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TAMPA — Well, this ought to be interesting. Sports fans in New England have made little pretense about how much they despise Rex Ryan. They hate his mouth. They hate his bravado. They hate his swagger. And they especially hate the way he talks as if he has an entire jewelry box of championship rings backing up his bluster.
And now, in a wonderful twist, they have this:
They have their very own Rex Ryan.
His name is Bobby Valentine.
You knew it was only a matter of time before Valentine would try to take 109 years of mutual Yankees-Red Sox contempt and make it his own, that he would bogart all the emotion and all the rancor accumulated over the decades and stick his chin in it.
Now, I don’t happen to have a problem with that, with Bobby being Bobby, in the same way I’ve never had a problem with Rex being Rex. The Jets coach wasn’t going to go out of his way to kiss Bill Belichick’s rings? The Red Sox manager sure wasn’t going to bow to 27 championship banners. If he refused to do that when he worked in the same town, he wasn’t going to start just because he shares a division now.
“I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t judge people,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said yesterday, on a day when Valentine’s riffs on the 11-year-old Derek Jeter Flip Play and Jason Varitek’s 8-year-old in-front-of-cameras-but-behind-the-mask challenge of Alex Rodriguez buzzed around the home clubhouse at Steinbrenner Field. “I don’t know what Bobby was thinking when he said what he said. I’d have to ask him.”
Girardi smiled.
“And I don’t think I will.”
It was a mystical bit of good timing that this should all happen yesterday because when the clubhouse doors opened at around 9:15 in the morning, there was a visitor wearing a different kind of pinstripes than the ones worn by the other denizens of the room, a smart blue-on-blue blazer-and-trousers pairing.
Derek Jeter walked in, saw the familiar face in the unfamiliar surrounding, walked over for a collegial manhug.
“It’s good to finally be able to wish you good luck,” Terry Francona told him, “and mean it.”
Francona and Jeter are two men who can tell you all about the Yankees and the Red Sox, a rivalry for the ages that crested in 2003 and 2004, each team winning epic ALCS battles, the Sox ending an 86-year jinx to boot, a time when Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park felt like tinderboxes ready to blow every time the teams took the field.
“It’s not something you can invent,” Francona said. “It’s not something you can manufacture. It’s just something that’s got to happen naturally.”
We know Valentine, we know his penchant for drama, we know his willingness to transform everything into a first-person narrative. There has never been an in-between with him: You either enjoy the hell out of it and listen for the baseball wisdom — and there’s plenty of it — between the centric spasms. Or you hope he goes 0-162 every year.
And it has to kill him that he remains on the outside looking in on this rivalry even as he wears the Red Sox uniform and resides in the corner office. It has to kill him that he has to play catch-up. Maybe that’s why, of all the tributes someone can pay to Varitek, he chose a moment that even the catcher himself has spent eight years trying to forget.
And the Flip Play?
Well, Valentine’s timing couldn’t have been more impeccable. It turns out relay drills were already on the Yankees’ carefully crafted daily agenda yesterday, so of course there was a moment when Jeter came flying across the field — just as he does, forever, on YouTube and a thousand highlight reels — and yelped gleefully, “I told you we practice this!”
And as you saw that, you could easily imagine Tom Brady, hearing Rex Ryan compare his practice habits unfavorably to Peyton Manning’s, zipping a laser beam throw to Rob Gronkowski this August and thinking: We practice a little, too.
New Englanders like that version of reality. They like force-feeding Rex Ryan and his title-free mouth heaping portions of crow.
Wonder how they like Bobby V. so far.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com