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Donovan Peoples-Jones has every big play from Super Bowl XXXVI memorized.
When he was 4 years old, Donovan watched and re-watched a tape recording from the game between Tom Brady and Kurt Warner and re-enacted every slow-motion replay. He'd slide across the carpet or dive across the couch with his own football and pretend to make the same highlight-reel grabs.
When the game ended, he'd slide the tape back in and play it again.
"A lot of kids would watch Sesame Street and cartoons," said Roslyn Peoples, his mom. "He would just watch football. You'd put that tape on, and he would just sit there for hours."
Donovan always wore a jersey when he re-created the Super Bowl in the living room, she said. He loved jerseys. They were always at the top of his Christmas wish list, and his parents were perplexed at how quickly he became attached to a jersey of any player.
He first wore a blue Charlie Batch Lions jersey. That one made sense — the Lions were the hometown team. But he also wore a red Priest Holmes Chiefs jersey. Then he had a green Brian Westbrook Eagles jersey. Then he wore a Randy Moss jersey, a Michael Vick jersey, a Donovan McNabb jersey. He'd wear any jersey he could find.
On Sundays, she nagged her son about wearing proper attire to church. He'd walk downstairs with one of his jerseys on and she'd order him back upstairs to change. He'd come back with pants and a collared shirt — over his football jersey.
"He wore jerseys so much," Peoples said. "Every day. He wore jerseys until he wore the numbers off the front. We had to turn it around, and then he wore out the numbers off the back."
Peoples-Jones scored his first touchdown when he was 6 years old. He lined up as a tight end, ran a short 5-yard route and turned around to make the catch.
After sprinting 60 yards to the end zone, he quickly realized he was uncatchable for most defenses. For most of his life, his speed was never matched.
One of his favorite hobbies as a kid was to race cars from his front yard, and he'd always win. Well, almost always.
"Some cars did me dirty," he said. "Cars are going 15 miles per hour down the street, and I'd try to catch them. Then they go 25 miles per hour on me, and I was just like, 'Come on!' It humbled me a little bit."
By the time he arrived for high school football at Michigan powerhouse Cass Tech in Detroit, his athletic talents were already ripe for an NFL Combine.
Coach Thomas Wilcher didn't believe what he saw when Peoples-Jones made his first attempt in the standing broad jump portion of the fitness test. It was the farthest of any player, so Wilcher checked to see what the NFL record was, too.
It was 11 feet, 5 inches.
Peoples-Jones beat the record. Wilcher doesn't remember the precise measurement, but Peoples-Jones was a hair farther.
"I was like, 'Damn, that's far!' " Wilcher said. "The numbers don't really mean much for the kids. When you're that young, you're just doing it. If the coach said do it, you do it. When we were doing drills, I was like, 'You gotta go farther, Donovan. You gotta go farther than anybody else.' "
He always did, and colleges quickly noticed.
Ohio State offered him his first scholarship in his freshman year. After that, the Peoples-Jones household was swarmed with letters from almost every football program in the country. Notre Dame sent over 100 letters. His mom, Roslyn Peoples, still has all of her son's college football mail in five plastic tubs in the basement.
"I think for a while, you just become overwhelmed," she said. "Everybody was overwhelmed, the mailman especially. He couldn't even leave it at the mailbox anymore. He'd just leave it in piles at the door."
At some point, the mail became moot for Peoples-Jones. His decision came down to five colleges: Ohio State, Florida, Florida State, Michigan State and Michigan, but football wasn't his primary focus when making the selection.
Football, actually, was secondary. He wanted to become an orthopedic surgeon, and that played a crucial role in narrowing down his selections.
"I had a friend tell me to pick a school you wanted to go to if you weren't playing football," Peoples-Jones said. "That stuff spoke volumes to me."
Dr. Eddie Jones, his father and an orthopedic surgeon, specializes in orthopedic trauma, sports medicine and joint replacement for OAK Orthopedics in Bradley, Illinois. When Donovan was 9 years old, he bought him "Anatomy: A Regional Atlas of the Human Body," a book commonly used in anatomy classes across the country. Donovan needed to study the photographs before he watched his father perform an ankle surgery.
When Dr. Jones quizzed his son on the anatomy during the operation, he scored 100 percent.
"I grabbed the forceps and grabbed something and said, 'What is this?' and he'd know the different muscles and the fibula," Dr. Jones said. "We'd show him how to put a plate in and how to drill the screws. He was really into it."
Peoples-Jones continued to study anatomy — he could usually self-diagnose any injuries he suffered in football without the assistance of a trainer — and always kept "A" grades on his school report card. That was one of the things he stressed as an eighth grader in his first conversation with Wilcher.
"We talked about how he wanted to be a straight-A student," Wilcher said, "and he talked about why he wanted to come to Cass Tech: He wanted to be the greatest player in the state."
Peoples-Jones accomplished that while fortifying himself as one of the top wide receiver prospects in the nation. He caught 29 touchdowns in his final two seasons at Cass Tech and was MVP of the state championship game his final year. But when the time came to make his college decision, he remembered the advice of his friend: Football is second.
So he picked Michigan. The university has a renowned medical school for students with orthopedic interests.
His football future, though, was certainly still bright.
"I don't have to just play football," Peoples-Jones said. "I can chase my other dreams. I wanted to do both. That's why I chose Michigan."
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