Hello, Hollywood. Need a Follow to ‘Moneyball’? - Ingles
Jerry Reese has arrived at his second Super Bowl in five years on the job as the Giants’ general manager. If he wins it, might he one day be featured in a book that will be turned into a movie and generate a haul of Academy Award nominations?
“This is a working job, not a come-to-work-at-10-o’clock-and-leave-at-3-to-play-golf job,” he said, shaking his head. In other words, it’s a job about backroom grit, little ancillary glamour.
Reese would not take the bait, speculate on whom could play an African-American man from an impoverished family in tiny Tiptonville, Tenn., who landed in the big town and eventually became a leader among champion Giants.
“Oh, God, I have no idea,” he said, sitting in the stands at Lucas Oil Stadium during the annual crush of humanity and inanity known as Super Bowl media day. “I don’t think anybody wants to play me in a movie.”
Granted, probably not Brad Pitt, up for an Oscar for his brooding “Moneyball” portrayal of baseball’s Billy Beane. But John Mara, a Giants co-owner, begged to differ.
“I’m trying to think of some interesting general managers out there that it would be worth making a movie of — not too many, to tell you the truth,” Mara said. “But Jerry, he’s got a pretty compelling life story, growing up in the situation that he did. He’s the old-fashioned American dream, started at the bottom and worked his way up to the general manager of a team in the Super Bowl.”
Make it two Super Bowls, as Reese — who as a rookie G.M. ruined Bill Belichick’s run at perfection in Super Bowl XLII — has another opportunity to beat the biggest of all N.F.L. brains and his New England Patriots here Sunday. Reese said he might let loose should the Giants reprise their victory in Arizona of four years ago and actually put off watching college draft prospects on video for 24 to 48 hours.
“That’s what we do, what the job is, roll your sleeves up, because there’s a lot of players you have to deal with, a lot of contracts, a lot of personalities,” he said. “And, uh, I love it.”
He loves the material that would make any name director scream, “Cut,” and send the script back for rewrite. But it’s a fair study of N.F.L. executive realism.
Baseball has Oakland’s transcendent Beane. It has Theo Epstein, formerly the prince of Boston and now of Chicago; and the Yankees’ Brian Cashman, known for rappelling down the side of a building and surviving Mount Steinbrenner. N.B.A. front offices have been manned by the headline-producing Jerry West, Larry Bird, Pat Riley and Isiah Thomas.
But N.F.L. general managers are stealth operators, obscured by the coach who dons the headset and inevitably wears the crown. Even the cranky Tom Coughlin moved Eli Manning to respond promptly when asked who might play the Giants’ front man in a feature film.
“I’d have to say Gene Hackman,” Manning said, admittedly inspired by Indiana’s film history with “Hoosiers.” 
In the case of Belichick, he is so much the master of his three-Super-Bowl-ring circus that the organization doesn’t even include the title of general manager on its front-office roster.
“We did in the earlier years, but you have to build an organization around the talent you have,” the Patriots’ owner, Robert K. Kraft, said. “And after being exposed to Bill the first three to four years as a head coach, I was quite comfortable letting him have more and more autonomy.”
With autonomy comes acclaim for the Patriots’ serial success. Over the last 11 years, they have averaged a shade under four regular-season defeats, winning 3 of the 4 Super Bowls they played while continually remaking their roster, with the notable exception of quarterback Tom Brady.
Is it really possible that Belichick has done all the coaching and achieved so much administratively without some truly expert assistance or direction?
We know Scott Pioli, Belichick’s former front-office guru, was widely respected within the sport. The Patriots currently list Nick Caserio as the director of player personnel, but so invisible was Caserio on Tuesday that a search for him was abandoned when Bob Ryan, the Boston Globe columnist, more or less admitted he wouldn’t know Caserio if he were tackled by him.
We can easily make the case that, exact title aside, the lead personnel position in the N.F.L. is the most daunting in all team sports. There are twice as many players to sign as in baseball, injuries are chronic and a hard salary cap creates chess to everyone else’s checkers.
Reese said he couldn’t imagine there being enough time to do both jobs, while Mara paid homage to Belichick, his one-time assistant coach, by saying: “There are only so many Bill Belichicks in the world. But I feel that when you have that separation of power, in the long term, it’s better for the organization.”
Some would argue that Reese inherited his first title team when Ernie Accorsi retired as the general manager in 2007. But Reese made difficult contract decisions that year and maybe the most crucial call of all: persuading Coughlin to look in the mirror and lighten up.
This time around, Reese’s draft picks (led by Jason Pierre-Paul ) and free-agent pickups (notably Victor Cruz) have powered the Giants from late-season mediocrity to the threshold of immortality. Once again, they are staring down Belichick and Brady in a rematch that already feels like the stuff of literary legend.
Billy Beane never did win it all. If the Giants triumph Sunday, we nominate Don Cheadle to play Reese in the movie.
(source New York Times)
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