A late bloomer, Jason Pierre-Paul has become a star
New York’s Pierre-Paul got a late start at football, but he has blossomed into a star.

Somewhere high in the stands at Lucas Oil Stadium, Jean Pierre-Paul will take in Super Bowl XLVI.

Blind for more than 20 years, Pierre-Paul won’t be able to see the spectacular pregame pageantry, dazzling halftime show or the remarkable plays made by his son, New York Giants defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul.

But Jean will know it when his son blindsides New England quarterback Tom Brady on a sack or bats down a pass or even blocks a kick.

Jason Pierre-Paul has done it all in just his second NFL season, collecting 16.5 sacks, forcing two fumbles, blocking a field goal and even recording a safety for the Giants.

And now he can only imagine how his father will visualize what the game will be like for him.

“Because I’m not in the same shoes that he’s in, I don’t know how it’s going to be for him,” Jason said. “But I know one thing’s for sure, that he’s going to be rooting me on and that my whole family is going to be rooting me on, no matter what. My mom, my whole family will be here. It’s going to be the first time they’ve all been to a football game.

“Coming from Haiti, the only football they know is soccer. I was born in America, and the only football I know is football. But he understands. I call and they say he knows I’m playing great.”

Jean Pierre-Paul lost his sight mysteriously, before Jason was born on New Year’s Day 1989 in Deerfield Beach, Fla.

“He said he was driving once, and he lost more vision in one eye,” Jason said. “He went to the doctor and the doctor said he couldn’t find anything. That was basically it. Then he lost his other vision and was totally blind from there.”

The disability created hardships for the immigrant family, including Jason, both a budding basketball and football player who nearly gave up sports because he had to work at Boston Market to help make ends meet.

Fearful of getting fired, he told his football coach he would have to quit in order to keep his job. But the store manager understood and adjusted Pierre-Paul’s hours so he could compete in athletics and still work the night shift.

“When I got out of practice, it was about 6 o’clock,” Pierre-Paul said. “At 7:30 I had to be at work so I took a shower in the locker room and went straight to work and got off work at 12 o’clock. I went back home and the next day I woke up and went to school.”

Pierre-Paul, a strapping 6-foot-5, 275 pounds, admired the way his father dealt with his handicap, and if anything, it provided inspiration.

“My dad never quit, no matter what,” Pierre-Paul said. “Most people, when something like that happens, they just think their life is over. But that’s not true. My dad can still do things like a normal person. He still cooks, watches my sister’s and brother’s baby when my mom’s not home. He does things like a regular person.

“What I bring to help my team out is that no matter what it is, we could be down 20 points, two touchdowns, I’m never going to quit. I’m going to keep rushing to the ball until the whistle blows and it’s the end of the game. That’s how I’m going to keep on playing.”

Pierre-Paul didn’t begin playing football until his junior year of high school. He had broken his leg playing basketball and said the high school coaches convinced him to try football.

“I never thought of playing football,” he said. “They dragged me onto the field. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. All they said was rush the quarterback, basically, and that’s what I did from there on out.”

That led Pierre-Paul, a diamond in the rough as a football player, to a pair of community colleges, including Fort Scott (Kan.) Community College where he had 10.5 sacks in 2008, before he landed at the University of South Florida. Pierre-Paul played just one year at USF, where he intended to redshirt but ended up earning all-Big East Conference honors and became a YouTube sensation for performing back flips and front flips at a bowl game practice.

The Giants selected him as a junior in the first round of the 2010 draft at age 21. And he quickly became the dominant force in one of the NFL’s most devastating pass rushes. He had just 4.5 sacks as a backup during his rookie season, but had a breakout year in 2011 ranking fourth in the league in sacks and earning a Pro Bowl berth.

Pierre-Paul compares sacking a quarterback to slamming home a dunk in basketball.

“You know, the adrenaline is pumping,” he said. “You just have to get there, and like a dunk, you’ve just got to dunk the ball. Once you do it, you just want another one. Like a sack, once you get one sack, you just want more. The guys on my front line, if Osi (Umenyiora) gets a sack, I want two sacks, because if I get two sacks, Justin Tuck is going to want three sacks. So, you just want to get there as fast as you can, but at the same time you have to play the run.”

The frightening part is how much better Pierre-Paul can become.

“He’s freakishly talented,” said Tuck. “He’s not even close to where he’ll be. The sky might not be the limit for that guy. It’s fun to watch him. Me and Osi are pretty good pass rushers ourselves, but there are some things he can do we shake our head at.”

On the practice field as well as in games.

“You can be standing around,” Tuck said, “and you see him, without taking a step, doing a full backflip in pads. At 270 pounds. How scary is that?”

[youtube]http://youtu.be/Nw_PgeE6u0k[/youtube]

INDIANAPOLIS – In the array of awe-inspiring things Jason Pierre-Paul has done in his brief NFL career, it is what he doesn’t know that still wows his New York Giants teammates and coaches.

Because when he learns it all, there’s no telling what the NFL might see.

Pierre-Paul, the 6-foot-5, 275-pound, back-flipping defensive end who has gone from Boston Market to New England nightmare, still has these moments where the Giants realize how new he is to the game.

“We were talking one time and I told him to ‘spill the guard,’ ” Giants defensive line coach Robert Nunn said, referring to a common term for how defensive ends are supposed to take out pulling guards on cutback running plays. “He looked at me like I was talking in a foreign language. He had no idea. All the guys are like, ‘Yeah, spill the guard, don’t you know that?’ He had no idea and that’s because he’s still so new to the game.”

