How His Father’s Time with the Bears Helped Mold DK Metcalf

PITTSBURGH — He may look like it, but DK Metcalf wasn’t curated in a lab.

He didn’t suck air through a snorkel, buoyed in a tube full of fizzing water while waiting to be dropped on a football field.

The Pittsburgh Steelers’ imposing No. 1 receiver may take on a cyborg-like appearance in his pads, helmet and smoky visor, but he’s no science experiment.

Until second grade, when a classmate made things easier on a teacher who kept mispronouncing his name, he wasn’t even DK.

He was — and to his father, remains — DeKaylin, Terrence Metcalf’s oldest child.

“People always used to call me, ‘Oh, you’re Terrence’s son,’” DK said after practice at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex on Thursday. “Or Big Cat’s son, or Metcalf’s son, and (I thought), ‘Nah, I got a fuckin’ name. My name is DeKaylin Metcalf.'”

Now, the shoe is on the other foot.

“When people call him, ‘Oh, you’re DK’s dad,’ I kind of get excited now because he knows what it feels like now,” he said. “But he didn’t take it the way I did. That’s why he’s my dad. That’s why he’s the ultimate person, ultimate human being.”

Terrence Metcalf, who helped pave the way on the Chicago Bears’ offensive line from 2002-08, will return to the Windy City this weekend, this time to watch his son play at historic Soldier Field. While the younger Metcalf considers himself a Mississippian through and through, the early chapters of his life were written in the midwest.

DK Metcalf, who arrived in Pittsburgh by way of Seattle in March, has 37 receptions for 551 yards and five touchdowns, all Steelers highs heading into Week 12.

The person and, to an extent, the player who he is today was molded by his father.

“What you see today wasn’t what I saw,” Terrence Metcalf told Steelers Now over the phone. “But I saw him out-work people. … He got it in his head that, ‘If I’m out-working people, I know I got an opportunity.’”

“He knows exactly what I’m going through”

Every day, Terrence Metcalf’s phone rings at 9:15 a.m. His son is always on the other end, on his way to get his usual iced caramel latte with oat milk from Dunkin. Their conversation hardly ever centers around football.

Instead, DK asks what’s going on at home in Mississippi. He has eight siblings he keeps tabs on, including a few still in grade school.

It used to be Terrence who was away, albeit for a shorter stretch. A consensus first-team All-American coming out of Ole Miss in 2001 and third-round draft pick by Chicago the following year, he brought his family along for the ride, including a four-year-old DeKaylin.

He already had family in the Chicago area, too, making the transition a little easier. The elder Metcalf grew up in Milwaukee in the early 1980s, rooting for the Bears, in part because Walter Payton was from Mississippi.

During his rookie training camp, which was...