Plaxico Burress sat alongside Santonio Holmes on the orange-and-white bench marked G Series, in the bright sunshine, the kind of sunshine he never got to bathe in for 20 long months inside the darkness of a nightmare place called the Oneida Correctional Facility.
The Jets had already picked off the Jaguars’ tomato-can quarterback, Luke McCown, four times, and now Burress and Holmes and Derrick Mason joked with secondary coach Dennis Thurman as the scrubs were finishing off a 32-3 rout of the trash-talking Jaguars in garbage time.
In another time, in another place, on another team, New York would have witnessed an entirely different scene, an entirely different Burress. But on this day, his final stat line spoke volumes about the man he used to be and the man everyone should hope he is now: no catches, no tantrums, no sulking, no worries.
Bottom line: Plaxico Burress doesn’t need to be Top Gun anymore.
So when someone wanted to know if it might have been difficult for him to stay motivated on a day when he was targeted only twice and Rex Ryan nearly got Mark Sanchez killed trying to get him a fourth-quarter touchdown in the red zone, Burress smiled and said: “It’s easy for me to stay motivated, everything that I’ve been through. . . . Little things like that — it doesn’t bother me. . . . I don’t let something like that get me down. I got 14 more games to play, with a lot more in me to let loose. So when that time comes, everybody’ll see it.”
He chuckled when asked if he ever remembered a game where he didn’t catch a pass.
“Yeah one. . . . I believe it was the Carolina game [the Giants] played back in . . . ’06, in the playoff game,” he said.
The next day, after Carolina 23, Giants 0, Burress blew off the season-ending team meeting.
“I’m a rhythm player, so you really want to get a ball early, and kinda get into a groove,” Burress said. “I didn’t have a ball in the first half last week, so you just stay patient, just keep fighting. Just one of those days where they just weren’t allowing me to try to beat ’em.
“They weren’t gonna let me line up and just play single coverage. They played a split-safety, a lot of two-high coverages to stop me from getting deep or going down the field or stuff like that. . . . Just run the little slants and those routes and try to keep everything in front of ’em.”
Burress chuckled when reminded that Ryan had tried to force feed him a touchdown.
“Yeah he was, he was, but it kinda got away, so . . . didn’t get that one either,” Burress said.
He has grown to accept that some days they lock you up with double coverage, other days you are rewarded with single coverage.
“This is how this game is, you know?” Burress said. “Made some plays last week. . . . Didn’t make any this week. . . . Then [Sunday] we play Oakland; they’re an all man-to-man team. You never know. That’s just how this game is, man. No plays this week. Big game next week.”
At 34, only 104 days into his long-lost freedom, it is much easier for Burress to drink from a half-full glass.
“There’s no need for us to try to force the ball into me in double coverage just to get me a catch,” he said. ” If teams want to pay me that much respect, then hey. . . . they went out and played me like that, hey, it says a lot about me too.”
What says more about him is how his new teammates view him.
“Plax is a great teammate,” said Dustin Keller. “Actually when he came to our team, I couldn’t believe how good of a guy he was, how good of a teammate. He has a wealth of knowledge, and he just shares that with everybody. His whole thing, it’s not about him, it’s not about him getting stats.”
Sanchez apologized to Burress about his goose egg.
“You know what, it’s disappointing, but he’s a pro and he was great about it,” Sanchez said.
Keller (six catches, 101 yards, one touchdown), the beneficiary of the Jaguars’ obsession outside with Burress and Holmes, recalled Burress in the huddle in the season opener when it was Cowboys 24, Jets 10.
” ‘I hate losing. I hate losing.’ That’s what he kept saying in the huddle,” Keller said. “He’s definitely a team guy, and he fits into this team as good as anybody.”
No one can call him a complete zero today.