WVU Hall-of-Famer Irvin’s path to stardom was unusual
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — When the text from the newspaperman in West Virginia asking if he were available to talk about his election to the WVU Athletic Hall of Fame came around noon on Saturday, Bruce Irvin couldn’t talk.
“I’ll call u as soon as I get off the water from fishing,” he texted back.
And the thought crossed that newspaperman’s mind, “Oh, if only they could see you now.”
The return call came at 6:06 p.m. Saturday night. Bruce Irvin was with his kids and wife, the catch of the day now having been devoured as dinner.
Again, the thought popped up, “Oh, if only they could see you now.”
Bruce Irvin living the good life, the same guy who fought his way up from nothing to get it, who let a strong will and a good heart carry him through leaving school early, being tossed out from home onto the streets, into a life on the streets going nowhere, involved in drugs, toting a gun and winding up in jail before finally, it turned for him.
Wonder what they’d be thinking now of him.
“I don’t know what they are saying to themselves. It’s crazy,” he said when asked about it. “They’re probably scratching their heads thinking ‘How does this kid get to the league but more important, how’d he stay in the league?”
He remembers where he came from.
“I literally started this thing from nothing … from the ground and built it up, had a great college career, a great pro career, made some money and I can live like I want to live now,” he said.
And, the beginning came when he found his way to West Virginia after getting a break as a kid, making his way to Kansas for one junior college and to California for a second, proving himself as a football player with so little to go on in terms of instruction beyond his own natural athletic skills and a burning desire within him to find something right in life.
What it was, he wasn’t sure, but he got there and he believes it came out of his decision to come to West Virginia.
“Definitely, it’s been a hell of a journey,” he said. “Honestly, I wasn’t surprised (that it worked out), I felt it was just a matter of time. Nobody represents West Virginia or loves that state like I do. I always felt my performance on the field spoke for itself, but the way I show love … I come back and take pictures with people, sign autographs, never say no to anybody.
“It’s just a special place in my heart. I’m just glad I had a chance to attend that school, have people embrace me for two years and stay with me for the rest of my career. I’ve played on five teams, but, you know, West Virginia is forever.”
It could have been different.
Back in 2012, as he awaited the NFL draft following one of the great pass rushing years in Mountaineer history with 14 sacks, Yahoo! looked back at the Bruce Irvin who was about to become a part of the past.
It started this way:
Bruce Irvin stood in a drug dealer’s house, his gun tucked away, searching for money. It never occurred to him that this might not be the best idea; that somebody might be home, that he might even get shot. In his mind he thought only one thing: “I’m going to get paid.”
“This is what Irvin’s life had come to since dropping out of high school when things started to go wrong and his mother threw him out of her home. By the end of the night he would be in jail, and it appeared likely he would be headed there again, or prison or something worse.”
From that to this, from a drug dealer not wanting to testify about Irvin coming to his house for money owed him, from a friend pushing him toward prep school in Atlanta to play football and him moving in there even without enrolling, leaving the drug house in which he had lived one day before it was raided.
It was that close.
Not that things turned around right away. The prep school closed its doors soon thereafter, the story said, and Chad Allen, a former player at Morehouse, took him in.
It was Allen who pushed him toward junior college, who helped him take the GED, which he studied for and passed, and got him moving down a different road than he had been following.
He wound up at Mt. San Antonio Junior College in California, where he discovered the defensive end position, and was a natural at the position. He was raw, yes, but by his second year there he had done so much that 22 schools came calling.
He committed to Tennessee, but then discovered West Virginia, or West Virginia discovered him, but no matter which one is right, it was the best discovery since Columbus discovered America.
“It’s just the people in that state,” Irvin said. “My whole life I always felt like I was the underdog. People who don’t know about the state of West Virginia, they have a lot of things to say. They say it’s a racist state, that may be true, but there’s racism everywhere.
“I’ve never encountered that in West Virginia. People approach me like I’m one of them, like we got the same skin color, like we got the same color eyes. It doesn’t matter,” he went on. “When you get in that circle, you become one and the rest of the stuff doesn’t matter.”
By his second year Mountaineer Field would be ringing out with “BRUCE! BRUCE!” changes from fans.
In 2011, he was first team All-Big East and was a first-round draft pick of the Seattle Seahawks.
He played three different times for the Seahawks, the last time last season when he teamed up with former WVU quarterback Geno Smith, who emerged as one of the league’s top quarterbacks after a decade as a backup.
He also played with Oakland, Atlanta, Carolina and Chicago, playing in Super Bowl XLVIII and XLIX, winning the first one against Denver in 2014, 43-8.
But Irvin’s charitable side stands as tall as his football career.
One of the first things he did after signing with Seattle in 2012 was contribute $100,000 to WVU’s new weight room then.
“I always wanted my money to go toward the weight room, because that’s where it starts,” he said the other day. “No matter your situation, no matter the circumstances, it’s never too late. That’s how I approached life.”
He became involved strongly within the community while in Oakland, being the Raiders’ 2017 nomination for NFL’s Walter Payton Man of the Year Award.
He never forgot West Virginia, hosting football clinics, volunteering with food banks, visiting children’s hospitals, participating in the team’s Crucial Catch community effort for breast cancer survivors while contributing to relief programs for the wildfires that raged in Northern California.