, a young woman who works for the clubhouse approaches in a golf cart. She sees Prescott, then looks at her phone, then back up at the quarterback.

“What’s your name?” she asks, squinting a bit. Prescott decides to have a little fun with her.

“Luther,” he says.

Wide receiver Cole Beasley says that Prescott has completely changed the culture of the Cowboys locker room. “Last year, you’d come in and get your work done, and you’d go home as soon as you could. Now people want to stick around and hang out.”

“I’m looking for Dak Prescott,” she says.

He points to the youngest of his five golfing companions, a few feet away. “That’s Dak Prescott.”

The woman turns and looks incredulously at this much smaller man.

“That’s Dak Prescott?” she says.

“I’m Dak Prescott?” the man asks Prescott.

The woman says that she was told by her boyfriend that she should go get a picture with the quarterback of the Cowboys. Prescott, seeming to tire of his own joke, relents and admits that he’s the one she’s looking for. The woman runs her hand through her hair, lifts her phone—Prescott presents the perfect automated smile—and off she goes.

Near the end of the golf round, Stephen Jones, the number two executive in the Cowboys organization behind his father, Jerry, stops by to see if his star player is having a good time. He shakes Prescott’s hand and pats his shoulder several times and tells him that he’s acquired some “new toys” from the most recent draft. After Jones leaves, Prescott spits out the rest of the tobacco and rinses his mouth out with a can of Dos Equis. He’s also sipping from a Styrofoam cup from time to time, but in the hours I’m with him, he never seems drunk.

Alcohol has become a bit of a sensitive issue for him. Since coming to the Cowboys, Prescott has been careful not to make headlines off the field, but he had two incidents in college that almost derailed his career. Shortly after Prescott took a spring-break trip to Panama City Beach, Florida, in 2015, videos surfaced that showed him in a lopsided fight in a parking lot there. In one clip, as Prescott’s attackers scatter, he has trouble standing up. It’s hard to tell how intoxicated he might have been.

Nearly a year to the day after the spring-break beating, Prescott was arrested for DUI near the Mississippi State campus, just two days after a lackluster performance for NFL scouts. He reportedly failed a field sobriety test, and he has admitted that he’d been drinking, but he swears he wasn’t drunk. He went to trial in municipal court and was acquitted, but not before his stock in the upcoming NFL draft took a hit. He seemed too risky a bet for most general managers. Despite Prescott’s success at Mississippi State, he was the eighth quarterback selected. Every team passed on him at least once.