None shall pass

This story appears in the July 12, 2010 edition of ESPN The Magazine.

Ask Dennis Thurman to describe the dance that Darrelle Revis does before games and the defensive backs coach of the New York Jets stammers. "Well, he kind of -- I mean, there's that -- oh, heck, what can I say? It's just goofy."

It takes a home video that Revis put on YouTube to understand what Thurman means. There, in a Miami hotel before this year's Pro Bowl, the cornerback does a bow-legged, crotch-grabbing, hip-hop jig that looks like something Jay-Z might do if he were learning to polka. It's the last thing you'd expect to see from a young legend in the making, a guy whose timing is so accurate that he has reinspired a cheeky catchphrase -- two-thirds of the world is covered by water; the rest is covered by Revis -- not to mention a Facebook page welcoming you to the Church of Revis Christ.

Jets coaches can't say enough about the fourth-year pro, who keyed a defense that held opponents to a league-low 252 yards per game last season. In fact, it's tough for anybody to categorize Revis, because while there are all sorts of ways to describe offensive success, the dictionary for defense is crude by comparison. To explain how dominating the 5-foot-11 Revis was in holding receivers to a 33 percent completion rate against him in coverage, while allowing a league-low 3.5 yards per attempt, the analysts at Football Outsiders had to reach across the line of scrimmage, declaring Revis' performance the equivalent of a wideout's breaking Jerry Rice's single-season record for receiving yards, or a QB's topping Dan Marino's iconic 1984 passing-yards total.

To keep reading Assael's profile of Revis -- it's from the Magazine, and you'd pay for that if you saw it in the airport, so you should pay for this too -- you must be an ESPN Insider. It's a good read, so go for it.

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Shaun Assael | email

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• Senior writer for ESPN The Magazine
• Author of "Wide Open: Days and Nights on the NASCAR Tour"; the New York Times best-selling "Sex, Lies and Headlocks"; and "Steroid Nation"