The biggest story of the week was the election and I thought it was excellent. I was barely able to get my vote in for Obama. I think it's awesome. There are a lot of Africans that went through a lot of different things to give us different opportunities here in the States. To go from at one point not even being considered a man to being the face of the country, I think that's huge. I don't know too many situations where the outcome was that.
You saw people like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was there when Malcolm X was alive, who was there when Martin Luther King Jr. was alive. People that actually experienced those things to see where we are at now, I can't imagine how they felt. People that never went through that were sitting at the house crying. You can only imagine what that was like for them. I'm sure part of them felt like they wished they could have been there to see it. For something like that to happen in America at that time probably was so far from their minds, to actually see it happen had to be pretty amazing.
We've come a long way. It's like that Sam Cooke song; I walk around whistling it all the time, "It's been a long time coming but I know a change is gonna to come." It's funny because that was Barack's main thing. He just kept saying "Change, change, change." It's nice for my son to be able to see that. He can say, "Hey, Barack did it. I can be there one day too."
That crowd at Grant Plaza in Chicago was pretty serious, right? It's funny; all those people and all I could think of was, 'Man, what if there were that many people at a football game? What would it be like to score a touchdown in front of all those people?' Man, something as small as that can't be compared to what Obama was thinking. We were just sitting in the locker room before practice earlier in the week and Brian Westbrook asked me "I wonder what Barack is doing right now?" I remember thinking that myself. "What is this guy going to be thinking when he walks out on stage and sees all those people?" What he was able to do up there with anything anybody in this country as far as African decent has ever been able to do. It was nice to see.
Getting a win over the Giants this week would be serious. Our division is obviously the toughest; that's without question. Every week counts, whether you are playing an intra-divisional opponent or not because if you're playing Dallas or New York or Washington, you know it's a must-win because obviously it has big playoff implications. Even if you are playing the Seahawks or 49ers, most of the time, Washington and New York are going to win those games too. You need those just as much as you need to win the head-to-heads in order to be in contention when it's all said and done. For us, I think more than any other division, every game counts.
The Giants lost Michael Strahan to retirement and Osi Umenyiora to injury but their defensive line hasn't missed a beat. That speaks volumes. Now you know why they were able to do the things they did on the road last year and against New England, which rarely let Tom Brady touch the ground. He touched the ground more in the Super Bowl than he did all year combined. People wondered how they were able to get it done. I think with what has happened to them up front and the fact that they are able to apply just as much pressure, now we know why.
