COLUMBUS, Ohio — James Pierre likes to wake up at 5:30 every morning and spend about 30 minutes getting his "mind right” before his feet ever hit the floor.
In that quiet time, ahead of dawn’s early light, the Steelers’ defensive back can contemplate the journey that’s delivered him from the hardscrabble neighborhoods of South Florida. He can think about the people in his life who helped him overcome so many obstacles. About the mother who picked him up from the detention center and kept him from becoming another “statistic,” about the high school coaches who served as father figures years after his dad had been incarcerated, deported and killed, about the little brother whose life he hopes to enrich.
Pierre understands that for undrafted rookie free agents like himself tomorrows are never promised even as he vies for significant playing time in his second season as a cornerback. He says “each day, the rent (is) due,” a nod to the humility his mom demanded several years ago during a heated, attitude-adjusting lecture.
And before the 24-year-old Pierre gets out of bed to start working out and preparing for another day of training camp, he thinks about the sage advice from his prep coach Jevon Glenn, who told him never to forget his “Why.” Why is he pushing himself so hard against the odds when so many others from the old neighborhoods succumbed to the temptation of the Deerfield Beach, Fla., streets?
“I’m just thinking about my mom, my why, you know?” Pierre said when asked what goes through his mind before getting up in the morning. “I think about her and (how) she never gave up, so I wake up and attack the day. She never gave up on me, so I just think about my mom and my little brother. That’s my why.”
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NATALIE McNEIL
Willie, Natalie, James and Nekia together for a family photo.
Natalie McNeil gave birth to Pierre when she was 16-years-old. He was her second child. Willie was born two years earlier — the first of McNeil’s six kids. The five oldest have earned their high school diplomas and her two daughters, Shavon (Army) and Nekia (Navy), have served in the armed forces.
“When I leave this Earth, I’m going to leave it with a Kool-Aid smile,” McNeil said laughing. “We all got to go one day, but when I go, I’m going to go with peace because all of my kids are wonderful.”
She lives in a two-bedroom home in Pompano Beach, a city of 112,000 residents just north of Fort Lauderdale. Her youngest child, Warren, is age 4 and he’s part of the “Why” that motivates Pierre, that keeps his nose in the playbook and his ears open to advice from Joe Haden, Minkah Fitzpatrick and other Steelers veterans.
McNeil isn’t worried about moving into a bigger house or living in a nicer neighborhood. She is thankful for the blessings she’s already received: a stern mother who wouldn’t allow her to shirk responsibilities as a teenage parent, the financial support from the father of three of McNeil's children and the government assistance that enabled her to raise her kids without having to leave them unsupervised at home.
She is moved to tears when discussing Pierre’s maturation and his ability to rise above his environment as a teenager.
“I’m just grateful he’s not in the streets or incarcerated,” McNeil said. “With me, it’s not about him making the money. I’m just grateful my son is not like where we are from. (The crime rate in Pompano Beach was higher than 92.7 percent of U.S. cities in 2018.) I’m just grateful he’s not part of the statistics that’s going on in the neighborhood. I’m living alright. I’m not in a hurry for anything.”
Pierre was still a baby when McNeil broke up with his father, James. She didn’t want to raise two small kids with a fellow teenager involved in criminal activity. James was jailed and deported to his native Haiti, where McNeil heard he had been poisoned to death by the family of his girlfriend.
Pierre honors his late father with a mention in his Twitter bio. Tuesday, as he met with reporters, the Steelers’ defensive back spoke in vague terms about the hardships he’s encountered.
“I just take it for what it is,” he said. “At the end of the day, you can't control it. You’ve just got to keep working. Each day, the rent (is) due.”
Pierre grew up playing youth football with a future NFL Most Valuable Player. His cousin is Ravens’ quarterback Lamar Jackson, and they are related on McNeil’s side of the family.
“He used to throw the ball to me. I was his receiver,” Pierre said. “We’d stay the night at each other’s houses and stuff like that.”
Football was Pierre’s passion from a young age. Household chores, not so much.
“He never picked up a broom,” McNeil said. “When he was little, he would say, ‘I’m going to be rich, I won’t have to do nothing but play.’”
The mother of six could not provide the material possessions many kids take for granted, but she prided herself on being present at their ball games and extra-curricular functions. She realizes Pierre hung out with some kids who didn’t blink in the face of danger, but more often than not her son knew what lines not to cross.
His only brush with the law, she said, was getting into a fight that involved a bunch of students during his eighth-grade year. McNeil let him sit in a detention center for about two hours before taking him home.
