The Mouth That Roars

It was a miserable year without athletics, but it changed Michael's life. Something essential fell into place. At St. Thomas, Michael encountered teachers and coaches who encouraged rather than criticized him and kids who welcomed rather than ostracized him. "I realized there were people willing to help me," he says. "I was around kids who had plans. I said, 'Man, this is what I've been missing.' "

At the same time Michael also lost an essential part of his life. While he discovered a world of possibilities, he learned that some people can work all their lives and never break even. The seemingly indefatigable Walter Irvin was one of them.

Early in Michael's junior year, Walter was found to have with cancer. Michael, idle after school because of his ineligibility, became his father's companion and driver when Walter went to the hospital for treatment. In the car and the waiting room they talked endlessly. Michael realized how profoundly adrift he had been. As Walter's illness progressed, Michael saw his father, for the first time, buckled by pain. Michael asked the priests at St. Thomas how to pray for his father not to be in pain. The shuttling went on for agonizing months, into the beginning of Michael's senior year.

Walter's cheerfulness in the face of his illness left yet another indelible impression on Michael. It also left him with the conviction that the best way to deal with trouble was to laugh in its face. Michael adopted a brightness that was almost fierce. "When people see you joking, they don't see a weakness," he says. "When I talk about how strong my father was, that's what I mean. You never saw the man's weakness."

One fall evening Michael came home from football practice to find the house filled with mourners. His father had died while he was at school. He stood wordlessly in the doorway of the house on 27th Avenue, then turned and fled. "He just left, running," says his sister Janet. "Running as fast as he could."

For hours no one heard from him. His mother was afraid he had thrown himself into the watery sinkhole in the woods behind the house. Finally someone called from St. Thomas. Michael had run five miles without stopping, all the way to the school, to sob in the arms of a priest.

While cancer was the immediate cause of Walter's death, Michael was convinced that his father had died from something else. "The work killed him," he insists. The loss of his father left Michael determined that no one in his family would have to work that hard—not if he could help it. "Football was the trampoline," he says. "It was going to bounce me right over the top."

On a spring afternoon later that year, the defending national champion Miami Hurricanes went through drills under their new head coach, Jimmy Johnson. A wolfish-looking teenager sat on a fence, surveying the field through a pair of sunglasses. Hubbard Alexander recognized him as a local recruit. "Even then he was fancy, Hollywood," Alexander remembers. Michael Irvin peered coolly at Alexander through his shades. "I'm just looking for whose job I'm going to take," Irvin told him.

When Irvin signed his first NFL contract, worth $1.8 million, he bought Pearl a four-bedroom house with a swimming pool in a brand-new Fort Lauderdale development. He also gave her a credit card. She was crazy about the house. She didn't know what to do with the card. She had never had one.

"What can I use it for?" she said.