Chris Long looks up from his phone in time to see the stoplight change from yellow to red. He slams on the brakes of his Toyota FJ Cruiser and apologizes; he’s trying to follow his GPS while looking for an Instagram video he filmed with a drone at his farm in Virginia. It’s a bird’s eye view of him and a few childhood friends blowing up a Darth Vader doll stuffed with colored powder and Tannerite, an explosive target used in rifle practice.

Long, a defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles, is driving to the Mariana Bracetti Academy Charter School in North Philly to speak to high schoolers. Earlier this morning, he announced that he and his wife, Megan, are donating his last 10 game checks to three different organizations devoted to educational equality in the three cities in which he’s played football. He’s calling his new initiative “Pledge 10 for Tomorrow,” encouraging fans to give what they can, and he’ll donate an extra $50,000 to the city with the most donations.

“Ah, here it is!” he says, finding the video. “I know Tannerite isn’t good, but how cool does this look?”

He hands me his phone. It looks very cool, mesmerizing even. Long has set the video to a song by My Morning Jacket, and the soaring chords match the brilliant bursts of teals, greens, and pinks that billow out against a white blanket of snow.

“One of my buddies from high school who I do this stuff with just had a kid,” Long says, taking his phone back. “I hope it doesn’t mean he’ll stop doing dumb shit like this with me.”

I remind Long, who is 32, that he has a kid, and that having children hasn’t stopped him, nor generations of men before him, from doing dumb shit.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he says, and smiles.

Long starts telling me about the other dumb shit he does. He regularly runs out of gas. He's had the car we’re in for two years and hasn't registered it. He lost his birth certificate a while ago. He was so obsessed with the movie Drive that he bought himself a ‘96 Chevy Impala, then totaled it listening to the soundtrack a day later. (He owned a replica of the scorpion jacket Gosling wore, too, but gave it to Goodwill after the crash because “the dream had died.”)

Last year, he listed his former Patriots teammate Danny Amendola’s number on a fake Craigslist ad for a Suzuki Spider, then watched a bewildered Amendola field calls from people looking to buy his nonexistent motorcycle. He and William Hayes, who’s on the Dolphins now but played with Long on the Rams, once filled a teammate’s car with packing peanuts and crickets. The crickets died and it smelled terrible.

“I am incapable of not being a regular fucking moron,” Long says, laughing.

He misses the turn for the high school. He whips the car around, finds the entrance, parks, and walks by a few vans belonging to local news crews and NFL Films. The league is filming the event for some series about Players Doing Good Stuff.

This fall is the first time Long has so overtly publicized his charitable work. He founded WaterBoys in 2014 after he climbed Kilimanjaro with his then-teammate James Hall. So far the organization has funded 26 wells — 22 of which have been built in East Africa — that serve 7,000 people each. With former NFL player and Green Beret Nate Boyer, Long also leads trips of veterans up Kilimanjaro. He then founded the Chris Long Foundation in 2015.

Following the Unite the Right rally in his hometown of Charlottesville, Va., he was moved to put his arm around his teammate Malcolm Jenkins when Jenkins raised his fist during the national anthem before a preseason game. Long has continued to do so through the season, and yesterday, he and Jenkins were two of 12 players at the NFL owners fall meetings to discuss the protests. In a week, they will spend their day off after the Eagles’ Monday Night Football game against Washington at the Pennsylvania State Capitol advocating for criminal justice reform.

After his symbolic gesture, Long felt he had to publicly do something concrete. In September, he gave his first six checks to fund two scholarships at St. Anne’s-Belfield, the private high school he went to in Charlottesville (even though he and Megan had quietly funded two already, and those kids are about to head off to college).

But he wanted do something “more macro,” so now he’s giving away his last 10 checks, too, forgoing an entire season’s salary. He also created the matching campaign on social media because he thinks a lot of people truly do want to help; they just don't know how. Give them a link and a pre-vetted charity, turn it into a competition, and boom: You’re raising hundreds of thousands of dollars. (As of publication, Long has raised over $205,000.)

Inside the high school, Sylvia Watts McKinney, the director of Summer Search, one of the programs Long is supporting, introduces him to the group of kids he’ll be speaking to. She reads a passage from Ralph Ellison’s essay What These Children Are Like.

“If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.”

“A little bit about me,” Long says, after he thanks McKinney and takes the mic. “I’m a football player. I spent eight years in St. Louis, and we never won more than seven games in a season, which is really bad, for anyone who follows football. It was a rough time.”

