Tiki Barber

Tiki Barber Can’t Stay Gone

Posted by Ian Crouch

Tiki Barber had, for a while, an almost perfectly managed retirement. His announcement that the 2006 N.F.L. season would be his last was a surprise. He had played ten years, a long time for any football player, and especially for a running back, and was already the all-time rushing leader for the New York Giants, but he seemed to be at the height of his powers. (Indeed, his final season was the second-most successful of his career, in terms of rushing yards, and the previous one had been his best.) But he probably surprised more people when he actually followed through with his plan and walked away.

Professional athletes have over the years been about as inclined to abdicate their positions of power and prestige as have Middle Eastern dictators.

In the past year, though, Barber’s story has started to sound a bit more familiar, culminating with word earlier this week that he had filed papers with the league to return to football, after a series of ups and then rather furious downs. “After seeing my brother still have fun at our age, it reignited the fire,” Barber explained to FOXSports.com, referring to his twin brother Ronde, a cornerback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “I’m really looking forward to the challenge of seeing if I can get back to the level of where I was.” But several sports columnists identified another factor: money. In the past year, Barber sparked a public scandal when he left his wife, Ginny—then eight months pregnant with twins—and began dating a twenty-three-year-old intern at NBC, where he had been a football analyst and contributor to the “Today Show.” Soon after, the network terminated his contract, citing a “morality clause.” In June, several news outlets reported that Barber was broke.

Un-retiring is awkward enough in the best of circumstances, but it’s especially tricky for Barber, who insisted in 2007 that he was thoroughly finished with the game, and then spent the next few years burning his bridges to the league; he spoke disparagingly about his former coach, Tom Coughlin, and his former quarterback, Eli Manning—and in so doing alienated the Giants organization and its fans. (The team said this week that they wished him luck elsewhere.) Antonio Pierce, a former teammate and current analyst for ESPN, offered this take on the Barber comeback:

Tiki Barber the person? The leader? The person in that locker room? He’s not going to do anything for your team. Now if that’s the guy you think you’re bringing in, you might want to look in another direction.

Some people had bristled at what they saw as Barber’s nearly season-long retirement tour in 2006, but generally Barber was remarkable for his widespread likability. When Ben McGrath wrote about him for the magazine, in 2007, both Barber and his agent, Mark Lepselter, were enjoying the far-reaching profitability of what they called Tiki Inc., which included forty-thousand-dollar appearance fees, ad contracts, and his entry into what Barber had announced as his post-football career: television news. Barber was also an intriguing character among professional athletes, a genuine Renaissance Man. McGrath notes that Barber wrote children’s books, acted in plays, and hosted a radio show with his brother Ronde. He had lunch with Condoleezza Rice and was an avid reader of history. Yet Barber was also a “shrewd businessman, methodical and calculating,” traits that, in concert with his revved-up engine of self-promotion, left some detractors cold. The hosts of WFAN’s “Mike and the Mad Dog” radio show, McGrath writes, “snickered about how Barber had come to see himself as Nelson Mandela.”

Barber seemed equipped to succeed in his life after football, but Frank Gifford, another former Giant turned television personality, expressed some skepticism to McGrath at the time:

He’ll have a very difficult time in television eclipsing what he’s done here … Unless he becomes Walter Cronkite, it’s not going to happen. He can be successful there, but to transcend what he’s done … I don’t think people will let him do it. Sometimes you get trapped in your own greatness.

Gifford might have been describing Barber’s current situation, only with the actors reversed. It seems Barber has trapped himself.

There have been signs that the Buccaneers, home to Ronde Barber, might give Tiki a look. (That’s assuming there will be a football season this year; team owners continue to threaten a lock-out for the fall.) Yet there have not been many successful thirty-six-year-old running backs. Even if you dial Barber’s odometer back a few years because of his retirement, thirty-something backs are not normally major contributors in the N.F.L. (Marcus Allen had success after thirty-five, but he’s an exception.) Will Barber be content to be a backup, a third-down option, and a veteran influence on up-and-coming players? And would any team really value that influence?

And should he even be thinking about playing? In 2007, Barber complained to McGrath about being old, and talked at length about the extensive rehab he required each week to recover from the poundings he took on the field. More recently, Barber has said that the game is inherently dangerous and that he feared he would suffer long-term brain damage from his playing days, in the form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. McGrath, in his article on football head injuries from January, spoke to Barber:

“They can’t try to do more,” he said. “They can’t afford to change what it is: an aggressively fast, physically brutal game.” He added that he believes he will die with traces of C.T.E. in his brain tissue; he now views C.T.E. as “a necessary side effect of contact activity… It’s scary.”

Barber’s earning power came from his legs and his likability. The latter seems to be exhausted; we’ll see if there’s anything left in the former. Regardless, we’ve come a long way from 2007, when, as McGrath wrote at the time, Barber had sounded so confident while explaining his retirement plans to reporters: “You know, it’s better to leave ’em wanting more.”

Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.

Source : Newyorker