The tears began flowing quickly, exactly 20 words into his farewell, when Chris Snee stepped outside the Quest Diagnostics Training Center on Monday afternoon to say goodbye. He didn’t need to look over to his right, where MetLife Stadium stands, for his voice to begin cracking. He kept pausing to rub his nose, kept looking down as if hoping there were some words he could read to break the intervals of silence that were broken only by the shutterbugs.
“It’s a sad day for the New York Giants,” Tom Coughlin said. “It’s a sad day for our whole family personally.”
Snee’s wife, Kate, Coughlin’s daughter, stood at the back edge of the media scrum, holding their 4-year-old son, Walker, hanging on her husband’s every word.
“It’s a bittersweet day,” he began, and halted there, because it was worse than that. It was a day he dreaded, they all dread, the day that told him once and for all he was no longer forever young.
“It’ll be an adjustment for myself.”
He had to stop again. After five seconds or so, he looked over to where his wife was standing and said in a voice that cracked, “My family.”
More silence.
“But something I had to do, so uh, it’s been a great 10 years, I’m thankful for all the memories, and for the opportunity to come back this spring and try to improve on the memory I have from last year, but it wasn’t going to happen. So, I had to admit that, I can no longer play. It’s a sad day, but one that once I leave here I’ll be at peace with.”
Snee steadied himself and answered question after question, about the two Super Bowls he won blocking for Eli Manning, making a mockery of the notion there was any nepotism involved playing for his father-in-law, on his way to becoming the first Giant promised by John Mara a place in the club’s Ring of Honor on the day he retired.
Then he thanked Giants fans, and media members who have chronicled his 10 wonderful years living a dream, and he picked up Walker and said, “All right, let’s go find mommy. Where’d she go?”
Snee walked to his wife, and by this time, 10-year-old Dylan Snee, the oldest of their three boys, was sobbing. Kate Snee had been kneeling down in a blue dress consoling him, but now Chris Snee took over, and Kate stepped back. Chris held Walker, a curly-haired blond boy, in his right arm, and spoke softly to Dylan, who was sobbing into his father’s chest and on his shoulder, undoubtedly wishing he could be making confetti snow angels on the field again following a Super Bowl triumph.
“Go inside?” Chris asked. “C’mon. Let’s go. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”
The crying didn’t stop once the Snees were inside.
“I just walked into the cafeteria and saw two of the boys, the two oldest boys, crying,” Coughlin said. “When Kate saw me she cried, too. Because you have to remember for Dylan, this is his whole life. He’s been coming around here since he was a little guy.”
Mara had called Snee “the quintessential Giant.” To Coughlin, his son-in-law was a great football player and an even greater man, and spoke to his team about that. A man of honor. Coughlin was the first member of the Giants family Snee had informed.
“Please, please Lord — I’ll take a hundred of ’em, OK?” Coughlin said. “If there’s 53, I’ll take 53 of him. Ask his teammates what they think about him. Go ask the guys that have been with him forever. Ask Eli, really what he thinks about him.”
Snee was a second-round pick in 2004 after the Giants traded for Manning in the first round.
Snee was everything they hoped for and more. He was tough, smart, powerful, durable. He loved the game. He loved being a Giant. He hated missing practice, much less games. He was the starting right guard before Manning was the starting quarterback. He played 10 seasons and no one suspected him of being a mole, even if he had to endure the inevitable grief about playing for his father-in-law.
“As he got older,” Manning said, “he kind of started responding back to the guys, and he kind of became the big man in the locker room, and his play kind of earned him the right that no one gave him a hard time.”
To Snee, Coughlin was “Coach” when he reported for work.
“I still think we have the same goal, and that’s to win games,” Snee said. “We approach this in a purely business fashion. I come in, greet him the way every other player does, and the same for me. Then off the field we’re able to separate that.”
Snee is the last link to the start of the Manning Era. He was Manning’s road roommate and roommate before home games back then. They would sit next to each other on the planes and buses. Snee called him Sunday and broke the news Manning didn’t want to hear.
“You look around and you see less and less guys who were kind of from that era or you share that connection with,” Manning said. “That’s just football.”
Chris Snee, The Pride of Montrose, Pa., in so many ways The Pride of the New York Football Giants as well, left it all on the field, until there was nothing left for him to leave. This is a young man’s game, of that he was reminded when David Diehl retired following the 2013 season, and as his hips and elbow began to betray him. It can be a cruel game, as he witnessed when Rich Seubert broke his leg, when Shaun O’Hara was handed his pink slip. Snee, 32, was spared that indignity, and gets to retire a Giant, more on his terms than most.
He was a throwback. He played 101 consecutive games before a concussion sidelined him. He played an entire game against the Eagles with food poisoning.
“I played through everything I could,” Snee said. He could bench press 605 pounds. He was the block of granite who paved holes for Tiki Barber, then Earth, Wind & Fire, and a defiant bodyguard for Manning.
He was a quiet rock, one of those heart-and-soul guys whose departure will leave a giant void in the Giants’ heart and soul.
“I used to look up and see where he sat. … There’s no question it was a great source of confidence to me,” Coughlin said. “ … And now he’s not going to be in that chair.”