A conversation with Shockey is akin to an all-out sprint of a marathon if that marathon also happened to be full contact.
For two and a half hours, Shockey’s brain operates at warp speed with his mouth, miraculously, keeping up. It’s stunning how much information Shockey can spit out at an auctioneer’s pace. He possesses the unique ability to make a complete stranger instantly feel like an old frat brother in playfully smacking your leg and gripping your shoulder and pulling your bicep to relive a play and jabbing a hard index finger directly into your chest to explain where he once cracked his sternum.
Staring straight ahead, Shockey then reenacts the bloody scene. He was an incoming high school senior when a college kid chucked a beer bottle at him.Shockey ducks his head at the bar with Keanu Reeves dramatics to avoid an imaginary bottle.Shockey balls up a fist and punches his hand with a loud smack! that’s so loud a few patrons at the other end of our bar look over. He connected. He leapt on top of him. He whaled away.
“You’ll go apes—. Trust me. Apes—,” he says. “This is your family. This is your s—. These are my teammates. We’ve been through a lot.”He did not consciously seek this fight. Like Mike Ditka lambasting Ted Karras four decades prior, Shockey inherently needed to let his new teammates know exactly where he stood once he reported to training camp July 30, 2002.
As Shockey chatted with his new quarterback, Kerry Collins, other rookies took turns singing their songs. Finally, defensive end Michael Strahan spoke up.“Rook,” Short chimed in, “you heard the man. Get up and sing.”Short replied. “You have to get up and sing a song.”Side conversations started to fade. The intensity in the room elevated and, for a moment, Short let it sink in that absolutely no rookie talks to him like this.
“Shockey!? I have to talk about this guy?” The events of December 22, 2002, have a way of haunting him still. At work, coworkers bring it up. At home, his kids recently played the clip on YouTube for friends. As the legend goes, in the lead-up to the Colts’ game against the Giants, Gibson was asked by the local media about the rookie sensation and said he wasn’t treating this game any differently. Then came the money quote: “He’s no Tony Gonzalez, he’s just another player to me.
Shockey eyed Peterson at the goal line. And rather than score an easy touchdown, he entered a new address into his internal GPS to totally change course and lowered his head into Peterson. From the cafeteria brawl in July to the airborne ice in January, this hell-raising tight end made it abundantly clear in Year 1 that nobody would tell him what to do or what to say. New York City loved him for it.
He then pauses and scrunches his face as if he just gnawed on those limes. “No, I don’t wish that. That’s all fake.” Even when he did drink, guilt tended to seep into his conscience. It was common for a drunk Shockey to bang out seventy-five to one hundred push-ups at 3 a.m. He needed to punish himself. No wonder he took it another level when one bid for revenge failed. Against the Dallas Cowboys, Shockey badly wanted to make Jerry Jones pay for drafting safety Roy Williams when the owner told him he’d be their pick at eighth overall. He played poorly in a Giants win.
“I didn’t go to her house one time,” he says of one relationship. “It was very simple: Play football. Don’t have any of the headaches. It makes life very simple. I love kids. But you see it with a lot with guys out of college. They have a baby mama and have to pay, pay, pay. If they didn’t have this problem, how successful would they be? … I was good at getting girls. Ain’t nobody sleeping over and I ain’t going to your house. It ain’t like that. Sorry.
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