The megawatt smile was missing when Victor Cruz stepped to the podium late Monday morning with his post-surgery right knee and nagging left calf and the Cowboys 13 days away and the reality that he has not even been cleared to jog.
“Calves are tricky,” Cruz says, and his is so tricky he has not yet been cleared to practice, he will not play Thursday night in New England, and there is no guarantee he will be able to make his 2015 debut Sept. 13 in Dallas.
“I think I’ll be ready to go,” Cruz says. “Hopefully, come Week 1, I’m able to get on the practice field and run around a little bit. I know how Coach Coughlin … if you don’t practice, you don’t play, so I want to be out here for practice come Week 1.”
Hope alone won’t get him back on the field.
“Nothing’s been set in stone in terms of playing that first week or not playing the first week, so I’m still excited for Week 1, that’s still the goal, that’s still the plan in my opinion,” Cruz said. “Obviously, the training staff will advise if they see differently. But we’ll see. So I’ll just take that one day at a time making sure that I’m ready to go.”
Of course Cruz believes he will be the Cruz who salsa-ed his way to stardom from nowhere. It’s how he is wired.
“I’m still confident, I still feel good,” he said. “Obviously the calf, once that’s back to form and I’m able to run again, that confidence will always be there to go out there and make plays and catch the football.”
The defensively challenged Giants are diminished without him. Eli Manning and Odell Beckham Jr. need him. Whenever he does finally return to the field, he’ll be rusty, and the timing between him and Manning will be affected. Cruz, the eternal optimist, was asked if he thinks he can get back to where he was whenever he is cleared.
“Yeah, absolutely,” he says. “Obviously, offensively, I know the offense, I know all the things that I’ve done since I started playing football: catching the ball and running routes and all those things like that. So I still think I’m right there. It’s just, you know, things happen, just a small setback, and I’m just anxious to get through this and make it out the other end.”
It has been a small setback that will have lasted three weeks and nuked his preseason.
“I haven’t been able to jog — well, not that I haven’t been able to — but they don’t want me to right now, they just want me to sit down and let it heal and let it repair itself and things like that,” Cruz said. “So I’ve just been working out lower body, one leg, or whatever the case may be, upper body, just doing all the things I can to stay in shape.”
Legs can be tricky when you are coming back from a torn patellar tendon.
“I think we’re just being careful and cautious with it,” Cruz said. “Calves are tricky. Once they feel healed and once they feel OK, you can go out here and mess it up again, so you want to make sure that it’s fully healed and fully recovered once you step back out there on the field.”
The telepathy Manning and Cruz always shared will be severely tested whenever he returns.
“There’s things we can do obviously in the meeting rooms, whatever we can squeeze in timing-wise, it’ll be good,” Cruz said. “It’s pretty much cut and dried, Eli knows where I’ll be, he knows the routes, I know the routes, so hopefully we can continue to stay on the same page that we’ve been on.”
Rueben Randle, who has been hindered with knee tendinitis (“just nagging,” he said, “when you try to be explosive at the top of your route, then it gets to aching”), would be asked to take the heat off Beckham.
“We have enough talent in the room to overcome any adversity that we may face,” Randle said.
Randle had seen Cruz make a remarkable comeback from his nightmare last October in Philadelphia.
“He was getting back to where he was,” Randle said. “I don’t think the knee bothered him at all while he was out there, so that was a good thing, and he was really looking forward to getting back out there Week 1. The calf injury is kind of a little minor setback, but just see how it goes these next couple of weeks.”
Cruz was asked what he would tell Giants fans agonizing over his Week 1 status.
“To just be patient and hopefully my body will be ready to go,” he said.