TIKI’S ‘CALLING’
He eyes play-by-play gig
IF TIKI Barber is anything, he is ambitious. In his second act as a media personality, Barber cohosts a daily national sports talk show. He will do analysis on radio for a few college football games. And, this Sunday, he will be a sideline reporter for the Giants-Jaguars game on Fox.
But Barber has even bigger plans for his broadcasting career. He wants to do NFL play-by-play.
“That’s my ultimate goal,” Barber told The Post. “It is a long, unfulfilled desire to be in the sports world with my brother [Ronde, a Fox analyst]. We only got to ‘play together’ in the Pro Bowls. We were never teammates other than in college. After being around him in his first years at Fox, I was like, ‘I need to learn how to do play-by-play so we can have the first twin booth ever.’ That would be fun.”
Ex-athletes turning into play-by-players is very unusual, with Pat Summerall having been the most successful, with his deep voice and economy of words that made him a fixture for years next to John Madden.
Barber knows he needs to start at the bottom if he is going to be good enough to be in the same position as the guys he admires, such as Ian Eagle, Kenny Albert and Kevin Burkhardt.
Albert and Ronde will be in the booth Sunday. The trio did a Giants-Bucs game last year.
Tiki said he would like to start out in play-byplay by doing either a high school or smaller college game.
“That opportunity will come and I’ll probably be terrible — or not,” Barber said. “I’ll learn from it.”
He said he has been approached with some opportunities, but the right one hasn’t come across yet. Barber, 43, has had a rebirth in his media career after he went from being an all-time great Giant to a bust as a “Today” show correspondent and an NBC NFL studio analyst a decade ago.
For the past five years, Barber has been hosting his national radio show on CBS Sports Radio — which is now simulcast on CBS Sports Network — with Brandon Tierney. But he wants more, which includes being an NFL playby-player.