If the combined 27 NFL seasons, while playing two of the most demanding positions in the sport, aren't singularly eye-widening, then the weight of production and accomplishment should do the trick.
Eight All-Pro recognitions; 10 Pro Bowl invitations; 436 games played (421 starts); 2,109 tackles; 270 tackles for loss; 166 sacks; seven interceptions; 19 forced fumbles; 19 fumble recoveries; 123 passes defensed; 335 quarterback hits; and five times named the team's Walter Payton Man of the Year.
Yes, the career down marker is on "4th" for New Orleans Saints defensive end Cameron Jordan and linebacker Demario Davis, 36-year-olds entering their 15th (Jordan) and 14th (Davis) seasons, whose resumes will lead them to the Saints Hall of Fame and Ring of Honor, and generate Pro Football Hall of Fame consideration if not induction.
As accustomed as Saints fans have become to seeing them together the previous seven seasons (Jordan has been a Saint his entire career, Davis joined as a free agent after six seasons with the Jets and Browns) the clock is ticking on careers that began in sprints away from Father Time, and turned into stiff-arming him while the calendar flips.
But there are reasons each "Unc" has lasted, produced and excelled, one of them being a disdain even for the predispositions that go along with the label.
"I wanna be an OG," Jordan said. "Unc seems like a very on-the-front-porch situation. OG is respected in the streets, and I get that they say Unc is before OG, but screw that. I'm here for OG status, if you call me anything at all.
"But (teammates) usually just call me Cam, because I'm outrunning all of them."
'I FELT LIKE HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN A LAWYER'
Steve Jordan played 13 NFL seasons with the Vikings, earned six Pro Bowl invitations, was inducted into the Vikings' Ring of Honor and named one of the 50 Greatest Vikings. He knew early that Cam possessed helpful traits if he pursued football.
"When he was two years old, sometimes he'd bang his head on the wall," Steve Jordan said. "I was like, there's going to come a time that that's going to be celebrated but right now, let's save your brain.
"And then he had a couple of things in grade school where he was just a little rough and some kids misinterpreted that. And, again, I said there's going to come a time when people celebrate this kind of behavior, but now is not the time."
In truth, Cam wasn't much interested in football because the Jordan children were involved in an array of activities, including ballet, tap dancing, golf and soccer. And mostly, he loved to hoop.
"Basketball was the first love of my life," Cam said. "Really didn't touch football until my dad was like, you guys need to get into this sport. We were like, nah, we do everything else. But football worked out."
That's an understatement. He has a franchise-record 121.5 sacks in 226 games (225 starts), with 160 tackles for loss, 15 forced fumbles, 11 fumble recoveries, three interceptions (one returned for a touchdown), 65 passes defensed, 233 quarterback hits, three All-Pro selections, eight Pro Bowls and is a three-time Walter Payton Man of the Year for the Saints.
But it wasn't without hiccups.
Steve enrolled Cam in Pop Warner football in eighth grade, reasoning that if Cam chose to play football later, he needed to know how to play the game.
"He was 175 pounds and he had to drop weight to make the cut to play," Steve said. "And at that point he could only play offensive line and defensive line, anyway, because he was so big."
Cam still had hoop dreams but Steve had done a calculation on 2-year-old Cam based on his size and the formula determined that at 18, Cam would be 6 feet 4, 240 pounds. (At that age, Cam was 6-3, 265.)
"I said, son, there's a lot of 6-4 kids that are playing point guard and that can jump out of the gym, and you're going to be too heavy to jump out of the gym probably at that point," Steve said. "So I was like, I just want you to play one year of Pop Warner, so you can learn how to hit and learn how to get hit. Because what I don't want to have happen is you get to junior year, senior year and realize basketball is not my thing and try to go out for football and end up hurt.
"I said, I just need you to play one year. If you like it, great. If you don't, you'll never hear a peep out of me, that's it."
Cam still didn't bite. In addition to informing all that he only was there because his dad wanted it, he hardly exerted himself.
"I used to get off work, I'd show up at practice and coaches were like, 'Cam didn't run today because he says his asthma was flaring up,'" Steve said. "I said, 'He doesn't have asthma.'"
So, Steve would have Cam complete the sprints after practice that he didn't run during practice. But finally, game usage flipped the switch.
