Janoris Jenkins’ Ascent to Stardom Isn’t Your Typical Redemption Narrative

NEW YORK — It’s a Thursday afternoon in late December, days before the New York Giants’ Week 17 matchup in Washington, and Janoris Jenkins—excuse us, “Jackrabbit”—is standing in front of his locker at the team’s training center, fielding questions.

There’s one about the bruised back that sidelined him the previous week, another on preparing for the upcoming playoff run. A host of other football cliches are lobbed before, finally, a reporter asks him something more pertinent:

Where did you get the hat?

“I made it,” Jenkins says. It’s a bucket hat, Giants blue, with a lowercase white “ny” stitched to the front. It looks like the kind you might see people wearing around a pool on the Upper West Side, only the top has been cut out so Jenkins can thread his black dreadlocks up and over the rim.

“So don’t steal it now,” he adds.

The questions then move back to football. Jenkins says he’s excited for the playoffs—that one of the reasons he signed with the Giants last spring was to become a champion. That they offered him a five-year, $62.5 million contract in the offseason, a deal that included $28.8 million in guaranteed money and a $10 million signing bonus, certainly played a role as well. Still, the quote is perfect filler for a weekday tabloid practice write-up.

It’s not crazy to think the Giants could be embarking on another one of their dazzling winter runs. Or that Jenkins could be the one to propel them there. He’s been a one-man wrecking crew all season, the team’s antidote to both the myriad prolific aerial assaults that populate today’s league and to the Giants’ bumbling offensive attack (No. 22 according to Football Outsiders).

How good has Jenkins been in his first year in New York? He allowed completions on half of the passes thrown his way during the regular season—fourth-best among cornerbacks, according to Pro Football Focus, which also rated him as the seventh-best corner in the NFL. If not for Jenkins, it’s unlikely the Giants leap from 30th last year to No. 2 this year in Football Outsiders defense rankings, and near-improbable they finish the year 11-5.

“I play this game as if anything can happen at any time,” Jenkins says at one point during the scrum. “You just have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

“I got the best out of my situation.”

It’s a telling answer, one begging for a follow-up.

Afterward, a reporter tries to ask one. He approaches Jenkins. He tells him he’s profiling him. He asks if he’d be willing to speak for a few minutes one-on-one.

“Man, I don’t want no story done on me,” Jenkins says. He then walks through the double doors that separate the locker room from the team showers and treatment areas before turning around to share one last thought:

“You can write the truth, but ain’t nobody want to hear it.”

The truth?

Well, the first thing you should know is that he isn’t kidding about the whole “Jackrabbit” thing.

Take this story, courtesy of Giants offensive lineman Adam Gettis.

“One of the first days I was here I was like, ‘Jackrabbit, what’s up?'” Gettis says. “And he got all excited and was like, ‘Man, you know my name? And I was like, ‘Of course I know your name, Janoris.’ And he goes, ‘It’s Jackrabbit. It’s Jackrabbit.'”

Gettis is far from the only Giants employee to be scolded this season for addressing Jenkins by the name printed on his birth certificate. Staffers, teammates, even coaches during team meetings have felt the Jackrabbit’s wrath.

Then there was his postgame interview with NBC following the Giants’ 10-7 Week 14 win over the Dallas Cowboys. Jenkins had played perhaps the best game of his career. He’d held Dallas star receiver Dez Bryant to one catch for 10 yards. He also picked off a Dak Prescott pass and forced a fumble (on the one ball Bryant did hold on to), all on national TV. After the win, it was his turn to receive some much-deserved shine.

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“This guy over here is Janoris Jenkins,” NBC sideline reporter Michele Tafoya said after completing her interview with Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr.

“Jackrabbit,” Jenkins responded, immediately and matter-of-factly, hands clutched behind his back. “Jackrabbit.”

Like we said, he takes this Jackrabbit stuff seriously. But don’t laugh, at least not before learning why Jenkins holds this strange nickname so dear.

It was bestowed upon him during his freshman year at the University of Florida. He has Vance Bedford, then a defensive backs coach for the school, to thank. Bedford was amused by the way Jenkins—always a gifted athlete but a bit raw in the lead-up to his first season as a Division I football player—would aimlessly dart and dash around the field. And so the Jackrabbit was born.

The name was more prescient than Bedford realized. Jenkins was raised in Pahokee, Florida, a city officially part of South Florida but culturally closer to the rugged life of the Glades than the glitzy one found in Miami Beach. Pahokee is in the heart of what is known as Muck City, a stretch of rough sun-bathed streets where the primary exports are sugarcane and professional football players.

The former helps produce the latter.

Boys in Muck City grow up hunting rabbits. Chasing might be a better word. The rabbits come out after the sugarcane is set ablaze; they run wild in the dark and sticky muck that gives the area its name.

The boys spend countless childhood hours running after these rabbits, sprinting up and down and back and forth—trying, as Pahokee native and Marshall defensive back Dontrell Johnson says, to do the equivalent of “catching a fly in the phone booth.” All the while they foster a mix of muscles and grit that’s sent more than 60 Muck City youth to the NFL.

The rabbit-chasing also allows Muck City’s boys to feel like men.

“That’s how we used to put money in the bank,” says Jenkins’ cousin and Bears linebacker Pernell McPhee, a fellow Pahokee High School grad. McPhee used to sell rabbits for two dollars a pop. Today they go for five.

“It makes you feel like an entrepreneur,” says Jenkins’ friend and former high school teammate, Anthony Sheppard.

Beneath the vaudeville of a professional athlete’s asking to be addressed by a mammal-like sobriquet lies something deeper.

Jenkins isn’t trying to turn himself into a wrestling character, an Ochocinco 2.0. The name means something. It represents where he came from, but also how he found a way out. Chasing jackrabbits enabled Jenkins to become the Jackrabbit, and becoming the Jackrabbit allows Jenkins to pay homage to his beloved Muck.

The name is Jenkins’ way of sharing his story.

It should come as no surprise that it’s been misjudged.

Sandy Cornelio remembers everything about that late April day.

He remembers making the nearly five-hour trek north to Gainesville with Janoris’ father, William Sr. He remembers sitting in the office of Will Muschamp, then the Florida Gators’ new head football coach, and being told that Janoris, having been arrested for the second time in three months and third time in two years, was being kicked off the team (Muschamp declined to comment for this story).

He remembers …

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