Antonio Pierce Q&A Part 2

When Arizona State hired Antonio Pierce, it was part of a professional model approach the program was implementing. When it comes to NFL experience, a good portion of the Sun Devil staff fall into the proverbial ‘been there, done that’ category, which has and continues to be valuable for ASU players. In our second part of our interview, Pierce candidly and exclusively discusses his experiences as a professional and how he imparts his wisdom on ASU players dreaming of a professional career.

DevilsDigest: How often do you tell kids when you’re recruiting them that you were in a similar spot you were in?

Antonio Pierce: “I’m an open book. Any kid I’ve ever recruited, you can ask them -- I tell them all my stories. I don’t hide anything. They know my highs. They can Google that. Some of my lows are not all Googleable. You tell them everything because you’ve got to relate to them. You’ve got to let them know like, ‘I’ve made mistakes. I was a 16-, 17-year old and I was doing dumb things. I made bad decisions.’ I never did anything that hurt me enough not to move forward, but I did things that just slowed my process down. Instead of going straight ahead, I went left, right, a couple of U-turns. Wrong way. Come back up. If you can help them to not do that, they’ll be that much better. And they know that.”

DevilsDigest: What was the main thing you learned at your junior college, Mt. San Antonio (in Walnut, Calif.)?

Antonio Pierce: “School. Stop messing around with school. Ball is easy. Football has always been easy. Put film on. Recruit. That’s easy. People are like ‘Oh, that’s hard.’ No, It’s easy. It’s football. That’s what I do. That’s my love, that’s my passion. You have to put time and effort into school. I wasn’t no dummy, I was in honor classes. Again, I was always too cool -- I’m a jock. It was that old-school jock thinking like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to carry a backpack today.’ Well, damn, I needed my backpack because all my homework was in there and, oh, you get docked 20 points. Dumb stuff. When I got to (Mt. San Antonio), I knew school came first. I said, ‘Man that’s the only thing going to hold me back from getting my dreams.’ I focused on that and I was able to get out of there. I was pretty much done with school after my sophomore season at (Mt. San Antonio) but I had to wait. I don’t remember why. I don’t remember the rules at the time but I couldn’t leave yet … Instead of being in (college) in January, I had to wait until June. But I had already graduated in December. I don’t know what held me up, I can’t remember that.”

DevilsDigest: The job you have now at ASU requires a lot of organization. Do you almost apply what you did, in a school sense, in junior college to this job?

Antonio Pierce: “Yeah. Because in JuCo, we were all over the place. When I was JuCo with Chad Johnson, TJ (Houshmandzadeh, both of whom went to other junior colleges), it was all over the place. What I learned there was communication, more importantly. That’s the one thing when I started to get into like being able to talk and go to the teachers and ask questions. And do more than what was asked of me to do. Because in high school, I just did what they asked me to do. I never did anything more. It was just enough. And then I obviously carried that onto U of A. It was the same thing. I also applied that to football. I’m like, ‘Ok, I’m really talented but I could be a couple of steps ahead of guys.’ And then you start realizing these other dudes are a little bit faster and bigger than you. So how do you beat them? Just know more, be smarter than them. So then it was like, ‘Alright, I’m going to outsmart these guys.’”

DevilsDigest: Did you think you were going to get drafted coming out of the University of Arizona?

Antonio Pierce: “Without a question. Without a question. Not even close. Never thought in a million years, it was the second most humbling thing that ever happened to me. Never thought -- because you look at these guys and I played against that guy in high school, I played against that guy in college. Were comparable, our numbers. But, I had some mishaps in college. I had a couple of little incidents that I got into that might’ve red-flagged me. I’m sure there are some things that came from my past growing up. But I always looked at it like, ‘I’m a good football player. I’m doing the same things these guys are doing. Like what do you mean?’ You hadn’t seen that on television.

“And, again, I’ll go back to the internet. Until the internet really started popping off, you couldn’t search things. So you heard about stuff but you never physically could see it, read about it all the time. It was like folk tales -- not getting drafted, or stuff that happened to them in their past. You didn’t hear about off-the-field incidents anything they did or that their off-the-field stuff would hinder their draft status. You just thought if they played good football they’d go to the next level. It’s like, ‘Hey I’m one of the best players, you pick me up. I’m the first guy to get drafted at the park playing hoops.’ You’re thinking that’s how they do it.

