The Relentless Positivity of Jason Pierre-Paul

The Bucs pass rusher made it through end-of-the-road junior college programs and overcame two serious accidents in becoming an NFL star. And what most people remember about him is his smile.

On his way to defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul’s hospital room shortly after the All-Pro lost the better part of three fingers on his right hand during a gruesome Fourth of July fireworks accident in 2015, Michael Alessi wondered whether his friend and personal training client might have finally exhausted the tank of energy and positivity that had carried him through a challenging life.

Then he saw Pierre-Paul in his room, flashing a knowing grin as he held up a training resistance band—the kind that he used to roll his eyes at during his monotonous warm-up exercises with Alessi. Pierre-Paul had someone smuggle them into Jackson Memorial in Miami, where he was staying under a pseudonym to filter out visitors. The slice of privacy allowed him to wander the hallways doing hip and leg openers. He also chugged up and down the stairs to keep in shape.

“It was a slap upside the head; it was an awakening for me to see him smiling,” Alessi says. “He’s all, ‘Hey! Mike! Good to see you man! How are you doing?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to walk into this room, and we’re going to be doom and gloom.’ I couldn’t believe this man was smiling and having fun.”

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This outlook is not anything new for the 32-year-old Pierre-Paul. Scroll through his constantly curated, patched-up-and-torn-down Instagram page and he appears very much a man of the times; the kind of person who crashes into mindfulness and emotional stability after a period of great tumult—in this case, a horrifying explosion that nearly cost him his hand, followed by a broken neck resulting from a May 2019 car accident, the latter of which actually warranted a rehabilitation process more difficult and precarious than heavy weight training with seven and a half fingers. He’ll post things like Today will never come again…be a blessing…be a friend…encourage someone…take time to care…let your words heal and not wound…or…we repeat what we don’t repair. Had JPP not been a star pass rusher, he might have become a 6' 2", 275-pound author of inspirational posters. His prized possession is a plaque that hangs on the wall of his home office that says “Beat the Odds.”

This season Pierre-Paul earned his first Pro Bowl nod since 2012, when he was with the New York Giants, and he has been a key part of a Tampa Bay defense that was rated sixth in the NFL this year. He had 9 ½ regular season sacks and another two in the NFC championship game against Green Bay, when he also forced two fumbles. But this season is not necessarily some peak on his narrative arc for Pierre-Paul. Instead, it’s a time for others to appreciate a player who has always shown the ability to weather storms with a convivial disposition.

In a lot of ways, the 2020 Buccaneers are like many of the stops along Pierre-Paul’s trajectory, in that they may have benefited more from the tao of Pierre-Paul than the other way around. From his upbringing in Florida to multiple stops at spartan community colleges, to the hospital where his career almost ended, people mostly remember his smile, even if Pierre-Paul was the one in need of help.

“Resilience to me is never giving up, being there for somebody when they truly need you and just being yourself even when its good times or bad times, you’re just the same person never changing,” he said days before the Super Bowl. “I done been through a lot man, but the things I go through, I just think those happy thoughts.”

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In 2009, the football team at Fort Scott (Kan.) Community College practiced in a rodeo arena. The weight room was the size of a small shed, the dorm rooms had bugs and the playing field was pockmarked with holes made by the horses who shared the space. In a moment that seems like kismet now, Pierre-Paul arrived on campus with linebacker Lavonte David, now his teammate in Tampa. The pair was recruited there by assistant coach Eddie Brown, a Fort Scott legend and the father of another current Bucs player, wide receiver Antonio Brown.

“I want to be respectful of [the school] because it’s a place that gives you opportunity, but it’s terrible,” says Jeff Sims, who was the Fort Scott coach at the time. “I mean, it’s an awful experience, and here’s the deal: The guys who look at it like it’s awful, they don’t make it. The guys who look at it like This is my opportunity do.”

When Sims talks about how to get the best out of Fort Scott, he often mentions his friend Pierre-Paul. They would joke about the disastrous state of things, including the rock-hard biscuits in the dining hall. “But,” Sims says, “he always mentions how great it was that they had made-to-order eggs.”

Sims says Pierre-Paul arrived without a high school diploma and with just nine total college credits after a year at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, Calif., where he had been renting an apartment with teammates. “Made-to-order eggs were a positive for people not used to breakfast,” Sims says. “Jason came from California, where he didn’t have meals. At Fort Scott, it was all-you-can-eat. Most people would say that food was bad. Some people might say that bad food is better than no food.”

