Michael Irvin embraces attention

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Michael Irvin isn't a cliché.

He's not the son of a famous athlete attempting to escape his father's shadow and carve out his own niche. This isn't the story of a young football player attempting to outrun his dad's massive legacy. Irvin decided years ago to target that legacy and charge toward it.

Boasting the same name as his Hall-of-Fame father, Irvin II plays the same position as the Cowboys' legend. As a high school senior, he moved from Texas to play high school football at his dad's school and is now committed to Miami, the same college at which his father first became a household name.

Escaping a legacy is the last thing on Irvin's mind. Metaphorical shadows concern him not.

"I'm not running away from it," Irvin said. "What's the point of running away from it? I'm doing what I want to do. I'm going to Miami because I want to play at Miami and I want to go. It's not about where my father played. It's about me."

Irvin's life in Texas was different than the Florida-based one he's lived for the last 10 months or so. The Lone Star mansion he lived in with his father? Gone. The competition level on Friday nights? More intense. Fancy cars? Absent from his life. Talk to Irvin Sr., and he'll tell you all of this is by careful design.

"I told Michael, when he was living with me in Texas, that he needs to match the hunger of these other guys," Irvin Sr., said. "I told him, 'All these guys you play against are hungry to live in that giant house you get to live in every day. They're hungry to have the things that you already have. You can't match the hunger living here' That's why I sent him down here to Florida to live with my nephew. I told him, 'Go live like they live. Go be with them. Go see it. Go be around them.'"

Carrying a checkered Louis Vuitton messenger bag that retails for $1,600, Irvin Sr. hasn't lost his sense of swag. That much is clear as he stands on the sideline of Ft. Lauderdale St. Thomas Aquinas High School taking in his son's final regular season game. The unabashed confidence that helped define him is alive and well. These days, he's attempting to force his son to earn the same aura.

Irvin II has always had some semblance of the drive his father has worked hard to instill. Goals? They've always been high. At an early age, the developing wide receiver started in with the trademark Irvin trash talk. The records his father worked so hard to set? He pledged to break them as an elementary-schooler.

This, it turns out, is standard dinner table debate when the setting features multiple Michael Irvins

"I told him, 'Son, you can't break my records," Irvin Sr. said. "We have the same name. Even if you break them, they are still gonna say 'Michael Irvin'. You can change the numbers, but my name's still gonna be there no matter what.'"

With the name comes privilege, sure, but it also brings a target. It hand-delivers talking points to doubters and opponents. According to Irvin, that's gotten worse with the move to Florida. Then, it's not as though any of the chatter has taken him off guard. When you're raised by a legendary smack-talker, you tend to not take things too seriously.

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"I told (Michael Irvin II), 'All these guys you play against are hungry to live in that giant house you get to live in every day. They're hungry to have the things that you already have.'"

-- Michael Irvin, Sr.

"Every game, I hear, 'This isn't Texas,'" Irvin II said. "I hear, 'You just live off your father's legacy'. I hear, 'You're not (expletive)' or 'You'll never be your dad.' But I'm not doing this for my father or to be my father, so that stuff never bothered me. I'm so used to hearing it."

Still, Irvin II says his late-high school move to Florida has been overwhelmingly for the better. The fact that he plays at Aquinas, a true national powerhouse, has forced him to push himself on the field. The fact that his cousin, with whom he now lives, acts as a 24-hour personal trainer of sorts, has him in college-ready shape.

And the hunger his father speaks of? That apparently has arrived as well. Irvin is on an ultra-talented team and has made 20 catches for 180 yards and two touchdowns in his first season with the team.

"Being down here changed the way I look at things a lot," Irvin II said. "When I got down here, playing with kids that are better than who I was playing with before made me work harder. I was content at my old school. That, and I'm not living in a mansion anymore. That put life in perspective. It reminds me that I have to get my own money and get it for myself."

And so Irvin II will continue to go about things in much the same way as his father did more than a decade ago. And should the unthinkable happen and some of dad's records actually fall, he'll be a stickler about the suffix.

"He always told me, 'I'm gonna make sure they put the 'II' on it,' Irvin Sr. said of his son. "I'm gonna make sure they stick a 'II' in that record book."