ROME, N.Y. — Whenever and wherever Plaxico Burress returns to the NFL, he won’t be the feared receiver he used to be with the Giants, and he shouldn’t expect to be a Super Bowl hero again. It is much more important for him now, starting today, from here to eternity, to be a champion person than to be a champion football player.
Because this morning, when walks out of the Oneida Correctional Facility and let’s freedom ring all around him, and then every tomorrow that follows, is his Super Bowl. His chance to write his own stirring story of redemption and make everything right after everything went so wrong.
He can still be the father he never had for his 4-year-old son, Elijah, and year-and-a-half old daughter, Giovanna can still be the husband his mother never had for his sweetheart wife, Tiffany.
Don’t drop the ball, Plax.
He did the crime, he did the time. Too much time, 20 months because he mindlessly toted an unregistered Glock into the Latin Quarter and accidentally shot himself in the leg, and Mayor Bloomberg decided it would be a noble thing to make an example out of him with some good old-fashioned celebrity justice.
Burress was wronged. Even John Mara, the straight-laced son of the Hall of Fame patriarch owner and longtime conscience of the league, has been on board with that argument. Burress will have every right to rail at the system, at the injustice of it all, even if he did this all to himself.
But he’ll be better off spending his time, time more precious to him now than ever before, freeing himself from the shackles of bitterness and anger and regret and instead embark immediately on building a better life for himself and his family.
He can’t get those 20 months back. Can’t turn back the clock and be there for the birth of his daughter. Can’t go back and put on blue No. 17 and be 32-years-old again and bathe under the powerful shower of adulation from Giants fans and help Eli Manning lead the Giants to a repeat. Can’t go back and register the gun or leave it home.
But he should know that there is so much more waiting for him than some desperate NFL team attempting to catch lightning in a 6-foot-6 bottle. He won’t have to while away the hours in protective custody inside a tiny cell. He won’t have to sleep on a bed too small. He won’t have to endure prison guards who made him yearn for Tom Coughlin. He won’t have to survive on peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and vegetables anymore. That hot bath he has dreamed about is now waiting for him.
Most of all, standing in the light at the end of his long, dark tunnel out of hell is a loyal, loving wife and a loyal friend like Brandon Jacobs, the little boy he used to hold in his arms during postgame interviews at his locker who longs to play catch and video games with his father, the little girl he can spoil now all he wants.
The beauty of this country is we give second chances, embrace would-be Comeback Kids. Michael Vick can tell you all about that. Even Mike Tyson, who couldn’t get it right when he first left prison, seems to have finally gotten off the deck, and cheered by many as he did.
Burress walks back into a country ravaged by tornado tragedy, drowning in debt and unemployment, longing for the great escape that is the NFL. He will never get back the millions of dollars he lost, or the last vestiges of his prime. But he will have the chance now to rehabilitate his image and reputation, and that ought to mean everything to him.
He will walk out of Oneida today into the arms of his wife and children and they will head to their Fort Lauderdale-area home together on a private jet. He may end up catching passes from Vick, but that doesn’t mean he won’t feel like soaring like an eagle once those prison doors clang behind him. The NFL lockout applies for him, too. But lockdown doesn’t anymore.
I am reminded of the scene in “Shawshank Redemption,” when Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), on the verge of escaping to Mexico, tells his prison lifer friend Red (Morgan Freeman): “I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
Plax, get busy living.
And don’t drop the ball this time.
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