Gian-Paul Gonzalez didn’t receive a Super Bowl ring for delivering the “All in” speech that became the rallying cry for the Giants’ march to the Lombardi Trophy last year. But that doesn’t mean his contribution to the team’s success went unnoticed.
“Since last December, things have been a bit crazy in a blessed way,” Gonzalez told The Post. “Ever since the article in The Post and the following stories I started to get a lot of different requests for speaking engagements. It started right after they won the Super Bowl.”
It really started the Friday night before the Christmas Eve game against the Jets, when Gonzalez, a high school teacher in Union, N.J., and a former basketball player at Montclair State, was asked by team chaplain George McGovern to address the Giants during their weekly chapel service.
Gonzalez told those in attendance they needed to be “All in,” that they needed to be fully committed to whatever and whomever was closest to their hearts: their families, their teammates, their friends.
“Sometimes we’ve got to step up and be all in,” Gonzalez told the group that night. “You have to be willing to say, ‘I’m going to be all in and risk everything and bet everything.’ ”
He gave each player a poker chip and had them sign it with their number and told them to keep it somewhere close to them as a reminder of their commitment.
The Giants beat the Jets and then the Cowboys and soon “All in” towels were waving throughout MetLife Stadium in the playoff game against Atlanta and on the road at Green Bay, San Francisco and Indianapolis. Since the Super Bowl, a lot more people have wanted to hear the message that inspired the Giants. It has made Gonzalez a highly sought after speaker.
“I went from getting one request every two weeks to now it’s two or three times a week, and at one point it was every single day,” Gonzalez said. “It’s gone up exponentially.”
In March, Chad Buchanan, then acting general manager of the Portland Trail Blazers, called and asked Gonzalez if he would spend a few days with his team, while it was “going through some transition and I need my guys to be ‘All in.’ ” Gonzalez met the team in Chicago on the same day the Blazers fired Nate McMillan as head coach.
“As I’m going into the hotel, [McMillan’s] actually leaving the hotel,” Gonzalez said. “I was shocked. But what better to be totally committed than when some changes are going to happen?”
The Blazers beat the Bulls that night.
A month later, Gonzalez was at West Point speaking during a breakfast ceremony for a group of Cadets.
“What better example of being committed than men and women who serve their country with their lives?” Gonzalez said.
Since the Super Bowl he has also spoken to youth groups, men’s groups, corporations, non-profit organizations and political agencies. He now has a personal assistant handling his scheduling, his new wife Elizabeth. “It’s been one thing leading to another,” Gonzalez said.
Though his message is tailored to the audience, all his talks follow the central theme the Giants heard last December.
“I feel if you’re committed as a man and you’re committed as a person and to the people around you and your family, being committed as an employee will happen naturally,” he said.
The reason why his message resonates in different environments is because it tugs at basic instinct.
“It’s something that I believe we all want to do, but one thing about being committed is it’s scary,” Gonzalez said. “It’s easier to be uncommitted. In our society, there’s that need to be uncommitted so that if something doesn’t work out, you can say, ‘I wasn’t really trying anyway.’ But deep down inside we don’t really want to live with regret. We really would rather say, ‘It didn’t work, but I gave everything that I had.’ It resonates with people wanting to be the person that they’ve been blessed to be. Sometimes we hold back because of our own fears.”
Gonzalez thanks his supervisors at Union High School for giving him flexibility in his work schedule. He’s also excited about how “All in” has impacted his non-profit ministry 4-one, which uses sports to spread a message of hope.
“Now I have people calling me up saying, ‘If you’re going to a jail I want to go to and play [basketball] with those kids.’ Or if I’m running a tournament in Brooklyn, I’ll have kids call me up and say, ‘Hey can I help volunteer for that tournament in Brooklyn?’ ” he said. “It’s about the organization becoming bigger because guys are saying they want to be committed: They want to be committed to God or they want to be committed to giving back to their neighborhoods or to run a basketball camp in their own community and show that they care.”
All in, still.