On the field following the New York Giants’ dramatic win over the Arizona Cardinals last Sunday, after the Giants quarterback Jameis Winston praised God and wondered in amazement at “so many supernatural things” that had happened, after he credited the Giants’ preparation and hard work and the “divine interaction” that led to Deonte Banks’s pick-six to seal the victory (“Just getting off his injury!”), after his eyes flew up to meet the gaze of the Lord, after his impassioned voice trailed off into a cloud of “wow”s, a sideline reporter for CBS, Aditi Kinkhabwala, changed the subject. The game was “also,” she said, a prime example of “the Jameis Winston experience.” So was the interview.
She didn’t need to define the Jameis Winston experience. The Giants’ 36–24 win over the Cardinals had been a refresher course, a reminder of the highs and the lows. Winston had thrown passes into pockets of space the size of a cupped hand, and launched sudden and astonishing deep spirals far down the field. He had also spun into sacks, and he threw interceptions to wide-open defenders. It wasn’t clear whether he was responsible for the Giants’ win—their third in his three games on the field this season, and his second as a starter—or for their close proximity to disaster. Winston had thrown three touchdowns and two interceptions, Kinkhabwala noted. How did he recover? What did he tell himself?
Winston closed his eyes. “One thing I do,” he said, swaying his head like a preacher feeling the spirit, hammering a clenched fist in the air for emphasis, “is forgetting that is behind me, and reaching forward to what is ahead.” His eyes flew open and he pointed at the camera. “You think that I’m joking,” he went on, now facing the camera squarely, like an actor breaking the fourth wall. “But Philippians 3:13 states this, and you have to do it, no matter the circumstances, conditions, or facts.” He had desired a Giants win, he said to the camera, and God had willed it.
Was this a sincere call to faith? Or was it a performance, a kind of joke? Was it funny, inspiring, tiresome, all three? “And what about the Giants?” Kinkhabwala said, or tried to say, but Winston was already answering. He had already moved on.
I, for one, did not think that Winston was joking. How else to understand the Winston experience except as a forgetting, a perpetual letting go? The sacred and the profane collapse around him. Before he was drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in 2015, as the No. 1 draft pick, it was hard to know what to think—or what not to. His talent wasn’t in question. He’d won the Heisman as a nineteen-year-old freshman at Florida State, the youngest winner in history at the time, and led the team to the national championship. He’d been suspended for a game the following season, after standing on a table in the student union and yelling, “Fuck her right in the pussy,” referencing a crude meme that was popular at the time. He was cited for shoplifting crab legs at a Publix grocery store. He was also accused of rape, an allegation that he strongly denied and for which he was neither fully investigated nor criminally charged. (After his accuser sued Florida State for violating her Title IX rights by improperly investigating, the school paid a nine-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar settlement. She also sued Winston, who countersued; the parties settled, with the terms undisclosed. The university did not admit liability as part of the settlement.)