Usher liked his social media post. Lindsay Lohan and Marlon Wayans have praised his talents. He even received a message from the renowned hip-hop dance group the Jabbawockeez.
“Working with them,” Camryn Bynum said last week, “would be a dream.”
This is what life is currently like for the best celebrator in the NFL. Bynum, a fourth-year Minnesota Vikings safety, is humble. But even he knows he holds the title. A few weeks ago, the league ranked the top post-play performances this season. Three of the top five featured him.
Who’s had the best celly so far this season? pic.twitter.com/mizZZYHvXW
— NFL (@NFL) November 21, 2024
Bynum has moonwalked and breakdanced. In Week 5 in London, he successfully executed one of the most complicated handshakes in movie history. In last week’s win over the Atlanta Falcons, he orchestrated and pulled off an elaborate dance from the movie “White Chicks” with teammate Josh Metellus.
Teammates work with him to help his choreography come to life. His family laughs at all of this. Yes, it’s funny Bynum goes viral as often as he does, but it’s funnier to them how much he enjoys the process of coming up with the celebrations.
And it is a process.
“I spend hours,” Bynum admitted.
Generating the idea is one thing, but then there’s the practice. You do not gracefully flip another teammate wearing shoulder pads without, as the footballers would say, time on task. You do not flop like a worm in the end zone without flopping like a worm on the living room floor. Commitment is required to be great, and Bynum is willing to do whatever it takes.
There is a deeper meaning to all of this madness. Bynum is a competitor. Celebrating means the Vikings turned the football over, and turning the football over means a greater chance of winning.
Bynum is also a thinker. Celebrating means a bigger platfom, and more eyeballs mean more attention paid to the people who made his journey possible.
Centennial High School is a football powerhouse about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. Besides Vontaze Burfict, the longtime Cincinnati Bengals linebacker, Bynum might be the most accomplished football alumnus.
As a sophomore at Centennial, Bynum was the fifth-string cornerback on junior varsity. When he swatted passes away from receivers, teammates would cheer loudly, the way you would when an inferior player unexpectedly makes a play.
Cam! Look at you! Nice job!
He wore gloves and high-top cleats with Batman logos on them. His baggy pants sagged. He was a puny, 5-foot-5, 140-pounder. But Bynum loved football, so his parents sought trainers throughout southern California to help him. They spent thousands of dollars and countless hours. But there wasn’t much in the way of results to show for it.
One trainer suggested they sign Bynum up to play for a seven-on-seven team called Ground Zero, so they did. During one of the first games in Bynum’s first tournament, the opposing team targeted him on essentially every play.
“I was getting, like, dogged,” Bynum said. “I’m talking deep balls, sluggos, just getting beat clean.”
After the game, Bynum’s father Curtis approached the team’s coach, an older gentleman named Anthony Brown, and asked if he would be willing to work privately with his son.
“I’m thinking in the back of my head, ‘Bro, you should’ve asked me this before your son got cooked,’” Brown said.
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He agreed, but on one condition: Bynum must arrive at 5 a.m. the next morning for a workout. The son listened to his father strike the deal, but he was dreading it. It wasn’t that Bynum didn’t want to wake up early. He was and always had been an overachiever. It was more about his disdain for Brown’s coaching style. Brown challenged and pressed and went as far as many coaches of yesteryear would.
But the agreement between Brown and his father left Bynum no choice. Before the sun rose, Bynum buzzed around a Fitness 19 gym, curling weights until his arms felt like Jell-O. Before dawn the next day, they met at a local park. Brown had Bynum doing endless footwork drills atop a hill. Falling back on his heels meant tumbling down to the road below.
Brown stressed rhythm and footwork. He mandated Bynum press hard on his big toe. He made Bynum, a shy kid who Brown felt had been broken by his struggles, repeat a phrase during the workouts: I am Cam Bynum.
For weeks and then months, Bynum’s parents sat and watched in lawn chairs, wondering how any of these drills without a football would generate success on the field.
The first time Brown brought his young daughter to a training session, she asked him afterward as they hopped into his truck, “Dad, why are you training him? He is sorry!”
“Maya,” Brown told her, “as long as this kid keeps coming, I’m going to keep showing up. And if he keeps coming, he will no longer be sorry.”
