When most 12-year-olds were sleeping in on summer mornings, Colton Hood was lacing up steel-toed work boots and running up a mountain.
That's the kind of grit the Giants are getting in their second-round pick out of Tennessee. And if you think the NFL is tough, you haven't seen what this kid has already been through.
Colton would wake his older brother Khaleb before dawn, and the two would pile into their father Bengie's SUV with younger brother Brandon. Destination: Stone Mountain, a 40-minute drive from their suburban Atlanta home. Each boy carried a pair of black steel-toed boots—the same kind you'd find on a construction site, not a football field.
Bengie didn't believe in easy. His pre-dawn pep talks set the tone: "None of that crying. None of that complaining. If you do it right, we'll do it light. If you do it wrong, we'll do it all day long."
The boys would roll their eyes, but they never argued. They'd pull on two pairs of long socks to prevent blisters, lace up those heavy boots, and hit the steep mountain trail as the Georgia humidity settled in. Bengie gave them 15 seconds to finish 50-yard sections. Too slow? He'd add another rep. Sometimes they even ran backwards.
Three days a week, every summer, Colton pushed through. He couldn't always stand it—the barking orders, the extra weight on his feet designed to make him faster. But he never quit.
That same relentless mentality carried him through no-water workouts with Patrick Peterson in Arizona's 110-degree heat, where he'd fight back vomit just to finish. It carried him through draft night, when NFL teams passed on him in Round 1 and reduced him to tears.
Now the Giants have their man. Colton Hood, selected 37th overall, is ready to compete for a starting cornerback job as a rookie. New head coach John Harbaugh has already praised his "pit bull" mentality, and in a revamped Giants defense hungry for a long-term No. 1 corner, that kind of toughness is exactly what the franchise needs after more than a decade of losing.
If running up mountains in steel-toed boots didn't break him, the NFL shouldn't either.