CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Dave Gettleman came back to the Giants and immediately announced he had returned to the franchise to kick ass. Then the new general manager began rebuilding the Giants on the fly before he was forced to commit himself to kick cancer’s ass.
And now the team he has been rebuilding on the fly will be playing the team he took to Super Bowl 50, the Carolina Panthers, at Bank of America Stadium on Sunday.
When the Giants beat the Texans, the head coach Gettleman hired, Pat Shurmur, announced in the visiting locker room at RNG Stadium that the game ball would go to Gettleman.
The doctors have cleared Gettleman, who is in remission, to make his first road trip as Giants GM, and this isn’t any sappy appeal for the Giants to win-one-for-the-ass-kicker.
But it sure would be a nice gift for one courageous 67-year-old Giant.
“I think it would mean a great deal to him, not only him, just to this organization, just to win, period,” Alec Ogletree told The Post. “For him, personally, I think going back to where he just came from would mean a lot. He knows a lot of people there. He definitely wants to win.”
Gettleman hired Shurmur, kept Eli Manning at quarterback, signed left tackle Nate Solder, traded for Ogletree, drafted Saquon Barkley and Will Hernandez, made Odell Beckham Jr. (at $95 million) the highest-paid receiver in the NFL … and his team is 1-3 and somehow offensively challenged.
“Everybody respects him as much as anybody I’ve ever been around,” Ogletree said. “He’s genuine in his conversations with you, and he makes you feel like you’re all a family. We love him, and appreciate everything that he’s done for us this year.”
Gettleman’s battle with lymphoma has inspired the organization.
“We always keep him in our thoughts and prayers and just try to encourage him as much as he encourages us,” Ogletree said. “He’s here, around the building, and he’s encouraging us to keep going, and keep fighting, and we try to do the same with him.”
It is not lost on Gettleman that Solder’s 3-year-old son Hudson has been fighting kidney cancer.
“The thing that has come across very strong to me is how much he cares about the people he brings in here, and how much effort he’s put into bringing the right type of people to fit his model,” Solder told The Post. “We’ve probably had as many conversations in the last few months [as] with previous general managers that was around [in New England].
“I know what he’s struggling with, and he knows what we’ve been through as a family, and we’ve been able to connect on some of those things. He does a wonderful job of keeping guys to the grindstone and pushing ’em, knowing what is at stake, and still understanding that we are human beings and to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.”
With the Panthers, Gettleman inherited and paid Cam Newton and Luke Kuechly, retained coach Ron Rivera, and constructed a roster good enough to sniff the Lombardi Trophy, only to be denied by Peyton Manning, Von Miller and the Broncos.
“It’s exciting. You feel like a proud father,” Gettleman said before the game.
Only months after drafting Christian McCaffrey with the Panthers eighth-overall pick of the 2017 draft, Gettleman was fired right before training camp by then-owner Jerry Richardson. He had made waves by rescinding the franchise tag on Josh Norman and alienated popular veterans Steve Smith and DeAngelo Williams.
“I was just disappointed,” Gettleman told me in January. “You want to complete the task.”
Gettleman, who had been the Giants’ director of pro personnel for 13 years when he was passed over as Ernie Accorsi’s successor in favor of Jerry Reese, was hired as GM last January when Reese was fired along with Ben McAdoo. He needs his new team to start to kick ass.
