Kyler Gordon was once considered one of the best nickel cornerbacks in the NFL. That is why the Chicago Bears felt comfortable extending him last offseason. Nobody ever could’ve imagined how quickly the team would regret that decision. Yet here they are. Gordon has played a grand total of five games since the moment he signed on the dotted line. He is going to miss at least three more. Bears fans are already fed up with him. The team doesn’t sound too far behind. Much of this stems from his ongoing behavior off the field. The lack of communication or clarity from his people is allowing the situation to fester.
Is one man responsible for this? Brad Biggs of the Chicago Tribune revealed after Sunday’s win in Carolina that Gordon has been working with a “trainer” named Montel Fleming, who is supposedly a specialist. This isn’t out of the ordinary. NFL players worked with their own trainers a lot. However, Fleming might be a different case. There are reasons to think that his influence over Gordon is doing more harm than good. Dan Bernstein of 312 Sports found evidence that Fleming’s credibility is highly questionable for multiple reasons.
Kyler Gordon might be asking advice from the wrong man.
“But here’s what we do know about Montel Fleming, who is also per a background check, his current address is listed as Houston, Texas, but he has lived in…Royal Oak, Michigan, Mapleton, Georgia, Oxnard, California, Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina, Decar, Georgia, Kansas City, Missouri, Houston, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Houston, Texas. And that’s just since he started working with him, because there’s a lot more where that came from.
Montel Fleming has a list of aliases here by which he goes: Montel Fleming, Montel Leonard Nicks Fleming, Montel Leonard Nicks Fleming, Montel Leonard Fleming, Montel N. Fleming, Montel Licks, Mix, M Leonard Nicks, Montel Leonard Nicks Fleming, Montel Nicks, and it goes on and on and on. That is an alarming number of aliases.
Then, as we continue to go through this, what gets even more interesting is under possible education? Zero schools found. Zero. So, whether or not he even is a college graduate is up for debate here, let alone a qualified, educated, or certified trainer or expert in kinesiology or physiology of any kind whatsoever. Nothing comes up as far as education. What does come up is a criminal record.
There are a number of offenses here, and some offense details are redacted, but he was arrested for assaulting a family member in what was said to be a domestic-related dispute. And then there are others that say foreign warrant out of county released to another agency. There are seven different criminal charges on his record, and a lot of this, as I mentioned, is redacted.”
This could explain Gordon’s behavior.
When Fleming spoke to Biggs, he made it sound as though the Bears’ training staff has no credibility in helping a player properly recover from soft-tissue injuries. Everything is about lifting weights. That is, of course, a gross misrepresentation of the truth. He stated that Gordon has been forced to overcompensate with his muscles during recovery, which is what keeps leading to the setbacks. If what he says were true, though, wouldn’t every player on the Bears’ roster be having the same problems?
Instead, it feels like the two players Fleming is directly connected to, Kyler Gordon and Jaylon Johnson, are the ones having the issues. Johnson started working with Fleming in 2021. He’s missed 21 games since then. Several of them were soft-tissue injuries, such as the quad, hamstring, calf, and groin. Gordon has endured basically the same issues. For someone who claims he can get the body back into proper alignment, Fleming’s clients tend to spend a ton of time on the trainer’s table during the season.
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It certainly isn’t helping them on the field.
Johnson had one of his worst performances of his career on Sunday. Carolina torched him for 127 yards, and he looked painfully slow all afternoon. It would be one thing if Fleming were a former trainer or even a former player who’d played the game. He is none of those things. Based on the available information, he is just some guy who decided to start calling himself a specialist one day. Apparently, he has enough charisma to convince two professional athletes that he can do a better job than highly trained NFL professionals.
It’s not like this is anything new. Athletes are human. They can be hoodwinked into ill-begotten schemes all the time. A Baltimore Orioles pitcher tried an herbal supplement to cut weight, and it ended up poisoning him to death. Track athletes embraced overspeed training in the 1990s and 2000s, using pulleys, high-tension cords, or motorized towing devices. All this did was tear hamstrings, blow out knees, and create terrible muscle discoordination.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same kind of fancy-language stuff that Fleming is feeding Gordon.
