If you think bringing Marshawn Lynch to the ground was a challenge, try getting on his calendar. The recently retired Seahawks running back (more on that later) agreed to talk during a tour of his hometown of Oakland—a serious achievement, given his arm’s-length relationship with the media—but then there was the matter of settling on a date. Since his exit announcement, slyly dropped during the Super Bowl, the five-time Pro Bowler has traveled to Haiti, Canada and Egypt, where he led a football camp, rode a camel and toured the Great Pyramid of Giza. A stealth visit to Flint, Mich.—he wanted to volunteer and lend solidarity to the citizenry—was postponed until later this summer; he appeared that week instead at a Clinton Global Initiative function in Oakland. When Lynch finally blocked out three free days, he warned that he would be spending one of those afternoons with his financial adviser. Then he would head to Seattle, where he would appear at a job fair as a favor to his friend, Starbucks' CEO Howard Schultz. ... All of which speaks to this point: Lynch, maybe more than any other athlete, embodies the gulf between perception and reality. Make no mistake, Beast Mode is no façade. Lynch, 30, carries himself the same way he played during his potential Hall of Fame career, all bluntness and brute force. This is a man who, even with cameras rolling, uses the word “motherf-----” as if it were punctuation. But he is also a gracious tour guide, with a diverse circle of friends and a wide range of interests. With no threat of getting fined for noncompliance, he’ll happily talk about everything from Bay Area gentrification to the importance of authenticity to the much-talked-about status of his NFL career.