Inside Washington State offensive lineman Esa Pole’s long path to Pullman

PULLMAN — Tears streamed down Esa Pole’s face as he sat on the sideline, his ankle battered and bruised, his spirit beaten to a pulp. As the afternoon sun beamed down at California Memorial Stadium, the site of Washington State’s road game against Cal last fall, Pole couldn’t believe all of that had led to this.

Two years of junior college. Two workouts a day. Working construction with his dad. Dropping out of school. Moving homes. Had he done so much to earn this opportunity, worked so hard he wanted to quit, just to get injured in his first season as the Cougars’ starting left tackle?

But what really gnawed at Pole, what brought him to tears was a thought he didn’t want to confront: Did he let down his brother Toni, who had starred on WSU’s defensive line roughly a decade prior? Besides, he had about 30 family members in the stands in Berkeley, only a few miles from his hometown of Hayward. What about them? What did they think of their Esa out of the game they had come to see him play?

“All I’ve ever wanted to do was make him proud, make my parents proud,” Pole said, “especially my mom.”

Standing next to him on the sideline, the kind of access allowed to WSU football alumni, Toni looked at Esa and smiled.

“Dude, you’re fine. Don’t worry,” said Toni, about 10 years Esa’s senior. “You’re gonna get back into it before you know it, and you’re gonna make me proud.”

Esa felt the knot in his chest relax, felt his anxiety soothe. He cared about his Cougs, wanted to help them complete a comeback, but he wouldn’t be wearing the crimson and gray if not for Toni. Toni hadn’t just supported Esa on his way to Pullman. He charted the path and showed Esa how to walk it.

If not for Toni, the world may not know Esa Pole, the WSU left tackle engineering the season of his life. This fall, the 6-foot-7 force has turned in three straight games without allowing a pressure. He hasn’t allowed a sack all season. During the Cougs’ 6-1 start to the year, he’s earned a Pro Football Focus pass-blocking grade of 90.1, an NFL-caliber figure, No. 6 nationally among qualified offensive linemen.

Just three years after picking up football for the first time, starting out at Chabot Community College in his hometown, Pole is authoring one of the finest seasons among offensive linemen across the country. He’s putting himself on the radars of NFL scouts, who have visited a few WSU practices this fall to chat with him. He’s a fast learner and an even faster mover, shuffling his feet against edge rushers from the likes of Texas Tech and Washington, proving his quick ascent is no fluke.

At the center of Pole’s climb is his family, whose branches intertwine: There’s his oldest brother, Toni, his inspiration in all facets of life, and the woman he calls his mom, Kalo Muller, who is his biological cousin. When Esa was about 1 year old, his biological parents, Lola and Sione, made a difficult decision, giving baby Esa to Muller to raise. At the time, they had four children in their home, and Muller had none. “It was a big, big thing for me and my husband to give him up,” Lola said, but she felt comfort knowing he would be living a few minutes down the road.

In the family’s Polynesian culture, though, it wasn’t such an uncommon thing. It was commonplace enough that people of Polynesian descent didn’t always look at it like they’re giving their child up.

“We don’t see it that way,” Muller said. “We see it as more people to love.”

They all grew up together in the Bay Area, Esa seeing his siblings on Sundays at the United Methodist Church in Hayward. So as he puts his season together, turning heads of opponents and pro scouts alike, Pole remains acutely aware of the impact his family had on him — the impact they continue to make on him every day, driving him to give them the life he never had.

Twice a day, Pole talks over the phone with Muller. He’s close with all his siblings. At first, he wanted to play defensive line like his oldest brother, but has he flourishes on the other side of the ball, he’s grown closer spiritually with his father, who never expected a round of applause for working construction and putting food on the table — just like Pole doesn’t expect a round of applause for protecting the quarterback.

The story of Pole’s ascension in football is simultaneously the story of his soul ties to his family and the way he’s deepened his relationship with those closest to him as he’s built himself into a brick wall at left tackle. They live in concert with each other. There’s no talking about one without talking about the other.

