RENTON — Bruce Irvin hasn’t played a football game in the state where he grew up for a while.
Almost a decade in fact. He has been homeless since then, spent three weeks in jail and for a few months back in 2008 he was one of 12 players living in a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment when he began attending a California junior college.
On Sunday, Irvin will be one of Seattle’s important players on the field at the Georgia Dome, starting the first game of his NFL career at defensive end.
“The stage is set, pretty much,” Irvin said.
It’s quite a story. One that goes back all the way to Irvin’s freshman year of high school, when he played exactly three games for Stockbridge, all of them at receiver. It was the only time he was academically eligible, later dropping out of high school and getting kicked out of the house by his mother.
And now Irvin, 25, is the oldest rookie on one of the league’s youngest teams. He’s being asked to replace defensive end Chris Clemons, who only led the team in sacks three successive seasons before suffering a season-ending knee injury at Washington last Sunday.
“This is Bruce’s opportunity,” coach Pete Carroll said. “That’s what we drafted him to play, and we’ll see how he does.”
And for Chad Allen — a mentor whose help proved so pivotal to Irvin — Sunday’s game gives him the most concrete example for anyone who asks what he’s gotten out of helping Irvin.
“This is it,” Allen said. “To see him be able to live out his dream.”
Irvin wasn’t in school by the time he bottomed out as a teenager. He stopped going to class his junior year at Stephenson High School, and in May 2007 — at the age of 19 — he was arrested on suspicion of burglary and for carrying a concealed weapon.
He was not in a gang, Irvin said, but he was living a life on the streets. He carried a gun. There were times, he told ESPN, that he sold drugs. But when those charges were eventually dropped, it opened the door for a turnaround that was aided by Allen, who had worked with other young men — some of them athletes — to get turned around.
“I was homeless, pretty much,” Irvin said. “And he took me under his wing and let me live with him and train with him.”
Irvin earned his GED on his first crack at the test, headed to a community college in Kansas in January 2008 without realizing the football team was allowed only a limited number of out-of-state players. He stayed for a semester, and the next fall arrived in California at a junior college that became his launching pad.
Irvin began his college-football career as a defensive back, one of nine guys sleeping on the floor in an apartment that had two bedrooms and a dozen occupants.
“I was looking to find any way to get out of my situation in Atlanta,” he said. “If that was me having to play kickoff team for 13 games during college, so be it. It was way out of the ‘hood and the environment I was in.”
Irvin enrolled at Mt. San Antonio College without the coaches ever having seen him play.
“All I saw was a profile,” said Iona Uiagalelei, Mt. SAC’s defensive coordinator and associate head coach. “A profile of his picture, standing with his arm stretched out, that wingspan.”
Irvin was athletic enough to be a special-teams standout right away, but he was a little raw in the secondary.
“The nuance and technique you need as a defensive back, he didn’t quite have it,” Uiagalelei said. “But the kid was a hard worker, a tenacious athlete.”
That prompted Uiagalelei to suggest an idea that would prove as pivotal to his playing career as that jail stint was for his personal life. He suggested Irvin line up at defensive end. A pass rusher was born, a 6-foot-3 end who filled out to 248 pounds.
After two college seasons he had as many as two dozen colleges offer him scholarships before choosing West Virginia.
“He’s a hunter,” Uiagalelei said. “He’ll track his prey down, focus, and he’s going to get him — no matter what.”
Seattle chose him No. 15 overall in last April’s draft, making him the first defensive end selected, it left some critics scratching their heads, and one coach licking his chops.
“This is the fastest guy that you could hope to get to play this position,” Carroll said on draft night.
Irvin didn’t start this season, but was more than a backup. He was a situational pass-rusher on the field for about half of Seattle’s defensive snaps. He had eight sacks this season, more than any other rookie in the NFL. Sunday in Washington, after Clemons was injured, Irvin had a sack of quarterback Robert Griffin III that demonstrated just how fast Irvin is. That quickness has carried him all the way to the NFL.
“It’s his great asset,” Carroll said.