“They’ve got all these draft picks and then you start watching guys and you’re like (throws hands up). And those are the same guys you just played against and the same thing happened again: They’re signing to colleges and I had to go to JuCo. Well now they get drafted and I got signed to a free agent contract. So I was even more pissed off.”

DevilsDigest: You were probably looking at that thinking you were better than most of the guys getting drafted.

Antonio Pierce: “Yeah it was like the same pattern but then it came back to me. I'm doing the dumb (expletive). That's me, I'm making mistakes. I did some things off the field and you know, questioned my character or my judgment.”

DevilsDigest: Did you get invited to the combine?

Antonio Pierce: “I didn’t get anything. I did two pro days. A pro day inside the Bear Down gym, because it was raining one day and (former Arizona football head coach John) Malkovich and wouldn’t let us work out. So, we worked on like a shitty practice field. And that’s when me and U of A fell out -- when that happened.”

DevilsDigest: Did you hire an agent right after school?

Antonio Pierce: “Yeah, it was a guy named Tim Younger. He actually represented the quarterback who got hit in the head from the Pittsburgh Steelers (Mason Rudolph) and was trying to sue the guys. I haven't heard from him in years. All I asked was, ‘Just give me a camp.’ I thought it would be like a seventh-round draft pick. I remember getting a couple of phone calls from some teams. I remember Ron Rivera had worked me out with the Giants. I had about six or seven workouts.

“What I did was I did my own homework. At that point, I was like let me look at what teams need linebackers. I’m not going to do this again. The Washington Redskins were one of the teams, they only had five linebackers so they need to draft some or bring in a bunch of free agents. That’s what they did, they brought in seven of us.”

DevilsDigest: Did you reach out to the Redskins?

Antonio Pierce: “No, they called my agent and, then if I remember, I had like three or four offers to go to different teams. I wasn’t even looking at the money, because to me that was chump change at the time. The big money is making the roster. So I didn’t care. I think I took about middle of the range money with the Redskins and I really should’ve started week two but then 9/11 happened so I started the third game on as a rookie.”

DevilsDigest: When the seventh round comes and goes, did that feel like signing day all over again?

Antonio Pierce: “Yeah, but more in a public setting. Because you got a family and you’re thinking like, ‘Alright, here it comes. Alright, no problem. Instead of 31 or 32 picks, there were extra picks (in the seventh round), like 40 picks. You’re like watching these guys going like, ‘Ok. Ok.’ Then it's getting closer and then the phone is ringing but then these guys are calling you about being a free agent. ‘What do you mean? Pick me now. Like, I’m available.’ And then it just went by.

“I remember being almost stunned just looking at the screen like, ‘Damn. Am I done?’ All I knew is you got drafted, I didn’t understand any of the free agency. So I’m like, ‘Damn. Am I done?’ My agent is like, ‘Oh, no, you’re good, that’s why teams are calling you. They’re trying to hold you off.’ I’m like, ‘Ok.’ At that point, I had more fire in my stomach than I’ve ever had in my life.”

DevilsDigest: How were you in that first training camp?

Antonio Pierce: “I was a pit bull off the leash. I was fighting, kicking, running. They’ll tell you, ask LaVar Arrington or Jon Jansen, Steven Alexander, I came in with a mission. There was only one speed for me -- and I was 100 miles per hour and I was running.

“More importantly what I did, I picked up the playbook because the good thing about that year, Marty Schottenheimer had just got there. So everybody was learning at the same time. So, I was on the same playing field with the vets. With some of the vets, they hadn’t really played a lot. They were all high draft picks but they all had about the same experience as me. That’s really where I kicked their ass. It really wasn’t even close. In the playbook. Not even close.

“By the time I came back, we had the rookie minicamp right after the draft. I came back for the vet minicamp and OTAs (organized team activities) and I knew it as well as or better than the vets. I just started on the third team because I was undrafted. They water you down because of your status, but the time I was at training camp I was on the two’s and by the time we played week one I was on nickel and dime and started every special team. And week three I was the starter.”

DevilsDigest: Did you study in your apartment all the time in Virginia during this time?

Antonio Pierce: “I didn’t go out, there was no dinner, no phone calls, no partying. There was no joy in that. I’m in the league, I've made it. It was just like, ‘I’m not screwing this up.’ It goes back to high school -- I’ve got to study more. So, I’m just going through that playbook, and I’m just sitting at home. And not only am I studying my position, I learned everybody’s. That’s what I think got Kurt Schottenheimer, who was the DC at the time and Greg Manusky, my linebacker coach at the time, was like, ‘This dude doesn’t just know ‘Will’ (linebacker position), he knows ‘Mike’ and ‘Sam,’ he knows what’s going on in front of him!?’ The back end, it took me a while to get, but front seven I was good. It didn’t take long.”