“I feel like offensive line associates with what I want to be when I’m a man,” Pole said. “When I grow up to be a man, I want to be like an offensive lineman. The protector of the household.”

Before he could protect anything, though, Esa had to get permission to pick up the sport.

•••

Lola Pole thought her son was in danger. She had just picked up her phone, and on the other end was Esa, crying, in hysterics – “screaming bloody murder,” Lola said.

It was September 2020, a little more than a year after Esa graduated from Mt. Eden High, and he just had an argument with Muller, a particularly bitter one. The day was Sept. 25, the weekend of both Lola and Muller’s shared birthday of Sept. 27, and Esa wanted to join Lola and the rest of his family in Lake Tahoe, where they had rented an Airbnb for a weekend celebration.

Muller had told Esa he couldn’t go. Lola might be his biological mom, but Muller was his guardian, so Esa’s biological parents always abided by Muller’s wishes. “Whatever she said, that’s what we went by,” Lola said. So when she got word from Muller that Esa wouldn’t be going on the trip, they left without him.

Esa, 19, remained close with his siblings, so the fact they were all going on a trip without him floored him. So he squabbled with Muller, frustrated he couldn’t go. That’s about when he pulled out his phone, dialed Lola and asked to move in with her, Sione, Toni and Fuka, his older brother, who had recently had a baby with his wife.

That weekend, before Lola, Sione and the family returned from Tahoe, Esa had packed his things and moved in. He needed time away from Muller, he figured, time to decide where he was headed next. He spent one night away, then two nights, then three. For everyone involved, it began to feel less like a quick getaway and more like a long-term arrangement.

“It slowly just became known that I just wanted to get my mom that space, that peace of mind,” Esa said. “I needed to work on myself, and I was giving her the time to work on herself.”

At the time, Esa was making money by picking up shifts at Shoe Palace, a shoe retailer in Hayward. He enrolled in classes at Cal State East Bay, a small university in Hayward, where he majored in computer engineering. He worked with Toni to help Sione with his construction projects, moving wheelbarrows of dirt to replace one client’s swimming pool.

Esa wasn’t his happiest, but he did feel a little more free. Muller fashioned herself a stricter kind of mom. As a high schooler, Esa attended Mt. Eden, only a few minutes away from home. Every weekday, when school let out at 3:08 p.m., Muller expected Esa home by 3:15 . She wasn’t home then – she worked as caregiver for a family that lived across the Bay, in San Francisco – so she would call Esa to make sure he had come home on time.

In hindsight, he appreciates the close guidance, understanding how much Muller cared . At the time, though, it felt a bit like a shackle. Esa wanted to live a little – “trying to enjoy this high school life and all that stuff,” he said – and living with Muller and her aunt Tiasia, he didn’t always feel like he could.

Muller had another rule that Esa could never shake: She didn’t let him play football. She saw too much danger in the sport. She saw the injuries some players suffered, the concussions that altered the rest of their lives, and she couldn’t bear the possibility of something similar happening to her Esa.

She also thought Esa had a brighter future in academics. She saw how easily math came to him. He had been accepted into Cal State East Bay’s computer engineering program for a reason, after all, which she figured would set him up with a lucrative job later in life. Growing up on the Polynesian island of Tonga, she never played sports. She didn’t see how they would figure into Esa’s future in any meaningful way, at least not a physical one like football.

Muller was convicted in her decision. She never have legally adopted Esa, but boy did she love him. She raised him with kindness and gentleness, which he shows today. In her early 30s at the time, Muller made sure Esa would grow up to represent the best of the family.

In her view, though, that also meant keeping Esa safe. To do that, she forbade him from playing football, the same sport that fueled Toni, who Esa looked to for everything. As he grew up, seeing what football could do for him, understanding how fun it might be to play and foster relationships with teammates, Esa felt weighed down. He fought the decision.

During the school day, his friends would bug him. You should play football, they said. He heard the same thing from Toni, even from Lola and Sione, his biological parents. Esa was 6-foot-6, a fantastic basketball player. Why wouldn’t he go out for football? He wanted to, he would respond, but he had to respect his mom’s wishes.

