For Giants rookie Jonathan Goff, mom is judge and jury

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on May 11, 2008 at 3:00 AM, updated December 02, 2009 at 12:32 PM
jonathan-goff-mother-new-york-giants-1202.jpgGiants linebacker Jonathan Goff and his mother, Gwendolyn Tyre.

The call came in exactly at 10 a.m., just as Gwendolyn Tyre had promised. After a long night of being at the mercy of the airline's schedule, she was precise as always.

"The time difference has me thrown off a bit," the Massachusetts resident said from Nashville, Tenn. "Even though it's only one hour."

This is a woman who could play for Tom Coughlin any day. Only it's her son who will be doing so.

But to impress the Giants coach, his new boss, Jonathan Goff will have to rely on just about every one of the lessons learned from Tyre, a single mother who demanded discipline -- knowing it would lead to her youngest son's success.

"There were a lot of limits and boundaries to keep me and my brother out of trouble," said Goff, a middle linebacker whom the Giants drafted in the fifth round last month. "She always kept us busy."

That's a major reason Tyre (pronounced "Tyree") is doubly proud this Mother's Day. On Friday, as Goff and the rest of the Giants' rookies were participating in their first NFL practice, Tyre and Goff's older brother, Jason, were at Vanderbilt to collect Jonathan's degree in mechanical engineering.

It was the culmination of an academic career fostered by Tyre, whose education pulled her "out of the ghetto," into the history books as the first African-American law clerk on the Georgia State Supreme Court and finally onto the bench as a judge in Middlesex (Mass.) County juvenile court, where she has sat for the past 12 years.

Tyre is tough on the troubled young people who appear before her in court, though she admits she was tougher on her children. From the time she moved them from Georgia to Stoneham, Mass., after her divorce in 1988, Tyre instituted firm rules in the home: No sports or activities until homework was completed (even on weekends), no television after a certain hour, no TVs in the bedroom until after they graduated high school, no part-time jobs to distract from school work and, for a while, no football.

"She was very strict in terms of being disciplined," Jason Goff, who is currently working on a Ph.D. in engineering at UCLA, said by phone. "A lot of my friends were more intimidated by her than we were. We were acclimated to that lifestyle of always having strict rules."

And full schedules.

"He was just so damn smart," Tyre said of Jonathan. "I had to expose him to as much as I could."

Tyre knew how smart Jonathan was by age 4, when he began reading. Jonathan would pick up the children's dictionary or encyclopedia and quiz his mother. The next day, he'd pick up the same book and ask her the same question.

"If my answer varied at all, he would look at me and say, 'Were you lying to me when you told me such and such yesterday?'" Tyre recalled. "I would have to explain why the answers were the same. And he would always ask 'Why, why, why, why and why?'"

After particularly long days at work, Tyre couldn't answer Jonathan and often sent him to help Jason with his homework. It wasn't really surprising when Jonathan was kicked out of one preschool class for being disruptive. Bored by colors, letters and numbers, he was soon moved up a grade.

Goff always had a lot of energy to burn. He did so through several sports -- but not football, which was much too physical for mom's liking. That changed when Tyre's brother, Rico, a former football player whose attempt to play for UMass was cut short by injury, told her she had an athlete on her hands, one that could go to college for free.

After four years at St. John's Prep in Danvers, Mass. -- a school with an outstanding athletic program and a solid academic reputation that pleased Tyre -- Goff got a scholarship to Vanderbilt.

And as always, he impressed on the field (second team All-SEC and two-time team captain who led the Commodores with 113 tackles last season) and in the classroom (the engineering department's scholar-athlete award winner who completed his degree a semester early).

"Jonathan is a first-class individual; a great young man," Vanderbilt linebacker coach Warren Belin told the Salem (Mass.) News last year. "I give a lot of credit to his mom for raising a quality young man."

Tyre gives the credit right back to her son for doing what she couldn't: Earning a degree in a difficult major while excelling on the field. As a student at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., she was forced to quit the basketball team to save a slipping GPA. In the end, it was a wise decision because it resulted in a rewarding job.

Recently, a young woman came to the courtroom years after Tyre sent her to jail.

"There are a lot of people who come back to thank you and there are a lot of people that come back and curse you. She thanked me," Tyre said. "She was going to graduate from law school. We both stood there, we hugged and we cried.

"She was a young, black woman and she saw me on the bench and she said, 'I just wanted to be like you.'"

Tyre's role as a juvenile court judge has also helped teach her what pressures her sons faced and how tough love would mold them.

"You always hear them say, 'You'll thank me for this when you get older,'" said Jason Goff, who was briefly a member of UCLA's table tennis team. "I can honestly say now that's true."

So can Jonathan, who has always been a stoic, hard-working young man of very few words. The kind of man who has learned the lessons his mother has taught him, but whose quiet nature is modeled more after his grandfather, a World War II veteran.

So while his mother was hugging her son and jumping up and down after he was drafted, Goff kept his emotions in check.

"I'm pretty much like this all the time," he said midway through an interview that included a lot of one-sentence answers and plenty of unflinching eye contact. "I've always been a bit more reserved and try to lead by example."

On the bench, his mother is reserved as well. While watching her son play, it's quite a different story. A few months ago, she engaged in some playful trash talk with South Carolina fans at a sports bar outside Boston after the Commodores beat the Gamecocks -- Vanderbilt's biggest upset in 70 years.

Now that her son is playing for a Giants team that scored an even bigger upset of her hometown Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, Tyre could find herself in similarly uncomfortable rooting situations.

"I'll always be his No. 1 fan," she said, "no matter what team he plays for."