Plaxico Burress describes his journey from Super Bowl hero to the Latin Quarter to the Oneida Correctional Facility to the Jets on Tuesday night in a compelling interview on HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.”
“I had a drink in my left hand,” Burress says. “I’m just walking up the stairs. And, you know, it was dark. And I kind of, you know, missed a step. That’s when I felt my gun … started to slide. I went to grab it … to stop it from falling. Pow.”
“I knew it had went off. I saw the fire, like, come through my jeans.”
Burress tells Gumbel he did not feel the pain immediately.
“I took a couple more steps and my jeans were like — my jeans are wet. And I looked down. I had some Chuck Taylors on and they were — the white was all red. I’m in trouble,” he says.
Burress never thought he would go to jail, even after his wife Tiffany, an attorney, told him he could be made an example. His attorney, Benjamin Brafman, informed Burress that following Mayor Bloomberg’s press conference, bail had been raised from $10,000 to $250,000.
“I came out, you know, from my little holding cell to the arraignment, and — (chuckle) I sat down with — with Ben,” Burress says. “He was like, ‘We got a problem.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Mayor Bloomberg just went on TV, said you should be, you know, punished to the full extent of the law.’ And you know what I said after that? I said, ‘Who is Mayor Bloomberg?’”
Burress’ appeal to the grand jury for compassion fell on deaf ears.
“I’m saying to myself, ‘I’m going to talk to some regular people that live in these streets up in New York City,'” he says. “And they’re going to sit there and listen to me and say, ‘The guy was just … not smart. Made a bad decision. The guy shot his self. Nobody else was harmed, you know. He’ll just learn a lesson from that in itself.’
“I was wrong again.
“Half of those people had no idea who I was, half of those people. They just saw a African-American over there sitting around making a lotta money carrying a gun into a club and shot his self.”
Asked by Gumbel why the appeal didn’t work, Burress says, “My name is Plaxico Burress. My career, my life hasn’t always been squeaky clean. You get portrayed as being a certain type of person or certain type of individual based on what the media says — kinda car you drive, how you dress. That’s just the reality of society.”
Burress describes his public image this way: “I won’t take no [junk] from nobody. You gotta earn my respect as a person. You got love for me, I got love for you.”
Burress addresses two domestic disturbances with his wife.
“My wife and I, our relationship hasn’t always been pretty. I went through things that as a normal person would have,” he says.
Burress details his 21-month time in jail.
“To be living in that cell 16, 17 hours a day, you go from, you know, being able to do just about anything that you wanna do to basically putting you in a cage, putting you in a box. It’ll get your attention,” he says.
He cleaned showers and toilets and mopped floors and stairwells.
And cried how many times?
“I lost count,” Burress says. “You work your whole life to get to a certain place and you can tear it all down with just making a bad decision.”
Jets coach Rex Ryan expresses confidence in a Burress revival.
“I just have that confidence and belief in myself that I’m gonna go out there and I’m gonna play at a high level,” Burress says. “And then everybody’s gonna go back there scratching their head again: ‘How does he do it? How did he not practice and do it? He’s been away for two years. How does he do it?’”
Burress will not play in the Jets’ preseason opener on Monday due to a sprained ankle suffered in training camp.
Asked if he needs to have a great year to complete a redemption story, Burress says: “I’ve already had a great year. Everything else is gonna be icing on the cake.”
Burress is not allowed to own guns anymore.
“I walk around every day with my head held high,” he says. “Yeah, I’m the guy that shot myself. People are always asking me, ‘Would you change that situation?’ I say, ‘Hell yea.’ Nobody wants to go to jail. But, the person that I am and where I’m at, at this time, I wouldn’t change the person.”
The interview premieres on “Real Sports” Tuesday at 10 p.m. It will be rebroadcast several times throughout the week.