Cameron Lynch: The real life Naruto
By, Danielle Jaculewicz
NFL linebacker Cameron Lynch starts his day right with a bowl of oatmeal, a glass of water and a prayer. When he entered the classroom at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in his salmon button up and Jordan 1’s he radiated light and animation to every person in the room.
From the moment Cameron Lynch sat down and addressed the class I knew he was a professional. He treated teenage students like press, not looking down upon us because of our age. Lynch has had a career in the NFL for almost five years. After playing at Syracuse University he was an undrafted free agent and signed with the St. Louis (eventually Los Angeles) Rams, since then he has also played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a linebacker.
While Cameron Lynch could just be known as a professional football player from his wikipedia page, he is multi faceted. He enclosed to the class his hopes of becoming a sports broadcaster and attending USC for graduate school. Cameron detailed his goal of becoming like Mike Terico or Michael Strahan. He mentioned covering the Superbowl and said “So I want to do something similar, and at the Olympics and those are my goals essentially. And then wherever else after that, you know, the sky’s the limit.” Unlike many other professional football players Cam knows exactly what he wants to do now that his athletic career is over, and he is lucky to have found the support to do so.
Lynch is currently working with two others, Meg Wiggins and Akeem Gonzales to promote his brand and further his career. “I just felt like he was a genuine person and I really enjoyed working with him and talking to him. And so I saw how hard he was working there and how he was really engaged and he loved doing what he was doing.” This is what Meg said him after meeting Lynch interning at the Superbowl and it perfectly describes Cam’s whole personality. As for Akeem, he was drawn to Lynch while editing an interview and realizing they connected over being both athletes and “nerds.”
Cam explained to us his nerdy side when describing his love for anime. He shared how anime makes him feel peaceful and he enjoys the stories, but as he kept talking it showed how much anime characters, especially Naruto are part of his identity. Cameron was once too heavy for football as a child, and is now considered small for the NFL, and from the way he described it, Naruto resonates with that. “I love those things and I love it because it says who I am. I feel like I can relate to those characters like Naruto. Naruto he’s an outcast, he wasn’t great at school. He wasn’t great at a lot of things. But one thing he had faith in himself.”
Lynch wears a bracelet which says “ME” on it. He said it was from Cabo San Lucas and it has mostly been considered a joke, but the more he explained about his life the bracelet seemed to represent more than just a joke.
Cameron Lynch is an NFL football player, but he is much more than that. He is a man who dreams of becoming a big time sports broadcaster, he is an anime fanatic, and he is a kind person with level ten energy at all times. Whatever the future holds for Lynch it is sure to be bright because he is truly one of a kind.
