Sometime in the fall of 2020, a wooden throne with a velvet-lined seat, seven feet high and 200 pounds, sold for $75 on Facebook Marketplace.The buyer was a football coach in Idaho.Each Friday, the throne followed the Skyline High School football team in Idaho Falls. A parent would load it onto a pickup truck and deliver it to the sideline for games. A player forcing a turnover would be feted like a king: gold chain (with a thick wooden paw and “Grizz” insignia across the middle) draped around his neck. He’d then climb onto that wooden throne — the “Turnover Throne” — and be lifted by celebratory teammates.The throne followed Skyline throughout its state championship run in 2020, and it was present for the title game in 2021, too. However, by the end of that game, the throne had a human-sized dent in the side of it.The damaged throne still stands. Years later and 2,200 miles east, the kid responsible for the damage shrugs his shoulders.“I broke it, I guess,” Kenyon Sadiq says.Standing outside the New York Jets’ facility in northeast New Jersey, Sadiq, the Jets’ first-round rookie tight end, looks around and smiles. He appreciates the sounds of silence — or, at least, how it sounds tucked into a quiet area, when construction at the facility isn’t roaring. He prefers peace.When he found out the Jets drafted him, the prospect of living in Manhattan stressed him out — it’s a long way from the woods of southeast Idaho. When he first arrived in Florham Park, he breathed a sigh of relief.Silence soothes him, but the tranquility also animates him. Through a life lived in nature, much of it spent fishing with his late grandfather, he learned to turn the volume down in his brain. Most people exercise to fast-paced music. Sadiq listens to slow jams when he works out.And the way he plays football, he might as well be wearing noise-canceling headphones. He rarely hears the sounds of a crowd, even the deafening noise of Oregon’s raucous Autzen Stadium, where he played his collegiate home games. He says there are moments when all he sees is the man in front of him, or the ball as he leaps for a catch or the end zone as he runs toward it.“What Kenyon would explain to me,” his mother, Heather Pledger, says, “is the game slows down in his head. So he could feel himself in the air and then catch the ball. Like, the ball would come in slow motion to him.”Beast Breakdown: Kenyon SadiqDave HelmanHis preparation is so intense, so thorough, that all he needs is a task — beat the man in front of you on a route, catch the ball when it’s thrown to you, make defenders miss once it’s in your hands. Or, block the man in front of you and don’t stop until he’s on the ground.Pledger recalled moments that made her think of the movie “The Blind Side,” when Michael Oher blocked someone through the back of the end zone and over a fence at the end of a play. Sadiq did something like that more than once. His mom would ask him: Where’d you go, son? Did you forget the game was still going on?“You tell Kenyon to finish, he’s gonna finish,” she says. “Whatever that means.”That’s what he did in that 2021 state title game. He took a Sandpoint High defensive back and blocked him through Skyline’s sideline, and then he kept going.Crack.He finally stopped. He’d blocked the kid into the throne. It tipped over.“He broke it!” his mom says, laughing.The image was fitting. A throne symbolizes power, and with that comes fame and adulation. Sadiq never had interest in any of that.McCammon, Idaho, is a two-stoplight town with a population in triple digits. The area it covers is so small that a bike ride across the entire town takes about 10 minutes. For locals, “going into town” means driving 30 minutes away to Pocatello to get groceries at Walmart. A few years ago, McCammon got its first-ever Family Dollar, which was a big deal.In this small stretch of land, Terry Pledger, Sadiq’s maternal grandfather, was beloved. An Idaho boy from Pocatello, Pledger was a three-sport high school star who stayed home to start a family with Alaina, the love of his life, rather than pursue dreams of playing baseball professionally.As an offensive lineman, he had offers to play college football, too. Instead, he worked at Kraft for a time, then became a police officer, a coach and a girls basketball referee. He pushed his daughter to find her passion. Heather danced, ran track, played volleyball and basketball. Terry had her playing baseball too; she was the only girl on the team.When Pledger looks at her son, she sees her dad: his athleticism, determination, kindness, intellect, love of nature — his essence. Even his hands, which she calls an “exact” replica of her father’s. Perhaps that’s why grandfather and grandson got along so well.“He saw a lot of himself in my son,” she says.Sadiq with mom Heather (left) and his grandparents, Alaina and Terry. (Courtesy of Heather Pledger)There were stretches when Heather, with Kenyon’s father out of the picture, was working as many as three jobs at a time — running restaurants, working at dental offices, graveyard shifts at the hospital, gigs at the local horse track, among others — for her three kids: Kenyon, his sister, Daisha, and his brother, Mikhi.Kenyon learned to do his own laundry at 5, and he and his siblings sometimes had to cook for themselves. For stretches, they’d move back in with her parents until she could get back on her feet.