(Garett Tujague, coach at the College of the Canyons, says that the players’ meal choices, such as peanut-butter-and-jelly bars and Top Ramen, were not always ideal, but that the staff exhausted their efforts to make sure everyone was fed. Tujague’s own kids would cut up fruit in the end zone during practice, and his wife would make as many meals as possible.)

Sims said that Pierre-Paul took more college credits during his time at Fort Scott than any athlete he’d coached in 13 years at the junior college level—51 over the course of a year. He would practice his class speeches in Sims’s office and light up the room.

Pierre-Paul also had plenty to learn about football. He had been playing the sport for a little more than two years total and needed to learn some of the most basic terms, such as the technique numbers that correspond with where a down lineman starts the play.

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During one game, Pierre-Paul got a stinger that rippled up his arm and into his neck, causing him to inform the trainer that he had a neck injury. The protocol required Pierre-Paul to be carted off the field and rushed via ambulance to the hospital. Soon after Sims was tapped on the shoulder by Pierre-Paul, who was saying “O.K. coach, I’m ready to go back in.”

When Sims waved him off, Pierre-Paul shoved the hospital’s discharge papers into the coach’s chest. “Well, fine,” Sims said. “Go in there, I guess.”

“Um, Coach?” Pierre-Paul said. “They had to saw my helmet off at the hospital.”

After they got Pierre-Paul suited up and onto the field, he broke three fingers on one hand. Sims says the team’s athletic trainer was so grossed out by the sight that she fled the scene. Pierre-Paul had to have his fingers reset by the doctor and then he went back in again. He would later say that he thought Sims might cut him if he didn’t return.

Throughout his time at Fort Scott, Sims said he remembered Pierre-Paul’s jovial pureness. An example: After Pierre-Paul began to stand out on the field and start being recruited by Division I programs, he went into Sims’s office and told him he was going to commit to Alabama A&M, an FCS subdivision school.

“And I was like what?!” Sims said.

“Well, that’s where [teammate] Anthony [Jackson] said he’s going,” Pierre-Paul said.

“You’re not going to Alabama A&M, Jason. You can go anywhere you want.”

“Well, it’s good enough for Anthony.”

“And he meant that,” Sims said. “His friend Anthony was a good dude and Anthony was going to Alabama A&M, so that’s where he wanted to go too.”

Another time, after Pierre-Paul had committed to South Florida, a week before he was to leave campus for good, a storm rattled Fort Scott and shut down the electric grid. Because the security cameras were off, someone raided the unlocked dorms and stole cash and valuables. Pierre-Paul ran into a freshman unaffiliated with the football team who told him that the money his mom sent him for a bus ticket home had been taken. Pierre-Paul went door to door to help him raise the replacement cash.

“I believe that if you gave Jason $100 million, he’s going to be happy,” Sims says. “If you took $100 million from Jason, he’s going to be happy.”

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Through a childhood dealing with his father’s sudden blindness, where he would entertain his sisters in the yard with jump rope and back flips, through back-to-back years of last-chance, end-of-the-road junior college football, through a busted hand and a broken neck, Pierre-Paul somehow, effortlessly maintained the life in the room.

Pierre-Paul, a first-round pick of the Giants in 2010, has been an NFL star for a decade, but it’s not unusual for him to enter a rehab facility for preseason strengthening exercises and start gabbing with the nonathlete clients recovering from typical muscle ailments.

“You gotta keep him on track along with my other patients, since he’s getting lost on a tangent with anyone in the room,” says Tyson Young, who handled some of Pierre-Paul’s knee strengthening rehab last summer at Fox Physical Therapy. (Young added that, before the season, Pierre-Paul promised him he was going back to the Pro Bowl and playing in the Super Bowl.)

Alessi says that the only thing that can bring Pierre-Paul down is the mention of Bulgarian split squats, a deep lunge that works many of the leg’s largest muscle groups. The first time JPP tried to bench press after the fireworks mishap, they had to wrap a towel around the injured hand to ease the pressure. Before long he progressed from the bar with no weights (45 pounds) to well over 300. On Super Bowl week’s opening night, when he was asked about his personal resilience, Pierre-Paul briefly held up his hand. He looked for a moment at the place where a full middle finger used to be, which is now a nub that looks as if his original digit had folded over on itself. He then used that nub to point to his neck, which was broken not long after.

“It’s easier said than done,” Pierre-Paul said. “But I’ve never quit anything in life I did. That’s just me.”