By Ben Shpigel
COLD SPRING, Minn. — His friends would call his house on summer days, and if Eric Decker was not around they knew where to find him.
Shoehorned into a residential neighborhood, four blocks from downtown, stands the town treasure, a ball field known here as Springer Park. Ivy shrouds the outfield fence. A towering ash tree, bombarded a decade ago by Decker’s left-handed drives, looms beyond right-center field. A sign outside greets visitors: “A Tradition Since 1923.”
Decker operated the scoreboard and retrieved bats and shagged stray balls. More often, he and his pals would gather by the first-base dugout to play a game called Butts Up. One of them would fire a tennis ball against the wall, and anyone who fumbled it three times got pegged, and hard, in the posterior. Rarely Decker, though. His hands, even then, were too good.
“My second home,” he said.
When Decker, 27, returns to his hometown, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis, those who know him best have no trouble reconciling the person who left nine years ago to play football at Minnesota with the man he has become: a 6-foot-3 Velcro-handed receiver for the Jets who established his bona fides by catching touchdowns from Peyton Manning in Denver, who primps for fashion spreads and co-stars on a reality television show with his country music star wife.
To them, he is just Eric, or Dex. The guy who followed his alma mater, Rocori High School, in the 2011 state title game, online, and then, after the Spartans won, called the Side Bar & Grill to surprise every coach with a $50 gift card. The guy who, having experienced the terror of hiding in a library closet with a gunman on the loose at Rocori, recorded a video message for students at a suburban Denver high school after a shooting there in December.
Before modeling sweaters and duffle coats for GQ, Decker wore a pinstriped Kirby Puckett jersey almost every day for a month. Before appearing with his wife, Jessie James Decker, on the E! program “Eric & Jessie: Game On,” he shined on stage as Little Grunt, a cave boy who discovers a dinosaur egg, as a second grader at St. Boniface. Before performing extra conditioning drills as penance after an erratic training camp practice last month at SUNY Cortland, he would run extra routes and take extra swings and shoot extra jumpers, with his Rocori coaches urging other players: Watch how Eric does it.
As a senior, he was selected by The St. Cloud Times as the area’s player of the year in basketball, his worst – his least best, rather – sport. Had Decker pursued baseball, the Minnesota Twins, who drafted him in the 27th round in 2009 only because it was obvious he wanted to play football after college, projected him as a superb center fielder and a top-of-the-order menace. That decision perplexed many in this baseball-mad burg. Why can’t you play both sports? he was asked. But it also directed him to the life he now leads.
“We studied the football tapes more than the reality tapes,” said John Idzik, the Jets’ general manager. “And we loved what we saw.”
IT DOES NOT HAPPEN much anymore, but every so often, when night falls, or if Decker hears a sound or smells a smell, he is transported back to one of the worst days of his life.
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