Tiki Talks to the World

“They don’t hit you like that on ‘Fox and Friends’”.

I credit Stan Verrett of the Sports Center posse with the most humorously succinct take on the “Tiki Situation”. We understand from Tiki that his Giants teammates have known for a while of his retirement plans, but now us mere fans have had a few games to process the announcement. I was pulling for my team in the first Monday night game vs. the Cowboys following Tiki’s announcement, yet there was something else I wanted to take a closer look at. I was also high fiving my friend and fellow Giants fan Adam when Tiki got blown up on a vicious hit by 257 pound De Marcus Ware, and lost the ball quicker than I lose my keys. Why did I want Tiki to get slammed?

Its not the fact that Tiki is leaving football, but where he is going that is unsettling. The world of morning network reporting just seems so politely objective and so cheerfully perky that it should be light years away from the mentality we expect from a Sunday Football Warrior. A football player should be partisan, dyed in the colors of his team, not objectively covering all sides with the required vanilla tone of network media. As a football player one is encouraged to yell and curse and slam your fist into the lockers when pumping up your teammates before a game, wouldn’t that make it almost comical to have a football player delivering the peppy pleasantries of morning news?

But Tiki’s definitely a different type of football player, you can hear it right away in the articulate gentleness of his words and you can see it in the unrelenting charisma of his million dollar smile. As Tiki informs the world in his unapologetic Cadillac Escalade commercial, “opportunities are seldom perfect,” but when the guy ahead of you is injured, you gotta run for daylight and make the most of it. Obviously, Tiki has moved way up the ladder of morning reporter candidates because he is already a media figure and a recognizable name. But why would he want to? There are a million other ways to make money and be a public person that also don’t destroy your knees. Some of which help people and most of which have more character.

Tiki’s early retirement has been compared to that of the great Jim Brown, who left football to kick ass on screen in lowbrow but popular movies. At least he still WAS Jim Brown, a swashbuckling larger than life hero. That Tiki could still be Tiki on the morning news, that he could be the REAL Tiki while quipping with the co-anchor and straightening his papers as they go to break just doesn’t feel right. As a fan you want your team to be led by larger than life warriors, who spit out the blood when they get hit and growl back to the line for the next play. It’s safe to say Mark Bavaro never wanted to read the morning news.