The ex-wife of New York Giant defensive end Michael Strahan held a garage sale at her $3.6 million Montclair, New Jersey, mansion over the weekend saying she can no longer afford to keep the 30-room home, which includes an 8-car garage. Associated Press.
It was a sad day for Jean and Michael Strahan, but only Jean was around to live it; their hopes, their dreams, arrayed along the edges of their quarter-mile-long driveway for all the world to see the dejected state to which they had fallen.
In happier times.
The couple's marriage had ended in a bitter divorce, with the judge awarding Jean $15.3 million and monthly child support of $18,000. It was no wonder she was forced to part with her Garden State Turnpike throw pillows and New York Giants lap blanket--a steal at $450.
"How much you want for this 2001 Defensive Player of the Year Award?"
Strahan has to date paid his wife more than half of what the judge awarded her, but he's holding out on the last $6.5 million. "It's not about the money--it's the principle of the thing," he tells a reporter from the Bergen County Record. "She put all my Earth, Wind & Fire cassettes out on a table in the hot sun, and now they sound like Jabba the Hut on Prozac."
"This here Lamborghini's got a ding in it--you take $80,000 for it?"
For her part, Jean says she is just pinching pennies as any newly-divorced woman should. "How do you put a price tag on a dream?" she asks as a little girl tugs her skirt to ask how much she wants for a Big Wheels riding toy that retails for $99.99 at Toys 'R Us.
"That's $275 sweetie, because the child of the all-time sack leader for the New York Giants rode in it, okay?"
"I have fifty cents."
"I'll take it."
Yeats: A Philadelphia Eagles fan during the Sonny Jurgensen era.
Jean turns back to a reporter who, recalling a line by Yeats that he read in a college English class, asks her whether she will be able to salvage anything from the "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" that her once-beloved home has turned into.
"Good Lord--it's a life-size Brett Favre doll!"
"Is it really foul?" she asks, curling up her nose. "We're on town sewer, but sometimes it backs up in the spring."
An elderly woman in a housedress picks through items in a plastic laundry basket, searching for toys for her grandchildren. "Good Lord!" she exclaims. "It's a life-size Brett Favre doll!" And indeed when she holds up the limp figure for inspection it is a dead-ringer for Green Bay's Mr. Durability, going down to allow Strahan to record sack number 22.5 of the 2001 season to top Mark Gastineau's record of 22.
The infamous Sort-of-Sack.
"How much you want for this?" the old woman asks Jean.
"That? That should be in the Canton."
"I'll give you a dollar for it."
Jean waits a nanosecond before saying "Sold!"
The woman pays and walks off as her Jack Russell terrier nips at Favre's frayed right foot.
At the end of the day, Jean totes up her take--$49.25 cents--with a smile on her face.
"Big Wheels, fifty cents. Favre doll--one dollar. Taking seven and a half million from your ex-husband--priceless."
NEWARK, New Jersey. Locked in an ugly divorce battle with her husband, the wife of New York Giant star Michael Strahan today moved to clarify comments she made about his relationship with TV doctor Ian Smith.
"When Michael moved into Ian's one-bedroom apartment, I said that an alternative lifestyle 'sprouted' between the two," she said on the steps of the Essex County Family Courthouse here. "I did not mean to imply that they are ####--not that there's anything wrong with that."
Pressed by reporters to describe what she meant by "alternative", the teary-eyed Mrs. Strahan choked back sobs before speaking.
"Basically, whenever they 'hang' together a 'guy town' springs up around them. They crack peanut shells on the carpet, leave the toilet seat up, read ESPN The Magazine--it's awful."
Both Strahan and Smith issued statements stating that they are "very heterosexual." Heterosexuality is gauged by two international standards, Metric and Celsius, and scientists at the Los Alamos Observatory in New Mexico confirmed that from a distance both men appeared to be straight. "'####-dar' isn't perfect," astronomer Philip Van de Camp cautioned. "The curvature of the earth may have affected our measurements."
Mrs. Strahan stood by her claim, saying the tipping point came when Smith stayed at their house late into the night to watch an NFL Fox Sunday game. "I said to Michael, 'Will you please come to bed when that's over,' and he said yes. I fell asleep and three hours later they were still up watching Australian rules football and playing 'Pictionary'."
Among the more serious allegations made by Mrs. Strahan in seeking to end her marriage to the New York Giants' Pro Bowl lineman is that he once forgot a birthday card she gave him, an allegation Strahan denies. "I didn't forget it, although I wish I could," he said. "It had a little rabbit on it and said 'I will always wuv you my big huggable bunny.' It made me want to fwow up. Once 'Best Damn Sports Show Period' gets hold of that my career is over."
Family Court Judge Lawrence Millburn said he would take the matter under advisement and review the evidence submitted by the two sides, which includes a detailed journal that Michael Strahan kept of the couple's sex life before they had children. "I want to make sure I give this important document my full attention," he said before recessing for the summer. "See you back here sometime after Labor Day."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