New, inexperienced, raw and, at the same time, spectacular.

In his second year in the NFL and seventh year of organized football since being dragged to the field by the Deerfield Beach High coaches, Pierre-Paul has quickly become one of the league’s elite defensive players. He finished the season with 16 ½ sacks, including a safety, two forced fumbles and six passes defensed.

He has done it almost completely on athletic ability, a truly rare concept in a league filled with great players. In some ways, Pierre-Paul is like a second-coming of Bruce Smith, a big man with unparalleled physical gifts.

To put it another way, when fellow defensive lineman Justin Tuck was asked when Pierre-Paul figured it all out, Tuck responded: “He hasn’t … that’s the scary part.”

Pierre-Paul, who made the NFC Pro Bowl team, is the latest in a serious of freakishly gifted athletes who show up every five or six years in the NFL. In a league of fantastically gifted people, Pierre-Paul is at the extreme, an outlier of seemingly limitless potential.

Or as New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick put it, he’s the kind of player who makes you go “Wow” on a regular basis.

“Probably about five times a game he has plays like that,” said Belichick, whose Patriots face the Giants in Super Bowl XLVI on Sunday. “He comes out of nowhere and makes a tackle. Or jumps 10 feet in the air and bats down a ball. Or makes an athletic move at the line of scrimmage while keeping his balance. He’s a rare athlete.”

Cincinnati Bengals coach Marvin Lewis agreed.

“We studied him a lot coming out [in the 2010 NFL draft] and the comparisons of what he could become were pretty significant,” Lewis said. “You’re talking about the explosiveness of guys like Jason Taylor, Jevon Kearse, Jared Allen and Julius Peppers.”

OK, but Taylor and Kearse were guys who did their best work while weighing only about 240 pounds. That’s a far cry from Pierre-Paul’s size.

“You’re right, Peppers is the only one who’s really like him,” Lewis said.

To say he is gifted is an understatement of monumental proportion. Pierre-Paul has been videotaped doing 13 consecutive backflips while in college when he took a dare from University of South Florida teammate Kion Wilson, who got to six before collapsing in exhaustion. The clip has been viewed nearly 900,000 times.

“You have no idea of the strength it takes to do that and to do that when you’re 6-5 and 280 pounds,” former NFL running back and Yahoo! Sports analyst Eddie George said.

To this day, Pierre-Paul will do backflips just for fun.

“It was in the [bye] week and we were just standing around in a circle talking and out of the corner of my eye I notice some movement and it’s JPP doing a backflip,” Nunn said, a little wide-eyed at the memory. “I’m like, ‘Jason, you don’t need to be doing that anymore.’ ”

Another time, as the players walked off the field after practice, Tuck heard a “thunk.” Looking back, he didn’t see what happened. He heard it again and looked back fast enough to see Pierre-Paul finishing a second backflip …

In full pads.

“A 280-pound man doing that in full pads,” said Tuck, who is not one for hyperbole but was nonetheless incredulous. “Yeah, I used to be able to do a backflip. Not anymore and never in pads. … I said, ‘JPP, enough with that.’ We don’t need him landing on his head.”

Rather, the Giants need to put more information in Pierre-Paul’s head.

Pierre-Paul’s path to this point has been complicated and tinged with challenge. His parents, who are Haitian natives, didn’t know anything about football and didn’t want their son to play. He had to hide the fact he was playing for the high school team from them.

He also had to balance responsibilities at home with trying to play. Pierre-Paul’s father was blind, so the son had to work constantly to help support his family. That included the job at Boston Market.

A job that almost put an end to football.

“I had a job to take care of my parents – to take care of some bills at the house – because my daddy wasn’t working,” Pierre-Paul said. “I had to figure out how to make that all work at one time. “I was working at Boston Market. … I went into work and thought I was going to get fired. So I told my coach, ‘I can’t play football because I have to make money to help my mom.’ ”

Pierre-Paul’s manager was accommodating, making adjustments to the schedule so that the student-athlete could work shifts following practice. However, Pierre-Paul’s days were long as he routinely worked until midnight.

Don't know him, but a friend of mine knows him from his USF days. He said the kid is really humble. And he said he was amazed that ( last year ), he was asking for a loan to go to school, now he's in the Superbowl.

I wish him all the best on Monday onward, but for now until Sunday I hope he plays the worst football of his life.

????

yep the man is an humble beast a real beast the Lebron James of the NFL

he is in top of the list for defensive player of the year as well has being one of the best defender all the time

good for him

That's going too far.

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ALLEZ LES BLEUS!!!

how many athlete do you know that can do that?



and look at this man

You consider him a Haitian? He was born and raised in the US.

There are a number of VERY athletic players in the NFL, NHL, NBA and numerous other sports. Jason Pierre-Paul cannot take over a game by himself. Without the rest of his linemates (Justin Tuck in particular and Osi Umeniyora who played part of the season) he wouldn't be nearly as effective. He is a good player, a very good player. Definitely NOT close to having the impact of a Lebron James. James carried Cleveland for years, and all the way to the finals. Pierre Paul had 16.5 sacks on a Giants team that went 9-7 and gave up 6 points more than it scored.

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ALLEZ LES BLEUS!!!

de Haitian gonna wuk Voodoo?

It only applies to you know what...

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Our Queen went to sleep, her people left to weep....in song she lives on.



Long Live the Queen!

I asked that because to me a Haitian is actually someone from Haiti.