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Despite Everything, Tiki Barber Is Good at Heart

Once and future running back unleashes Holocaust analogy

by
Marc Tracy
May 25, 2011
Tiki Barber in 2009.(Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)
Tiki Barber in 2009.(Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

In an excellent Sports Illustrated profile (via Deadspin) of retired New York Giants running back Tiki Barber, who is looking to return to the NFL, we learn what happened after Barber, then a Today Show correspondent, left his pregnant wife, spent two nights sleeping at Rockefeller Center, and then shacked up with his now-girlfriend Traci Johnson, the 23-year-old NBC intern he had apparently been seeing. Soon, the tabloids pounced.

Barber and Johnson went into hiding in the attic of [agent Mark] Lepselter’s house in New Jersey. “Lep’s Jewish,” says Barber, “and it was like a reverse Anne Frank thing.” (Here is Barber writ small: He has the wit and smarts to make an Anne Frank allusion and the artlessness to liken himself—an adulterer trying to elude gossip columnists—to a Holocaust victim.)

I, for one, am shocked. I mean, a Jewish sports agent???

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.