No matter how far Micah Parsons goes — or doesn’t go — in the NFL, he will always be Sherese Parsons’ “biggest blessing.”
Relationships rarely exist like the one the Penn State All-American enjoys with his mom.
Both will look you straight in the eye and tell you divine intervention played a role.
That’s because one of the most-gifted athletes Harrisburg has ever produced was almost never born.
Micah dropped that bombshell when he arrived alone — no posse, hangers-on or agents — at PennLive for a pre-NFL draft interview.
“It’s actually a crazy story,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this before. My mom already had two kids when she got pregnant with me. She just didn’t know if she could afford it.”
Meet unfiltered Micah Parsons: The 21-year-old proud father, early college grad and soon-to-be multimillionaire.
He came from humble beginnings and has overcome his share of obstacles and criticism.
He’s made missteps, too — and admits that.
Some of those slipups could cost him millions on his first pro football contract.
If the April 29 draft in Cleveland were based solely on on-field performance, Micah would likely be a top-five pick. But the NFL is big business — $16 billion a year to be exact pre-COVID — so character concerns can plummet a player’s stock.
But Micah will tell you it doesn’t matter when he gets drafted. He’s going to make it big.
And, why not? He’s been hearing that since he suited up for the Harrisburg Packers as a 6-year-old and — according to Uptown legend — scored a touchdown on a dozen straight carries.
“‘You’re going to go way further than anybody has before,’” Micah said. “I heard that from every coach and every mentor I had growing up, and that was literally a boost of confidence. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going.’ There was no doubt in my mind.”
Micah Parsons holds the Cotton Bowl Defensive Player of the Game trophy in December 2019, surrounded by family and friends. It was his final, and best, outing with the Nittany Lions. Joe Hermitt | jhermitt@pennlive.com
More than a football player
Sherese was 24 and juggling two jobs to keep food on the table for two children, when Micah’s impending arrival caught her off-guard.
To make matters worse, Micah’s dad, Terrence, was in and out of their Jefferson Street house.
“I was like, ‘I’m already struggling,’” Sherese said. “I told his dad, ‘I think I’m going to the clinic.’ I was really thinking about it.”
What happened next could be chalked up to coincidence, but Sherese believes something spiritual occurred.
Outside of Terrence, no one knew she was pregnant, and they certainly didn’t know she was contemplating an abortion.
One day the phone rang, Sherese said, and on the other end was Sister Hall from the church. When Sherese told her that she was “doing fine,” Hall said she was hiding something and eventually surfaced the truth.
“She talked my mom out of it,” Micah said. “I think that is why (my mom) was always like, ‘God looks over you, son, and you should continue to keep doing good things in your life and give back to God.’ That was one of the first lessons she taught me.”
The Parsons family insists Sister Hall’s call wasn’t the last supernatural happening on the road to Sherese giving birth to a 10-plus-pound baby boy.
Even the name Micah has a story. It came to Sherese in a late-night dream.
“That’s why,” Micah said, “it’s always seemed like I was brought into this world to do something bigger than just play football.”
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The rise from Jefferson Street
It took more than one miracle for the child who almost never was to grow into a hulking 6-foot-3, 245-pound linebacker.
Micah loved Jefferson Street, and on the surface, it’s easy to see why. There’s a sense of community — kids play along the sidewalks, and neighbors hang out on their stoops chatting the evening away. But poverty is an unquestionable issue, and a young, Black man can’t afford any missteps.
“I think about the young boys (Micah) grew up with there,” Sherese said. “Most of them are dead or in jail now.”
Micah’s former high school quarterback, Yahmir Wilkerson, said: “In Harrisburg, there are two lanes. You have the sports lane, or you fall into the streets. There’s just not much else to look up to.”
But thanks to Sherese, Micah had structure. Sports became a tool to keep him busy year-round. He bounced from sport to sport and season to season and had little idle time.
“If we had a million more Shereses,” Micah said, “this world would be OK.”
And although Terrence wasn’t around as much as his son would have liked early on, they eventually patched things up. In junior high, Micah wrote his father a letter, telling him that he loved him and wanted him to be a bigger part of his life. To his credit, Micah said, Terrence followed through.
“We’re like homies now,” Micah said. “He’s like my best friend.”