DevilsDigest: Because you knew so many positions, did they move you around a lot?

Antonio Pierce: “Yeah. I played both positions other than ‘Mike’ and I played ‘Mike’ in nickel (packages) It was me and LaVar Arrington and when I was the ‘Mike’ I would call the huddle. It’s funny because we all joke about it. We did the same thing in New York with guys -- line them up and told them where the play was coming and if they’re athletic enough, they’re going to make the play. In the meeting rooms, we knew where it was coming from.”

DevilsDigest: When you finally got your big contract, do you remember your first purchase?

Antonio Pierce: “My first big purchase was when I bought my mom a house and a car. The first thing I did was I went to Las Vegas. I took like 20 of my boys and, I’m not going to lie to you, I took $25,000 and we had a good time. Listen, $25,000, it sounds like a lot but when you’re making money it was like (nothing). I needed to reward myself because I hadn’t enjoyed the fruit of my labors because I was always hoping about making it, looking for that big payday to come. It was like, Ok, put a little bit of money away but I’m going to take out like 10 percent.’ But it wasn’t even that. It was like two and a half of what I made as a signing bonus. So it was like, ‘Alright cool, let’s go.’”

DevilsDigest: How great did it feel to be able to give your mom a house and a car?

Antonio Pierce: “It was cool. I never grew up in a house. I lived in an apartment my whole life. Two bedrooms. You know what I mean? About max 1,000 square feet. Compton, Long Beach, Paramount, California. My mom always wanted that. I always wanted that for her.

“She still has that house today. Paid for, taken care of, she’s good. That’s her crib … I figured out the (taxes) later. I was like, ‘The house is paid for,’ and they’re like, ‘Taxes,’ and I was like, ‘No, I paid the house off.’ They’re like, ‘Well, you still have to pay the property tax.’ You don’t know. Like, alright, cool. My mother, she’s on top of (finances) and that whole thing about not losing your money and spending a lot of money. She’s basically my financial advisor because she wouldn’t let me spend any money.”

DevilsDigest: Except for the Vegas trip?

Antonio Pierce: “I didn’t tell her about that one. Only child -- you don’t tell your mom everything.”

DevilsDigest: Was that first big contract in New York?

Antonio Pierce: “New York. I actually turned down -- in my third year going into my fourth year -- they call it restricted free agent. And that was the year (offensive lineman) Steve Hutchinson and (wide receiver Nate) Burleson went to the Minnesota Vikings on a poison pill (contract, which is when a player on the last year of his rookie deal receives an extension). I didn’t go. It’s funny I still have the contract -- I actually still have it here. I still show it to these guys. It’s like a poison pill -- two years, 30-something million dollars. And this is what I do to our guys because they always ask, ‘Coach, how much money did you make?’

Pierce opened up an envelope inside of one of his cabinets and pulled out two checks. The first one he hands over is after he signed with the New York Giants. The next is a check from his rookie season with the Redskins. They’re weekly checks but have obviously been hole punched. And they’re both legit checks, equipped with statements on how much they’ve made to that point and how much is taken out for taxes, etc. The Giants’ check is drastically larger than the one from Pierce’s rookie season in Washington -- at least six-times more money.

“So that was like a weekly check. And I said, ‘I started there (pointing to the Redskins check).’ And I show them. This is what me and (former ASU wide receiver Brandon) Aiyuk would do. I was like, ‘(expletive), man, this is my rookie year. Look at the difference.’ Like that’s what I paid in taxes (with the Giants), 10,000. So you’re going from that to that, look at the jump.”

DevilsDigest: So this is from your rookie year to your fifth year?

Antonio Pierce: “Yeah. When you show guys like, ‘Man, that’s the difference it is in the league.’ And then I’ll show them the contracts.”

DevilsDigest: Almost as a sentiment of why they should work so hard here?

Antonio Pierce: “Yeah, man, because this is what you’re working for. But you work for that and then what do you do with it? What do you save? You make what some people make -- what you make in a week is what some people make in their life in three or four years. Or, cash, they make that in an entire year (as gross income). That’s net (income).

