Steve Serby and new Jets safety Yeremiah Bell covered a lot of ground in a Q&A session.
Q: Your dad was never around when you were growing up. How did that affect you?
A: I mean honestly, I wouldn’t change anything that’s happened to me thus far, but growing up as a boy and a young man, I think you need that father figure in your life, so I think, honestly, that it’s something that I really missed. And you could kinda tell about my childhood. I wasn’t a bad, get-into-trouble kid, but I always had anger issues. And I think it stemmed from me just growing up and not having that father figure in my life.
Q: What were you angry about?
A: Just anything. I mean, I had the temper out of this world. I was just snapping left and right. I was a mean kid (chuckle).
Q: What’s an example of one of your worst temper outbursts?
A: Just yelling at people. I’m a young kid and just yelling at grownups. I think when you’re growing up and you’re a young boy, you don’t have that father figure, I think there’s a certain point where you realize that, OK, Mom can’t do anything to me. She can’t really hurt me anymore. And you don’t have that father figure to kinda put you in check. So I was just kinda popping off at the mouth and doing things that I shouldn’t have been doing.
Q: Do you have a relationship with your father now?
A: No.
Q: Have you tried to?
A: I’ve tried. I’ve tried to talk to him, but I’ve come to the realization now that it’s just something that’s not gonna work. I would love to have a relationship, but I’ve tried and it’s just not there.
Q: Does he live still in the Wincester, Ky., area?
A: Yeah, he still lives around the same area. I often see him in passing when I’m at home and things like that. … It’s a bit weird but, it’s been going on for so long now it’s just like second nature.
Q: What’s your best Bill Parcells story?
A: (Chuckle) Well the thing I’ll say about Coach Parcells, when I was with him [while Parcells was executive vice president of football operations with the Dolphins], is he said he wasn’t the coach, but he really was the coach. I’m serious. Because there, he really didn’t have the title of the coach, but every time that you go in to eat, or every time you’re in the building, even lifting weights, he’s just walking around. And when he’d see you, he’d give you the little finger … and as soon as he motioned you over, you know that you’re gonna have about a 30-minute conversation on everything. It was amazing to me because, like after a game, he would take to everybody, and he could tell you exactly what you did wrong. And exactly where your eyes were. I mean, he could do this with everybody.
Q: You’ve referred to him as a jokester, too.
A: He stays on guys, he’s got nicknames for guys.
Q: Did he have one for you?
A: Nah, he didn’t. I mean, Coach Sparano calls me Slider, but …
Q: Why is that?
A: Because when they first came there, I was coming off the (Achilles tendon) injury, and they would always tell people to stay up. But they didn’t know me coming in, they were bringing in their own player, so every time that we would practice, they’d say “Don’t dive for balls,” but I was always diving for balls, knocking them away and things like that. He’d keep telling me to stop, and I just never would because I wanted to show him I could play and stay. So, from that point on, he started (chuckle) calling me Slider.
Q: Have you talked to Tim Tebow about your critical remarks regarding the celebration for him at Sun Life Stadium last season, when the former Florida college star made his Sunshine State return?
A: We talked a little bit, and I think even he thought it was kinda ridiculous. That was like a slap in the face, honestly.
Q: Why?
A: For a simple fact, we’re the Dolphins, it’s our stadium. He was a Bronco, so that was kind of a smack in the face to come in and have something for him in our stadium.
Q: What are your thoughts on former Jets and Dolphins QB Chad Pennington?
A: One of the smartest people I know. He’s a guy that you want to be around in the locker room, he’s a great leader. He made it easier for me when I was in Miami. He taught me some stuff being a quarterback that I should do as safety. I’m very happy that I ran across Chad, and still to this day he’s one of my best friends.
Q: Describe your big hit on Jets QB Brett Favre in the regular-season finale in 2009 when you finally made the playoffs.
A: He was rolling out of the pocket, and I had contain on the play, and he just kept holding and holding it, and then he finally released it, but at that point, I was kind of in his face and kinda got a good shot on him, leveled him real good. I still have the picture to this day. I always thought that I’d have the last hit on him and that I’d have the last picture when he retired, but so much for that, so. (laugh)
Q: What’s your on-field temperament like?
A: Very focused and very mean at the same time.
Q: LaRon Landry describes himself as a lion. What are you?
A: If he’s a lion, then I’m a bull I guess. … Bulls, when you’re not messing with ’em, they’re all calm and stuff. But soon as something clicks over, then they get mean.
Q: If you were NFL commissioner, you would …
A: Try to get a serious grasp on the concussion issue.
Q: Do you know how many concussions you’ve had?
A: I’ve had one.
Q: When was that?
A: That was in 2010, last game of the season versus the Patriots.
Q: How bad a concussion was it?
A: It happened in the third quarter. I was out for a couple of seconds. I do remember that. After the game, I wasn’t feeling cloudy or anything like that. I don’t think I had any effects really.
Q: If your 8-year-old son Brayden wanted to play football, what would you tell him?
A: I’d let him play. I mean, I wouldn’t stop him. But I wouldn’t encourage him to play either. I’d make it strictly his choice.