He’s not using any notes, and sounds far more natural than he did recording a Pledge 10 PSA from a teleprompter this morning at the Eagles facility. The students, very few of whom are white, seem skeptical at first. But they warm up as Long tells them how the Rams never made the playoffs, how he was injured in 2014, how he was released in 2015, how he went to New England and won a Super Bowl. He thinks he can do that here with the Eagles. A few kids whoop.

“For me as a student growing up,” Long says, switching gears, “I had everything I could ask for. Every resource was at my disposal. I went to a private school, I had tutoring, all those mentoring opportunities I needed, but I still struggled in school. I wasn’t a great student, but I also think I took it for granted. And that is something I really regret.”

Long did, and does, have everything. He’s the son of Diane and Howie Long. Howie was a famous NFL player, actor, and is now an analyst. Football is the reason Long — and his brother Kyle, who plays for the Bears, and Howie Jr., who works in player personnel for the Raiders — grew up rich and is the thing that has made him richer. It’s afforded him over 311,000 Twitter followers, giving him a platform, which, right now, he’s using to tell kids that they should value people the way people value retweets or likes on Instagram. This makes them laugh.

Then he lets it rip.

“Life is short,” he says. “Live it with joy. I really think that the biggest thing I could leave you with today is to take pleasure in the work that you do, whether in classroom or community, and enjoy it. Be that contagious light that spreads energy to other people. Great people make other people feel they can be great, too. We talk about this in the locker room as football players and leaders, how you want everyone around you to feel like they can be great for having played with you, sat in a classroom with you, been a friend of yours. Through your loyalty, your excitement, and for who you are. Be contagious in your energy.”

It’s Wednesday around noon, five hours before the event at the high school, and Long is walking into the Whole Foods next to the apartment he and Megan are renting in Philly. It’s 75 degrees, but he’s decided it’s fall, so he’s wearing socks with Birkenstocks, thick sweatpants, a long sleeve wool shirt, and a Carhartt vest.

“I call his style, ‘rich hobo,’” Green Bay Packers tight end Martellus Bennett will tell me on the phone a few days later. He played with Long in New England, and the two became very close. Bennett describes their connection as “cerebral.”

“He’d walk into the locker room and I’d be like, ‘Nice jacket, but those sweats are trash, and those Birks gotta go,’” Bennett says. “But he has to wear socks because his toes are gross. I love his style, he always makes me feel OK to dress the way I dress. We both just didn’t care. He’s like a rich bum. Just look at him.”

The rich bum is currently looking at a wall of healthy-looking drinks. He picks up a Maple Water and puts it in his basket. I ask what Maple Water is. He’s not totally sure, but it’s probably just water with maple in it, and he says it’s good. I ask if he worries about getting recognized when he goes out in public.

“Nah,” he says. “I haven’t been in Philly long enough. And the great thing about being a football player is you don’t get a ton of face time. You always have a helmet on.”

Long also grew up around fame. It’s not something new he’s had to adjust to.

“It’s too hot for the hot bar,” he says, waving his hand in the direction of the steam trays of chicken and tofu.

He then proceeds to wander up and down each aisle. I lose him at one point, which is hard to do, because he’s 6’3 and weighs 276 pounds. His arms are the size of a normal human’s neck. He has wide eyes, a square jaw, and broad, decisive shoulders. He could pass for a Viking, if Vikings had tattoos that said VIRGINIA; he has a full sleeve on one arm and a half on the other that will soon become full. Tattoos, he says, are addicting.

“He shows us as black players in the NFL that he gets it. He’s not turning a blind eye.” — Martellus Bennett

Long scoops some peanuts and raisins out of a bulk bin. If he occasionally acts like a teenager, he consistently eats like one (or at least a somewhat health-conscious one). Over the next three hours, I’ll watch him eat a bowl of cereal, a protein bar, a piece of Ezekiel bread with peanut butter, a chicken breast, an entire bag of trail mix, a grapefruit, more trail mix, all of these peanuts and raisins, and another protein bar.

“He’s a total meat,” Diane will say about her son when I call her tomorrow. Long credits his parents — who’ve been involved with the Boys and Girls Club of Charlottesville for a long time — for teaching him and his brothers the importance of giving back.

“Did he clean his truck when you were there?” Diane asks.

I tell her I don’t know if he cleaned it, but that it was very neat.