In Pop Warner each player had a minimum four plays per half and early on, despite the work that he actually was submitting, Cam had four plays per half.
"I told him, you told everybody here that, 'I'm only here because of my dad,' you've showed out to let everybody know you don't want to be here, so do you think the coaches are going to want to put you in the game?" Steve said. "There's kids that have a fraction of the talent you have and they're out here fighting."
With his reality checked, Cam wound up being a starter and team captain.
"I knew he was going to love it because it's a team thing," Steve said. "He's a team guy, loves hanging out with his guys, loves taking care of his guys. I just knew it was going to be good for him."
Cameron Jordan became "Cameron" Jordan while attending Chandler High in Chandler, Ariz.
"Before that he was 'Tyler,'" Steve Jordan said. "His name is Cameron Tyler, so everybody from Minnesota knows him as Tyler because everybody called him Tyler. And when he got to Chandler High, his freshman year they're calling roll and it was like, 'Cameron Jordan,' and he said, 'Here.'
"And the girls were like, 'Oh, Cameron, that's a wonderful name.' And he became Cameron his freshman year of high school."
On a typical sweltering Thursday in late July in Chandler, the sun spits out 106 degrees and while it's "dry" heat, it's hot enough that Eric Richardson, the Wolves' outstanding girls track coach who also coached running backs for years, uses a golf cart to transport a visitor around the sizable campus.
The influence of "Tyler" is all over the football facility.
The weight room, estimated at 3,000 square feet, has an autographed, framed Saints jersey – No. 94 – on the wall, located to the right of an NFL shield. Cam Jordan's donations helped fund the weight room (designed by Steve Jordan, an engineer who also designed the family home) and team meeting room, a scaled-down facsimile of the one in the Saints' training facility.
Exit that building and behind it you'll find the Chandler High football stadium (seats 10,000) with field turf so pristine it could have been laid the day before.
Richardson calls the stadium the House That Cam Built.
"I left him on the freshman team his freshman year, I didn't want to bring him up to the varsity," said Jim Ewan, Cam's high school coach who has since retired. "But from his sophomore year on, he was on the varsity."
Cam refused to play tight end, Steve's NFL position, and then – as today – he abhorred the thought of the offensive line. So, defensive end it was, though Steve said he convinced Ewan that in order to have the best 11 on the field at all times, Cam needed to play some offense.
"He was a Division I prospect from his sophomore year on, and you knew that right away because he had great feet," Ewan said. "He was big but he had really good feet and not only linear speed, but he had great lateral movement and he could change direction quickly."
Credit Richardson, at least partly, for the stamina of Jordan, an indefatigable iron man in the NFL (two games missed, one due to Covid, and a frequent post-practice sprinter).
Cam, also a track athlete who won the state discus title as a senior and was fast enough that Richardson considering using him for the open 400-meter run, had a regimen that included running a mile of straights and curves each day – sprint the straights, then jog the curves, four times around the track.
"Cam hated it," Steve said. "But, finally when I convinced Coach Ewan to let him go both ways, that was what he needed to be able to do that."
No story of Cam Jordan can be told without mentioning Anita Jordan, his mother.
Steve was as present as an NFL father could be, but Anita was the constant. She'd show up at school to monitor the behavior of the child with a personality the size of his frame, provide the necessary discipline when he strayed off the path academically or behaviorally, balance it with the kind of love that Cam showers on his family and teammates.
"Anita is an old-school mom," Steve said. "'Do it because I said so.'
"One of the other things about Cam is, I felt like he should have been a lawyer because he would debate until the cows come home. He's going to present a case as to why 'X' is 'Y.' But Anita was like, I'm not hearing it. This is what I said do, this is what you're going to do, this is how it's going to go. End of discussion.
"She really was instrumental in nurturing him but keeping him centered and not letting him get too far out there, because he would test the boundaries."
'I LIKE TO SAY I HAD FIVE OR SIX CHILDREN IN ONE'
The rule was, if there was no trouble, don't call before 6 a.m. or after 9 p.m.
"Because I feel like after that, something is going on," Sue Magee said.
When the phone rang at 10:30 p.m., she had an uneasy feeling. Her son, Demario Davis, had had a couple of incidents that weren't confidence-inspiring – he was expelled for half a year in high school, and was jailed briefly in college for shoplifting – but appeared now to be on the right path.
