Former Giants running back Tiki Barber launched in 2007 a much-hyped career in broadcasting, pairing sports with news. His career has been sluggish at best, and we’re told that his tenure on NBC’s Football Night in America ended upon the completion of the 2009 football season.
But Barber remains a contributor to NBC News, though he’s now making the kind of news that possibly could have an impact on that relationship as well.
Wednesday’s New York Post reports that Barber split from his wife, Ginny, when she was eight months pregnant with twins. The Post reports that Barber left his wife for former NBC intern Traci Lynn Johnson. It’s unknown whether the relationship began while Johnson was still working for NBC.
In 2004, Barber criticized his own father for leaving his mother. “Not only did he abandon her, I felt like he abandoned us for a lot of our lives,” Barber told the Post at the time. “I have a hard time forgiving that.”
The Barbers have two other children.
Barber’s career with NBC Sports seemed to fizzle over the past year or so. He had limited “face time” during Football Night in America before being sent out of the studio to conduct short interviews from the site of a given Sunday afternoon game, a role he filled throughout the 2009 season. And while he was in Vancouver for the Olympics, he was working not for NBC but for Yahoo!
Barber’s biggest on-air gaffe came in August 2008, when he seemed to use a horribly profane and offensive term when uttering the phrase “total medal count.” Though he denied that he meant to omit one of the vowels from the word “count,” the video evidence seems to suggest (in our opinion and not in the opinion of NBC) that he knew darn well what he was saying.