Friday, July 14 The Disruptor By Tim Keown ESPN The Magazine

You look at the man whose job it is to pass-block Jevon Kearse and you notice the fingers. Not Kearse's fingers, each of which is about the size of a nightstick, but the fingers of the man crouched in his stance, waiting to perform the unsavory task of keeping Kearse out of his backfield -- and by extension, keeping his quarterback out of the hospital. The fingers are moving with manic energy, twitching back and forth, as if all the pent-up tension and anxiety from the rest of the body were tunneling its way out through the fingertips. As if by some physiological quirk, moving the fingers rapidly and repeatedly could somehow jump-start the feet, which remain the only effective means of fighting against the pass-rushing prowess of the Titans' remarkable rookie.

	Tennessee rookie sensation Jevon Kearse has put fear in the hearts of those who attempt to block him.

To have any chance against Kearse, to even preserve the slightest hope of making it through the afternoon without shame, a tackle needs to have his body on full molecular alert. Take the Rams' Fred Miller, who's been seeing Kearse in his sleep since the Titans beat St. Louis on Oct. 31. Miller was called for six false starts in that game -- five of them when he lined up opposite Kearse. That's the kind of scare the 6'4", 265-pound defensive end -- the human equivalent of a sledgehammer powered by a V-12 engine -- can put on you . . . and not just on Halloween. Poor Miller revisits his personal nightmare Super Sunday.

By himself, Kearse has changed the way teams play Tennessee, which, in the process, moved the Titans into the NFL elite. His teammates tell him he's the difference between last year's 8-8 and this year's Roman numeral date. If you doubt his impact, there's always one place to look for proof. "You look at these tackles in their stances, and they're practically standing up," says Titans LB Barron Wortham. "Their necks are bowed back like a racehorse, and they're as far back off the line as they can get.

"I wouldn't say they're shaking, but they're definitely cheating. He's The Freak, man. What else can you do?"

Can any tackle contain him one-on-one? Kearse answers with a mixture of insult and disgust. "No," he says politely but with heft. "Uh-uh. No."

Says Wortham, "You leave a guy one-on-one with Jevon? Why? Why would you do that? It's suicide, pure suicide."

So teams do what they have to do. They keep a running back in to chip-block him. Or they keep the tight end around to double-team him. Some do both, especially in the late stages of a close game, on a dead-cinch passing play. The Jags' Leon Searcy thought he had Kearse's number -- he had held him in check in two regular-season meetings. And in the AFC title game, he got help from tight end Kyle Brady and running back Fred Taylor. Still, the shadow of The Freak loomed over a jumpy Mark Brunell all afternoon.

Kearse wasn't in the picture when the ball was punched out of Brunell's hands late in the third quarter. But one frame later, he was scooping up the ball, an avalanche with hands sealing Jacksonville's doom. (Of course, a frame after that, he gave the Jags life with a foolish lateral, but hey, he's a rookie, remember?)

"Jevon takes teams away from their base plan," says Titans DT Mike Jones. "Sometimes you'll look on his side and it looks like a maze -- there are so many people over there. The funny thing is, they're usually barking into the wind, because he beats them anyway. It's kind of like Jordan, man. Just go ahead and assume he's going to get his and and stop everybody else."

You think you can overpower Kearse, because the laws of physics dictate that his 265 pounds wouldn't stand a chance against 300-pound tackles and 240-pound fullbacks. You think that, because you look at Kearse and see, a tremendous pass rusher who can be bullied with bodies. This thinking is flawed, though. It turns out Kearse can do more with angles and arms than almost anyone else can do with sheer girth.

"At the beginning of the year, teams would just power right at him," says Jones. "It didn't work. He just reaches through with those arms and those hands and stops the pile. He's so low and so explosive. Everything people have tried to do, he's negated with his athletic ability. Once he learns a few more moves, he'll be at 25-30 sacks a year, easily. You'll see those Mark Gastineau, Bruce Smith, Reggie White numbers again. There won't be a sack record standing when he's done."

Among the boisterous Titans, there's teasing but no animosity toward Kearse and the attention he receives, partly because he has handled it with modesty, but mostly because he has made everyone's job easier. "You can be running down the field on pass coverage thinking, 'Oh, man, I'm beat this time,' " Wortham says. "Then you hear the crowd and you say, 'Freak sacked him? Cool. Oh, Freak caused a fumble, too? Cool. And we recovered? Cool.' He's nice to have around; he makes plays to cover all our mistakes."

