'Yayyy Tiki!'

You did it! You're a baseball player!

This is too much. Bleary-eyed from another night of little sleep I am up yesterday and flip to NBC Today, a show that used to be bad and is now just vapid. There he was, right in front of me dressed in a a Boston Red Sox uniform (number 21 natch), former University of Virginia Cavalier and New York Giant running back and future NFL Hall of Famer Tiki Barber (Wahoowa!) awkwardly taking batting cuts under the watchful eye of Willie Mo Pena at Fenway Park. I did a spit take with my coffee.

I knew that being a correspondent for Today had been a part of the 'announcement' Tiki finally made in February after teasing us since rumors of retirement surfaced in Octboer 2006. Personally I was glad Tiki did not land on Fox, where he guested and filled in on the awful Fox & Friends morning show in 2005 and into 2006. But I had yet to see him in action.

So here is a man that played a tough position in a tougher league accomplishing the toughest: playing hard and staying focused after announcing retirement at the top of his game in the toughest media market in the country. Tiki finished 2006 with 1662 rushing yards and a 5.1 yards per carry average, that's just a sick performance for a guy that had to fend off the whole world for the second half of the season. Against the Redskins, Tiki was particularly inspired, running for 123 yards / 5.3 ypc at Giants Stadium and 234 yards / 10.2 ypc at Redskins Stadium, carrying the Giants into the playoffs despite an 8-8 record. Brandon Jacobs has a lot to live up to this season.

And now he sends it back over to Al Roker for a living, has to bear Ann Curry clapping with her big TV smile fake-praising him while her producer yaps in her ear about the next story. The camera loves you Tiki and thank god you're not Dan Marino doing weight-loss commercials. Watching you on the Today show makes me laugh because you're a football player.

And as it turns out Tiki is a man of many talents. Here's Tiki in a suit in Rockefeller Square telling us how to make barbeque...safely. And here's Tiki in a suit telling us how to turn a backyard into a summer playland...safely. In the course of researching this piece I happened to learn that Tiki lives in an apartment and therefore neither barbeques nor has a backyard.

But this isn't a hit piece. It made me think about football and what players do with their lives, while they play and afterwards. Tiki is really the anti-Michael Vick, isn't he?

Michael was hotly pursued by many schools, including UVA and Syracuse and wound up at Virginia Tech. There he was outstanding, a player that no team had answers to his abilities. ESPN the Magazine put him on the cover in 2000 with the headline Human Highlight. Michael was not know to be a good student and opted to go into the NFL draft after his second year at Va Tech, and to my knowledge has not finished his studies. Michael was drafted number one overall in the 2001 draft and was immediately heralded as a superman, the future of the position, a combination of Fran Tarkenton and John Elway.

Tiki and twin brother Ronde Barber opted for UVA, either for the academics or because UVA was the school that would give both of them scholarships, depending on which resource you quote. Tiki went on to become UVA's all-time leading rusher until Thomas Jones, late of the New York Jets, succeeded him. Tiki is still number two overall at UVA. He completed his studies at UVA with a year of eligibility remaining, earning a degree in Management Information Systems (MIS).

But he was unheralded in the NFL draft. He was drafted in the second round of the 1997 draft by the Giants and envisioned as a third-down scatback, in the mold of Brian Mitchell and Dave Meggett. Tiki only earned his starting job fulltime in his sixth year after an injury to Rodney Hampton. As Tiki says in the Escalade commercial, he made the best of his opportunity.

Look at the contrast between Michael and Tiki. Michael has never really fulfilled his promise. Sure he went to the NFC Championship in 2004, and I was at that game and Michael was never in it. He's had injuries and a string of controversy, from Ron Mexico to flipping the bird to the home crowd to the potter bottle to blowing off Congress. Now the dogfighting case and his co-defendant flipping. Michael has turned out to be a nightmare for his coaches, agenst, sponsors and TV and media executives everywhere.

Tiki on the other hand became a consummate professional, unafraid to confront his fumbling problem and try to improve and is in the mind of at least one Giants fan, the greatest running back in Giants history. He has been everything everyone could have asked, appearing on TV, on radio and when he decided to retire, he wrote his own ticket.

You go Tiki. Wahoowa!



Ann Curry and Al Roker cheering Tiki Barber on like a five year old from Today Show broadcast 2 Aug 2007, screencapped from here. PS, for some more good Tiki, check out this video. It's of Tiki catching a touchdown pass from Mike Groh against the FSU Seminoles on November 2 1995, my 26th birthday and the first time an ACC team had beaten Florida State since they joined the ACC in 1991.