“I always tried to be there for my kids,” she said. “From out of the womb, all we know is each other.”
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AARON GRAY
Deerfield Beach assistant coach Aaron Gray with James Pierre.
Deerfield Beach High assistant football coach Aaron Gray keeps a handful of pictures of himself and one of his best friends as a kind of a show-and-tell scared straight. The photos are in chronological order — two chums as grade schoolers, as high-school teammates, as young men in college, their whole lives ahead of them.
Gray played football at Florida A&M. His buddy was a student at Florida State.
The last picture in the sequence is the attention grabber for so many at-risk kids in the program. It’s the one of his longtime friend in prison, serving 30 years for armed robbery.
Gray has shown the photos to Pierre, who had issues with truancy and skipping more than a few football practices in his four years of high school.
“Where Jamie grew up it was easy to make the wrong turn, the wrong decision and lose everything,” Gray said. “Some of his friends, the kids he grew up with, made the wrong decisions and ended up locked up or worse.”
Inner-city coaches such as Gray and Glenn do much more than run practices, break down film and devise game plans.
When they spot athletes with potential, they do almost everything within their power not to see it squandered. It’s one reason their program boasts more than a half dozen players currently in the NFL, including cornerback Aaron Robinson, a 2021 third-round draft pick of the Giants.
“Coach Gray is all about the kids,” McNeil said. “James would buck practice and they would come to my house looking for him. They would drive around the neighborhood to find him. They didn’t have to do that. They did that for other kids, too.”
Gray has been coaching since 2007, and Pierre is his only four-year starter in that time. He immediately recognized Pierre’s talent and how his lanky 6-foot-2 frame could be used in the Bucks’ secondary as both a safety and cornerback. Pierre wasn’t the fastest or strongest player, but the coaching staff loved his aggression, his bravado and, most importantly, his football acumen.
“He’s the smartest kid I’ve ever coached,” Gray said. “He was one of those kids who loved to watch film. He was like a quarterback in our secondary with the way he diagnosed plays.”
Gray worked with Pierre on his technique and discipline. He convinced him to attend summer school to improve his grades and to run track to improve his speed.
Pierre relished challenges, particularly at college camps where recruiters watched prospects showcase their abilities. The defensive back was labeled a three-star recruit and loved to punch above his weight.
“He would walk around saying, ‘Where are the four stars, where are the five stars? I want to go against them. Who’s the man out here? I want to guard him,’” Gray recalled.
Pierre earned a scholarship to the University of Miami, but de-committed in 2015 over concerns with the Hurricanes’ coaching staff. That decision set off a chain reaction of misfortune. He was ruled academically ineligible at both North Carolina and Syracuse.
More troubling in the minds of his coaches and his loved ones was the fact Pierre would have to sit out a year before regaining athletic eligibility due to the initial transfer. It meant a year of hanging around the neighborhood and some old friends who didn’t always have his best interests at heart. Luckily for Pierre, there were others who did.
“He had guys who looked out for him, guys who recognized his talent and said to him, ‘you can’t be out here, you gotta go home,’” Gray said.
He and Glenn kept in close touch with their former player while charting new paths toward his college career. They also kept reminding Pierre of Glenn’s mantra.
“You gotta to have a Why,” Gray said. “If you don’t make it, you don’t know where you are going to end up, you don’t know where your mom is going to be. Everything Jamie does, he does for his mother. She has always been his Why.”
On Deerfield Beach High game days, Gray wears a replica NFL jersey corresponding to one of the school’s alums. It’s a reminder to his current players that former students who walked the same halls and faced similar struggles fulfilled their dreams.
For the Bucks’ season opener, Gray rocked a Steelers’ No, 42 jersey — the number serving as Pierre’s homage to the Deerfield Beach exit on I-95.
“The one word that sums up Jamie is perseverance,” Gray said. “I’m not going to tell you about all the stuff he had to go through when he was here. But if Jamie ever wrote a book or opened up in an interview, it would be the kind of material you see on those ESPN documentaries.”
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FAU ATHLETICS
James Pierre, left, became the shutdown corner for Florida Atlantic during his three seasons at the school.
Florida Atlantic University assistant coach Jason Jones can still picture the sweat-soaked jersey, the look of total exhaustion on the face of his shutdown cornerback after removing his helmet from a long day on the humid practice fields.
You probably have heard the phrase, ‘Leaving it all on the field on game day.” Pierre treated every day the same way. It didn’t matter if they kept score or not.
“He was just so competitive, he never quit on plays,” said Jones, now an assistant at Indiana. “He’d walk off that field drenched.”