When Micah Parsons transferred to Harrisburg, he was fully unleashed. He returned kicks for touchdowns, turned around, and bombed kickoffs back into opposing end zones. He punted. He sacked quarterbacks, and he ran over and away from defenders as a running back. Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com
A multigenerational talent
Jimmie Manning has spent the past three decades working with athletes across the city, including 10 years as the head track and field coach at Harrisburg High.
He’s seen the type of elite talent — Bishop McDevitt’s Ricky Watters and LeSean McCoy, for instance — the area can produce. What Manning hasn’t seen, though, is another athlete who compares to Micah.
“He is generational,” Manning said. “He might be multigenerational. Harrisburg (High) has been around since 1971. (Former Southern Cal quarterback) Jimmy Jones came out of Harrisburg, and part of his fame was he beat Alabama. He was great. But Micah is just different.”
That was evident from the first time Micah stepped on the field.
Football was his passion, but he became the Bo Jackson of Harrisburg. No matter the sport, he dominated — and with little preparation.
Micah moved fluidly from the gridiron to the Camp Curtin YMCA gym and never missed a beat. He was even a natural at wrestling.
Cole Nye, who won a state championship at Bishop McDevitt, competed alongside Micah in middle school.
As soon as Micah, a seventh-grader, stepped on to the mat in the junior high state tourney, he started pinning ninth-graders. Nye said if Parsons would have stuck with wrestling, he would have been one of the state’s all-time greats.
“You just don’t see talents like that come around too often,” Nye said. “He was good at everything he did. He could pick up a squash racket and be good. I don’t think there is any raw athlete from Pennsylvania who will ever be like Micah Parsons.”
Micah Parsons with his son, Malcolm, in August 2020. As the pandemic continued, Parsons opted out of his junior year at Penn State and headed to California to prepare for the NFL draft. Joe Hermitt | jhermitt@pennlive.com
A tough decision to make
As athletes advance to higher levels of competition, the talent gap narrows. But you can count on one hand the games where Micah wasn’t the best player on the field — from the Packers to high school to two seasons at Penn State.
He led Harrisburg High to the state title game as a junior and was named an All-American as a senior.
Cougars coach Calvin Everett told PennLive “sometimes it wasn’t fair” when Micah took the field. “When opponents are coming over and asking for autographs,” he said. “That is when you know you really have something special.” Micah then led Penn State in tackles (82) despite never starting a game as a freshman and became an All-American as a sophomore, finishing with 109 stops and five sacks.
He saved his best performance for last, a dazzling 14-tackle (three for loss) Cotton Bowl outing with two sacks, two pass breakups and two forced fumbles in a 53-39 win over Memphis. During the game, play-by-play broadcaster Mark Jones, said: “This is maybe the best player I’ve seen all year in college football.”
Before his junior season started, Parsons opted out, citing COVID-19 concerns, left Penn State and headed to California to prepare for the NFL.
He returned to State College earlier this year and ran one of the fastest 40-yard dash times ever by a linebacker — a blistering 4.39 seconds.
“I think it’s important to understand Micah,” PSU coach James Franklin told the NFL Network. “Micah would not have opted out last year, if the Big Ten had not canceled the season. Micah loves football, had a great Penn State experience, and graduated in three years from, obviously, a highly respected academic institution.
“He had a chance to be a two-time consensus All-American at Penn State — which, I think, has only happened three other times.”
Micah Parsons shakes hands with fans after announcing he would attend Penn State. Joe Hermitt | jhermitt@pennlive.com
Off-the-field missteps
Micah’s size, speed, intelligence and production are unmatched by his peers.
But a series of incidents that began his junior year in high school have reportedly raised character concerns.
Critics of his off-field moves are predicting he could fall out of the top 10 of the draft and into the middle or latter stages of the first round.
When Micah and his family moved to the suburbs, he enrolled at Central Dauphin High School. Several white female students published an Instagram post, holding up a sign with a racial slur.
Micah responded on Twitter: “Lmao this is the school I rep … I gotta transfer.”
Days later, he was suspended after the school said he attempted to incite a riot by yelling “gun” in the cafeteria, Terrence told PennLive.
Terrence said his son was calling out to a teammate, and that soundless security footage showed students and police in the cafeteria had little reaction. The school disagreed, and Micah transferred to Harrisburg High.
Eleven months later, Micah took a recruiting trip to Ohio State. The Buckeyes appeared to be the front-runner to sign Pennsylvania’s best player — a decision that angered many Nittany Lions faithful. But the weekend visit resulted in a misstep that opened the door for Penn State.