“Only thing I remember is like, ‘Ok, I’m cool.’ I put the money away. Kids, bought a house for myself. Really wasn’t flashy. Bought some cars -- two or three cars -- and that was it. I had a good time. I partied. We were in New York City. (The Giants) were hot. You know, I had fun. I always tell the guys like, ‘Don’t get it wrong now. Save your money but have a good time. Enjoy that. Because when it’s over, it’s over. And then you can’t go back and do it once you do (retire).’ As a 25-year old with ‘X’ amount of millions of dollars, you better enjoy life.”

DevilsDigest: Do you use these checks to explain taxes and real-life stuff to your players?

Antonio Pierce: “Oh I did that, me and (wide receiver Brandon) Aiyuk. The last month of the season, he would come in here Monday or Thursday and we would literally go over everything. From agents to -- well, Eno (running back Eno Benjamin) signed with (agent) Drew Rosenhaus, who I was with and Aiyuk signed with who represented me, who I was with on television. So I knew both guys. But, yeah, taxes, Aiyuk didn’t know anything about taxes. He’s like, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘Bro, you’re going to be in a 40-percent tax bracket. So you get a million dollars -- 40 percent.’ So he said, ‘I’m losing $400,000!?’ And I was like, ‘Where are you playing at?’ (And he responded) ‘Man, I hope I’m in California.’ And I’m like, ‘Gone. Done. Worst state to play in. You should go to Texas. Go tell your agent to get you a workout with the Texas teams.’ And he’s like, ‘Dammit, Ok.’

“But then financial, like getting him to understand how to make his money work for him. Like a lot of guys all the sudden -- how much does a bank secure of your money, like what’s the max?’ (standard deposit insurance by the FDIC is $250,000). So you can’t put a million dollars in there -- well you can, but if the bank goes under, you only get your $250,000 back. So, I had to explain that to him and he was like, ‘Well, where should I go?’ ‘Goldman Sachs, look at these private banks.’

“So just like the educational part that we talked about. And it was interesting to see him -- the first time, I would poke at him and then every week he would come in. It was like clockwork. Come in, sit, close the door and we’ll just talk. He’s going to be prepared. He shouldn’t be surprised by anything that’s going on right now because I think we covered it. From videos to YouTube, what’s going to happen at the combine, what’s going to happen at the pro day -- we looked at that, we recapped everything. Eno is the same way.”

DevilsDigest: Did N’Keal Harry -- who was drafted in the first round by the New England Patriots last year -- do the same thing?

Antonio Pierce: “With N’Keal, because we had just got here, you have to earn his trust and I think that happened a little bit later. With me and Aiyuk, we came at the same time and he would come rant to me about not playing. But with N’Keal, the practice habits more so (we talked about with) N’Keal. How to practice like a pro, conduct yourself like a pro.”

DevilsDigest: You mentioned teaching guys that they can’t put a million dollars in the bank because if something happens with the economy, they may not get all of it back. You were in New York during the recession, did that happen to some of your teammates?

Antonio Pierce: “Yeah, or stocks. Of course. I was in New York when the (Bernie) Madoff, (a financial advisor who stole $65 billion in a Ponzi scheme), deal popped off. I was like, ‘What?!’ And I remember hearing about a guy named ‘Madoff.’ I remember. Because we went down to Wall Street. We went down and dealt with those people down in the Financial District. And there were a lot of names you would hear pop off. Like, ‘Oh man, if you put your money with certain guys or let this guy manage your money.’ I only heard (Madoff’s) name and I didn’t put two and two together until years later. I was like, ‘That’s the same dude they were talking about. Oh my God.’

“I was fortunate because in New York I had Strahan and (running back) Tiki (Barber), who were older guys who had been in New York for 10-plus years. So, it was like, ‘Man, what do you have going on? Who’s this guy?’ They knew everybody, just like I did by the time I ended my career -- you know because it kind of circles around.”

DevilsDigest: But no one ever came to you and was like, ‘Go put your money with this guy Bernie Madoff?’

Antonio Pierce: “No, not Madoff. But other guys. With other deals, like what happened down there in Louisiana or Mississippi with T.O. (hall of fame wide receiver Terrell Owens) and them guys (who got involved with Robert Allen Stanford, who conducted a $7 billion Ponzi scheme). A lot of things got approached to me but I’m like, ‘I’m not into that kind of stuff.’ To be honest, I had pit bulls at the time. I liked dogs and then the (Michael) Vick thing happened and I got scared and sent my dogs back to California. I used to breed pit bulls.”

