4:00 pm Dec. 7, 20129
Who remembers the last time the Giants played the Saints at home?
I do; I went to that game. It was on Christmas Eve in 2006, and the weather was unseasonably warm. These unexpected tastes of spring can be rejuvenating sometimes, but that day it had the opposite effect. Absent a winter chill, torpor prevailed, both in the stands and on the field.
The Giants played like they were underwater, and lost 30-7. It was their sixth loss in their last seven games. They had been 6-2 not long ago; now they were 7-8. After freefalling for weeks, they had finally gone splat, their ill-fitting pieces scattered and laid bare.
Towards the end of the third quarter, I joined some 70,000 other Giants fans in a vitriolic repudiation of the head coach, who, it seemed quite obvious, had lost this team. “Fire Coughlin,” we chanted in that “Let’s Go Yankees” singsong, with its cadence conveying a taunting inevitability.
Somehow, after all this, they were still in a position to make the playoffs if they won the following week against Washington. But those Giants didn’t deserve the honor. Most of us just wanted those guys out of our hair.
Except for one guy, that is. That Christmas Eve game was Tiki Barber’s final home game. He was the last Giant introduced during pregame introductions, and received a profound ovation.
He returned the love by blowing a kiss toward the crowd, his signature gesture, performed after touchdown he scored. See, Tiki was a different kind of Giant: A brutish manly man, or an LT-style crazed dog he was not. His style of play was consistent with how he liked to think of himself off the field: refined and evolved.
About that running style: It’s beyond my ability as a writer to do it justice, to do the Roger Angell thing of structuring my sentences with the flow and counterintuitive pivots to mirror how Tiki ran.
The standard descriptive words don’t help much either. Elusive, sure, but that wasn’t the half of it. Shifty, yes, although that description applies to millions of running backs, none of whom had Tiki’s subtle, low-gear brand of shiftiness. Roach-like comes close, as it aptly describes his knack for darting in a direction that had occurred only to him, with a single cut forcing eleven defenders to recalibrate their spatial assessments. But even this is flawed because it casts him as a lower-order creature. Really, the defenders were.
I go back to two quotes when thinking of Tiki, both from flattering magazine profiles from that 2006 season, during which he announced his plans to retire at the end of the year.
The first, from Ben McGrath’s piece in The New Yorker: “Recently, he said, ‘I don’t run fast anymore when I’m on the football field.’ He did not mean the comment to be self-deprecating.”
The second, via his twin brother Ronde, from David Amsden‘s piece in New York: "Some people play for fun, but I think Tiki played the game so he could master it."
It’s not exaggerating to say that Tiki played the game in a way that approached some kind of genius. That’s why he was and still is my favorite player of all time.
I GET WHY TIKI HAS BECOME PERSONA NON GRATA, why he was booed at the Giants’ ring of honor ceremony two years ago, let alone whenever his highlights appear on the stadium big screens.
He made his own bed here, the theory goes: He badmouthed Eli and Coughlin, then watched them become improbable Mount Rushmore Giants the very next year. He purported to be a family guy, but then was revealed as an adulterer. He held himself apart as a renaissance man, but turned into a bungler who kept putting his foot in his mouth. For all of his instinctive grace as a player, he’s been the opposite kind of retired player.
What seems to have made his crime unforgiveable to some was simple bad timing: Had the Giants not won the Super Bowl the year that he set himself against Eli and Coughlin, his comments would have had the chance to die down, and be shrugged off as a crass stumble for a newbie broadcaster. But the “controversy” was still fresh when the Giants won, and thus, the Manichean fault lines were etched in stone between Tiki and Coughlin, the bratty 2006 Giants versus the triumphant champions of ‘07.
Presented with the choice between the Super Bowl-winning coach and the guy who was rapidly bombing his way out of broadcasting, we chose the coach, conveniently forgetting that we were on the exact opposite side the year before. All the vitriol that had been directed at Coughlin during that 2006 Saints game was shifted onto Tiki. “Scapegoat” is the word for this.
The second Super Bowl canonized Coughlin, consequently making look all the worse the player who once said Coughlin had been “outcoached” and who wrote that he had “robbed me of … the joy I felt playing football.”
To be sure, Tiki has exacerbated things. He seems unable to help being grating, or clueless, or kind of a dick. But just as sure, his missteps have been gleefully met at each turn by collective false outrage, schadenfreude and thoughtless piling on.
I accept that Tiki’s an unlikeable face on television and flawed guy, but I don’t root for athletes on my teams based of their Q ratings. As for moral judgments, I’ll only say that like every other Giants fan, I venerate a certain defensive player from the ‘80s whose behavior has been far worse that Tiki's.
Ultimately, we have a choice when it comes to Tiki, between remembering the beautiful football player we were lucky to watch and joining the feeding frenzy. It’s not a hard choice for me, and it’s confounding and upsetting that more Giants fans don’t feel the same way.
