NOBODY’S PERFECT

The game had just ended, bits of confetti were still fluttering in the air, and Giants coowner Steve Tisch had just become the first person ever to win both an Academy Award (he was producer for Best Picture winner Forrest Gump) and a Lombardi Trophy. As he climbed down the stairs from the stage set up in the middle of University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona, where the Giants had come back and beaten the previously undefeated Patriots, 17–14, in Super Bowl XLII, one of the first questions asked of him was which meant more.

Tisch thought silently for about 10 seconds, then said he would give back his Oscar to win the Super Bowl.

Not surprising. He had just been holding the Lombardi for the first time in his life a moment earlier, so the emotional rush and attachment to it was much more immediate. But even years later, he stood by that hypothetical decision.

Why?

“Every great movie has characters, some you root for and some you root against,” Tisch said. “There is excitement, there is action, there are surprises, there are situations that are unpredictable that the audience isn’t ready for. Sometimes there is a surprise ending that you just can’t believe happened. A good movie has great characters and a great script. A good movie takes 100 days to shoot with a crew of a couple hundred people.

“We had just seen in the Super Bowl a game that had every quality, all the excitement, all the surprises, all the action, all the people you root for, and all the characters you root against, played out live in 60 minutes on a football field. None of it was rehearsed, none of it was scripted. And that’s why I would give back my Academy Award. It was real. It was not scripted or rehearsed. It wasn’t a movie. It was real life, in real time. And real exciting. A surprise ending.”

One of the most surprising ever.

“That’s why I love it,” he said.

The Super Bowl ended with Patriots quarterback Tom Brady dejected and disappointed, but the week began with him amused. He even laughed a bit. Not at the audacity of an opposing player thinking his team might beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl, or any game for that matter. No, that was fine. That’s what football players are supposed to believe. But when Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress predicted a final score—and a low one—well, to Brady that was the strange part.

Burress had dropped his vision to a reporter from the New York Post named Brian Lewis, whose job was to watch the players walk by after their final practice in New Jersey and ask each of them if they had a prediction. It was a journalistic fishing expedition, and no one really expected any nibbles. There weren’t any, either, until Burress walked past. When Lewis asked if he had a prediction, Burress simply gave him one.

“23–17.”

Somewhat shocked, Lewis asked Burress to repeat it, just to make sure.

“23–17,” he said.

He never used the “G” word, but it was about as close as anyone had come to guaranteeing a Super Bowl win since Joe Namath had with the Jets against the Colts. And this one seemed even more outlandish than that one.

This was a Patriots team that was not only 18–0, one win away from a perfect season, but also one that had set an NFL record by scoring 589 points. Brady’s 50 touchdown passes set the record for most in a single season, and Randy Moss had caught 23 of them to set the receiving record. And just a month earlier, the Patriots had posted a 38–35 win over the Giants. Brady had already won three Super Bowl titles without ever losing in the big game.

Which is why the quarterback mocked chagrin when he arrived in Arizona and was told of Burress’s prediction.

“We’re only going to score 17 points?” Brady chuckled confidently. “OK. Is Plax playing defense? I wish he had said 45–42 and gave us a little credit for scoring more points.”

It turned out Burress gave the Patriots more credit than they would deserve.

The Giants defense in Super Bowl XLII managed to do what no team had been able to all season: slow down the Patriots. It was a simple game plan, really, that relied on using the front four players on the defensive line to put pressure on the quarterback—hit him, move him, make him uncomfortable—while the remaining seven players dropped into coverage and kept tabs on the receivers.

Simple to scheme, anyway. Executing it would be the key.

Which is why Osi Umenyiora, one of the Giants’ top pass rushers, sat nervously at his table during a team breakfast the day of the game. Michael Strahan came into the room his usual bubbly self, cracking jokes and keeping everyone loose.

“He was doing his thing, talking, laughing loud,” Umenyiora remembered. “And I remember telling him, ‘Stray, listen, if we don’t play our best game we’re going to lose.’”

Strahan nodded and kept talking to others, the truth and intensity of Umenyiora’s sober morning-of-the-game epiphany still not fully registered. So Osi tried again.

“I was like, ‘No, no, no, listen to me, man,’” Umenyiora said, repeating his observation slowly with his eyes locked on Strahan’s. “‘This is the biggest game of our lives. If we don’t play our best, we’re going to lose and it’s going to be our fault.’”

That got Strahan’s attention.

“He brought everyone around him, said a few things, and then I could see it sink in,” Umenyiora said. “I didn’t hear him say another word until the actual game itself. It was crazy.”

The defense had plenty of time to ruminate on the reality they faced, because the Giants received the ball to open the game and embarked on a 16-play, 63-yard drive that ate up the first 9:59 of the game. Despite the duration, it resulted only in a field goal and a 3–0 lead. Between the hoopla of the pregame ceremonies and the longevity of the first possession, by the time the Giants defense took the field, they had been standing around for close to an hour without playing a single snap.

The stagnation showed as the Patriots marched down the field for a touchdown on their first drive to take a 7–3 lead.

From there, though, the Giants’ defense tightened up. They started to rattle Brady, whose mobility was hampered by an ankle injury he’d suffered in the AFC Championship Game. Four of the next six Patriots possessions ended in punts, one ended in a fumble, and another on a failed fourth-down attempt. The Giants, meanwhile, went ahead, 10–7, early in the fourth quarter when Eli Manning hit David Tyree for a touchdown.

