A Bison's Fast Track To the Super Bowl

There Geoff Pope stood Tuesday morning, hand on a buzzer with the hub of commerce frozen beneath him, waiting for the call to work. He pushed the button. A bell clanged. The New York Stock Exchange exploded to life.

And how exactly did he get here?

How was it that, he, Geoff Pope, cornerback from Howard University, undrafted by every NFL team, cast away by the worst club in the league, told years ago by the football coach at Eastern Michigan that he wasn't even good enough to play there, wound up on the New York Giants? On the field? Going to the Super Bowl?

"It's certainly a rush," Pope said that evening as he sat in a Starbucks near downtown Bethesda. He wore a gray pinstripe suit, purple tie and a Giants playoff cap. Across the table sat his business manager, Omar Sillah. And they had put together an ambitious agenda for this first Tuesday of his Super Bowl life with the stock exchange visit in the morning, then some television interviews in New York, a flight to Washington and more television appearances before resting here while a car service waited on the street outside.

Quite a day indeed when you consider there never should have been the stock exchange or the Super Bowl or any television interviews. When the Giants signed him to their practice squad at the start of the season it was with the idea that he would stay there all year -- a player still raw in technique but so undeniably fast that it was worth keeping him around.

This was the plan, anyway, until the playoffs, when injuries in the Giants' defensive backfield forced the team to put him in uniform for its playoff opener at Tampa Bay. Then the next week, in Dallas, he was activated for the game against the Cowboys, starting on special teams before suddenly being thrust into the defensive rotation when cornerback Aaron Ross was injured. Suddenly, the player who wasn't supposed to be there was defending Terry Glenn and Patrick Crayton and holding his own.

Last week, in the NFC championship game, he played again, appearing in many of the Giants' nickel packages against Green Bay. Now, as the Super Bowl comes along, he's a regular -- someone who actually plays -- and if the injuries linger he could play in the Super Bowl as well.

So he figured he might as well use the Super Bowl to his advantage. After all, he always saw himself as more than just an athlete, someone who could do more than just run the 40-yard dash in 4.29 seconds. Which is how he happened to be opening the stock exchange and doing numerous interviews on a day off less than two weeks before the Super Bowl.

"I think I'm marketable in my personality and character," Pope said.

He smiled. The words were not meant to be boastful. If anything, he looked tired sitting there in his business suit after a long day between New York and Washington. But Super Bowls don't come along often in players' careers. The list of stars who have never played in one is long and elite. And here he is going to one when he wasn't even supposed to be playing.

But in a year of great Giants stories of perseverance, Pope might be the most unlikely. That he's even in the league is hard to fathom. Years ago, back in his Detroit neighborhood near 5 Mile Road, there was nothing that said he would be a football player. He was fast, yet he always figured there were others faster. It wasn't until high school, at Detroit Jesuit, that he realized he was faster than everyone.

This got him to Eastern Michigan, where he was a starter at cornerback until he seriously injured his quadriceps. Eastern changed coaches, hiring Jeff Genyk, who was not impressed with his hobbled defensive back.

"You will never be good enough to play at this level," Pope remembered Genyk saying.

The words still sting. He said he never forgets them -- not in the two years he played at Howard after transferring there, not in the three months he worked out with noted trainer Chip Smith outside Atlanta, not when his 4.29-second 40 at the pro day at Howard was noted as the fastest time of any player before last year's draft.

When he went unpicked, Genyk's words played in his head through the training camp of the one team willing to take a shot at him -- the Miami Dolphins. Then on the last day of cuts, the team told him it was keeping the four veteran cornerbacks it had. Coach Cam Cameron told him he didn't believe in keeping cornerbacks on the practice squad and he was cut.

And once again, Genyk's words rattled in his brain.

"You will never be good enough to play at this level."

But the next day the Giants called with a spot on the practice squad, where he stayed all season until the playoffs. Then he was on the field at Dallas, and Glenn, the Cowboys' star wide receiver, was across the line. At one point, Glenn tried to put a little move on Pope, something simple. Pope picked it up instantly and, maybe because the fight had been so hard and he had something to prove to the Dolphins, to the NFL and to a coach in Michigan he had long left behind, he recalled that he smiled at Glenn and blurted: "That's all you got?"

So, yes, he will enjoy the Super Bowl he never saw coming. And if it gets him before the stock exchange or on television, that's fine, because a year ago no one, not even most NFL scouts, knew his name.

Now he has an NFL paycheck and is an investor in a sports media venture called presspasstv.com and was sitting in Starbucks with the business card of the New York Stock Exchange's CEO in his pocket. There's even talk of him filming a pilot for a hip-hop sports television show that is in the planning stages.

Yesterday, he planned to stop by Howard and meet with school officials to figure out how he could finish the 20 credits he needs to complete his degree in advertising.

His words were coming fast now.

"People are always telling you that you can't do something," he said. "I wish they would tell me that I can't do something more. I'll just prove them wrong."

And on a night when everything had suddenly gone right for Geoff Pope, it was hard to disagree.