Q: You worked in a steel mill for two years before joining the Eastern Kentucky football team as a walk-on. What did you do in the steel mill for $8 an hour?
A: Made tunnel liner, bent guardrail, things like that. They’d give us the flat sheet of metal, we stick it through the machines, bend it up to the right curvature and things like that, put the right holes in and things like that.
Q: Did you think you were going to have a career in the steel mill?
A: I didn’t know at that point. I had time to kinda just sit back and look at my life that I realized that that’s not what I wanted to do. I honestly felt like that God had a better plan for me.
Q: All along, you dreamed of playing in the NFL?
A: I just wanted to play football. NFL was something that I felt like was farfetched, but I just knew that I wanted to play football. It all came when I was watching the “Roy Kidd Show” when I was working there.
Q: Tell me about the “Roy Kidd Show.”
A: It was something I got hooked on. It came on every Sunday at 12:30. I had a friend there that graduated with my sister, his name was Danny Thomas. We went to high school together, and he played at Eastern [under Coach Kidd], and I’d watch the show and I’d always see him on there, you know, doing his thing and things like that, and then I just got obsessed with the show and one day I was like, “I can do that. I can do that.”
Q: What happened when you wanted to quit?
A: It was after I walked on, it was my first summer camp, two-a-day practices when we were there, and I think it was probably like the second or third day, and I got full body cramps from the neck down. I was on my way to practice leaving the dorm and then the cramps started hitting me on my legs, so I had to sit down the hallway. And I remember I told one of the players … to send one of the trainers back. Well by the time the trainer got back, I was already in full body cramps. So what had happened was they end up taking me to the hospital. I sit in the hospital for three days, getting IVs. And at that point, it scared me, because it never happened to me before. I didn’t know what my body was going through. I didn’t know if it was something that happened all the time. Basically it just scared me, so I went in and told Coach Kidd that I was done playing. He was like, “This is what I’ll do.” He was like, “I’ll give you like a week to think about it. If you want to come back, you can. If not, then that’s fine.” As I sat around and kinda thought about it. I ended up going back. And thank God, because if I hadn’t gone back, I wouldn’t be sitting right here.
Q: What was it like missing your senior season thanks to a pickup basketball game?
A: One of the worst years of my life, I’d have to say honestly. It was crazy, because it was two weeks before camp started. I’m just playing pickup basketball like I did any other day, and went up, came down the wrong way, popped my knee, and that was that. Being hurt and going through that, I just figured that I wasn’t gonna get another chance but luckily I did.
Q: How devastating was tearing your Achilles in the 2007 opener?
A: It was very devastating. … It was gonna be my first full season starting, so it was a big blow to me.
Q: How’d you get through that?
A: Honestly, I looked back at when I missed my senior season in college, and I thought to myself, “nothing gets worse than that.” So I felt like if I could come back from that, and that being one of the worst years of my life, then I could definitely come back from the Achilles.
Q: Childhood memory?
A: We had a swing, it was a tree, and it was up on the hill, and we had tied a rope on top of a big tree that hung over the train tracks, so when the train would come, we had tied this rope, we had a stick on it, so we would always swing over top of the train when it came. It’d be stationary, though, it wouldn’t be going, so every time the train would come and stop, we’d always swing, and land on top of the train, and just swing back to the hill. There was no train there this day, and we were just swinging back and forth, and I had grabbed it, and I was holding it waiting for one of my friends to grab it and swing out. But what had happened was, one of my other friends was coming up the hill and he accidentally bumped me, so when he bumped me, I had one hand on it, and I had swung out over top of the train track. And my hand slipped off. And then I go down, and hit my head right on the train track. And I came like two centimeters from fracturing my skull or something like that. Io had like this big, huge gash — I still have it today [on right side of forehead]. Cracked it open big time. And didn’t feel a thing. I’m like, “Oh God, my head.” So I’m climbing up this hill, and as I climb up the hill, it’s a dirt hill, and I see drip, drip, drip, drip, and then it just starts flowing down my face. So I jump on the bike and I’m riding home, and where we stayed, it was a big circle, so I’m going around the circle and there were some people sitting in the yard, and as I’m going around this circle, I mean my head’s bleeding, and I just heard the neighbors say, “Oh my God, look at that boy’s head.” So when she said that, I just burst into tears, and then rode my bike home real fast and then ended up going to the hospital getting like I don’t know how many stitches (chuckle), so that was crazy.
Q: Boyhood idol?
A: Michael Jordan.
Q: Three dinner guests?
A: Dr. [Martin Luther] King, Harriet Tubman, President Obama.
Q: Favorite movie?
A: “Gladiator.”
Q: Favorite actor?
A: Denzel Washington.
Q: Favorite actress?
A: Charlize Theron.
Q: Favorite singer/entertainer?
A: Michael Jackson, DMX
Q: Favorite meal?
A: Steak and potatoes.
Q: Can this be the No. 1 defense?
A: I don’t think there’s a reason for us not to. We’ve got players at every position. We’ve got veteran, smart guys almost at every position. Then we’ve got a coach who runs the best defense in the league.
Q: Can this be an intimidating defense?
A: Oh yeah, definitely. We definitely have the players for that.
steve.serby@nypost.com