Still, she hadn't been in favor of Davis, then a freshman linebacker at Arkansas State, going to a Christian conference in Nashville, Tenn., after he'd joined campus outreach.
He was adamant even though it was scheduled not long after his grandmother, Sue's mother, had passed. Sue wouldn't let him drive his car to Nashville but she bought him a bus ticket, figuring there was a lesson to be learned.
"I'm thinking, I've got to teach him some kind of way to have some discipline and follow some kind of rules," she said.
"I had a scared straight moment in high school that kind of got me back on track, (but) once I got to college, I was just wilding all over again," Davis said. "So I fell back into a lot of that same stuff with drugs, alcohol, partying.
"I knew something needed to change – I ended up going to jail my first year in college – and I was like every time I take a step forward, I take three steps back. I'm getting in my own way, so I knew I needed something different."
That backdrop made the ringing phone unsettling but when Magee answered, she wasn't at all expecting the topic of conversation.
"I'm like, oh my God, I knew he shouldn't have gone," she said. "And when I picked up the phone, he was crying. And I'm like, what has he done in Nashville? How am I going to get to Nashville to get him?
"And he was like, 'I got saved.'"
That began a faith walk for Davis that only has strengthened since, one he often credits for an NFL career that crested with the Saints: 114 of his 201 games and 196 starts; 811 of the 1,393 tackles; three of the four interceptions; 45 of 58 passes defensed; three of the four forced fumbles; three of the eight fumble recoveries; 31 of 44.5 sacks; 72 of 110 tackles for loss; 63 of 102 quarterback hits; all five All-Pro honors; both Pro Bowl invites; and both team Walter Payton Man of the Year awards.
"They invited me to go to this Christian conference and the only thing I knew was they had a basketball tournament, and I wanted to play in the basketball tournament," Davis said. "That's why I really went.
"And I saw them doing all this worshiping and I think by the end of it, though I had grown up in church and I knew all these different things about Jesus, I didn't really know Jesus. And when I was there, I felt something that changed my life. It made sense. I felt the love that Jesus had for me, why he had to go and die on a cross for our sins, to make a way back to God.
"And I understood it, and I was like it's not about me working my way to God, it's God has come to me and offered me a free gift back to Him. I was like, it all makes sense. And that emotion just came over me and it was like, He has already paid it all. It just felt like freedom. I think that was the switch where everything changed in my life."
Brandon, Miss., is roughly a 3.5-hour drive from New Orleans. NFL alums from Brandon High include defensive back Brian Hutson (two games with the Patriots in 1990), running back Jerious Norwood (66 games over six seasons with the Falcons and Rams) and quarterback Gardner Minshew (entering his seventh season, with 59 games and 46 starts spread among the Jaguars, Eagles, Colts and Raiders; currently on the Chiefs' roster).
A sizable poster of each, in chronological order based on the year he entered the NFL, is on the left wall of the team meeting room, where the large-as-life renderings greet visitors face to face as they enter the room.
Davis, though, is much larger than that. He always has been outsized.
"He was always competitive and very outspoken. That's been from Day 1," said Jarrad Crain, an alderman in Brandon, Miss., a high school teammate and a friend since they met in third grade.
"I was the quiet guy and he was the more outspoken guy. But he loved to compete. He was a hard worker – a very hard worker."
Crain and Davis were teammates in football, basketball and track.
"In all three sports I pushed him and he pushed me, but we did extra work after each practice. And that's from running laps, to doing one-on-one drills, to shooting shots after basketball practice. It didn't matter, he always did extra work."
Steve McCann, Davis' defensive coordinator at Brandon High, noticed.
"He would do stuff that nobody else would ever do," McCann said. "Back in those days camps and all that were just starting out, all these combines and stuff, and he knew that his (40-yard-dash) needed to be at a certain time. He knew the other measurables, and he did stuff on his own to meet those measurables.
"I remember hearing him come back, 'I went to this combine' or 'I went to that combine,' and he had a purpose. He had a want, he had a dream."
McCann said Davis was a 6-3, 215-pounder that the Bulldogs played at receiver and free safety. The decision was in Davis' senior year to move him to outside linebacker, so Davis could blitz off the edge.
