"What's up, boss?"

Bryan Cook, the self-made in Cincinnati safety charged with getting the Bengals lined up and putting the rest on the ground, is old-shooling us.

He's got us in his late-model Dodge Challenger seemingly straight on '70s Astroturf before heading up Hamilton Avenue and driving through '80s R&B mixed with Rap piping through his phone to where he first learned to tackle in a game called "Kill A Man."

We land at a grassy patch of passion in College Hill. In front of the Astor Place Apartments on the Hamilton Ave. sidelines. Maybe as long as the red zone, maybe longer, give or take some of those angles he loved to study in school.

The basement one, right in front there, where his mother made sure to raise him right, along with his brother, and sister until they moved the five-minute ride to Mount Healthy and junior high.

"This is my heart," says Cook, who has one big enough to fit two Super Bowl rings, his two kids, and the woman of his dreams. "You can say anything you want about it. I am who I am."

This is how you played Kill A Man at Astor Place:

"You have to change the verbiage now," Cook says. "Basically, you're solo by yourself. You throw the ball up, and whoever grabs it, that person is now the ball carrier. Everyone's object is to tackle that person. Once you tackle him, the ball is back up, and you start all over."

This is where he made that first tackle. It could be as few as two or as many grade-school kids as they could get in every-day clothes with ESPN dreams of Chad "Ocho" Johnson and the Marvin Lewis Bengals. He says he scored against nine kids. The education of a physical, take-no-prisoners  NFL safety.

"I loved carrying the ball," Cook says. "Pickup football. No rules. That was our pickup basketball, if you will. That was everything. You learned a lot. You learned how to carry the ball. You learned how to tackle. You had to. At night, you're going to feel badly. What if you didn't tackle anybody and you never scored? If somebody else scored three or four times?"

First tackle. First interception. First bike ride. A dip down the patch is where they played King of the Hill. Tough, sure he says. But his mother made sure they had everything they needed.

"It shaped who I am today," Cook says of the patch. "I'm a man who had a vision and had a picture of a life, and he worked to make that vision come true. God opened doors and made it happen for me."

He'll take us through Groesbeck Road and Davey Ave to get us to McEvoy Park, home of the Hilltop Hawks, where Jimmy Waller taught his 10-year-old safety high school coverages. He played quarterback, too, and has a picture in his phone of a kid from the Forest Park Rams yanking his helmet.

Then he'll swing off Hamilton again, where Mount Healthy High School sits and where he learned to play cornerback on YouTube when head coach Arvie Crouch switched him his junior year to get a better shot at college offers.

Back on Hamilton Ave., which would take him right to his dorm room at the University of Cincinnati, about six miles from Kill A Man Stadium, going past the street where his grandmother lives, as well as the monstrous grass hill he used to run in college overlooking the interstates to everywhere and nowhere in front of Cincinnati State.

"There's niceness here," says Cook when a driver lets him cut in front.

A take-out lunch at his favorite UC eatery, the Penn Station on West McMillan. Watch out, he says as you walk. He pulls you away from a parking meter. "Never split a pole. You don't want to stop the flow."

Regular pizza (no onion, no mushrooms) and fries. Just  like when he roamed at safety so well for the Bearcats that the Kansas City secondary, still smarting from Joe Burrow in the AFC title game loss to the Bengals, took him with the 62^nd pick in the 2022 Draft.

Back home? This latter-day Cincinnati Kid never left.

"It comes with certain expectations," Cook says of the move back. "Realizing you can't make everybody happy, you can't live up to everyone's expectations of you. It's a challenging transformation. I feel like because I already went through that, that's why I'm able to embrace coming back home.

"It's an understanding of what I'm here to do. I'm not here to play games or mess around with the gift God gave me to give back to my hometown. There's a bunch of different ways. But the inspiration from winning games for the city, it's an amazing opportunity despite it all. I get to raise my kids here. You have questions, doubts, thoughts. But coming back home and seeing certain things, it gives me a stronger sense of self."

Cook is standing on the grass of McEvoy Park where he remembers several age groups splitting up to practice. He points to where another NFL standout, running back David Montgomery, practiced with an older group.

Cook was always old for his age. Had to be, he says. No blueprint to follow. Fewer resources than others.

Jimmy Waller, the father of one of Cook's closest friends who considers him one of his own sons, would have to catch himself twice sometimes. This kid who was maybe 20 years younger was talking to Waller as if he were one of his peers.

"He was always a good listener. That's one of the things that attracted me to him," says Waller, who gave him a key to the house and took him on family trips. "He was always mature. The conversations …  He always grabs things, and he was just so mature. I had to remind myself I was still talking to a child."

As Crouch says, "He's extremely intelligent."

