A WELCOME SIGHT
Eli gets a familiar face in the huddle
T HEY were magic together, long before Odell Beckham Jr. was a twinkle in Jerry Reese’s eyes, and finally, finally, after nearly two long years without him, Eli Manning gets to play catch again with Victor Cruz.
The prospect of a threeheaded monster — a healthy Cruz, Beckham, precocious rookie Sterling Shepard — makes Manning envision being a chess grandmaster checkmating defenses, perhaps like never before.
“Hey, he’s a talented player,” Manning said, “so if he can get healthy, it just gives us another playmaker, a guy who can play on the outside, he can play on the inside. When you have receivers that are multiple, like Victor, like Odell, Sterling, and you can move guys around, it’s hard to game plan for certain teams. Got to be versatile with that, and having him part of that action, and having a guy who you have great confidence and trust and have that chemistry with is important.”
It was Manning throwing to Cruz (82 catches, 1,536 yards, nine touchdowns) and Hakeem Nicks that Super Bowl XLVI season. Cruz caught 86 more of Manning’s passes the next season (10 TDs), then 73 more in 2013 (four TDs). That’s a lot of salsa.
And then, without warning, on the fateful night of Oct. 12, 2014, the cruel football gods forced Cruz to confront his football mortality, writhing in pain in an end zone at the Linc, sobbing on a cart with his patellar tendon and his dreams shattered, then shattered again by a calf that betrayed him, then teased this summer by a nuisance groin.
But they wrote off the wrong guy.
“I am excited for him,” Manning said. “He is a longtime teammate, a longtime friend, and I know what he’s been through, I know it’s been tough, tough road these last two years, I know he wants to be out there, and so I am excited for him to have that possibility. Obviously preseason, be nice to get him out there, but when it comes to regular season, get him back in some action, get him some catches, get him a touchdown, that would be special.”
The memories of Cruz in his prime come easily to Manning, even as far back as preseason 2010 against Rex Ryan’s Jets. Cruz caught three second-half TDs that night, two from Jim Sorgi, one from Rhett Bomar after Manning had to be treated for a forehead laceration that required 12 stitches.
“I think I was getting stitches in my head, so I think I missed a lot of it,” Manning said, and chuckled. “I saw it on the game film, and obviously, hey, he made plays. I know he had kind of a fade down the left sideline, made a one-handed catch, had kind of a back-shoulder catch, a couple of other fade routes. … Obviously a big part of him making the team was that night and stepping up and making plays.”
Manning was reminded Cruz wore No. 3 that night.
“It was Victor Cruz before anybody knew who Victor Cruz was,” Manning said, “so he definitely made a name for him that night.”
His legendary 99-yard catch-and-run TD came at the end of the next regular season and both ignited the Giants’ Super Bowl run and ruined Rex Ryan and the Jets.
What separated Cruz, even more than his lightning cutting ability and hands, was his uncanny flair for getting open and making himself available for Manning.
“He’s always been a special guy in the slot. … It’s been easy for me to read his body language when he’s coming in and out of breaks, and so it’s good that we still have that,” Manning said.
No one, of course, should expect the vintage Cruz, three months from his 30th birthday. But the mere sight of him in his old familiar No. 80 jersey will bring back the familiar “Cruuuuuuz” chorus from Giants fans who still love him.
“He’s got to get used to catching the ball, making that first defender miss, where he’s not thinking about anything, just thinking about catching, just acting normally, what he naturally does,” Manning said. “It takes a little time just to trust it and to realize, ‘I still got it,’ and it seems like he’s moving that way.”
But the arrow is pointing up. “He looks explosive,” Manning said.
To this Victor belong the spoils at last.
“Although it’s just a preseason game, for me, mentally and emotionally, physically, it’s more than just a football game,” Cruz said. It is his personal Super Bowl. “I’m ready,” Victor Cruz said. Give us a salsa, for old time’s sake.