Just between you, me, the lamppost and everyone else we know, Sunday's rumble in the Meadow(lands) is really shaping up to be one of those old-fashioned cataclysmic NFC East grudge matches. You know the kind of game I'm talking about. Two teams who know and loathe each other intimately, going after each other over a frozen gridiron, each side trying to grimly outlast the other. Over my years as an Eagles' fan, I've seen a lot of games like this, all of them filled with good, old fashioned hate. Gosh, I can't wait for it. Who doesn't love to hate the Giants?
In an interview conducted the other day, Antonio Pierce stuck his foot halfway down his mouth, perhaps as a way to further spice this matchup. For once in my life, I feel grateful for his presence. In an interview that was posted yesterday on the Giants website, Antonio Pierce had this to say about his team's "psyche." According to the Giants' defensive captain: "The psyche of the [Giants] this year is a group that understands what it takes to win the championship. We have 35 or 40 players that were on this team last year, coaching staff, front office, everybody. They know what it takes to win the championship. So what we have this year is experience. And that is what we are going to use this Sunday."
The way that Pierce phrases this golden little nugget just about kills me. Up to a point, this is a perfectly logical, even bland, assessment of what he feels to be the strength of this year's crop of Giants. I can see where he's coming from, since the Giants are a veteran team that very closely resembles the team that won it all last year, (give or take a village idiot) most of whom do remember knocking off the Pats in Arizona. I can even follow Pierce in his thinking that the Giants feel themselves to be in possession of the sort of collective unconscious social memory that a championship brings. Winning it all is not an impossible thing to them, since they just did it last year. Fine. But let's do some unpacking of his narrative thread.
Does Antonio Pierce really mean that he expects David Tyree to catch another ball in his hat again? If you took Mel Kiper Jr., Stephen A. Smith, Michael Bloomberg, Kramer, my dead mother, Niko Bellic, Boris Yeltsin and Chewbacca into a room to reach a consensus about the single moment in which the Giants broke the Pats' back last year, they would come to agree on Tyree's catch faster than you can say "Giants suck, Eli swallows." Does Pierce mean to suggest that the experience of watching that play has so galvanized and inspired the Giants as to give them a decisive edge when the Eagles come to town? Let's consider Pierce's use of the term "psyche." According to those wonderful people who are responsible for the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun "psyche" derives from the Greek "psukhe," meaning the breath, life or soul of a thing, and has over time come to mean the human soul, mind or spirit. Huh. Applying this definition to the awkward phrasing of Pierce's statement, one might reasonably come to the conclusion that the soul, mind and spirit of the Giants (I didn't know they had a soul either, but bear with me here) hold the cherished memory of the most unlikely and unsatisfying championship in the history of the NFL so close that they feel armor-plated, ironclad protection from the assassins that will come in to kill them and their dreams of a repeat on Sunday. Remember this, when you hear the Giants talking about their title. They were one really, really lucky play away from letting the Pats go 19-0. So, from the horse's (ass's) mouth, the Giants are pinning their lives, souls and collective spirit to the hopes of getting similarly lucky again. Luck is what it took for them to win the Super Bowl, luck is apparently what they will hope for this time around.
This is all good news to the Eagles. Brian Dawkins knows nothing about luck. Brian Westbrook is under the impression that luck is what comes when you want it more than those other guys. McNabb is determined to make his own luck. I have it on a reliable source that Andy Reid is more or less an agnostic on the subject. Someone told Saint Samuel that he is lucky to be on a playoff team this year, and he just took their balls with him to the endzone. Point is, the Eagles know that this game is about more than skill, more than determination, even. This game is going to be brutal. This game will be elemental, it will be a classic, it will be a battle over the soul of our conference, simply a fight to see who hits who the hardest. And you know what? When I remember Westbrook scampering away from Pierce just a little while ago, when I remember Pierce's excuses and protestations that Westbrook has "put up a a hall-of-fame career," I agree with him, I concur with his insinuation that he has not, and I start salivating, thinking about the game to come. Think that play was "irrelevant," Antonio? We'll find out.
Comments