"Even in high school, he always talked about, I want to get married and have some kids, and just live life," Waller says. "And I'm like, well, you know, that'll happen. It's crazy, man, because that's exactly what happened."

The maturity translated to football, too. Jimmy Waller  also coached the North College Hill High School defensive backs, as well as the 10-year-olds.

"I would leave high school football practice to go to Pee Wee football," says Waller, who somehow also found time to run his re-modeling business. "Once I saw how fast Bryan was catching on, I didn't even change what I was teaching. So the same thing I was teaching my high schoolers at a varsity level, I was teaching him. It was unbelievable."

Cover Threes. Clouds. And Cook could communicate it to the other kids getting ready to play the Western AA Warriors.

"It was remarkable," Waller says. "And he also was the quarterback."

Waller and Crouch, the Mount Healthy coach, believe that maturity came from his mother.

"Great lady. Great discipline herself," Waller says. "She was his backbone," Crouch says. "She had his back all the way through. A wonderful lady, very supportive, always helping out with the team.

"All I know is he showed up to everything. Never missed. Always 100%. Always, 'Yes sir, no sir.' That's why he is where he is today. … Bryan Cook is a great human being."

Crouch still can't understand why there was just one college offer. He was so good, "I probably underutilized him. He never should have come off the field." Crouch let everyone know about Cook, and he made sure Howard University knew, since three years before he had sent linebacker Dominque Smith there.

Cook took his YouTube corner skills ("I had a receiver mindset. I could figure out the rest.") to Washington D.C. and became a Division I lure with an impressive freshman season. He was there only a year when he came back home and floored the UC coaches with a drop-dead workout. From one offer to third-team All-America safety,

Then-UC assistant Doug Phillips, now the head man at Youngstown State, told Crouch, "No question he can help us."

But that door Cook talks about? It blew open when he went to Howard and saw that woman he'd been dreaming about since Astor Place.

One day in the cafeteria he met Jayla Thornton and became friends. While she would go on to become the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference Player of the Year in her senior year at Howard, and Cook would go on to lead the Bearcats to bowl glory as a senior, somewhere it became more than that.

After he got his two Super Bowl rings with the Chiefs and she won the vaunted Newhouse School's Faculty Award at Syracuse University as a graduate student in the sports communications track of the television, radio and film program, she is now Jayla Thornton-Cook, and they have two children under the age of three.

"When he signed here," Jimmy Waller says, "he was laughing. 'Pops, all (the media) wants to ask about is my wife."'

Which is perfect because Bryan Cook says, "I'm not a camera guy."

But he is a Mount Healthy Owl, and he does what he did then, and moves an obstacle so he can drive us to the football field, and he can lean on the fence he used to jump so he could work on the field and run on the track. The grassy hill on the other side?

"We'd run up and down it for workouts," Cook says. "Sometimes play Kill A Man when I was a kid."

He is also talking about the woman from Howard.

"You think about it. You meet someone you want to share your life with, and you have kids who are extensions of you," he says. "It's a beautiful thing."

He is also talking about his tattoos, relatively new additions. He can cite these Biblical verses from memory, but he also put the numbers on his hands. On the left is Isaiah 54:17 ("No weapon formed against you shall prosper,") and on the right Psalms 23 1-4 ("The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want").

On his body he also has "God Qualifies," as well as a wolf weathering a storm, a UC symbol ("Love my Bearcats"), the Suspension Bridge that connects Cincinnati to Kentucky, along with the 513 hometown area code.

All of them, he says, were added after the second  Super Bowl ring of two years ago, not long after he converted. It would seem to be a time he was on top of the world.

"But that's the time I needed Him the most," Cook says.  "I feel like you need something outside of yourself to believe in because, naturally, since we're human beings, we're flawed. By going over to the Lord, not only do I know I'm flawed, but I know through this I can become a better person, a better husband, a better father.

"I even take my work more seriously. At one point in my career, I felt like I didn't take my craft that seriously. I do have Super Bowl rings. You might think I'm comfortable. But that's just the dangerous part you're going to be in …  The tattoos are more to remind myself to keep humble and to remember where I came from."

Home is where he fell in love with geometry. Now he is talking about angles. Which is also what the Bengals were talking about when they signed him. A safety who never seems to take the wrong angle. He loved geometry in school.

"I'm fascinated by angles and shapes," says Cook, the old Mount Healthy center fielder and UC pool player. "All sports have an angle. Sure tackler in football. Boxing. Even baseball. To catch a fly ball, you have to have a proper angle."

He just had a pool table delivered to the rec room in his new home in the Cincinnati suburbs. He's still got an angle. Bringing that third Super Bowl. It would be coming straight down Hamilton Ave.

"That," says this era's Cincinnati Kid, "would be an inspiration."