MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – 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.

Anywhere but on the verge of the NFL draft.

Yet, here he is, sitting in a hotel lobby across the street from the football stadium at West Virginia where he played defensive end for two seasons, a likely second- or third-round pick in waiting.

"I just lay in bed and think about life," Irvin says. "Me and my situation where I was – man I could write a book. It's just crazy. God had a plan for me."









Bruce Irvin is not a religious man. He does not go to church. But sometimes things don't make much sense, like the robbery charge he avoided or the drug raid he missed or how sitting on a curb, his clothes stuffed in a garbage bag next to him, he found a mentor who would help guide him to the verge of the NFL.

"He's the best story I've come across in years," says Ken Herock, a former NFL general manager who runs a program that prepares college players for their interviews at the NFL scouting combine.

Growing up in Stone Mountain, Ga., Irvin attended Stockbridge High, a mostly-white school 20 minutes away. He had trouble adjusting to the different culture, and when he overheard his teachers talking about him in the halls wishing he would leave, he did. That broke his mother Bessie Lee's heart, and so she did the only thing she thought she could: She threw him out.

If he was not going to school he would have to find his own way.

"He got caught up in the hype of the street," she says. "Sometimes you have to pray."

Says Irvin: "I was foolish, man. It takes some people longer to realize certain stuff than other people. You never want to go through that situation that I went through, but a lot of people who did that stuff wouldn't be doing this stuff today. I beat the odds. It showed me a lot of stuff: life is not just about getting money or having fun. I'm not going to take this one life I got and wreck it."





And so he remembers dates, calling them out as if they are signposts appearing in the fog.





May 23, 2007

The day Irvin and two others broke into a drug dealer's house in suburban Atlanta. After dropping out of high school, he fell in with people who were tumbling like himself – the kind of people his mother warned him would "laugh at you when you are down and out."

All rational thought was gone, though. He didn't much consider the consequences when he entered the home. Nothing mattered besides the money. He and two others robbed the house and escaped, not realizing that the person next door saw them and called the police.

It didn't take long for Irvin to be arrested and hauled to the police station where he was charged with burglary and carrying a concealed weapon. Then he was thrown into jail where he sat for two-plus weeks.

"I thought I was done," he says.

He probably would have been done were it not for one fortuitous circumstance: drug dealers tend not to want to go to court and say, "Yes, that was my drug house that had been robbed." With no one to testify against him, Irvin was set free.

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