“I'll tell you what,” she says. “That’s probably the one inauthentic thing you saw about him. Because usually, when you get in that truck, there’s piles of clothing and paperwork. He looks like he lives out of his car. He probably cleaned it for you.”

About an hour after the Whole Foods excursion, Long is sitting in a plush room off the lobby of his apartment. He just called in to Ryen Russillo’s radio show, and we can’t go back upstairs because Megan doesn’t want us to wake their 18-month-old son, Waylon. We have to get out of this room, though, because the sun is beating directly in and Long is sweating through his wool shirt.

“You wanna play pool?” Long asks.

I say sure, so we head to the lobby, where there’s a pool table that no one ever uses. We’re playing best of five. Long breaks, then sinks the eight ball a few turns later. I win. I somehow manage to win the next game, too, on my own merit, which shocks both of us.

Suddenly, he realizes there's a chance he could actually lose this thing. His eyes narrow and he starts enforcing obscure rules. He wants to raise the stakes, so we bet that I have to publicize who loses in this article.

Long was the No. 2 draft pick out of UVA and a fierce competitor during his eight “miserable” seasons with the Rams. He was, at one point, one of the best defensive ends in the league, but the team consistently sucked, and he suffered back-to-back, season-ending injuries in 2014 and 2015.

When then-Rams coach Jeff Fisher released him, Long reached out to Bill Belichick and the Patriots. New England wasn’t the perfect schematic fit for Long in terms of defense, but he just wanted to win, so Belichick said he’d find something for him to do.

Last season wasn’t ideal from an individual standpoint — he was on the field for only 65 percent of the snaps — but it culminated in a remarkable Super Bowl win. And it gave him some of his closest friends; he still talks often to Bennett, Devin McCourty, Julian Edelman, and Rob Ninkovich. That team had something special.

Still, he can’t get rid of the devil on his shoulder whispering that he wasted his prime with St. Louis, a team that was once a single fake punt away from going 0-16. He decided not to re-sign with the Pats because, while a championship was nice, he’s still acutely aware that he won as a role player. He loved team success, but his individual ambition was still unfulfilled.

“My career’s been all over the map, and I think players struggle with what’s their legacy,” Long says. “I haven’t been a superstar, but you can still think about your average-ass legacy. What’s kept me in the game is trying to leave on my terms. This has probably happened to so many players, and I probably won’t be able to accomplish it. But I want to leave playing at a high level. And using the game. I don’t want to let the game use me.”

Long felt that the Eagles defense was a better fit for him, and his intuition that they’d exceed expectations has turned out to be correct. With only one loss, Philadelphia has the best record in the league as of Week 7. And while he isn’t on the field more than he was in New England — he’s playing just 45 percent of snaps this year — he has two sacks so far and seems happy with his role. He also knows that as an active player, he has a bigger platform to raise money and speak out than he would if he retired.

Long sinks a shot and rubs his arm. He’s still sore from the Thursday game against the Panthers, which was almost a week ago. When he was recovering from surgery in 2014, he’d sit on the sidelines and watch huge guys crash into each other, thinking, I do this? He hasn’t been diagnosed with any concussions, but he worries about how CTE manifests itself. He also knows it’s too late to reverse any damage.

“And what’s me taking a knee in response to Trump? That’s not what this is about. He can’t make me kneel or stand.” — Chris Long

“Something I worry about more than that is the void that football will leave when I’m done playing,” he says. “You’ve been doing something your whole life, and then it’s over. You’re approaching your middle age. My friends back home have settled in. When I stop playing, I’m going to be the one who’s like, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

Long wins the fourth game to tie us up, 2-2. He keeps getting interrupted by the phone calls, FaceTimes, and texts from other players (including one from Edelman that just says “so tight”) as Pledge 10 gains traction.

“I think he’s one of the most genuine guys you could be around, especially off the field,” Hayes tells me. “Ninety percent of the guys you play football with, you don’t talk to after that. Chris and I haven’t played together the last couple years, but we’ve never left each other. He was my partner in crime when it came to pranks, and we both love competition. I tried to push him every day, and he did the same for me. He’s more of a brother than even a friend.”

Long breaks to start the fifth game, then goes on a roll, putting away most of his stripes for an early lead. He eyes up the cue ball, aiming for the striped No. 10, but he judges the angle wrong and sinks the eight ball again. I win.

