Super Bowl 2021: Fox sideline reporter Laura Okmin has special connection with Bucs' Jason Pierre-Paul

Jason Pierre-Paul took his seat across from Laura Okmin in the Fox Sports production meeting in advance of the Giants-Buccaneers game in Tampa on Nov. 8, 2015. More than four months after suffering disfiguring injuries to his right hand in a July 4 fireworks accident, Pierre-Paul was about to play his first game since returning to the Giants.

Okmin was especially eager to speak with Pierre-Paul, and not just because of what the game meant to him.

She soon revealed her own secret to the defensive end.

"It was the first time I had a conversation with him after the accident happened," said Okmin, a sideline reporter for Fox and the Westwood One radio network. "I noticed immediately when he sat in the room that he put his hand underneath the table. I was very aware of it. He talked a little bit about it, but not about his feelings. It was more about what he had to do to adjust, do you have to do anything differently. We didn’t get into anything more than that."

After the interview ended, Okmin asked Pierre-Paul if she might speak privately with him.

"Can I share something with you?" she asked. Of course, he said.

She held up her left hand. The middle finger was shorter and wider than the others.

"I started talking about how I’d spent my whole life hiding mine and watching what he had done and hiding his hand underneath the table," she said. "We just had this really terrific conversation about it. At that moment, he was still in the ‘hiding it’ stage, and he took off his glove and showed it to me, but he didn’t do that in the room."

From that meeting, an unlikely friendship blossomed, and the two have been in regular contact ever since, texting regularly and speaking whenever Okmin’s TV crew has covered one of Pierre-Paul’s games. There will be more conversations this week in the same city where they first shared that poignant moment.

Now Pierre-Paul is about to play in the Super Bowl for the second time. After helping the Giants win Super Bowl XLVI against Tom Brady’s Patriots after the 2011 season, he now is a Buccaneers pass rusher and Brady teammate.

In the time since he and Okmin first spoke, Pierre-Paul has been very public about his injury. He held up his mangled right hand on Monday’s Zoom call with the national media, revealing a shortened thumb, a stub where his index finger had been amputated, and three other damaged fingers.

Initially reluctant to discuss details of his injuries, Pierre-Paul has since become a role model for others struggling with their own feelings of inadequacy related to injuries they’ve suffered.

Okmin was nine months old when she nearly lost the entire middle finger on her left hand.

"We had an exercise bike that didn’t have a cover over the wheel, and they had spokes," she said. "My 2-year-old brother and I were playing — I’m sure my mom walked away for a second — and my brother started making the wheel go around. I went to take my hand out, but my finger stayed in."

It had been severed.

"My mom walked right in and grabbed me, took me to the emergency room and thought I’d lost the finger," she said. "But the doctor had my neighbor go get that little baby finger, put it on ice in a bag and bring it to the hospital, and they sewed it back on."

As she got older, though, the finger didn’t grow normally.

"What happens in a lot of cases is if you lose a finger or toe and they sew it back on, it just grows back fatter, and it looks like a little stub," she said. "It’s round and has a nail that curves, so it’s a little stub on my hand."

There wasn’t a day that went by that Okmin hadn’t adjusted her behavior because of the injury.

"I pretty much spent my whole life trying to hide that hand," said Okmin, who will be the Westwood One sideline reporter for Sunday’s game. "Every single memory I have about that finger has been a negative one. I’m always aware of how I hold a microphone or when I was sitting on a set, I would never have my left hand up. My whole life has been trying to hide it with fake nails, with gloves, hiding it in my pocket, anything."

Until she and JPP spoke.

Last week, she posted a picture on her Instagram and Twitter accounts of her and Pierre-Paul playfully showing their hands.

"I learned so much from watching @iamjasonpierrepaul go from hiding his fingers to being so open about showing them/teaching from them," she wrote. "Our secret handshake? We flip each other off every time we see each other.

"For the majority of your [journalism] career, it’s not about you," said Okmin, the founder of GALvanize, a company that helps women navigate the sports world in and out of the media. "So if you told me five, 10 years ago I was going to tweet a personal story about something I’m ashamed about, I’d have said, ‘Are you crazy?’ But there’s something wonderful about that, to be vulnerable like that. And mine is one little nub. In no way am I comparing my hand to his in any way, but I wouldn’t have known that by talking to him."

Pierre-Paul knows he has impacted Okmin and others with his personal journey, and his message of hope certainly resonates. Not only did he overcome the fireworks accident and resume his career with the Giantsbefore being traded to Tampa Bay in 2018, but he recovered last year from a car accident in which he suffered a fractured bone in his neck.

And now he’s one step away from winning a second Super Bowl.

"It’s about never giving up, being there for somebody when they truly need you and just being yourself, when it’s good times or bad times," he said Monday. "I’ve been through a lot. My father, him being blind at the age of 30 when I was born and my mom working, he never quit, and to this day, he’s happy I’m in another Super Bowl.

"It’s about never quitting," Pierre-Paul said. "To those people out there facing something like what [happened] six years ago, went through a hand injury in a fireworks accident and last year I had a broken neck, you just got to look at the things you can do.

"You put your mind to it, you can do whatever you want in life, no matter what and no matter how hard it seems. Don’t quit. I never quit anything I did. I’m going to give it everything I’ve got until I can’t."

By Bob Glauber

Special to NewsdayBobGlauber

Bob Glauber retired in 2022 after covering the NFL for nearly 40 years. He was selected in 2021 for the Bill Nunn Career Achievement Award by the Pro Football Writers of America, and is a three-time winner of the New York State Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association. President of the PFWA for the 2018-20 seasons, he is the author of “The Forgotten First” and “Guts and Genius.”