Still, he didn’t always have an easy time doing so. On a few occasions at Mt. Eden, he tried to sneak into football meetings, looking for a way to get involved with the team without Muller finding out. She always seemed to. She would call him, give him an earful, and that’s about when Esa would find the exit, telling his friends he had to leave.

Even at home, Esa tried to plead his case with Muller. No luck there either. When he brought up the topic, asking if he could go out for football, the conversation would end before it started.

“I would just shut it down. Like, we’re not going there,” Muller said. “He was always good in school, so I just wanted him to go down that path. He was such an obedient kid. That’s why I said he’s such a good kid – he just went along with whatever I said.”

It’s why he would make good time getting home every day, taking the bus to the Chabot College stop and walking the rest of the way. It’s why he respected Muller’s wishes and took a serious approach to growing up sooner than most kids, becoming what he called “the man of the house” when his mom was away at work, putting in shifts from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. Esa was already becoming what his family knew he could be.

What he couldn’t get over, though, was playing football. He might have respected Muller’s wishes and held out of the sport in high school, but after the argument, after he moved in with his biological parents and that side of his family, the reality of the situation began to hit him.

He could play football.

Esa couldn’t leap into action, though. He had never played to begin with, and he appreciated that Toni didn’t badger him to start when he moved in. Esa was allowed his space, allowed to take his time to decide what was next for him. He figured Cal State East Bay’s computer engineering program wasn’t in his long-term plans, but that’s where he found himself at the time.

Around then, he began to fall into some bad habits. Basketball was no longer a part of his life, no longer giving him a healthy outlet. His grades slipped. The friends he made weren’t into the kinds of hobbies that would further his career. In some ways, he found himself living the kind of carefree life he wished he could have enjoyed earlier, back when he had to be home by a certain time every afternoon.

“Because he wasn’t able to do that stuff in high school,” Lola said, “he just started running wild.”

Esa wasn’t at a dead end, but there wasn’t much of an end in sight. He kept working at Shoe Palace, channeling his aspirations into trying to become a manager. Around the same time, Toni found work as a security guard at a parking garage in San Francisco, keeping an eye out for any type of danger. He brought dumbbells to his overnight shifts to stay in shape.

It saddened Esa, who looked up to Toni like he was Hercules. Only a few years prior, Toni was a star on the Cougars’ defensive line. He became an Apple Cup hero in 2012, his redshirt sophomore season, when he picked off a pass in overtime and returned it 60 yards the other way, paving the way for WSU kicker Andrew Furney’s winning field goal. Pole lettered in each of his last two seasons at Washington State.

Now here Toni was, protecting a parking garage back home in the Bay Area. It was honest work, just not the kind that felt right, not to either brother.

“He would tell me all the stories about him doing the job,” Esa said, “and I’m like, ‘Sounds cool, but you were, like, the star growing up.’ I don’t want to say fall from grace, but I’m like, ‘I don’t think this is what we’re meant to be doing right now.’ And then I realized, yeah, OK, I think we both need to make a change right now. I’m not working this job for the rest of my life, and you’re not either.”

As the calendar flipped to 2021, Esa began to grow restless, like something wasn’t right in his life. He was still enrolled in classes at Cal State East Bay, but he didn’t attend many. He dropped out within a few weeks, and he’s fortunate he did so early in the semester, because WSU nearly stopped him from transferring due to a lack of eligibility.

The Cougs were nowhere on his radar back then, though. Nothing was really on Esa’s radar, not much besides working and spending time with his family. But the longer that dragged out, the longer he worked at Shoe Palace, he grew uneasy. What was he supposed to be doing? He wasn’t sure, but he knew it wasn’t this.

Before long, Esa came to Toni with his mind made up: He was ready to try football. It had been tugging at him too long, taken up a corner of his mind for too long. He maintained his love for Muller, respected her like he always has, but she couldn’t stop him from playing football anymore.

When Esa told him the news, Toni’s eyes lit up. He could tell both of their lives were about to change. Looking back on it now, the reality seems obvious to everyone involved.