That so many people in the NFL said Kearse was undersized at 265 shows us just how much the league's waistline has expanded. Hard to believe now, but Kearse came with disclaimers. They said he was either a small defensive end or a big linebacker. But the reliance on pure numbers to measure Kearse's talent was a dismal miscalculation. He set the rookie record with 14½ sacks in the regular season, and forced 10 fumbles. He added two more sacks, one for a safety, against Buffalo in the wild-card game.

The Titans knew Kearse was their missing link from the start. "We wanted him from the beginning, and we were willing to trade up as high as No.5 or 6 to get him," says defensive coordinator Gregg Williams.

"We had him marked as the one single player who could change our defense. No one wanted to deal with us, though, and as he got closer and closer to us, we couldn't believe it. We were amazed he came to us at our position (16th)."

The Freak just can't be contained by the numbers. He has a made-for-the-pulpit voice and a body that "couldn't be duplicated unless it was cloned," Jones says. He has the wingspan of a man five inches taller and covers 40 yards in 4.4 seconds. He has 19" biceps, and his hands are so large he can hold a 12" ruler between his thumb and pinky. He once pushed out a ceiling tile (room height: 12 feet) during a preseason test to measure his vertical leap, which is a freakish 40".

Kearse is by nature serious and quiet, though staying calm is no easy feat given the number of cheap shots he absorbs as his legend takes root. If he slips or gets knocked down, he often finds himself with one or more linemen driving a helmet or a knee into his back. Late hits are commonplace. "He's a target," Wortham says. "They get frustrated, and you never know what might happen." Says Kearse, "If it keeps up and the refs don't call it, I'm going to do something about it. But I'm going to do it legally and within the rules."

So far, he's just played harder and laughed in the faces of his opponents. He got so far inside the head of the Rams' Miller that you wonder whether Miller will sleep at all in the week before their Super struggle. "Jevon comes back to the huddle with a big smile saying, 'This cat's trying to cheap-shot me,' " says Titans LB Eddie Robinson. "Jevon thinks it's funny."

Beneath all the lavish physical skills and that smile is a 23-year-old playing with a sense of anger, retribution and resolve. He plays each Sunday for his murdered half-brother and his incarcerated older brother. He plays for his younger brother and sister, both of whom need to see a side of life that hasn't always been visible from their home in Fort Myers, Fla.

Jevon's success was not predestined. A member of the National Honor Society at North Fort Myers High, Jevon is the first member of his family to earn a high school diploma. His father, once publicly described as one of the "baddest men in Lee County" by a law-enforcement officer, was shot and killed in a pool hall eight months before Jevon was born. His brother J.J. is serving a 7½-year sentence for armed robbery in DeSoto Correctional Institution in Florida. His half-brother, Rocky, was killed in 1996 (when Jevon was a redshirt freshman at Florida) in a drive-by shooting.

The events of his life have engendered in him a combination of anger and pride that is as mean as it is stubborn. Add to it his indignation at dipping down so far in the draft, and you sense what awaits each one of the unfortunate souls called upon to keep him away from the quarterback. Depending on the game situation and Kearse's frame of mind, the poor guy is no longer just a man in a helmet and pads trying to do his job. Maybe he's one of the GMs who bypassed Kearse before the Titans chose him.

"I've never hidden the fact that I said I wanted to make every one of those teams pay," Kearse says. Maybe he's a Kearse family tormentor. "When I'm really tired, or when I really need the motivation, sometimes I'll look across the line and think, 'That's the guy who killed my brother.' "

He phones his imprisoned brother whenever their schedules allow and, Jevon says, "He's loving watching these games. The way things are going, he really can't wait to get out now." He also speaks to his younger siblings often, and arranges for them to visit Nashville so they can witness up-close the benefits of hard work and dedication.

Maybe life is making something up to Kearse and his family. Is it possible to take all the bad things, all the sadness, and exchange them for something luminous and inspiring?

Kearse thinks so. He feels it. From where he stands now, one victory away from exchanging the unlikely for the miraculous, possibility is the only thing in sight.