From this week’s New Yorker. Much of the article is basically Angel’s wistfully lamenting the fact that modern-day athletes, because of their outlandish physiques, ridiculous salaries, and, in his words, “infantile tastes” are somehow less accessible than they were when he grew up in the 1930s watching good salt-of-the-earth guys like Hank Greenberg and Jimmy Foxx, and that their personalities — what’s Roger Clemens really like? — are bound to leave us disappointed when contrasted to their excellence on the field. But, to his credit, he catches himself from this false nostalgia and makes the point that we sports fans shouldn’t concern ourselves with the fact that Shaq has a Superman beadspread or that Tiki has a gigantic mural of himself in his son’s bedroom; these guys still provide us with something sublime and mesmerizing on the field of play. That is all they can give us, that is all that is fair to ask of them, and that is enough.

He is midsized and not particularly fast as running backs go, but here he was, again cruising close to his blockers and then finding the hole or the invisible seam and driving for yardage before disappearing under a vanload of tacklers. The Giants scored a couple of field goals and a touchdown on a pass from Eli Manning to Amani Toomer, but the play of the day was a second-quarter run by Tiki, around the left side and then brilliantly back and forth between grasping and flying frustrated Chief defensemen, forty-one yards, for a touchdown. He ran some more after that, driving in for the twenty-yard clinching touchdown late in the day—it was night by now, and you kept your eye on his gleaming blue helmet in motion, always a little lower than the rest. In the end, he’d run two hundred and twenty yards from scrimmage—and away from us, you might say—for a franchise record, and had compiled 1,577 rushing yards for the season, breaking the team record he set last year.