Bryan Kehl leans back, smiles and says his dad has always been a "storyteller."
He wraps exaggerated finger quotes around that last word to make it clear the stories his father tells aren't always rigorously fact-checked.
Six of Gary and Nancy Kehl's nine children were adopted, including Bryan. As a rule, there were never any distinctions made about whose genes came from where: Everyone was to be treated equally. But there was always one exception—and it always involved Bryan.
In one of those yarns that his dad was so fond of telling, Bryan's biological father was an NFL running back. "I wasn't sure it was true," he says. "Like I said, my dad tells stories.''
The first time Bryan touched a football, however, out in the family's backyard in Salt Lake City, he decided to play running back. All through youth football and until he went to high school, he was a running back. Now, some 20 years after that first run, he thinks his fondness for carrying the ball was influenced by family lore. "I'm sure that had something to do with it. My brothers all played defense."
Mr. Kehl is a strapping 26-year-old linebacker entering his third season for the New York Giants. He's no longer a running back. He plays defense like the rest of the Kehls.
But when it comes to his path to the NFL, there's something basic that Bryan Kehl doesn't know—whether his athletic talent was something bred into him by his parents, his siblings and his Utah childhood, or whether it was coded into his DNA.
Unlike most people, whose sense of their origins grows deeper as the years go by, Bryan Kehl's has moved in the opposite direction. The mystery of who he is, and exactly how he got there, is still a deep one.
Nancy Kehl had three children when she decided she wanted a fourth—a half-white, half-black baby girl the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' adoption program couldn't place.