Brown does not teach defensive back play the way other coaches do. Most ask their players to start in a square stance, then swivel like they’re a center fielder trotting back for a baseball. Brown despises the swivel. He thinks it feeds exactly into what the receiver wants to accomplish.
As his three boys were developing into defensive backs (they all played varying levels of college football), he wondered: Why not stay square for as long as possible and force the receiver to declare before you do? Other coaches offered their counterarguments. Turning and running like a center fielder, they said, gives the defensive back a better chance to keep up.
Brown’s reply? “You’re starting off backwards, so you’re never going to run as fast as him … unless you’re Deion Sanders and run a 4.2 40-yard dash. There’s not a lot of Deion Sanderses. But there’s a lot of Cam Bynums.”
Brown compared his “square technique system” to children tracing between dots as they learn to write their letters. At some point, you remove the dots, and they’re eventually able to scribble on their own.
He explained this to Bynum at the hill between bright orange and electric green cone drills as he mimicked the moves he’d be making in games. Bynum bought in. He backpedaled, weaved and twisted his hips. He repeated these same drills each day, quick bursts of rapid foot movements to build muscle memory.
“It was so detailed,” Bynum’s mother Jennifer said.
“Cam would wear a visor during training to keep his eyes down, to teach him to stop looking up for the ball,” Curtis said, “which had been ingrained after so many years of other drills.”
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The more he spent time practicing around other kids, the more Bynum began to open up. The better he played with the seven-on-seven team, the more he believed in what he could be. The cycle became intoxicating, and by the time his junior season at Centennial rolled around, Bynum felt like a completely different person.
Initially, his pass-swatting received the same Cam! Look at you! Nice job! hooting and hollering. They were almost backhanded compliments. Brown attended one practice, and although Bynum performed well, he was still wearing the Batman gloves and high-top cleats. Brown approached Bynum’s mother afterward.
“Hey, Mrs. Jen,” Brown said, “These cleats and pants … nobody is going to take him seriously.”
She drove Bynum to a sporting goods store that night and bought him white, low-top cleats. The new swagger supercharged his confidence. He had already climbed Centennial’s depth chart, but a suspension to a classmate made him a starter. In one of Bynum’s first games, he matched up with highly touted prospect Cordell Broadus, who is rapper Snoop Dogg’s son. Bynum blanketed him. The next week, he picked off two passes against perennial power Long Beach Poly.
“Once Cam got on the field,” Brown said, “it was over. It just made him work harder. He was no longer sorry.”
The early morning sessions with Brown had morphed into two-a-days, and Bynum carried the fluorescent-colored cones around with him everywhere. Visits to camps earned him college offers. He attended the University of California-Berkeley, where he initially enrolled in pre-med classes before shifting to American Studies.
In the fall of 2020, he wrote a 32-page thesis about his journey, detailing his parents’ commitment, Brown’s role and how developing rhythm in his feet was like musical flow. “The road has not been easy,” he wrote in the introduction, “but I have enjoyed every second of it.”
It’s a Wednesday evening at the TCO Performance Center, and here comes Bynum.
He’s holding a pair of fresh low-top cleats and a handful of bright orange cones. Soon, he’ll head back upstairs for his post-practice work, which has been delayed by a couple of hours. Most of his teammates have already left the facility, but he is in no hurry. When someone wants to talk about his celebrations, he’s happy to oblige.
“Realistically,” he says, “I’m not a good dancer.”
But the moonwalk?
“That took skill,” he says.
See?
He clarifies: “That took practice. It wasn’t natural.”
How much practice?
“It was, like, over some months,” he says laughing.
This is a window into how a fourth-round draft pick, one who was converted from cornerback to safety his rookie season, has not only adapted to the NFL but thrived, starting 50 games over the last four seasons.
How was Bynum able to garner playing time as a rookie? Ask him and he’ll say his refined technique, which gave him more confidence. How was Bynum able to go from 81 tackles in 2022 to 137 in 2023, the most in the NFL? Ask him, and his answer will be the same. (This season, he has started all 13 games for the 11-2 Vikings, posting 75 tackles, three interceptions and a fumble recovery.)
He says his discipline is to thank for his success, and the best way to enjoy the reward from all of the hours and all of the pain is to let loose and bring others along for the ride. That’s what these celebrations are about. They are mementos of joy and gratitude. They are the I am Cam Bynum statements for the entire world to see and hear.
(Top photo: Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)
