Four years ago, former Shasta Community College (Redding, Calif.) football coach Sonny Stupeck leaned against the railing of a ferry as it chugged toward Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. He was on vacation in New York City with his wife, Beverly, to see a former player, when the couple took a sightseeing detour.

What Stupeck saw on that boat startled him more than if Lady Liberty had reached down and tapped him on the shoulder with her torch.

"We were taking the ferry over to Ellis Island, and there were these kids wearing Jason Sehorn jerseys," says Stupeck, who doesn't see very many New York Giants shirts in California. "I was like, 'Come on! What's that all about?'"

Stupeck remembers Sehorn as the teenager

	New York Giants cornerback Jason Sehorn didn't start playing football until his senior year of high school.

who lived in his house for a while, almost flunked high school and "couldn't find the weight room with a magnet." Stupeck coached Sehorn in junior college before the 1989 graduate of Mt. Shasta High (Mt. Shasta, Calif.) became a superstar cornerback with the New York Giants. He knew Sehorn before he was a national celebrity, before he proposed to "Law and Order" actress Angie Harmon on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" in March.

"He's my boy. He's part of our family," says Stupeck, 46, who now coaches the softball team at Shasta CC. "He still walks into our house through the garage and goes straight to the refrigerator and says, 'What have you got to eat?'"

Sehorn dabbled in sports in high school, but his grades were poor and he had trouble staying eligible. He was kicked off the Capital Christian School (Sacramento, Calif.) basketball team in ninth grade before coach David Gray stepped in.

"David Gray intervened on (Jason's) behalf," says Sehorn's mother, Nancy Alexander. "That was the turning point."

Sehorn got his grades in order, raised his GPA to a 2.0, rejoined the team and later earned Capital's Most Improved Player award. Sehorn then moved with his mother to Mt. Shasta, a town she felt would be a better place to raise Jason and her other son, Colby Alexander.

Nancy says her son again did poorly in school to make a point.

"He didn't like the fact that I moved him up to Mt. Shasta (in 10th grade)," says Alexander. "He thought if he didn't do well in school, Mom would move him back to school in Sacramento."

But the family remained in Mt. Shasta, and Sehorn was forced to adjust his study habits so he could play sports.

He joined the Mt. Shasta basketball team as a sophomore and later averaged 35 points per game during his senior year. He went out for track but didn't consider football because he thought it "didn't look like fun."

In stepped Joe Blevins.

In Sehorn's senior year, Blevins took over the football program at Mt. Shasta. He inherited a team with a solid running game, but he knew he needed more weapons. That's when Blevins began to hear about a kid who could soar through the air on the basketball court.

"Jase was excited about playing wide receiver, and I like to throw the ball a little," says Blevins, who is still the head football coach at Mt. Shasta. "That was the bait on the hook."

Blevins had little doubt Sehorn could be good, but even he couldn't predict what happened next.

"He wowed me as a coach," says Blevins. "We played Trinity High, and he made one of those plays normal high school kids just don't make."

As Sehorn describes it, the Trinity game was when football started to make sense.

"We've got a two-point conversion to win the game, and we go for it," he says. "The quarterback is scrambling and he just throws it up, and I remember going up and catching it and falling backward and putting the ball over the goal line. That's when football started to click."

It was Sehorn's second game - ever.

"He just picked it up," says Blevins. "He was a sponge. Some guys are phenomenal with computers. This guy was just as phenomenal an athlete."

Sehorn admits he was not a good student in high school. He says he didn't see the point in learning something that was useless in the real world, so he studied enough to stay eligible for sports and keep out of trouble.

"I realized I wanted to play sports, so I went to school," he says. "Athletics kept me in school; school didn't keep me in athletics."

On the field, Sehorn was a quick study. He earned Shasta Cascade League MVP honors at Mt. Shasta, then went on to set 17 records at Shasta Community College, including national records for most all-purpose yards in a game (506), in a season (2,404) and in a career (4,308). "Do the math," says Stupeck. "That's 253 yards per game. And he only played 17 games."

After two years at Shasta CC, Sehorn earned a scholarship from the University of Southern California. He scored 34 touchdowns as a wide receiver for Stupeck, but USC secondary coach Dennis Thurman, a nine-year NFL veteran, had other needs.

"I didn't feel like playing DB. I wanted to score," says Sehorn, who earned a degree in communications from USC in 1994. USC moved Sehorn to defense anyway. The Trojans had two future NFL first-round draft picks at wide receiver in Curtis Conway (1993, seventh overall) and Johnnie Morton (1994, 21st overall). Sehorn's decision was easy.

"I had a short amount of time, and I needed to be on the football field," he says. "I didn't want to be on the sidelines watching everybody else play, so I said, 'No-brainer. I'll go play safety.'"

The transition was smooth. Sehorn started from his second game at USC in 1992 and wound up as the 59th overall pick in the 1994 NFL draft by the New York Giants. And it wasn't even his first pro contract.

During the summer between Sehorn's senior year of high school and freshman year of college, a Chicago Cubs scout noticed him playing center field during an American Legion baseball game and offered him a contract on the spot. Sehorn signed and delayed going to college for a year to play minor league baseball in West Virginia. He hadn't played baseball in high school and played only two seasons of Little League, but that didn't matter - he was a pro baseball player.

Today, Sehorn is a 29-year-old cornerback in the nation's biggest sports city, with the most media exposure and the most pressure. But even with the scrutiny of the New York press, Sehorn continues to play sports for one reason.

"All sports, even at this level, should be fun for you," he says. "It's gotta be enjoyable."

Wide receivers who sweat arrogance. Three-hundred-pound linemen who drive block you into the stands. Coaches with egos that eat up more real estate than a Wal-Mart parking lot. That's fun?

"Yeah, it's sweat, and you get beat up," says Sehorn, "but, hey, when it comes game time, it's fun and that's what you live for."

Welcome to the world according to Jason Sehorn, where having a blast is top priority and that California-kid, laid-back smile never takes a commercial break.

"I was a kid that wanted to do things that were fun for me," he says. "I wasn't concerned if I was going to be the best or not. But if I was going to go out there and give my time, I wanted it to be fun."

Sports have turned out to be more than just fun for Sehorn. Football is his career, even though only a handful of people ever dreamed it was possible.

"I'm a big believer in young people," says Stupeck. "It's not if they get it, but when they get it. If we just hang with them, a lot of times we get these great stories. If people had quit on Jason early, we may not have seen all these great things he's done."