One and the Same (6 page)

Ronde agrees. “New York shaped him and this culture shaped me. A perfect example: Neither one of us could play golf when we left Virginia, and now I have a four handicap and he still can't play the game.”

Does Tiki try?

“He tries and he quits.” Ronde laughs. “It's not something he can perfect on the Upper East Side.”

Ronde says it wasn't just their tastes that changed but their dispositions, too. “I became real casual,” Ronde says. “Just doing my thing. No guidelines, no real sense of urgency to do anything, other than my job. While Tiki turned into this structured guy who went by the minute on the clock. His second year on the Giants, he was already doing commentary in the morning with WCBS Sports, and I was like, ‘What the hell are you doing? Don't you want to be a football player?' He was gaining interest in new things, stuff I had no exposure to, and eventually turned into who he is now. When we left Virginia, I wouldn't have predicted for anything in the world that he would have become this guy, but that's who he is. I think he took advantage of a good situation because he's an opportunist.”

I ask Ronde if he'd describe himself the same way.

“Yes, but I don't know if that's translated in the ways that it has for him. I mean, he left football and went right to a great job at NBC News. I don't have that opportunity like he does. It's something I may do down the road, but I can't possibly set it up the way he's set himself up. That's just about being in the number-one market in the country. The opportunities to groom yourself here are not the same as they are there. … And he's good at what he does—for no reason! He never had any formal training other than jumping into the fire. I don't know if my jumping into the fire here would be as fruitful.”

Is he surprised that Tiki's had such a smooth career-change? “No.” He smiles. “He's good at everything.”

Does he look at Tiki and say, “He has skills I don't”?

“Yes. He has learned skills that I don't have. Tiki is much more cerebral than I am. He's an intelligent dude, picks up things very quickly. It's been that way our entire lives. For the most part, I was the twin that was beating on his door, saying, ‘I can't figure this homework out.' He was like, ‘Come on, you're stupid; it's easy.' He's always been more above-the-neck than I've been. But I've got a tough standard to keep up, because one of us has got to be the short end of the stick.”

I tell Ronde that his mom remembers his childhood response when she suggested that he study five minutes more each night: “You've already got one geek in the family; you don't need two.”

“Exactly.” Ronde nods. “And I don't know if that was self-conscious or intentional. I don't know if I was saying to myself, I don't want to be like him, or, I want to be
exactly
like him. Tiki always did everything so easily in school, and I felt like I was the one that had to work at it. Somewhere along the way, he became the smarter twin.”

How many twins could say that without bristling? Very few. There's this odd sanguineness when the Barbers describe their flaws and strengths, while other twins I spoke to seem to dodge and weave about who does what better. Maybe professional sports breeds bluntness; there's no whitewashing whether you're good enough to make the team, good enough to play (at first neither Barber made the starting roster), average or exceptional. The Barbers fling their compliments and gibes without seeming worried that it will color the larger picture—that they think the world of each other. The only time Ronde recoils at an adjective is when I offer one that might sound negative.

I asked Ronde if he'd call Tiki more “ambitious,” and he seemed to stiffen. “Depends on how you use the word,” he cautioned, clearly protective of how I might label his brother.

I clarified that by “ambitious,” I meant “itchy, always reaching for the next thing.”

Ronde softened. “I could see that, yes; judging by the fact that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing next, whereas he knew exactly what he was doing and he put a lot of thought toward it.”

Tiki tells me why one day he was finished with football. “This wasn't about ‘I hate my coach,' or this or that; this was about quality of life. The year before I retired, when my wife asked me to play with my kids, and I didn't want to, nor could I, I knew it was time to do something else. … I said, ‘If I'm fifty-two, like Earl Campbell in a wheelchair, who's going to be cheering for me then?'”

“He didn't talk about quitting all the time,” Ronde recalls, “but you could just feel it. Same way as when you play Ms. Pac-Man a thousand times and you've beaten it a thousand times and you're like, All right, either Ms. Pac-Man 2 is coming out or I'm going to put in Galactica. That's what it felt like. Not that he was bored by what he was doing, because our sport's unique: It's exciting when you play. But I think he was just bored with the routine of that part of his life and he was ready. He knew it wasn't going to last forever, so he made steps to move on. Whereas I'm more along the lines of ‘It will end someday, and when it does, I'll decide what to do then.' Eventually your body just can't do it anymore and then you have to do something else.”

“Physically I was much more beat-up than Ronde is,” Tiki says. “Being a running back, I get hit forty times a day, where Ronde gets hit maybe four or five. It starts to take its toll.”

“I feel great,” Ronde tells me. “I swear to God, I would never know that I'm thirty-three if I didn't read it every day in the paper or in every magazine article written about me: ‘He's thirty-three; he can't do it forever.' Eventually in the back of your head, you start thinking, Is this true?”

Why does he think he's still thriving at the older end of football age? “I think it's something in my makeup; I refuse not to be successful. Take that back to my youth: I refused to be a failure in comparison to Tiki. And I'm sure my mom told you this—last year she was thinking I felt guilty because I was still playing football when Tiki quit. And I don't know if I put that much thought on it, but I could see that being the case, because we always did everything together, and now, how do I judge my success? I never judged it against anybody else's. … That aspect of my motivation was suddenly lacking, and I honestly had used it a lot. It was definitely a void I had to fill, and I don't know if I did or not.”