Pierre was offered a scholarship at the University of Kansas, and his high school coaches encouraged him to the take it. They recognized Florida Atlantic as a quality program, but it was a 10-minute drive from the old neighborhood. The proximity was a concern.
McNeil thought her son was committed to Kansas, and the family even planned a going-away party. But Pierre opted to stay home to be close to his loved ones. It proved to be the right choice on several levels.
Jones coached him during his junior season, deploying him against the opponents’ best receiver. Pierre missed only one practice that year, and his reason for the absence was noble. He had rushed home to help break up a fight between his mother and a boyfriend, Jones said.
“He got over there and picked up his little brother and brought him back to the school for the rest of the day,” Jones recalled.
Pierre registered 44 tackles in his junior season and posted career-highs of 4.5 tackles for losses and three interceptions in 2019. Determined to financially assist his family, Pierre became just the fourth FAU player to declare for the draft as an underclassmen against the advice of some who believed one more year would improve his stock.
“I wanted to see him stay and get his diploma,” Gray said. “But that would have meant one more year of seeing his mother struggling to make ends meet.”
Pierre isn’t viewed as an elite athlete, but his ball-hawking instincts and competitiveness prompted pro scouts to invite him to the 2020 NFL Combine.
While his swagger impressed talent evaluators, it led to a memorable confrontation with his mother, who didn’t appreciate his attitude and the vibe he was sending out across social media.
“James was arrogant at the time,” McNeil recalled. “Nobody could tell him nothing. He knew he was good and he knew the type of talent he had. When he didn’t get drafted, I told him these exact words: ‘Until you humble yourself and be grateful for what God has in store for you, you’re not going to get it. It’s not going to happen for you. You’ve got to be grateful for what everyone does for you.’
“There was stuff he was saying on social media that didn’t sit well with me. I had to sit him down and say, ‘That’s got to stop. You have people watching you now. You got to stop talking about your friends who were incarcerated. That ain’t got nothing to do with you. They shouldn’t have did what they did. They don’t get the validation to share the things you got because God has blessed you for humbling yourself and doing right by others.’ After that, his demeanor changed and things started going right for him.”
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CAITLYN EPES / STEELERS
James Pierre catches a ball during drills at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex.
Haden remembers all the questions. During his 12 NFL seasons, he’s seen his share of rookies walk into locker rooms thinking they had all the answers before proving their worth to teammates.
Pierre was not that type. He understands how quickly the rent comes due.
“James has all the physical abilities — he’s big, he’s strong, he’s got long arms,” Haden said. “And the one thing I love about him is he’s willing to listen. He loves to take coaching. He doesn’t think he knows everything, so he makes it a whole lot easier because he’s there with an open ear ready for whatever I tell him.”
Pierre probably couldn’t have picked a worse year to enter the league. The global pandemic eliminated minicamps and exhibition games. It was a daunting scenario for any rookie, let alone one of his status.
But the defensive back excelled on special teams and became the only undrafted free agent to make the Steelers’ roster. Pierre earned just 27 snaps on defense, but his diligence allowed him to move up the depth chart and see some late-season action, including breaking up a pass in the playoff loss to the Browns.
He spent part of his offseason working out with Fitzpatrick, and he’s enjoyed a strong training camp, playing ahead of Justin Layne. Pierre has positioned himself to be a key contributor in nickel packages following the offseason defections of Mike Hilton and Steven Nelson.
“In practice, when I see something I would have done differently, I will say something to Pierre and he soaks it all up,” Haden said. “It’s like, ‘thanks, big bro,’ and he looks forward to the information I’m giving him. He soaks it all up and he tries his hardest and he loves the game. With him, it makes it really, really easy to help him out.”
Whether Pierre can handle the increased responsibility remains to be seen. The league is filled with special teamers who have flashed on defense or offense only to be exposed over the course of a long season.
Early returns are encouraging, however. If all goes well, Pierre will get the opportunity to intercept a pass thrown by his cousin when Jackson and the Ravens travel to Pittsburgh on Dec. 5.
“It’s crazy,” Pierre said. “We never thought it’d be like this.”
In the meantime, his mother and little brother Warren are coming to visit in October. Pierre has three small dogs, and the youngster figures to have a blast with the canines.
“James takes a lot of Joy in (Warren),” McNeil said. “He’s always checking in on him to make sure he’s OK.”
In two months, Pierre will have his two most important Whys under his roof. It’s the kind of thought that can get a young man’s mind right at 5:30 a.m.
