IT’S safe to say the majority of Giants fans don’t care whether Jerry Reese is black, blue or green as long as he figures out a way to get the the team to another Super Bowl. But there are plenty who do care, and most of them are African-Americans who believe too many organizations want them on the playing field but not in the front office.
“That’s [felt] around the league,” former Giants great Harry Carson said yesterday. “There are former players and African-Americans around the league that have those frustrations.”
Reese’s hiring as the Giants new general manager should turn some of those frustrations into motivation. That’s what role models do. He becomes just the third African-American GM in the NFL, after the Ravens’ Ozzie Newsome and Rick Smith of the Texans. Rod Graves, another African-American, is the vice president of football operations for the Cardinals, and James Harris is the vice president of player personnel with the Jaguars. All have important roles, but Reese’s appointment is perhaps more significant because of the franchise.
“This is not Baltimore and this is not Houston,” Carson said. “This is New York and this will resonate throughout the league.”
Carson attended yesterday’s press conference to formally announce Reese’s hiring not as the organization’s Hall of Fame linebacker, but as the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which advocates the hiring of minority coaches and executives in the NFL. It’s a position Reese persuaded him to take.
“This is huge from the standpoint that [the Giants] are a very conservative organization going back to 1925,” Carson said. “It would have been easy to have gone for some other people. But here’s a guy who has shown what he can do and he’s been rewarded.”
John Mara and the Tisch family weren’t trying to make a social statement by promoting Reese. They interviewed several other candidates, and who knows whether Reese would have gotten the job had Steve Pioli of the Patriots expressed an interest. What matters is Reese earned his job, as Mara said, “the old fashioned way.”
Hired by George Young as a scout in 1994 on the recommendation of scout Jeremiah Davis, Reese was the assistant director of pro personnel by 1999. In 2002 he was promoted to director of player personnel, running the Giants’ draft.
“Obviously we were aware of the significance of this announcement, but you know what? If in a couple of years from now if we’re not successful, nobody’s going to care about that,” Mara said. “They’ll be looking for changes. But we obviously feel very strongly that he is the guy.”
So do his peers. Doug Williams was watching highlights of Super Bowl XXII, in which he was the first black quarterback to win the big game, when he saw the announcement of Reese’s hiring scroll across his television screen.
“It all boils down to getting an opportunity,” said Williams, who is in his third year as a personnel executive with the Bucs. “We’ve got to have more people like the Maras and the Tischs of the world being open to making those decisions.”
Just as Williams allowed ensuing generations of young blacks to believe they could play quarterback in a Super Bowl, Reese will motivate some to become GMs. It’s a duty he embraces.
“I feel like it’s my time to carry the torch,” he said. “I’m a torch bearer to keep the dream alive. There are African-Americans coming behind me that will say, ‘Look at Jerry.’ I don’t take that lightly. It’s part of who I am.”
The Giants like all that he is.