There’s something to be said for athletic gifts. While professional sports are littered with the failed careers of great athletes who thought they could get by on their mere talent alone, there are far more players who knew exactly what they wanted to do but didn’t have the talent to do it well enough, often enough, to remain consistently employed.
Those who have both, like Patrick Peterson, tend to be the cream that rises to the top, and the future Hall of Fame cornerback has long been regarded as such. Now in his first season with the Pittsburgh Steelers, he recalled how another Steelers great from the past he first met as a junior in high school couldn’t believe he wasn’t already in the NFL.
The cousin of former Steelers cornerback Bryant McFadden, Peterson was invited to work out with several of his family member’s teammates. Among them was cornerback Ike Taylor, who was one of the fastest players in the NFL and one of its biggest cornerbacks.
“Ike said, ‘What team do you play for?’”, McFadden recalled in a story for the team’s website by Dale Lolley. “Pat was like, ‘What do you mean?’. Ike said, ‘What organization are you with?’. I said, ‘No, Ike, he isn’t in the league. He’s about to go to college.’ Ike said, ‘No way. You’re lying'”.
Peterson, mind you, is 6’1” and close to 200 pounds, and he says that he has been the same size since he was in high school, as he was at the time that he first met Taylor and several of the other Steelers at that time, which would have been around 2006.
“We ended up racing”, Peterson himself recalled. “I was keeping up with him and one time I ended up beating him. He was like, ‘Hey, what year is he in college?’. BMac was like, ‘Nah man, he’s just a junior in high school’. Ike was like, ‘Hell no. He ain’t in high school. I want to check his birth certificate'”.
Set to turn 33 years old in July, Peterson is now going into his 13th NFL season and has very little left to prove as a professional, at least individually. An eight-time Pro Bowler and three-time All-Pro, he has 34 career interceptions with 111 passes defensed. He also has 610 career tackles, four sacks, and two forced fumbles.
The new Steelers starter is also coming off one of his best seasons in the back half of his career, recording five interceptions and 15 passes defensed in his second and final season as a member of the Minnesota Vikings.
Though he didn’t specify precisely why it didn’t happen, Peterson recently admitted that he wanted to sign with the Steelers a year ago already. He’s here now, though, at a time where the stage of his career and Pittsburgh’s needs and salary cap considerations have finally converged for the long-predicted union of the high schooler bound for stardom in the NFL.
