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Mike Greene | Northern Star
NIU's Patrick George (33) attempts a tackle during a game against Akron Saturday.
There may be no more romantic position on a football field: one lines up directly across from their man, matching him step for step.
It is the first, and sometimes only, line of defense against a dangerous wide receiver.
Lose one step, and get burned.
Such is the life of a cornerback. A life that Patrick George seemed to be bred for. He’s been chasing people down his entire life.
“He used to go around and hug strangers when he was little,” said Patrick’s father, Phillips George. “It took a while to tell him ‘no, we don’t just hug any old person we see.’”
Now, years later, Patrick is still chasing people down with open arms. The only difference is that now his targets are running away from him.
They might not be escaping as often as they’d like, as the junior cornerback has 31 total tackles this season.
While George is already a junior, he won’t be done tackling for quite some time. Instead, he’ll be tackling crime.
“When I was thinking what career choice I wanted to be, I knew that I wasn’t going to sit down and be in an office all day,” said George, a criminal justice major. “That’s not me. I was just thinking, you know, some kind of law enforcement. I don’t even know why.”
Even though George may not be able to give a concrete answer concerning why he chose criminal justice, his father believes that his son’s demeanor is a key factor.
Phillips George describes his son as “very sweet and caring,” as his hugging habits have no doubt proven.
But George was never, even as a child, one to break the rules or disobey instructions.
“The most trouble he ever got in was in grade school,” his father said. “He was about six or seven when he started watching the Power Rangers. He went to school and was jumping from desk to desk thinking he was one of the Power Rangers, and that was the extent of him getting in trouble.”
A strong upbringing paved the way for Patrick to pursue a career in law enforcement, but television, of all things, may have played just as big a role.
An avid watcher of CSI and Cops in its heyday, George could see the qualities that the characters in those shows exuded and realized that they fit with what he was looking for from a career.
“Those people they deal with are so funny,” George said. “It just keeps things interesting.”
Phillips also believes that his son’s affinity for football, and defense in particular, may have been influenced by his interest in police shows.
After all, offensive players don’t get to chase down and tackle people nearly as often.
“There was no reason why he wouldn’t play offense, rather that he preferred defense,” Phillips George said. “I think that [those cop shows] might have something to do with it.”
George also had a great love for other sports, spending much of his free time as a child running around kicking a soccer ball or throwing a baseball through a tire that was set up in his back yard.
But when it came to football, he had a love for the game that was unparalleled, though his initial reasoning may seem a bit odd.
“I remember the exact day [I became interested in football],” George said. “It was during Thanksgiving, I was sitting down and I was watching the Cowboys and the Redskins. I’m just sitting here watching the Cowboys game thinking, ‘those people ... their shoulders are pretty big,’ I’m thinking those are their real shoulders so I think, if I played football I could be big like that.”
While Patrick hasn’t grown the pad-sized shoulders he always wished for, he has obtained the skills necessary to do the things that he is passionate about: tackling his opponents on the field and, possibly, on the streets as well.
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