When Ohio State’s quarterback faltered against Oklahoma, social media erupted in a debate over whether coach Urban Myer should have benched J.T. Barrett.
Micah joined the discussion, tweeting he would have made the switch.
Terrence said Micah took down his tweet and apologized, but Meyer cancelled a Sunday morning meeting with the family, and then skipped a makeup call.
“I felt like my son had an opinion,” Terrence said. “They didn’t like it, and they wanted to cut ties. I was like, ‘Wow.’”
“... There comes a time when you look in the mirror, and you say, ‘OK, if I really want to do this, I’ve got to give some things up.’”
Micah Parsons
The third — and biggest blemish — NFL teams are looking into is a 2020 lawsuit filed by former Penn State safety Isaiah Humphries against the university.
Parsons is not a defendant in the suit, but Humphries claimed Parsons punched him in the face, grabbed hold of his neck and began choking him. Humphries said he felt threatened and pulled a knife to defend himself.
The lawsuit hasn’t been settled, according to court documents, and Parsons has never been arrested or charged with a crime.
Former Penn State great LaVar Arrington — who bonded with Micah after he traveled to California — has called the accusations fake news, sad, silly, inappropriate and misleading.
“He’s a high-quality young man,” Arrington tweeted. “Find something else to use.”
Micah told PennLive he’s grown up since making some questionable decisions.
“A lot of people who say I have these character concerns think I’m the same person I was when I was 14 or 15,” he said. “But I’m not. You learn, and you grow. Muhammad Ali said that if you are the same person when you are 50 as you were when you were 20, you didn’t grow. So, why would I be the same person I was eight years ago or even five years ago?
“But there comes a time when you look in the mirror, and you say, ‘OK, if I really want to do this, I’ve got to give some things up,’” he said. “So, I lost friends along the way. I lost people I trusted. I lost family.”
When he becomes a first-round NFL draft pick, Micah Parsons will be setting his son, Malcolm, up for the kind of life he could have only dreamed of during his days on Jefferson Street. Joe Hermitt | jhermitt@pennlive.com
‘A beautiful story’
Micah did what he had to do to make it out of Uptown and get to this moment.
But his heart won’t let him forget where he came from. That’s why he trekked back to Jefferson Street in 2016 to record a video and let the country know he was heading to Penn State.
Earlier this month, he returned, leading cameras to his old front steps to tell his story again.
Music filled the street, and a barbecue filled the air just a few doors down from where it all began for Micah.
“I see a superstar!” someone yelled from up the block.
As folks approached to catch a glimpse, Micah was so comfortable — it was almost like he never left.
He’s much more than a star athlete to his former neighbors. He’s an inspiration.
As a young father brought his sons over to get autographs, Thomas Evans stepped out of his home to survey the scene.
Micah Parsons signs an autograph for his old neighbor, Darcel Evans, in front of his childhood home on Jefferson Street in Harrisburg. Joe Hermitt | jhermitt@pennlive.com
“It’s great to see someone you know in the neighborhood leave here and make a name for himself,” Evans said. “And, to come back … that’s great because they don’t really ever come back to the neighborhood. It just shows how humble he is.”
Another former neighbor, Darcel Evans, said: “It’s a hard-knock life. But it shows it can be done. It can be done, if you have support and structure.”
Micah believes his footsteps can be followed by many young men and women from Jefferson Street. He’s even shared some of those plans to make that happen. He has a degree in criminology and dreams of developing programs that will give those who have made mistakes a second chance.
And, as he sat down for a family portrait in front of the rowhouse where it began — flanked by Terrence and Sherese, and his arms wrapped around his son, Malcolm — his former neighbors couldn’t help but smile.
“He is literally about to change his whole family’s life and his son’s life,” Wilkerson said. “His son will grow up totally different than he did. It really is a beautiful story.”
The next chapter should be written in Cleveland, when Micah hears his name called at the draft.
He’s already imagined the moment he’ll cherish with Malcolm, who is almost 3.
“He won’t know exactly what’s going on,” Micah said. “But, when I can look at him, give him his hug and his kiss before I go up (on stage), that’ll be a picture that we will frame and have for the rest of our lives.”
No matter where Micah Parsons will land in the NFL, he will always remember his early years on Jefferson Street. Joe Hermitt | jhermitt@pennlive.com
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