For a day, for a news cycle, the Giants got a taste of how the other half lives — which is to say, on the record, on the edge, on the back page, on the Internet, on Twitter, on Facebook, on call. For a day, for a news cycle, blue was green, East Rutherford was Florham Park, hard work was “Hard Knocks,” speaking softly was replaced by the big stick.
“That isn’t us,” Eli Manning said.
“We live in a whole new world,” Justin Tuck said, “and it takes some getting used to.”
It’s funny, for the first few weeks of football camps, the Giants practically had to trip people by tying their sneakers together to get anyone to talk to them. The world, it seemed, had moved the capital of New York — certainly football New York — from Albany to Cortland. It seemed as if every Jet had two reporters and a blogger surgically attached to him.
The Giants? Sure, they had a fresh Lombardi Trophy to show off. But since when is it news to win a world championship? They give a trophy out every year, don’t they?
Heck, a postage-stamp town like Green Bay, Wis., can win a world championship. That’s easy. Getting every syllable Antonio Cromartie utters properly recorded for posterity? That’s the big ticket.
And sure, the Giants being the Giants, they laughed about the attention the Jets were getting coming off an 8-8 slopfest of a season. They seemed happy as clams allowing bad dormitory beds to serve as the entrancing news nugget of their lives. Ignore us now, they intimated, because you’ll need to conserve your strength for when we’re still playing in January.
Still, as Jets Week approached, as the blood lust for the Snoopy Cup began to boil, you could sense ever so slightly the Giants, as a whole, were more than puzzled, if less than peeved, at the reality that the Jets always seem to set the regional football conversation — even as they mugged the Jets 26-3, treating them the way place-holder Lucy Van Pelt treated placekicker Charlie Brown (who, contrary to rumor, is not the third man in the fight in the Nick Folk/Josh Brown boot-off).
And then a funny thing happened.
“We got a taste,” Tuck said, “of what it’s like when you’re not careful.”
“Careful” has different meanings to different people. The Giants spent a day, spent a news cycle, talking about new images that surfaced of Jason Pierre-Paul dunking Prince Amukamara in an ice tub and older ones involving rookie Rueben Randle. All the attendant sociological issues came tumbling forth — hazing, bullying, stuff Tuck says “everyone in this room understands as a serious issue and wouldn’t tolerate if we thought that was happening here.”
“The guys,” Tom Coughlin said yesterday, “understand how they’re supposed to behave.”
There are two things that are especially funny about all of this. First, of course, is the whole brouhaha started thanks to punter Steve Weatherford posting video of the incident on Twitter; need we mention where Weatherford used to hang his helmet before he played with the Giants?
Second, how much spicier would an “ice-tub incident” have to be in Jets camp for it to be noticed among all the other daily carnival acts? Here’s a guess: A rookie would have to have his head shaved, have his cheeks taped together like Larry Lester in “The Breakfast Club,” be forced to scream into the camera “Bleep you, Belichick!” all while wearing a Tebow jersey … and then be dunked in the tub.
And that might not even be enough, frankly.
No, all it took was one day, one news cycle, for the Giants to remember what they so admire about being Giants, about the difference between Bergen County and Morris County, between the opera and the circus. Maybe it gets a little dull going to work, doing your work, keeping your mouth shut, going home. Maybe a slew of Jets would suffer from hives if they tried doing it that way.
But it isn’t a bad way to be. Steering clear of TMZ can actually be A-OK.