On the day he retired as a New York Giant, Tiki Barber planned to protect his legacy as a one-uniform athlete the same way he protected the football in the fourth quarter -- with extreme urgency and care. He wanted to be like Phil Simms and Lawrence Taylor, a Giant you couldn't fathom in the colors of another team, but four dormant seasons later, at 36, Barber has no choice but to abandon the sentiment and launch his improbable comeback with another franchise -- maybe the Pittsburgh Steelers, maybe not. The Giants don't want him back, and truth is, the greatest offensive player in franchise history couldn't rebuild a bridge to the past, anyway, not after everything that went down with Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning and a once-adoring fan base that now jeers his image or the mere mention of his name. "But with my life stagnating, and feeling like I wasn't really doing anything," Barber said by phone, "I realized I still love the game of football. I'd lost my way, and then I realized this is what I still want to do." After a sobering failure in his bid to become the next Matt Lauer, and after his marriage came undone in a very ugly and public way, Barber needed to go back to running the ball, but before he runs it for a different team, the man who finished his career with three straight seasons of 2,000-plus yards from scrimmage can notarize the claim that he never wanted to leave the Giants family, even as he blitzed Coughlin and Manning from the blind side. In 2007, less than half a season after he retired, Barber considered accepting an offer to play with his twin brother, Ronde, in Tampa Bay before declining in the name of staying true to blue. "Staying a Giant in retirement was very important to me," Barber said. "Playing with my brother is something we dreamed of doing for years, but I'd been brought up and nurtured in one organization. I saw it as a sacred thing." Source: ESPN New York
Even if Barber played for Tampa that season.......wouldn't have made any difference in their playoff game against the G-Men. :icon_cool:
