CURTAINS

The Giants and Jets have never met in a Super Bowl. That may be the only way that a clash between the two football teams who share a city and share a stadium could mean more than it did when they faced off on Christmas Eve, 2011. And even then, it might be up for debate.

That 2011 meeting was the most intense regular-season game many of the participants say they have ever played in. Its drama had been building since the offseason, when Jets coach Rex Ryan, fresh off two AFC Championship Game appearances, started talking about his squad taking over New York and becoming the “big brothers” in the rivalry. It simmered throughout the season, as both teams contended for the postseason and, by the time they reached this next-to-last game on their schedules, were each in need of wins to reach the playoffs.

But it all came to a head when the Giants walked into MetLife Stadium as the visiting team and were met with what they saw as the harshest slap in the face they had ever encountered.

On the walls outside the Giants’ locker room are murals painted for each of the Super Bowl victories. At the time, there were three of them. But on that day, because the Jets were the home team, they did what their stadium protocol called for in a normal game.

They covered them up.

Long black curtains draped from aluminum poles that were hung on brackets in the cinderblock wall obscured those Super Bowl reminders.

First, a little geography from the bowels of MetLife Stadium. There are four full locker rooms off a concourse that runs in a ring around the playing field. In the southwest corner there are two, the Giants’ home locker room and the one that is used by teams that visit to play the Jets. In the northwest corner is the Jets’ home locker room and the one used by teams that visit the Giants. This is done to prevent teams who play each other from having adjacent locker rooms and from having to take the field through the same tunnel. So, for Jets home games, the visiting team uses the room next to the Giants’ room. And when that happens, those Giants murals are covered. Most times, no one cares, because they’re not Giants and are focused on playing the Jets anyway.

But in this case, well, it created quite a stir.

“It was a complete disrespect factor,” said Giants offensive lineman David Diehl, still fired up by the slight: “It’s their home game, but their side is on the complete other end. They don’t walk through the same entrance, they don’t go through the same way to walk past that. For us it was like, ‘Yeah, this may be a split stadium, and yeah, you may be playing up against us, but if you are going to cover all that stuff up and show disrespect to the history of the Giants like it doesn’t even matter, we’re going to prove you wrong.’ And not by saying it, but by our actions.”

Kicker Lawrence Tynes had tried to pull the curtains away from the wall as he walked in to work that day, sliding them on the poles, but stadium workers just fixed them. Tynes gets a chuckle out of it now.

“It was kind of a big topic,” he said of the pregame conversations in the locker room. “Players find stupid ways to be motivated, but there was kind of a little buzz in the locker room about it.”

It was as if the Jets had insulted the mother of each Giants player personally. In the Jets’ locker room, their players had no idea what was happening on the other side of the stadium. If any Giants weren’t properly revved up for this game when they pulled into the parking lot, they were by the time they walked past those curtains.

“I don’t understand why he did it,” running back Brandon Jacobs said of Rex Ryan (who probably had no idea about the curtains, but whom the Giants blamed for the dis). “Don’t cover our shit up. We took it personally. It pissed a lot of people off because they had no right to do that.”

It did take a while for that anger to channel itself into football, because early in the game, it seemed as if the Jets were in control and they would be able to back up Ryan’s bravado. They scored the game’s first touchdown, and their defense was in control with a 7–3 lead late in the second quarter. The Giants’ offense had trouble getting into gear, difficulty finding yards, and when the Jets downed a punt at the 1 with 2:37 left in the half, it seemed unlikely that the Giants would be able to find any more points before the break.

Victor Cruz and the Giants sailed past—and over—the Jets in a tense Christmas Eve Battle for New York. (Newsday LLC/David Pokress)

After two incompletions, on third-and-10 from the 1, the Giants were just looking to create some space to punt the ball back to the Jets. Eli Manning tossed a short swing pass to Victor Cruz on the right side. Cruz caught the ball at the 11, and the Giants thought to themselves: Great! A first down! But it turned out to be so much more.

Cruz turned it into a 99-yard touchdown, the longest play from scrimmage in Giants history, and one that is largely credited with igniting the run to the Super Bowl a little over a month later.

Two Jets, Antonio Cromartie and Kyle Wilson, converged on Cruz as he caught the pass, but he was able to split them to pick up more yardage. He maintained his balance and sprinted down the sideline. At around midfield, Jets safety Erik Smith dived trying to trip him up. Cruz high-stepped over him, then won a footrace to the end zone before spiking the football and breaking into a salsa on turf bearing the Jets’ logo.

The Giants took a 10–7 lead and never again trailed in what eventually became a 29–14 victory.

“We definitely put them in a blender,” Jacobs said. “They were embarrassed.”

The win kept the Giants’ playoff aspirations alive, but the Jets and Ryan never recovered. They would never again reach the postseason, and never be as close to it as they were in the first half of that game against the Giants.

“If you could point to a play that turned not just the game around, but maybe the season around, it was that play,” Ryan said of Cruz’s touchdown. “The Giants came out a totally different team, and they carried it through. It changed their fortune, and it certainly changed ours with that play and that loss… The fact that we never got into the playoffs since then, there’s so much that changed after that.”

