What’s Your Why: Sauce Gardner

What's Your Why is an in-depth interview series to get to know the players at the New York Jets. On Part One, CB Sauce Gardner sat down with team reporter Caroline Hendershot and discussed growing up in Detroit, what made him fall in love with football, and his evolution from Ahmad to Sauce Gardner.

Caroline Hendershot: All right Sauce before there was Sauce, there was Ahmad, the boy who grew up in Detroit. What would you say you were like as you were growing up?

Sauce Gardner: I was always athletic. You know, I grew up always playing basketball and football. I just used to get in trouble in school, from time to time, because I used to be a class clown. Stuff like that. But I was always smart, I was always intelligent, my grades were always good. That was me. Oh, and I always loved video games, just like I do now.

CH: Do you feel like there was a moment growing up where you were forced to realize how dangerous where you were growing up was and that reality?

SG: I've seen somebody get shot and killed before. That wasn't on Seven Mile, this was after, I was a little bit older. I was 12 or 13. That's when I really realized this is what it's like in Detroit. Obviously, you always hear gunshots, and my mom always had the news on, so you always know that's where those gunshots happened. Being where we lived, you could just hear it and be like "Oh, that's over there" by whatever the street is. That moment is when I actually knew. I feel like it just really made me make sure I'm on a narrow and a straight path. In school, I made sure I had perfect grades. In high school, I think my cumulative GPA was 3.5. Same thing in college. I just made sure I was on my A-game in everything.

CH: Why do you still prefer to go by Sauce?

SG: My best days of football were when I was six. I'm living my dream right now, but those were the days. Every time somebody used to called me Sauce, I used to get so happy because I just got the nickname. I can still remember it clearly when I was six years old, and it was just a blessing. I was six years old getting caught Sauce, just being able to have fun with the game and be able to start my journey there. I feel like flag football was cool, Pop Warner was cool, but when I got the nickname Sauce, that's when I really started my journey because I'm still getting called the name to this day.

CH: Does it ever make you kind of like emotional when you think of where you came from, and where you got to and all of that that went into it?

SG: I try not to think about it too much. I'm an empath, so I am emotional. I can get emotional. So, it definitely does. Just being able to make my mom happy, cause she's the one that makes me emotional because she wears her heart on her sleeve all the time. It could be the littlest thing, and she just gets so emotional and that's what made me emotional. I try to be to the person that acts like I'm not emotional because I got people around me who are emotional, you know? I feel like it's just a blessing to be able to say that I made it, and my mama is taken care of.

Q&A with Sauce Gardner | Part Two:

CH: Why did you choose Cincinnati?

SG: "They believed in me. You could just see some schools are just trying to get players just to get them. I liked the things that Coach (Luke) Fickle was saying that we were going to be able to do. Coach Brady (Collins), the head strength and conditioning coach, he was saying that he was going to be able to turn me into the guy that I want to be on the physical side. They both were men of their words. They did just that. They made something special happen, we went to the college football playoffs. Unfortunately, we didn't make it all the way but we still made history."

CH: What did it mean to you to go fourth overall [in the NFL Draft] to the team that you wanted to go to?

SG: "It meant a lot, I was the highest drafted in Cincinnati history. So obviously, I wanted to accomplish that, and I wanted to make history in that aspect. My marketing team is based in New York, so they were excited for that. It was great because Coach Tony Oden, my cornerback coach, being from Cleveland. Detroit and Cleveland, we got this love hate relationship, because we (are) so similar to each other. Being able to be coached by him is what I wanted. He's extremely intelligent, he's coached a lot of guys like [Richard] Sherm[an], [Darrelle] Revis, a bunch of other elite talent like Xavien Howard, Darius Slay. The list goes on but being able to end up here and be coached by a guy like Coach Saleh, a guy that's from Michigan, that with that dog mentality, great leadership, that's where I wanted to be."

CH: What do you hope that you're showing people that have followed you and your path?

SG: "I hope I'm showing them that anything is possible. No matter where you come from, no matter the circumstances that you're put in or the things that you go through, as long as you want it to happen for you, then it's able to happen. It's possible."

CH: I know that this team's goal this year is obviously the Super Bowl, but I know Sauce always has goals of his own. What are your goals for the 2024 season?

SG: "Keep grinding. Keep grinding for Defensive Player of the Year. I said this last year, MVP. I'm going to keep griding towards that too because, me saying that just means I have to do things I've never done before. I don't know if a corner has ever won MVP. I probably have, like I said last year, .000… lot more zero's, 0.1% chance of accomplishing it. But it's going to help bring the best out of me."