I’ll only say that like every other Giants fan, I venerate a certain defensive player from the ‘80s whose behavior has been far worse that Tiki's.
Do you mean Lawrence Taylor ? I don't remember Taylor holding himself up as an example to the world as an exemplary man. As a player ,yes. What irks about barber is his incessant chattering and bragging. As long as he was a good guy people put up with his chattering. Once the level of 'skeave' barber had descended to was disseminated no one was willing to listen to his annoying double talk. Extreme smugness would best describe barber at his most verbose. His actions tell the tale and that's all anyone needs to know about him. Words are cheap and so is barber. Fail.
I’ll only say that like every other Giants fan, I venerate a certain defensive player from the ‘80s whose behavior has been far worse that Tiki's.
Do you mean Lawrence Taylor ? I don't remember Taylor holding himself up as an example to the world as an exemplary man. As a player ,yes. What irks about barber is his incessant chattering and bragging. As long as he was a good guy people put up with his chattering. Once the level of 'skeave' barber had descended to was disseminated no one was willing to listen to his annoying double talk. Extreme smugness would best describe barber at his most verbose. His actions tell the tale and that's all anyone needs to know about him. Words are cheap and so is barber. Fail.
Greg,
Nobody will ever deny Tiki's great contribution on the field.He was the greatest Giant running back of all time.Prior to his retirement I ,for one,felt he was a lockerroom cancer.He would undermine the coach's decisions,not only in the lockerroom ,but directly in the press.Every player has to balance the age old choice of personal glory versus team success.Tiki felt that he knew what was good for the Giants better than the appointed and paid coach(Coughlin).He as a player acted too big for his bridges(sp).He then became a bigger primadonna,by announcing his retirement during the ongoing season and becoming a huge distraction.
He then went into the media,with an awesome job with NBC. Just to show he could be an "objective reporter" he purposely attacked the very fiber of his old team,the coach and the qb.What Giant fans are opposed to is Tiki's desire to try to create and walk over (his perceived) Giant grave.Unfortunately,for Tiki,the Giants were better without him,both in the lockerroom and on the field.
Results are what counts;and Giant fans,who may complain to this day about Coughlin's coaching they ,all,respect and cherish the wins he has produced.Tiki made a huge miscalculation in his career planning and it seemed to avalanche down with his infidelity.Ironically, Tiki tried to pile on when Coughlin's Giants lost to Carolina in the playoffs and EVERYBODY piled onto Tiki's demise.
Athletic talent and hard work creates a great player.Only decency creates a good person.
Tiki got and gets to this day what he deserves.
It's similar to the LeBron James situation. They both disappointed their supporters. The venom stems from the feeling of being stabbed in the back by somebody you loved. I cannot overcome that feeling, nor can I move past it. Maybe time is the only answer, or maybe it will never happen. But I don't think that makes either type of Giant fan 9Tiki supporters, Tiki bashers) better than the other type.
Excellent article. Tiki's last 3 seasons in the league were something truly special. Greatness like that doesn't come often and although he's a jerk he's possibly the best offensive player in the Giants 87 year history. I'll always remember what it was like to watch him play. In this day and age with the running back role often filled by a platoon, the presence of serious knee and head injuries, and the fact that most teams discard great running backs like yesterday's paper at the ripe age of 28, we may never see such a complete back wearing Giants blue ever again.
It may be that the difference between Taylor and Barber was that LT flawed as he was, remained loyal to the Giant coaches, players and the organization.
Barber made an effort a concerted effort to appear squeekly clean. Remember the 60 minutes story; in light of later revelations, it's hard to stomach the manner in which he showed his finely cultivated tastes, beautiful home and family, et al. He still doesn't seem to accept that his life is simply what he made it.
Taylor never maintained he was anything other than what he was. I remember his travails with drugs; to his credit he admitted the problem and overcame it, being MVP that year. Can he rise above his embarrassing tryst? Who knows. At the least, he accepts responsibility for being what he is. It may not always be pretty but at least it is honest.
Good points all, and thanks for the comments. But my point here really wasn't to compare who was a worse guy between Tiki or LT, but rather to say that what an athlete does off the field should constitute a relatively small portion of our relationship with him. I'm not trying to make the rules for fandom here, but as I see it for myself, the athlete's off-field persona shouldn't impact our judgement of him except for the most extreme cases (as in, OJ Simpson).
Tiki comes off as a tool -- I get it and I'm not trying to dispute it. I'm just saying that it's my choice, our choice, to decide how important all that is. To me, it's really not very important. I think it's all been blown out of proportion by the controversy-driven way sports are covered, which have a heavy dose of mean-spiritedness. I mean, for all we know, Thomas Lewis might have dedicated his life to saving AIDS orphans: Does that mean he'll get a standing O at MetLife?
maybe you could give tikee your job..... and since character does not mean anything to you, maybe when sandusky gets paroled he could coach your grandsons' football team... i mean the guy won a national championship @ Penn St.
Tiki is a low life with no class.