“If it wasn’t for that fallout,” Lola said, referring to Esa and Muller’s argument, “he would have never played football.”

•••

Usually, Eric Fanene likes to say, Chabot College football has a prerequisite: Players must have played in high school.

“But you can’t coach 6-7,” Fanene laughed.

In the summer of 2021, when Esa and Toni coordinated a time to meet with the head coach Fanene, he was ready to get to know a little more about this mysterious prospect who had yet to play organized football. Esa enrolled at Chabot, started attending the Gladiators’ workouts and before long, he landed a spot on the team. Toni had a spot on the coaching staff, taking an assistant defensive line coaching gig.

But Esa didn’t know how to play defensive line, where coaches figured he fit best, and he had no strength. At least not the kind he needed to flourish in the weight room. He struggled to complete push-ups. He bench-pressed just 95 pounds, squatted only 70. He had the body type; he just “wasn’t physically able to do the things that football players should be able to do,” he said.

He saw there’s a difference between working out for football and working out for, well, work. That’s how Esa had spent the previous several months. He needed extra money, and with his mind set on going out for junior college football, he decided to join Toni in helping their father, Sione, with his construction projects.

Sione had a wise vision, trying to instill the importance of hard work within his sons, and with the help of Toni, he succeeded. If Esa wanted to thrive on the football field, his dad would tell him, he needed to develop strength in his hands. Needed to be able to lift heavy weights, to move them distances.

So Sione put Esa to work with him and Toni. Their days looked a little like this: In the morning, the men would head to Home Depot, where they would pick up the tools they needed for that day’s job, which could have been anything from filling swimming pools with dirt to breaking up concrete with a jackhammer. After that, they would head to Chabot workouts at 1 p.m., completing those by the early evening. By that time, Toni would be scheduled for an evening shift at the 24 Hour Fitness in Hayward, so he would bring Esa with him to get extra workouts in.

It was a grueling schedule, so taxing on Esa that at times, he began to wonder if Toni was going hard on him just to go hard on him. “No,” Toni would remind him, “I’m not trying to kill you. You’re just behind.” Esa had virtually no football on his resume, he had to remember, so he had to go the extra mile — about a thousand extra miles — to catch up with the players around him.

Plus, Toni added, he didn’t want Esa to just dominate at the junior college level. He wanted Esa to do the same at his next opportunity, which he knew was coming. Toni always had his sights set high for his little brother, which meant demanding every drop out of him. Esa had never been coached like that, so it took him some time to internalize it was for his best, but he always seemed to remember it.

“One of the things that keeps us grounded is just remembering where we come from. We don’t come from rich families,” Toni said. “The family dynamic also helped instill a certain type of work ethic and understanding of family duty, and the type of sacrifices it takes, sacrificing time and effort. It just helped Esa stay grounded.”

By the time Chabot’s season rolled around and Pole had switched to offensive line, accepting the suggestion from an assistant coach in a spring camp, he felt far more ready than he did when he first showed up on campus. The Gladiators’ season opener was a 41-7 road loss to Fresno. Pole, starting at left tackle for Chabot and injured his knee on the second series of the contest. He never returned to the game.

Pole returned for the second half of the season, a trying one for Chabot, which finished 2-8 . Pole didn’t put his best on film, he knew, which worried him. But he might not have returned to action later in the season if not for Toni pushing him to get back out there, health permitting. “You’re behind,” Toni reminded Esa, “so any reps are good reps.”

In May 2022, before he had a chance to recover and put better reps on tape, he received his first Division I offer. Lindenwood, an FCS program in Missouri, was ready to take a flier on Pole, banking on his size and potential. When he told his friends and family, they all congratulated him, knowing how much work he had put in. Inside, though, Pole wanted to prove he could go even higher.

Esa was at home when he proved himself right. It was September, and he had just talked on the phone with a coach from Utah State, who extended an offer, his first since the spring. He was floored. Toni was in the restroom, but Esa paid no mind. He ran to the bathroom door and banged on it.

“Ton!” Esa shouted. “Utah State just offered me!”

Then Toni yelled back from behind the bathroom door: “Let’s goooooo!”