But before that, McCann positioned Davis at defensive end in spring practice, solely to have Davis become more physical.
"And he had a great year," McCann said. "We relied on him, he was the leader on defense, he got people right and kept them working hard and playing hard."
Davis partly was raised by his maternal grandmother. He was born when Magee was in high school, so from about the age of 2 to 7, he was with his grandmother in Collins, Miss.
"I like to say I had five or six children in one," Magee said. "From the time he could start talking, he was talking. (His grandmother) is a good bit of his foundation because she was a talker, too.
"He's always been very outgoing, talk to anybody in the grocery store. He's always had an I-don't-meet-any-strangers, I-love-people and If-you-talk-to-me-I'll-talk-to-you type of personality."
To date, that remains Davis to the core. It helped lead to some detentions and in-school suspensions, but it also exhibited a confidence that was unshakeable.
"He has always said that he was going to the NFL," Magee said. "When he went to college and I'm like, what's you Plan B? He was like, 'I don't have a Plan B, because I'm going.' And even his college coach told the team that only two percent or one percent of you all are going to the NFL. He said, 'Raise your hand if you think you're going.'
"(Davis) was a redshirt freshman, but he was the only one to raise his hand."
Getting to the NFL was one thing; remaining, another.
Davis' fifth NFL season nearly was his last. In the first year of a two-year deal with the Browns, he was on the brink. God, he said, saved his career.
"I was in Cleveland, and my body is shutting down," he said. "My back is hurting, my knee is hurting, neck hurting, and I just can't get it to stop hurting.
"It was disturbing because I loved the practice, I loved to train but I would get to the facility and I didn't want to be there. And I just think it was killing my love for the game, because I couldn't get my body to respond. The coaches were rotating my snaps and I'm just like, God, I have given everything I have.
"I remember driving home one day – probably Week 9 or 10 – I'm sitting in the parking lot and I'm just like, God, I'm finished. I've given you everything I had. I can't go any further in this game. I've been playing this game since the fourth grade, but here is where I'm throwing in the towel because I can't push any further.
"But, I also had this internal knowing that God wasn't through with me in the game, He still had more for me to do. But I was finished. So it literally was, I went into my prayer closet – I walked right past my wife and my kids – I went into my prayer closet and I just started crying. Because I knew I was finished, and I was telling God my heart. It was like, God, unless you rejuvenate my mind and rejuvenate my body, I can't go any further.
"And I came out of that, and I kind of heard this subtle voice, like, 'Thank you for getting out of my way.' I didn't know what that meant, but it was like, 'Thank you for getting out of my way, and remember that you waved the white flag right here. So anything that happens from here, it's all me.'
"I remember that and it was like, 'OK, God, whatever you want to do. It's all yours. It ain't me.' Not thinking that anything is going to happen."
The rejuvenation he sought, happened. Eight seasons and counting past that year, Davis is one of the most respected players in the NFL.
"I started reading Psalms 40, and it talks about God will take you out of the miry clay and put your feet on solid ground, and He'll give you a new song to sing, one of praise," he said. "And many people will see and fear the Lord, and put their trust in the Lord. That's what I started to see; I started to see God pull me out of that miry clay and put my feet on solid ground."
For as confident as Davis was in his youth, even he didn't see coming what has transpired. The production, and awards and respect earned, are befitting this Saint.
"I think I dreamed it, but I don't know if I believed that it was truly possible," he said. "My goal was, if I give everything to it, I believe I can be one of the best to ever do it. I don't know if I thought it was actually possible, I just knew I could dream it and I would go for it
"And I think I'm somewhere around where I dreamed, but so much farther than I think I actually believed that I would get. The fact that I'm here is like, God, I didn't dream this far, I didn't plan this far. It's like, what do I do now? So I find myself trying to recreate dreams of where do I go next, where do I go from here?
"Now that I'm here, it's like, man, God, you are amazing. The Word says He'll do abundantly more than you can ask or imagine, and I'm certainly living in that space. I'm living in more than I imagined."
Magee agrees.
"I always told Demario, even when he was in trouble, 'This is not your life. This is not the way you were raised, what you're doing is not who you are, and hopefully you'll see that in yourself one day.' And I'm thankful that he did."