The 99-yard touchdown is just one memorable moment in a game that had a number of them. The day was like an episode of Seinfeld, so full of classic stories that are remembered individually, but looking back it is difficult to fathom they were all packed into the same framework.

For some, it wasn’t the Cruz touchdown that emphasized the Giants’ dominance over the Jets that day, but the one after it, when Ahmad Bradshaw took a handoff from the 14 in the third quarter and obliterated safety Brodney Pool on his way to the end zone. Bradshaw lowered his shoulder, Pool went flying, and the running back was triumphantly holding the ball out before he even crossed the goal line.

For others, it was Giants running back D.J. Ware being tackled on his team’s sideline and sliding into the legs of Tom Coughlin. The head coach jumped right back up and continued to coach the rest of the game despite having a hamstring injury so severe it pulled muscle from bone.

“I saw that and I was like, ‘Holy shit! He’s gonna die!’” Tynes said of Coughlin being upended. “And he just popped right up like he always does. Just tougher than woodpeckers’ lips. He pops up and he’s kind of hobbling around the rest of the game, but you know him, not a single complaint out of him the rest of the game.”

And once the game was over, that’s when the real fun began. Like after-credit scenes in a Marvel movie.

Former Giant and Super Bowl winner Plaxico Burress was with the Jets that season and played in the game against the Giants. Afterward, he was on the field catching up with some former teammates. One of them was Brandon Jacobs. As the two chatted and exchanged some holiday greetings, Rex Ryan walked past them.

Well, maybe not past them. More like he tried to walk through them.

“He bumped into me!” Jacobs recalled. “He bumped me pretty good. I remember Rex saying to wait until they won a Super Bowl, and I thought, Your ass won’t make it out of this game alive. So, I turned around and I told him I’d kick his ass. He was messing with the wrong guy, and I’d punch him in the mouth. And he started talking and running his mouth.”

Pretty soon the two men were jawing at each other on the field with photographers and players surrounding them, trading threats of physical violence and trying to get the last word. Jacobs never confirmed it, but those nearby say at one point he said to Ryan: “It’s time to shut up, fat boy!”

“Did I plan on punching Rex Ryan? Absolutely not,” Jacobs said. “But I just know his philosophy. I just know his philosophy and how he handles things.”

That’s because it was pretty much the same way Jacobs handled things. The two had more similarities than differences, which is probably why their personalities clashed on that postgame field.

But asked if he would have liked playing for Ryan, Jacobs was quick to answer.

“Oh absolutely. I can’t deny that. I can’t deny that at all. I’d be lying if I said no.”

It would have come at a cost, though.

“I would have probably enjoyed playing for him, no question about it, but I don’t think I would have become the overall guy that I am,” Jacobs said. “The character of my being, none of that would have been the same. I’m not saying I would have been a bad person. There are plenty of guys who played for Rex Ryan who are great guys, great characters. But I think with the way I was, the way my attitude was set up, I think I needed a coach like Coach Coughlin to teach me not just about football but about being a man, about being a good father, stuff like that. I learned a lot of values from Coach Coughlin that help me even today. I got a lot more out of Coach Coughlin.”

Jacobs admitted he was sometimes jealous of the Jets because of their relationship with their coach and the lax rules he employed.

“Those guys loved Rex,” he said. “They loved playing for him. They loved talking about him. They’d do anything for him. Rex this, Rex that. We don’t have to go in until this time, he doesn’t care if we’re late. Blah blah blah.”

Of course, there was a downside to all of that.

“At the same time, though,” Jacobs said, “you’re getting your asses kicked every other week.”

While Jacobs and Ryan were squaring off, there was still one unresolved issue: the curtains.

Diehl, Tynes, and long snapper Zak DeOssie ran through the tunnel to the Giants’ locker room, but they did not stop there. They continued through that space out the door to the concourse, and, while still wearing their cleats and full uniforms and even with their hands taped up, they began yanking the black drapes down to the ground.

“We get in the locker room and immediately my first thought is Let’s go out there and pull these curtains back again,” Tynes said. “So, me and Dave Diehl and Zak went out there in our uniforms, pulling them back, saying, ‘This is our house!’ just kind of being stupid.”

Diehl took it more seriously. He remains proud of the show he put on for reporters and cameras waiting outside the postgame locker room to go in and interview the players, only to have three of the most fired-up of them come out in the hallway and wreck the place.

“I wanted it to be known,” he said. “You want to cover these things up? You wanted to do it before the game saying it was a distraction? Well, we just kicked your ass and now we’re going to show that this is what the Giants’ tradition and history is all about.”

The Giants had held in much of their animosity toward the Jets during the week leading up to the critical game. Now it was all coming out.

“As Coach Coughlin always said: Modest in speech, superior in action,” Diehl said. “That’s something he always said to our football team. And they were the complete opposite. Not only from their team, but from their head coach. To hear that all season, to get yourself ready for that football game, that was one you had circled right when that schedule came out in the spring.”

Diehl said the Giants made a huge statement that day.

“I definitely think we did,” he said. “The feeling of us walking out there and ripping down those banners knowing that this is our stadium. You may say you are the big brother and you may put all of that stuff out into the press, but that doesn’t make a difference in who is going to win or lose a game.”

Close curtains.