“I wanted to hug him,” Esa said. “I was like, ‘Man, all this hard work, and he’s in the bathroom.’ I was like, ‘Dang it, get out here, bro.’ I remember first posting it. That was just the most hype thing that happened to me, and I just knew that all I needed was one. All I needed was one opportunity.”

Esa was right again. Within a month, he had collected three more offers, including Mountain West schools New Mexico State, Hawaii and Fresno State. On Oct. 21, Pole got a call from a man named Clay McGuire, who said he was the offensive line coach at Washington State. He wanted to extend Pole an offer, inviting him to become a Coug, same as Toni did all those years ago.

At the house, Esa and Toni hugged, the gravity of the moment washing over the two of them like a tidal wave. But Esa just had a lot to learn. Without much of a football background, he didn’t understand that WSU played in the Pac-12, making the Cougars a Power Five outfit. Toni had to teach Esa that much, helping him understand he had just graduated a level. That’s about when it began to sink in with Esa.

Several other power-conference schools followed suit. One day, he checked his Twitter, where he had been followed by coaches at Kansas and Oklahoma, then of the Big 12 Conference. He turned to Toni. Aren’t those Power Five schools, too?

“So is Washington State,” Toni replied.

“I’m like, OK,” Esa said with a chuckle. “You’re telling me it’s my choice, but it doesn’t really feel like it.”

Toni was only needling his younger brother. He wanted Esa to make his own decision, whether it was to attend WSU, BYU or even Cal, his dream school growing up. In fact, when he told Muller he had received an offer from the Golden Bears, she started to cry. The two had begun to make up, to establish regular communication again, and when she understood the school Esa idolized growing up now wanted him, it overwhelmed her.

She didn’t care if he accepted the offer, she told Esa, only that she was proud of him for putting himself in a position to earn that kind of recruiting attention. More important, she could sense a change in her son, which was the only thing that really mattered to her.

“I saw how happy he was,” Muller said.

Esa became even happier later that year, when he took his official visit to Pullman. He toured the campus and facilities. He stopped by a practice and befriended former WSU edge Ron Stone Jr., who gave him an earful during practices. In his signature gravelly voice, Stone would call out to Pole, telling him all the way he would beat him on the practice field once he committed.

In that interaction and beyond, Esa said, he felt a family vibe he couldn’t get over. In the back of his mind, he thought about his Utah State visit, which he enjoyed enough to make this a tough decision. But toward the end of the weekend, when he, Toni and several members of WSU’s coaching staff got together for a nice dinner in the basement of Todd Hall, he felt convicted.

He turned to head coach Jake Dickert with one message: “I think I want to be a Coug.”

Dickert repeated it loudly enough for everyone in the building to hear: “We’ve got a Coug!” Everyone at the table yelled and mobbed Esa, congratulating him on his decision. It was a long time coming for the guy who had only begun playing football 18 months prior.

“I’m just so thankful that I made that decision,” Esa said. “My brother couldn’t have been more proud. He’s just so proud of me now.”

Two years later, Lola puts it a little simpler: “He would have never played football if it wasn’t for Toni. Period.”

•••

Esa squinted his eyes and looked quizzically at Laiatu Latu, UCLA’s star edge rusher. It was Oct. 7, 2023, and the Cougs were at the Rose Bowl, ready to put their 4-0 record on the line against the Bruins. It was a day game, and the Pasadena temperatures hovered around 90 degrees, causing Esa and his teammates to sweat buckets.

Latu was wearing long sleeves.

“I was like, ‘This guy’s crazy,’ ” Esa said.

Turns out, Latu wasn’t just crazy. He was an animal. Matched up against Pole, Latu made him look like he still belonged at Chabot, burning him for nine pressures, per PFF data. He swam his way around Pole, bulldozed his way through him, you name it. The Cougs lost in large part because former quarterback Cam Ward was running for his life all afternoon.

A day after the clock ran out on WSU’s 25-17 loss, Pole earned a pass-blocking grade of 0.0, the lowest possible figure, the worst of any offensive lineman across the nation that week. For the whole season, only seven other offensive linemen finished with a 0.0 grade, including Pole. It wasn’t such a bad outing that it was unheard of, but it came close, especially within WSU’s program.

