SEATTLE -- There is a deaf football player about to play in the Super Bowl. He's the best listener on his team.

Seconds after the Seahawks won the NFC Championship, Derrick Coleman stood inside delirious CenturyLink Field -- noise swirling like confetti -- and felt only vibrations. But he read every lip he could. He read Pete Carroll's "Attaboy"s and Russell Wilson's "We did it"s and even Richard Sherman's "I'm the greatest." His world is quieter than everyone else's, but don't mistake that for weakness. He misses nothing. His survival skill is concentration. Give him a clear view, and he can tell you what the referee is whispering about under the replay hood. This isn't a handicap; this is progress.

The first deaf player in NFL history was defensive tackle Bonnie Sloan, a 1973 member of the St. Louis Cardinals who thought it was fortuitous that he didn't have to hear his coaches curse. The second was defensive end Kenny Walker, a Denver Broncos 1991 draft pick out of Nebraska, who was so thorough he used to bring an interpreter with him to team meetings.

But the third deaf NFL player has gone where none has ever gone before … to offense, where, in the 21st century there are audibles and "Omaha"s and outright races to the line of scrimmage to snap the football.

Coleman, a backup fullback for the Seahawks, is overwhelmed by none of it. When he is in the lineup, the first person he finds is quarterback Russell Wilson. He follows Wilson to the huddle. He asks Wilson to stare at him during the play call. If there's an audible under center, he expects Wilson to turn around and mouth it to him loud and clear. If Wilson forgets, he'll go grab the quarterback's face mask. That's his other survival skill: whatever it takes.

It's simple, actually: You don't have to hear to be able to listen.

Seattle's Derrick Coleman doesn't get a lot of attention as a fullback, but he's still made a lot of fans. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Elementary school can be the cruelest place on earth. The truth is spoken there, for better or worse, and one of the first taunts Coleman received in grammar school was: "Hey, Four Ears."

His parents, Derrick Coleman Sr. and May Evans, had been dreading that moment ever since an Orange County, Calif., specialist told them their 3-year-old son was virtually deaf in his left ear. Doctors explained that young Derrick was a genetic anomaly. Derrick Sr. and May could hear normally, but each was missing a hearing gene -- which meant their son's hearing was in gradual decline.

First, the left ear went entirely, then the majority of the right. By elementary school, he wore two bulky hearing aids, which helped amplify sounds. The upside, at first, was that he could hear again. "You could see his eyes lighten up," May says. But the downside was that he was fair game to all the smart alecks in his first-grade class.

His response was to ignore anyone who was rude or simply turn the volume down on his hearing aids. "That's the one good thing about having 'em," Coleman says. "You guys have to actually listen when somebody's talking. I just turn 'em off."

But the more he tuned out the world, the more the world pushed back. When he was about 9, he was attacked at a playground, according to May, by five children. "[They] double-teamed him and jumped on him because he was different," she says.

His sister found him wandering the park, searching for the hearing aids that had been ripped out. A furious May went door-to-door, found the attackers and warned their parents that the next time she'd press charges. Derrick Sr. claims he was in "sheer anger." But young Derrick quietly went back to his room … to do push-ups.

Football, as is often the case, was the great equalizer. Whereas Derrick was once the shy, disengaged deaf kid, he soon became the kid most likely to make a tackle.

It didn't happen overnight, but there was value in the journey. In the seventh grade, he had begged his parents to let him play Pop Warner football, and, at first, May, a nurse, resisted because of the hearing aid issues. She worried they would come flying out on impact -- which would turn out to be correct -- and she was wondering, too, whether collisions could damage his hearing even more.

Derrick Sr. pushed to let him play, convinced that football would be his son's ticket to normalcy. Derrick Sr. had always feared that, in response to the heckling, young Derrick would resort to using his fists. Football was the better alternative, he felt, and May let their pediatrician decide.

The pediatrician ordered an MRI to examine the bone structure in young Derrick's inner ear, and his conclusion was that football would not damage Derrick's hearing any further.

"What football did was save my life," Coleman says. He already had begun to read lips with the help of his audiologist, but football inspired him to master lip reading sooner and at a more expert level. He knew coaches would be yelling. He knew quarterbacks would be panicking. He had to be able to focus, stare at their mouths and translate swiftly.

The hearing aids could do only so much. At that time, in the early 2000s, his hearing devices were bulkier and not as amplified. "If we go on a scale of zero to 10, with 10 being what normal people hear, without my hearing aids, I'm about a one, one and a half,'' Coleman says. "But with hearing aids when I was younger, I was more like a six or seven."

But his "six or seven" would dip lower, he says, when there was the accompanying mayhem of the football field. Teammates were wearing mouthpieces. They were speaking in incomplete, garbled sentences. In his brain, all of that noise morphed into an undecipherable hum. Pop Warner coaches didn't trust him at first. They stuck him on the offensive and defensive line. They didn't realize that, for a lip reader, it's more difficult to understand someone when they're shouting and twitching. And the coaches were doing a lot of shouting and twitching.

But football still boils down to blocking and tackling, and young Derrick was usually the most ripped physical specimen on the field, not to mention the most fearless. There was only one glitch. May would see him digging through the grass to find his hearing aids after he leveled some opponent. So she fixed that by designing a pantyhose skull cap to keep his earpieces from falling off.

"Football gave him self-esteem he never would have had," Derrick Sr. says. "After he got to prove himself, he was no longer picked last -- he was picked first. Because now everybody knows this kid. 'Oh, that kid? Yeah, Derrick with the hearing aids. Yeah, he's a great player.' So, he found his niche in life early on."

The only question was: Could this be his niche in life later on?

Football inspired Derrick Coleman to master lip reading sooner and at a more expert level. Bob Donnan/USA TODAY Sports

Until he arrived at Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., his football existence was a rugged three-point stance, watching and waiting for the ball to be snapped -- and then plowing anything in his path.

But the high school coaches at Troy, after watching him run, had a novel idea: Give him the ball.

He was 200 pounds, instinctive, athletic, blazing fast, and, better yet, had a chip on his shoulder. The coaches didn't know his entire history -- like having been pummeled at a park for being different -- but they were unconcerned about his impairment.

"There really wasn't a buzz about the hearing," says then-assistant coach Kevin Hastin. "If you didn't see the hearing aids, then you really wouldn't know about the impairment. 'Cause he reads lips so well. If you're directly looking at him, he can communicate with you almost perfectly."