I ask if Tiki drove him in a competitive way or a motivational one. “More in a motivational way. I was just excited to see him be successful. … It made it worth doing, above anything else. Even if the
game stank and our team stank, it was, ‘Hey, we may have lost today, but I'm going to see how Tiki did.' And that element completely disappeared last year, and in my mind, it was all on me. I had to find a way to adapt to the new structure of it.”

“There is no doubt in my mind,” says Tiki, “that we are both successful because we refused to let the other one down. It was partly ‘I have to keep up with him; he has to keep up with me.' But it was also ‘Don't dare be a failure, because then you drag me down.' So we competed against each other's successes. And we were always fortunate—actually, it may have been intentional, even subconsciously—that we never did the same thing. So when we wrestled in seventh and eighth grade, he dropped weight so he could wrestle at one thirty-six, I wrestled at one forty-two. When we ran track, he learned the hurdles while I was a sprinter and did the long jump. When we played football, he was defensive back, wide receiver, and I was a running back. We never did the same thing, but we always had success. It was kind of like, ‘If you're going to win, I'm going to win. If you're going to be good, I've got to be good.'”

Doesn't it bother Tiki that Ronde's the one with a Super Bowl ring? “It was probably the greatest moment of pride I've ever felt,” says Tiki of Tampa's victory over Oakland in 2003. “Cynics will say, ‘Oh, you're jealous.' But those same people have no idea what we have.”

The press loved the twin versus twin angle whenever the Giants played the Bucs, but the Barbers viewed it as “more talk and hype.” Ronde says, “At the end of it, he was just another opponent.”

Tiki tells me Ronde was playful during those match-ups. “One time, I was getting tackled out of bounds and he wasn't even close to me, but he comes over and just elbows me like this.” He shows me. “I'm like, ‘What the hell are you doing?' He says, ‘I'm just trying to make it look good.'” He especially loves one particular photograph of Ronde tackling him near the goal line in 2006, because he's enveloping Tiki just as he must have in utero.

“Someone told me this great quote yesterday,” says Tiki. “‘Life is
a crack of brightness between two eternities of darkness.' My first eternity of darkness with my brother was me on top of him—because he came out first. And when we were babies, my mom would put us on opposite ends of the bed and before you know it, we were lying on top of each other like we were in the womb. And here we are again in this photograph.”

I wonder where the wives fit into this duet. Tiki's striking wife, Ginny, a former publicist who comes from Korean and Vietnamese lineage, has known the Barber twins since college, when she started dating Tiki. (They married in 1999.) Ronde's equally attractive wife, Claudia, who now works with Diabetic Charitable Services, is of Filipino descent and married Ronde in 2001. All three Barbers I spoke to tiptoe around the question of how the wives handle the twinship. “Let me answer it this way,” says Geraldine. “Do they understand it? I'd say, ‘Not totally.' Do they respect it? Definitely.”

“When we're all together, it's a great foursome,” Ronde says. “When we're not, it is what it is. …” He smiles, clearly not wanting to expand further, then takes a different tack. “You know what it is? And they'll never admit this: They're both control addicts; they want control. And neither one of them can have it, especially when Tiki and I are the ones who are really in control, if that makes any sense. It's not intentional; they have the
appearance
of control and they do a lot of things for us. But at the end of the day, we all know who's making the decisions. It will come down to what Tiki and I want to do, because that's the Relationship. So
you
figure out the psychodynamics of that. … When you're married to a twin, essentially, whether you like it or not, you're married to the other one, too. Tiki's as much involved in my life now as he was back when we were in college.”

Does he think that bothers their spouses? “Of course. Absolutely. And they'll never talk about it; they probably don't even necessarily recognize it, but, yeah, that's what it is.”

Tiki echoes him: “I think our bond is the strongest it's ever been and the strongest bond that there possibly is. Greater than marriage. I'm closer to Ronde, without a doubt. And that will never change.”

So many married twins told me the same thing. And it always moved me to hear it, but it's not how Robin and I feel. Our husbands know us better. They get more of us now—not just in terms of time spent but in what we tell them and whose counsel we seek. When Ronde told me their spouses don't always embrace their closeness, I thought of my brother-in-law, Edward. He's accustomed to my relationship with Robin, but I wouldn't say he facilitates it. He and I have a warm friendship, but it's been clear over the years that he doesn't believe that a twin should get special treatment. When Robin first got pregnant, for example, Ed didn't think she should tell me the news ahead of his family or the rest of ours. She told me anyway, but it was hard to learn she'd had to overrule him to follow her impulse. It seemed self-evident to me that she would rush to share something so momentous. To thwart that reflex was to obstruct the normal blood flow of our relationship.

Days later, I asked Ed to meet for coffee to discuss it, and he explained matter-of-factly that he didn't see any reason why I should get particular consideration, any more than his younger brother or older sister. I was stymied; I couldn't sit across a table and make the case for the Twin Exception. It felt like if it wasn't obvious to him, it wasn't defensible—my argument for twin precedence was basically “It just is.”

I tell each Barber that some twins' relationships have struck me as a kind of love story and I wonder if they find that's a fitting analogy. Ronde nods, “We see beyond who we pretend to be. I know who he really is, he knows who I really am, and if you were writing a love story, that's what it would be. All those romantic ideals—‘conquers all,' ‘stands the test of time'—yes. That's certainly the case with us.”

Tiki agreed that twinship is “a perfect intimacy.”

“It starts from the zygote splitting and one destined person becoming two,” he continues. “And while we go our separate ways in life and our experiences vary, at the end of the day, we're still one.”

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