Fast forward 12 years, and Davis was picking up his new boss at the airport so the two could watch practices for the East-West Shrine Game. "I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you," Reese said to Davis. "No, no," Davis said with his typical humility.
"I'm a boiler-room guy. You're a boardroom guy. I don't get any of the credit.
" "He's just kind of embarrassed by the whole thing," Reese said. "It's who he is. He's got that bulldog personality, and he loves trying to find guys that will help the Giants.
He's never wanted to be in an office." Davis, 53, is entering his 20th season as a scout for the Giants. He's found more than a few players for the team, and missed on a few, too.
From a hotel room in Houston this week, he spoke about what could turn out to be his biggest find: Reese, who played chess with Davis and displayed the kind of leadership ability that Davis has watched grow over the years. "You could see it, in the way he interacted with the players," said Davis, who essentially was Reese's boss at UT-Martin. Reese was an all-conference safety as a player and moved right into coaching, so he worked with Davis' secondary.
"There were just a lot of qualities you can't describe," Davis said. "The way he handled people was one of his strongest suits, you know? He worked for me, but he had a lot of responsibilities.
He coached those kids up." So much so that, after two years, Reese moved up to secondary coach when Davis left. Davis knew Tom Boisture, then the Giants' director of personnel, and hooked on as a part-time scout after a decade of bouncing around the college coaching ranks.
He arrived at Giants Stadium in 1988 and was paid by the hour to break down video. "He worked harder and stayed longer than most of the full-time guys," Reese said. "George Young called me 'The Guy Who Walked Through the Door That Never Left.
' I'll always remember that," said Davis, who grew up in Montclair, N.J. "I still don't plan to leave.
" In 1990, Young made Davis a full-time scout. He and Reese kept in touch - Reese became UT-Martin's receivers and assistant head coach in 1993. Shortly after that, Davis told his friend that Reese should consider joining the Giants as a scout.
"He was making $30,000 a year and had a car with an allowance of 6,000 miles on it," Davis said. "He thought he was big-time. I knew he could help the Giants out.
" It took nearly a year of convincing, but Reese sat down with Boisture and ultimately took the job. It meant nearly 200 days a year away from home, where his wife, Gwen, was handling one small child and had another on the way. But Reese embraced his new gig, as Davis knew he would.
"We were both scouts for five years," Davis said, "and I never got one call from him complaining about this, that or the other. He wants to be perfect at everything he does." It didn't surprise Davis to watch his friend's rise to assistant director of pro personnel in 1999 and director of player personnel in 2002.
That meant Reese was coordinating the draft, which meant he now was Davis' direct supervisor. It also could have meant a promotion for Davis, who was the team's Southeast area scout. But Reese had come to know that nothing made his friend prouder than to discover a little-known prospect at a small school, or a lightly regarded prospect at a bigger one.
Only when prodded did Davis come up with one such player: Corey Raymond, an undrafted cornerback from LSU who beat out drafted players to make the Giants in 1992 and eventually became a starter. "He can't resist stopping by every little school in his area to see who they have," Reese said. "He'll do his assigned stuff, and it's very thorough.
But he goes above and beyond." It's where Davis' "boiler-room guy" comment comes from. Davis joined many others in the Giants' organization at the memorial service for Roy Posner, Bob Tisch's financial adviser, who died just after the win over the Redskins.
A speaker recalled Posner as equally at home with the boiler-room guys as the boardroom guys. "That's me ..
. I'm a boiler-room guy," Davis said. "My job is to find talent that can help us win.
I appreciate what Jerry's said about me, but he doesn't have to say that stuff. I've got my area to cover, and I'll do that. It's what I love to do.
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