Mathew McConaughey partied with Earl Campbell at the University of Texas. The Green Bay Packers drafted his dad. And don’t forget that he once held a joint subcommittee meeting on the 50-yard line with Lee High’s star quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd back in ’76.

Long before the Academy Award-winning actor aimlessly drove around whispering about his hometown in a Lincoln SUV, he beat his war bongos for the Washington Redskins.  

How in the name of Longview, Texas, did Matthew McConaughey become a Redskins fan in Cowboy Country?

“Two things,” he tells GQ. “First: 4 years old, watching Westerns, I always rooted for the Indians. Second, my favorite food was hamburgers. The Redskins had a linebacker named Chris Hanburger.”

The Dazed and Confused, Magic Mike, We Are Marshall, and Dallas Buyers Club actor tells the men’s magazine that he has returned to church, instills a Southern “Yes, Ma’am”/”No, Sir” etiquette in his kids, and believes that fatherhood stands as the height of manliness: “Never is a man more of a man than when he is the father of a newborn.” 

He compares the campaign against the “Redskins” name to the crusade against the Second Amendment: 

What interests me is how quickly it got pushed into the social consciousness. We were all fine with it since the 1930s, and all of a sudden we go, “No, gotta change it”? It seems like when the first levee breaks, everybody gets on board. I know a lot of Native Americans don’t have a problem with it, but they’re not going to say, “No, we really want the name.” That’s not how they’re going to use their pulpit. It’s like my feeling about gun control: “I get it. You have the right to have guns. But look, let’s forget that right. Let’s forget the pleasure you get safely on your range, because it’s in the wrong hands in other places.”

The actor confessed to aspiring as a kid to play running back for the Washington Redskins and toting around a team cap in his bag during the interview. He says he’s resigned to the inevitability of changes for his favorite NFL team.

“I love the emblem,” he tells GQ.”I dig it. It gives me a little fire and some oomph. But now that it’s in the court of public opinion, it’s going to change. I wish it wouldn’t, but it will.”