Damontre Moore

Giants defensive lineman Damontre Moore hands out Under Armour shoes at Biondi School in Yonkers, N.Y.

(Conor Orr/The Star-Ledger)

YONKERS, N.Y. — Damontre Moore led the procession across the parking lot and up the stairs to Mr. Smith’s seventh-grade annex classroom. Two men followed, all carrying stacks of brown cardboard boxes to be delivered just before school let out.

Moore, the Giants’ second-year defensive end, didn’t need directions or a pass.

For the past three months, he has made part of his life here at The Biondi School at Leake and Watts, a second-chance educational facility in Yonkers where the student body is a patchwork of those the system might otherwise leave behind: Victims of mental, physical and sexual abuse, children with behavioral and severe learning disabilities, and frequent truants too far behind to recover in a traditional setting.

Moore gave a speech here in February after developing a friendship with Joe Ruback, a dean of students and athletic director — better known to Giants fans as "License Plate Guy."

Moore started coming back so often he needed to be registered as a volunteer by the New York board of education; a process that included a background check and fingerprints.

On this particular Monday, it was time to reward his adopted students, but only if they showed the right amount of progress.

The boxes were filled with brand new Under Armor sneakers; black and silver for the boys and neon rainbow colors for the girls, all paid for by Moore. He scanned his iPhone to ensure the sizes were correct before arranging the shoes on the table.

Dismissal, a white-knuckle blur of screaming, shoving and sprinting under the calmest of circumstances, was in just a few minutes.

Outside the classroom, a girl in a gray hooded sweatshirt swung around the door frame. She looked at Moore like a big brother who shielded her from some of the boys in school.

"I’m his favorite," she said, smiling.

In each NFL Draft, the Giants make a push to stack their roster with potential team captains; rookies with a pedigree for leadership that will naturally ascend in the locker room structure and serve as examples for the rest.

Maybe Moore, who was drafted in 2013 at age 20 and dropped into the third round for supposed character concerns and an arrest for marijuana possession, was not seen that way by some.

He admitted to "slacking off" in college, and his coach, Kevin Sumlin, called Moore a "feast or famine" kind of player.

But as he prepares for his second NFL season, Moore is working against that perception with each unprompted trip across the George Washington Bridge into Yonkers. The school’s staff can hear the stereo from his Escalade when it hits the main gate. They wait for the students to start screaming for ’Tre, their new favorite teacher.

"When I first started here, I tried to pick the two coolest kids and roughest kids up here," Moore said. "They related to me, and I got them to start changing the other kids.

"If you cut off the head, the body will follow."

SHOWN THE RIGHT ROAD



Moore learned how to live the right way in installments.

When he was younger, it was his mom, Detra Johnson, pulling the double-shift at the nursing facility only to come back to their Oak Cliff, Texas, apartment and stay on the clock. Moore had grandparents and great-grandparents who needed intensive care and Johnson was the one they counted on.

His father, Damon Moore, drove a rig. The shorter runs went the 260 miles from Bedford to Houston, the longer ones had him up in Memphis, Tenn. Damontre always remembered how his father would wake up very early in the morning to start the haul. He wanted to make it home for the family at night.

Damon stretched his paycheck thin to keep a house in the Dallas suburbs, 40 minutes from the old neighborhood, as a lesson to his children. He always hosted the extended family there and was the first relative on speed dial during a crisis.

"I guess that’s where I got it from," Damontre said as he walked back to Ruback’s office for lunch. "They gave me more than what was required. They kept me off the street."

Under Ruback, who, through his relationship with various players has brought more than a dozen Giants to Biondi for appearances, Moore found a mentor who could dispense crucial advice.

More than anything, though, Ruback wanted Moore to connect with the kids. Some are older than Moore and most didn’t care that he was 6-foot-6 and 260 pounds.

"They went right at him," Ruback said. "Right at him to tell him good and bad."

During his first visit, Moore stood on a stage in front of the entire school and talked, in detail, about his arrest. There were no Power Point slides or slogans. He bounced between topics but the message was clear enough.

He saw the students like he saw himself — at a point in their lives where things can change for the better.

"When we have mentors in the program that own up about their history and trouble and how they’ve turned their lives around, this is the kind of example our kids need," said Meredith Barber, the school’s director of institutional advancement.

"They need someone saying, ‘I had to decide not to be in a gang.’ It’s an example that is meaningful."

LOOKING FOR MORE



At a recent charity event on the eighth floor of a massive Manhattan communications company, Giants punter Steve Weatherford lingered to sign autographs for the staff and their families.

Moore, noticing that most of the workers had gone, hunched in the corner and began stuffing stray cardboard and packing peanuts into garbage bags.

"I mean, look at this dude," Weatherford said. "He’s just picking up trash. Nobody is asking him to do this. Nobody told him to be here."

Moore felt content to work in the background. When he’s not taking care of his pit bull or playing video games, he’s pumping Weatherford for more events to attend. He said he wants to fill the offseason malaise with work that will prove meaningful.

And he wants to come back to the school, too, just like he did in March and April.

As class let out last Monday, Moore swung his arm around a student’s shoulders and followed him toward the stairs. He stuck his fingers in the kid’s short afro and teased him about getting a haircut. He warned him about keeping his grades up before spinning off to catch another one of his regulars.

• "Why are you upset?"

• "What did I tell you about using (curse words)?"

• "Are you serious right now? What did you think was going to happen?"

"I want to know the reports on these kids," Moore said. "I want to know how they’re doing. If they haven’t improved, I’m not going to reward them for being bad."

And he won’t punish them by disappearing, either.

"It goes a long way with these kids," Ruback said. "They’ve been let down their whole life, and thought someone else would let them down again. Damontre doesn’t do that."