The quiet one was Eric. The loud one was Tory. They grew up together in the Happy Hill Gardens in Winston Salem, and they were inseparable.

In a way, they still are.

“My best friend committed suicide when I was 14,” Tory Woodbury was saying yesterday at Jets camp. “I’ve seen people shot, you know, shot at and all of that growing up. I knew for two-and-a-half hours out of the day I was at football practice I was away from that stuff, so that’s basically how I fell in love with the game.”

Your friend got in with the wrong crowd?

“It was over a girlfriend.”

His name was Eric Lewis. Eric was a running back in Pop Warner. Tory started off as a shotgun center before switching to quarterback. “He was No. 4,” Woodbury said. “And then after he passed away I got No. 4.

“I think about him every day. That’s a motivation.

“There’s so many people that want to be here in my situation, I don’t take anything for granted. That’s why if the situation brings itself for me to play wideout, I’m gonna go out there and play it the best I can, ’cause if I don’t do it, somebody else is gonna do it.”

Herm Edwards wants Tory Woodbury to do it. Edwards has decided that this is the week Tory Woodbury, No. 3 quarterback, becomes Slash. The kid is 6-foot-2 and 208 pounds of swagger and fearlessness, and when they let him dabble at receiver in practice a year ago, he caught everything in sight.

“He’s an athlete,” Sam Garnes said.

He is bright and ambitious and gifted with a powerful right arm. But he also has a chance to be the big, physical receiver the Jets crave in their West Coast offense. “I want to play anywhere, man,” Woodbury said. “The more things you can do, I think the longer you can play in this league. I prefer to play quarterback but I believe I can be good at both, so why not do both?”

He played only five games as a senior at Glenn High. “I was about 5-7,” Woodbury said. “It’s tough 6-3 playing quarterback so you can imagine how it was then.”

By the time he enrolled at Winston-Salem State, he was 6-0. “I had no intentions of playing football at all,” Woodbury said. “I wanted to play basketball.”

When he registered for classes, he ran into one of the football coaches. “He asked me to come out,” Woodbury said. “I decided to walk on. The rest is history.”

He threw for 40 touchdowns (and a school-record 4,536 yards) and signed as a free agent with the Jets over the Dolphins and Ravens. “If they just woulda cracked the door open, I would have done the rest,” Woodbury said.

He is doing the rest.

“I’m the type of person I feel that with prayer, with God, I can do anything,” Woodbury said. “Coach Herman said don’t worry about nothing, just go out there and have fun, and that’s what I do. I don’t let nobody tell me I can’t do it.”

What makes you think you can play wide receiver at this level?

“What’s gonna stop me from doing it but myself?” Woodbury asks. “I got Laveranues [Coles], [Wayne] Chrebet, Santana [Moss], Kevin Swayne to learn from. I got Vinny [Testaverde] and Chad [Pennington] to learn from quarterback, Aaron Beasley on defense, Sam Garnes, so I can’t do nothing but get better.”

Woodbury, who has yet to throw a regular-season pass, was a force on special teams last year before tearing his quad and watching the Jets get whipped by the Raiders in the playoffs on television. “It was hard watching my team out there in Oakland perform, especially on special teams where I had a major role,” Woodbury said.

What kind of receiver can you be?

“Any kind of receiver they want me to be,” Slash says.