It looked like the Giants might pull off the greatest upset in football history, but the Patriots were too good. They used a 12-play, 80-yard drive to eat up over five minutes of the fourth quarter and took a 14–10 lead with 2:42 remaining when Corey Webster slipped in coverage against Moss and Brady found him in the end zone for a touchdown.

The Giants, it seemed, had come up short. The Patriots were too good. Too prolific. Too… perfect.

“I was disappointed,” Umenyiora said of his feelings as he and the defense came off the field having allowed the go-ahead score. “Obviously we had played so hard. They came back and they scored and we were disheartened.”

There was only one thing the defenders could do. Hope.

So as the offensive linemen stood on the sideline waiting to take the field for a drive that would either result in the game-winning touchdown of a classic Super Bowl or an effort that would come up short, Michael Strahan marched back and forth in front of them.

“17–14 will be the final score,” he told them. “Believe it and it will happen. 17–14, fellas. One touchdown and we’ll be World Champions.”

Strahan, it turned out, was channeling his father.

“The whole week leading up to the game, my dad kept telling me, ‘You guys have already won this game, you just have to claim it. You won it, you just have to go through the formalities of playing,’” Strahan said. “Mentally, he was saying that you have to believe it. You have to accept it. You have to claim that you have this victory.”

The captain started spreading that gospel.

“For me it was going over there to let them know basically what my dad had been telling me the whole week leading up to it,” Strahan said. “I don’t know if they believed it. Heck, sometimes I wonder if I believed it.”

The Giants began the drive at their 17-yard line with 2:39 remaining. Manning hit Amani Toomer for a first down, but then the offense began to stall. On third-and-10 on the play after the two-minute warning, Manning hit Burress, but for only 9 yards. That left a do-or-die fourth-and-1.

The Giants handed the ball to Brandon Jacobs up the middle for a successful first down.

They were alive, but still 61 yards away from the end zone, and now with just 1:28 remaining. Manning scrambled for 5 yards on first down, threw an incompletion to Tyree on second down, and then, on third-and-5 from the Giants’ 44, came “The Catch.”

Manning eluded the Patriots’ defense, was nearly sacked and pulled down by his jersey, kept his footing when he was flung, and threw a deep pass down the middle of the field that had no business being caught. Somehow, it stuck to Tyree’s helmet, a play so astounding and memorable that it gets its own chapter in this book. A Miracle Moment within a Miracle Moment!

But the 32-yard completion would mean little without reaching the end zone. For that, the Giants had to go another 24 yards. And after Manning was sacked on the next play, they were out of timeouts with 51 seconds remaining.

Manning threw an incompletion and then, on third-and-11, hit rookie Steve Smith along the sideline for a gain of 12 to the 13. It’s a play sandwiched between two of the most memorable catches in Giants history, but perhaps equally important.

Smith was pushed out of bounds to stop the clock, which allowed the Giants to settle themselves and call their play. As they broke the huddle, Manning grabbed Burress and told him: “If they go single, I’m throwing it.”

Sure enough, the Patriots were in single coverage with Ellis Hobbs lined up against Burress. Plaxico’s first thought was that he wouldn’t be able to go to his left on the route because of the injured knee he was playing with the entire game, the one that had nearly scratched him from the lineup. But this was no time for doubt, and the thought was quickly dismissed.

“I said, ‘Man, you know what, just run the route like you’re healthy and if it goes, it goes,’” Burress said. “That’s the conversation that I had with myself before the ball was hiked because I’m planting off the knee that’s taped and I can’t go left. I’m like, ‘If you tear it up, it better be on the last play of the game.’”

The Patriots sent an all-out blitz, and Jacobs was in the backfield to help pick it up. That bought Manning enough time to turn to his left and loft the ball into the end zone for Burress.

“I see the ball up [in the air] and people in the stands,” Burress said. “I turn 360 degrees running full speed with a bad knee. Then the feeling went out of me. I was, like, walking on air. I couldn’t believe it just happened. I couldn’t believe it was me of all people.”

Touchdown. 17–14. Just like Strahan said it would be.

Plaxico Burress didn’t know if his injured knee would allow him to make the game-winning catch in Super Bowl XLII, but he pushed through it and brought in Eli Manning’s pass. (Streeter Lecka / Staff, courtesy of Getty Images)

“First of all, if we didn’t do it, nobody would remember it,” Strahan said of his speech. “But because we did everybody pays attention to it so I look like Nostradamus.”

And it was almost just like Burress had predicted, too.

There were 35 harrowing seconds left. Enough time for the Patriots to attempt a few last-ditch efforts to get into field goal range and tie the score. Enough for them to score another touchdown to win it. Brady threw an incompletion and then was sacked by rookie Jay Alford, another huge play that often goes unrecognized. That set up third-and-20. On consecutive snaps, Brady threw long Hail Mary passes to Randy Moss, and the crowd of 71,000 at the University of Phoenix Stadium was breathlessly quiet while those footballs arced through the air. One glanced just off Moss’s fingertips. Both fell incomplete, the final one with one second remaining in the game.

That allowed Manning and the offense to go back on the field and take a knee, a curtain call of sorts after their remarkable game-winning drive. The Patriots, it turned out, weren’t so perfect after all.

It was, too, to be the final game of Strahan’s Hall of Fame career.

“A good way to end it all,” he said. “After that, for me, what else was there to do and what else was there to prove? It would have been nice to play the next year as a Super Bowl champion and travel to these cities and all that stuff and play other teams, but there is nothing like going out on top.”

Not that it would have been easy to top this one.

“What a hell of a game,” Strahan said. “Best football game I’ve ever been a part of.”