“That’s a game I’ll never forget. It’s kind of hard to forget,” Pole said. “He made it really obvious that he was a different caliber. Coming up to that game, we were watching the film, and it was just the way he was able to bend his speed. Just being so tall, but also being able to play low. He has a good way of reducing his shoulders, so even if you try to punch, he would take it away from you.”

This spring, the Indianapolis Colts made Latu the No. 15 overall pick in the NFL draft, proving his different caliber. Last season, Latu earned PFF’s highest pass-rush grade in the country, a 94.3 figure. In other words, Pole wasn’t just beaten by anybody.

Still, in the weeks that followed and to this day, Pole thinks about the experience often. He sits with the failure, lets it drive him. He reminds himself to never put himself in a position to let something like that happen again, and he thinks about steps he could have taken to prevent it from unfolding in the first place. In the week leading up to the game, maybe he could have hit the sauna to prepare for the heat. Perhaps he could have studied Latu’s game more.

Part of the problem, though, he couldn’t control. All season, he was battling injuries in both of his knees, which reduced his mobility in a meaningful way. About a month prior, in WSU’s win over then-No. 19 Wisconsin, he left the game briefly when he noticed a sharp pain in his knee. He departed for the locker room, where head trainer Jim Spooner taped it up, freeing Pole to return to action.

Only later did Pole learn the problem: Part of his MCL in his right knee had peeled off the bone. That’s why he missed the Cougars’ next game, a blowout win over FCS Northern Colorado. Sometime in that span, he received a platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injection in his knee, which is used to promote healing and reduce inflammation. He rejoined the team the following week, for a home win over Oregon State, and he enjoyed a bye week before the UCLA contest the following weekend.

“Throughout that process, my knees were just slowly not feeling the way they should be,” Pole said. “And this was in my right knee, so a lot of that time I was trying to compensate with my left knee, and then I started messing my left knee up. It was just bad ball.”

The injuries bothered Pole the rest of the season, forcing him to adjust to the power and speed of Power Five edge rushers all the while dealing with discomfort in both his knees. He gave up three pressures against Oregon, five pressures and one sack to Arizona State, then four pressures and another sack against Cal before he injured his ankle on a pileup , ending his season with two more games to play. He underwent double knee surgery after the season.

On the sideline in Berkeley, Esa found comfort in the presence of Toni, knowing he hadn’t let him down. Nearly a calendar year later, he has done quite the opposite, making his older brother proud, knowing he paved the way for the season Esa has produced as a senior.

“It’s just a cherry on top to see your brother being able to accomplish things at Washington State,” Toni said. “It was a home for me, and now it’s a home for him.”

•••

If Esa Pole understands anything, it’s that his story does not only belong to him. He shares his life with those around him, with his seven siblings. With younger brother Henry, a sophomore linebacker at Chabot; with his older brothers Stanley and Fuka, both of whom work for United Airlines, allowing his family to fly to his games free of charge; with his older sister Olivia, whose Nissan Altima Esa borrowed when he was at Chabot, paying half the car note every month.

Esa is as much himself as he is the family who has helped him become the man he is today, one of the country’s best offensive linemen, a 23-year-old who understands himself in a way many do not. He’s more accountable thanks to football, his mother says, another change Esa acknowledges as he learns more about himself. He finds it easy to understand himself because he cares so deeply about the people in his orbit, who have fed into him every step of the way.

He’s gone back to Chabot to talk with the Gladiators, to share his story, to show younger players his ascent isn’t something out of a Disney movie. It’s based in reality, in the Bay Area, the place that raised him the way his family did – by pushing him, disciplining him, helping him blossom and share his blessings with everyone in his orbit.

“Now they’re going and now they’re inspired,” Esa said. “Now they’re working hard. Now they understand what it takes to do what I did. Whatever happens in the season, I’m just so glad that I can inspire another generation. I can show them that even when the odds are against you, you can do what other people still struggle to do now.”