We go back up to Long’s apartment after playing pool. Waylon has woken up and is very busy putting wooden pieces of mail into his wooden toy mailbox. He’s a spunky kid with a mullet, which Long thinks is hilarious. (He called him a young Mike Gundy on Instagram, in reference to the mulleted head coach of Oklahoma State). Megan gives Long a hard time for losing to me while she gets ready to take Waylon to the park.

Nicole Woodie, who used to run community outreach for the Rams until Long hired her to run his foundation, showed up at the apartment a few minutes ago. She sits on the couch replying to emails. Media requests have been pouring in since Pledge 10 went live.

“Someone from The Ellen Show just emailed me,” Long says, sprawled out on the coach and overflowing onto the ottoman. “They want me to come on. I’m gonna tell them no.”

“Chris, are you crazy?!” Woodie says. “You can’t turn down Ellen! Think of the moms!”

“Hmm,” Long says. “I don’t know. Would we reach people we wouldn’t reach through the sports media stuff we’re already doing?”

“Yes!” Woodie practically cries. “It's a totally different demographic! And Ellen usually does something like gives a big check. Come on, you have to do this.”

Long reluctantly agrees.

“His thing is that he’s not trying to bring attention to himself,” Bennett tells me. “He's trying to bring attention to the cause. That's noble, because a lot of people try to make it about themselves. He's trying to spread a message. He’s like, ‘Nah, I’m a part of this fight, but these [black players] are the generals. He wants to put the generals out there, guys who are more adept to talking publicly about it instead of himself."

I’ve watched Long try to do this all day. The Eagles’ PR guy asked Long this morning if he’d do SportsCenter before the upcoming Monday Night Football game against Washington.

“Nope. Put Malcolm on,” Long told him. “Put Malc up there. He’s doing great stuff in Philly.”

On Monday night, SportsCenter will run a short segment on Long anyway. But they will have to use old footage, random photos they dug up, and quotes from one of Long’s statements.

“How do you support guys like Malcolm without hijacking the situation?” Long wonders. “And then how do you interject your opinion without making it seem like you know these issues better than the people dealing with them? That’s a thin line you gotta walk.”

Bennett thinks Long is managing to walk it.

"You go through the league,” Bennett says, “and not many white players are actually saying things like Chris does. When he does, it goes bigger than just a black player saying it. He shows us as black players in the NFL that he gets it. He’s not turning a blind eye. When white players stay quiet, I’m like, I know you see the struggle. I know you see what’s going on. You play with me. We're examples of how people can get along and come from different backgrounds to work toward the same common goal. But when I speak on things that matter like this, and you turn your head, it’s like you think you can wash it away.

“Chris has always been real about it,” Bennett continues. “We'll have a conversation if he doesn’t understand something. That’s a powerful thing. And now he’s donating all of his salary to equality education? It's just like, what?!?"

Hayes appreciates Long’s involvement, too.

“When he put his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder, it showed a lot,” he says. “That one little thing he did. He knew that it could possibly cause a rift or cause a lot of conversation, but Chris, he knows what’s right, and what feels right. And he’s gotta stand up for it.”

Long hates that President Trump has made the method of protest the point of contention. He thinks the national anthem is the most effective way players can draw attention to social injustice in their communities, but he’s never felt comfortable taking a knee because of the work he’s done with veterans. After Trump said that team owners should fire any player who kneels, a lot of people tweeted at Long telling him it was now his duty to do so.

“A lot of people use the knee as though it were some barometer for how much you care about these issues,” Long says. “I could take a knee and not do a thing off the field — and I’m not alluding to anybody doing this, I’m just saying — and it would be worthless. And what’s me taking a knee in response to Trump? That’s not what this is about. He can’t make me kneel or stand.”

Long picks up Waylon and gives him a raspberry on his stomach, then goes to find a shirt that doesn’t have a picture of the band The Highwaymen on it. He comes back out wearing a corduroy button-down that Megan bought him yesterday. He almost walks out the door with the tag still on.

On Wednesday night, after his speech, Long spends time with the Summer Search kids in the cafeteria. He takes pictures, posts a video to his Instagram story, and then does the requisite press conference before thanking McKinney, the director of the program. On the drive home, he talks about how jazzed he is that he got to meet some kids his donations will benefit.

“Before somebody’s president, or a hero in society, or somebody who invents something, they were sitting in a classroom,” he says. “You have no fucking clue who that person’s gonna be, who sets that whole thing in motion that alters the path of a city. Programs like this tell kids, ‘You matter. You fuckin’ matter, man.’”

