INDIANAPOLIS — Dan Basch does not think he will even check with Chase Blackburn to see if he can make it to dinner Saturday night. Or to brunch Sunday morning. Nothing like that.
“I doubt it and I don’t want to even ask him. He’s got business,” Basch said yesterday. “Bachelor parties are cool things, but a guy’s job and providing for families are way more important.”
COMPLETE GIANTS SUPER BOWL COVERAGE
Basch will be involved in a pretty remarkable and fortuitous situation this weekend. He is Blackburn’s best friend — they were college teammates at Akron, Basch was Blackburn’s best man at his wedding and is godfather to one of his sons. Now Blackburn, the Giants’ starting middle linebacker, is set to be Basch’s best man at Basch’s wedding this month.
Basch’s bachelor party, though, is this weekend. And it’s not in Vegas.
It’s at Super Bowl XLVI.
Basch is among a group of approximately 10 people driving from Cleveland here on Saturday to have a bachelor party that surely puts any in Vegas to shame. How did this happen?
Basch said he and Blackburn began discussing the bachelor party more than a year ago, and came up with an interesting idea last summer when Blackburn was still unsigned.
“He said, ‘Well, if I get picked up, the Super Bowl would be a good thing,’ ” Basch said. “But when he didn’t get picked up, we kind of teased and before even the Giants called him, we actually scheduled it to be this weekend [in Indy]. Because we figured what better place?
“And then once we scheduled that, he got picked up and I was like, ‘Do you want to change the weekend?’ ”
Blackburn said no, and now Basch and friends aren’t changing things, they’re embracing them.
Actually, he said if Blackburn’s Giants weren’t here to play the Patriots, the party might have gone somewhere else. Odds are the group wouldn’t have been able to stay in Indy, go to the game, etc. But Basch has a Super Bowl ticket now.
“I’m pretty sure that was a wedding gift,” he said.
Blackburn has been generous with his buddy and he’s been superb for the Giants as well. He spent the previous six seasons with the Giants but was not invited to training camp before this season. He joined the team in Week 13, started the final four regular-season games and all three playoff games. The Giants are 6-1 since his return.
Blackburn has helped make defensive calls and, according to Mathias Kiwanuka, greatly improved the unit’s communication.
“Historically speaking, I don’t know if there’s ever been a guy like that. In the history of the NFL,” Dave Tollefson said, “that’s joined a team this late and has really propelled us to win games.”
Blackburn has a newborn and a son under 2 at home, so to earn a paycheck during his hiatus from football, he considered becoming a substitute eighth-grade math teacher at a school in his native Ohio.
“He didn’t want to be teaching yet, but he would do it because he’s a hard worker,” his wife, Megan, said. “He couldn’t be sitting around. He was driving himself crazy sitting around the house all day.”
Ironically, Blackburn was with the Giants the entire championship year in 2007-08 but played a backup and special teams role.
“Obviously,” he said, “it’s completely different seasons for me.”