Psychology Adjunct Professor Frank Sulloway was featured in an NBC News article titled "The key to this Super Bowl quarterback's success? Being a little brother."
In sports, some siblings are so accomplished that they can be recognized by only their surnames. The Manning brothers. The Williams sisters. In North Carolina, they have the Mayes: four brothers who are all strong athletes, born within about 5 ½ years.
Luke, the oldest, played basketball at the University of North Carolina and made the shot that sent the Tar Heels to the 2017 Final Four. Cole, the next brother, pitched at the University of Florida and won the College Baseball World Series. Beau, the third brother, also played basketball for the Tar Heels.
Then there’s Drake, the youngest. By his own description, he was the “runt” of the family. His brothers all grew to be around 6 feet, 7 inches, 6-8. Drake stopped a few inches shy of that. He was the “instigator,” the one who tried to get under the others’ skin.
“I was getting beat up on,” Drake once said. “Luckily, I was the most athletic, so I could run away. They couldn’t catch me.”
That runt is now the starting quarterback of the New England Patriots. He’s a finalist for league MVP, and on Sunday he’ll play the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. All in his second year in the NFL. He’s still only 23. If Maye wins Sunday, he’ll become the youngest quarterback to have ever won a Super Bowl.
Drake’s coaches often credit his upbringing, as the youngest of four brothers, for his success: “If you were going to script a way for an athlete to grow up — to be tough and a leader and confident — you’d put him behind those three brothers,” Mack Brown, Drake’s college football coach, told NBC News. “Just because his whole life, he’s been in the backyard competing.”
Scott Chadwick, Drake’s high school football coach, said, “He had to be so competitive and such a fighter to survive in that family.”
In most cases, that might sound clichéd or hyperbolic. But perhaps they’re on to something.
“From a Darwinian point of view, we expect siblings to compete,” said Frank J. Sulloway, a research associate at Cal-Berkeley and an expert in the history of science, psychology and evolutionary biology. “It’s part of animal biology.”