I ask Long if he liked high school and instead of answering, he asks me if I liked high school. He keeps flipping the script like this — who would I profile if I could pick five people to write about? What’s been my biggest mistake in an article? What’s been my most disastrous tweet? (All of them, I tell him.) He might be testing the waters; he’s mentioned that he might want to have a podcast, or try writing, once he retires.

He’d be good at getting people to talk; I’m five minutes into a story about the time I almost got suspended before I remember he's supposed to be telling me things like this. I ask him the question again.

No, he says after a beat, he didn’t especially like high school. He thinks he squandered it. He loves his friends from Charlottesville, but he wonders what his life would’ve been like if he hadn't gone to college in the same town he grew up in. He’s grateful for football, but he wonders what it would’ve been like to find a passion off the field, something that didn't require Toradol shots to the ankle. That wouldn’t be over before he’s 35. That he’d be sure could fill the void. He never graduated from UVA and still wants to get his degree. He wishes he could've lived two different lives at once.

“I don’t know if you were like this,” he says quietly, staring ahead. “But when I turned 18, I got so sad. I was like, man, I just want it all to slow down. I kept thinking how I’d be 30 soon, how we're running out of time. I’m always thinking 12 years ahead.”

Long is motivated by an adolescent invincibility and stubbornness but guided by an old soul’s understanding that life is short. He’s at once the teenager still doing “dumb shit,” and a grown man looking 12, 20, 50 years into the future.

It’s this duality that allows him to believe two things can be true at once. He's convinced he can still have his best season yet, but he knows time is working against him. He knows about the risks of CTE and the fragility of bones and tendons, but he puts his brain and joints on the line each week. He’s squirmy in the spotlight but knows he needs it to make the biggest difference he can.

“You’re looking to catch him in the lie. And you won’t. It’s just like, why bother?” — Scott Van Pelt

The path of least resistance for Long would’ve been to retire after winning a Super Bowl and shut the hell up. Instead, he signed with a new team and dove into the thorniest political issues facing the league. And now he's doing it for free, at a potentially huge physical cost.

“Charity is one of the coolest parts of being a football player,” Long said on the night before the launch of Pledge 10. “I’m really not bullshitting you, I really do care about what we do. I would totally resent the idea that I just do this shit for no reason.”

He sounded desperate to make me believe him; I could almost see his brain spinning. I asked him if he’s ever anxious.

“Yeah,” he said. “I am. And I’m trying to control the narrative in a positive way. I want to make sure I’m not misunderstood. I hate being misunderstood.”

Long has this recurring dream where he’s going to jail for life. Because no matter how hard he tries, the narrative is out of his control. Thanks to social media, he hears people who accuse him of having a white savior complex or of being an entitled millionaire trying to stay relevant.

He can see when people call him a libtard, a snowflake, unpatriotic, tell him to stick to sports. It drives him nuts when people insult his intelligence, and it’s the reason he fires back — the way he did when people criticized him for not going to the White House after the Super Bowl. Or the way he will in a few days when a conservative columnist (whose recent columns include “Hollywood has too little masculinity, not too much”) for the Bucks County Courier Times writes that Long “is a good example of the odious trend of virtue signaling.”

There will always be naysayers, so what can he do? Find a place — both on and off the field — where he can be useful, try his hardest to do what he believes is the right thing, and hope to cement a legacy he’s proud of.

“You can’t believe this guy is as good as he is,” ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt says. He admires Long and gave $10,000 to Pledge 10. “You’re looking for reasons for him not to be great, or good, or with his heart in the right place. You’re looking to catch him in the lie. And you won’t. It’s just like, why bother? Why not just accept that this is someone whose heart really is where it appears to be, and just be happy that exists? As opposed to trying to figure out how, or being an accountant for ways he could better. What a waste of time.”

Long’s mother says something similar.

“It almost sounds like a Disney movie,” Diane tells me. “It’s like he’s a weird, dark Disney movie. Dark because the subjects are more serious, but really, he’s just a good soul trying to do good.”

Having successfully navigated back from the high school, Long pulls up to the parking garage of his building and turns his car off in the middle of the road. I’m confused at first but then realize the fob that opens the gate is attached to his keys. Which means he has to take them out of the ignition. He does, then waves them in front of the security pad to open the door.

“Chris,” I say, “There’s gotta be an easier way to do this.”

“Yeah,” he says grinning. “I know.”

Then he puts the key in the ignition, turns the car back on, and floors it up the ramp.