One and the Same by Abigail Pogrebin Page A

I’m going to put in Galactica. That’s what it felt like. Not that he was bored by what he was doing, because our sport’s unique: It’s exciting when you play. But I think he was just bored with the routine of that part of his life and he was ready. He knew it wasn’t going to last forever, so he made steps to move on. Whereas I’m more along the lines of ‘It will end someday, and when it does, I’ll decide what to do then.’ Eventually your body just can’t do it anymore and then you have to do something else.”
    â€œPhysically I was much more beat-up than Ronde is,” Tiki says. “Being a running back, I get hit forty times a day, where Ronde gets hit maybe four or five. It starts to take its toll.”
    â€œI feel great,” Ronde tells me. “I swear to God, I would never know that I’m thirty-three if I didn’t read it every day in the paper or in every magazine article written about me: ‘He’s thirty-three; he can’t do it forever.’ Eventually in the back of your head, you start thinking, Is this true?”
    Why does he think he’s still thriving at the older end of football age? “I think it’s something in my makeup; I refuse not to be successful. Take that back to my youth: I refused to be a failure in comparison to Tiki. And I’m sure my mom told you this—last year she was thinking I felt guilty because I was still playing football when Tiki quit. And I don’t know if I put that much thought on it, but I could see that being the case, because we always did everything together, and now, how do I judge my success? I never judged it against anybody else’s. … That aspect of my motivation was suddenly lacking, and I honestly had used it a lot. It was definitely a void I had to fill, and I don’t know if I did or not.”
    I ask if Tiki drove him in a competitive way or a motivational one. “More in a motivational way. I was just excited to see him be successful. … It made it worth doing, above anything else. Even if thegame stank and our team stank, it was, ‘Hey, we may have lost today, but I’m going to see how Tiki did.’ And that element completely disappeared last year, and in my mind, it was all on me. I had to find a way to adapt to the new structure of it.”
    â€œThere is no doubt in my mind,” says Tiki, “that we are both successful because we refused to let the other one down. It was partly ‘I have to keep up with him; he has to keep up with me.’ But it was also ‘Don’t dare be a failure, because then you drag me down.’ So we competed against each other’s successes. And we were always fortunate—actually, it may have been intentional, even subconsciously—that we never did the same thing. So when we wrestled in seventh and eighth grade, he dropped weight so he could wrestle at one thirty-six, I wrestled at one forty-two. When we ran track, he learned the hurdles while I was a sprinter and did the long jump. When we played football, he was defensive back, wide receiver, and I was a running back. We never did the same thing, but we always had success. It was kind of like, ‘If you’re going to win, I’m going to win. If you’re going to be good, I’ve got to be good.’”
    Doesn’t it bother Tiki that Ronde’s the one with a Super Bowl ring? “It was probably the greatest moment of pride I’ve ever felt,” says Tiki of Tampa’s victory over Oakland in 2003. “Cynics will say, ‘Oh, you’re jealous.’ But those same people have no idea what we have.”
    The press loved the twin versus twin angle whenever the Giants played the Bucs, but the Barbers viewed it as “more talk and hype.” Ronde says, “At the end of it, he was just another opponent.”
    Tiki tells me Ronde was playful during those match-ups. “One time, I was