DevilsDigest: You bred pit bulls?

Antonio Pierce: “I just grew up with dogs, I bred them. In college -- this is how I made money. I had three females, about three or four males. And then I’d sell them for $200 a pop. That’s how I made extra money in college.”

DevilsDigest: How did you sell them?

Antonio Pierce: “People just saw my dogs, because I had pretty dogs. There are stories, if you ask people at the U of A, I go down and when we were doing seven-on-seven, like how these guys are working out down there (Pierce points down to players working out on ASU’s small turf field visible from his window) and I had all my dogs just like (hanging around). They’re like, ‘Man, how (do you sell them for)?’ And I was like, ‘$200 or $300.’ And I’d sell them. The litter would be gone and then in a couple more months, three or four months, there would be another litter and you let the litter go.

“You’d sell them on the newspaper classifieds. Yeah, man, I did that. If you ask the coaches at U of A, they’ll be like, ‘That dude had more dogs…’”

DevilsDigest: Where did you keep all of those dogs?

Antonio Pierce: “So I wound up getting a house far out from campus, probably about 45 minutes from campus. I had a backyard and a kennel. My cousins lived with me and that’s what we did. We bred them. And we had pretty dogs. We had blacks, we had blues, greys they call them, and then red noses.”

DevilsDigest: Did you know someone who did that growing up? I’ve never heard of a college kid just getting into that.

Antonio Pierce: “No, my thing was my mom never let me have a dog. So the first thing I did when I went to U of A is I went and bought a dog. And then my cousins came and they had pit bulls. Everybody liked our dogs because we were in Arizona but our dogs were from California and had a little bit more size to them. So they were pretty looking, like the ones you see with the chains and all the muscles on them.”

DevilsDigest: And then the Vick incident happened and you sent them back from New York?

Antonio Pierce: “And then the Vick thing happened and I sent them back. Like, ‘Oh (expletive), too close to home.’”

DevilsDigest: When you think back to your time playing with the Giants, how much did you learn from the vets on those teams like Tiki Barber and Michael Strahan?

Antonio Pierce: “Learned a lot. Tiki taught me -- and I didn’t understand it at the time, I was, I probably should apologize to him. But I had animosity towards him because he would walk in every Wednesday and Thursday suited and booted. The rest of us are in normal gear walking around, how like me and you are now, or we were in our Giants’ gear. Well, Tiki is in this full-blown suit and tie like he was coming off a job interview because he was coming off of ‘Fox & Friends’ every day.

“So he had already started his process. I didn’t get it. I was watching him like, ‘What are you doing? Man, we’re about football. Like I want to win.’ I was in year five, he was in year 10. I know he’s on the exit strategy -- and then he retires in the middle of the season and it bothers me. It bothered me that season. I bothered me for a lot of years later because I just felt like his attention wasn’t on football. And I didn’t think it was fair to me or the guys -- because we were younger at the time, I was in my fifth year and a lot of us were rookies that year except for Strahan, (wide receiver) Amani Toomer and him. So I’m like, ‘What are you doing? You’re worrying about yourself.’ But that’s OK to do, I just think there’s a time and place. I don’t think you do it during the middle of the season or during the season but it did teach me like, ‘Alright, you need to think outside the box more about football and how you get over it.

“(What I learned from) Strahan was just patience, networking, personality, how to handle the media. We had a lot of rough moments during our first two years there with wins, losses, locker room stuff, there was just so much going on. There were times he blew up and it was a bad example but there were other times he was real calm, patient, understood it.

“And then the same thing, networking. Like Strahan networked. And it’s like, alright, you’re in New York, you’ve got all these people at your fingertips of everywhere you want to go -- from media, to fashion, to money, everything. Everything is in New York, you don’t realize it until you’re there. He taught me that.

“And then you had your other guy, like Eli Manning, who had everything in the world but he’s driving a Toyota Highlander with a flip phone and he’s in the same clothes every Friday meeting. It’s like, ‘Woah, he’s saving his money. He’s not being superficial. He’s not trying to keep up with the jewelry, the fast cars, the newest clothing line.’

“When I was in Washington, that’s the way it was. It was like (the TV show) ‘Pimp My Ride.’ Every week it was like, ‘Oooo, look at those rims. Look at those cars.’ And those are my dudes that are on the 30 for 30 (documentary) ‘Broke” right now.”

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