Giants' Gavin Heslop fought the long battle with injury to give himself another chance
Giants defensive back Gavin Heslop participates in a drill during training camp at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center in East Rutherford, N.J., on Thursday. Credit: Brad Penner
It was the moment Gavin Heslop had been working toward his entire life.
After a year and a half on the practice squad, he had been signed to the Seahawks’ active roster last December, called up to replace the injured Jamal Adams. He had played a handful of special teams reps and was hoping for the opportunity to make his mark on the defense.
Then, late in the Week 14 game in Houston, with his team up by several scores and the Texans with the ball, he heard the two words he’d been waiting for since he first began playing football while growing up in Yonkers.
“Get in,” the Seattle coaches told him.
He’d always known such things were possible, even when he did not receive any substantial offers from big-time FBS colleges out of Stepinac High School in White Plains and wound up going to Stony Brook University. His first year on the Suffolk County campus was 2015, the year former Giants tight end Will Tye became the first Seawolf to play in the NFL and score a touchdown.
“I was like ‘Dang, that could be me!’ ” Heslop recalled thinking while watching Tye. “It gave me hope.”
He’d been teammates with Jake Carlock, who didn’t make the final roster but made a big splash for the Giants as an undrafted free agent in the summer and preseason of 2019 and landed on the practice squad. He’d seen Victor Ochi and Sam Kamara and Timon Parris — “My boys,” Heslop called them, Stony Brook players all — get their chances to play in regular-season games at the highest level.
And now he was getting his.
He sprinted onto the field with one thought in his head:
“It’s my time.”
Four plays later, he was carted off it.
Heslop suffered a fractured tibia and fibula in a freak collision when a receiver and cornerback tumbled after an incomplete pass and rolled into his left leg. He was rushed to an area hospital and had emergency surgery the following morning while the rest of his team flew back to Seattle. He was back in the Pacific Northwest by the end of the week, but he was placed on injured reserve. His season was over. Before long, his tenure in Seattle was done, too.
“What a heartbreaker,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said of Heslop at the time of his surgery. “He just got started. He was doing well, too, and to get to this point where we got him active and all that, versatile football player. It’s just too bad. It’s a real shame.”
He’d been Moonlight Graham-ed, allowed just the briefest whiff of the sweet dessert of professional athletics only to have the plate and all its goodies yanked away from him.
Then last week, that familiar aroma returned — with sprinkles.
Not only was Heslop, who returned to running just last month, called in for an NFL workout, he was called by the Giants, of all teams. He showed up at the facility on July 22 and by the end of the day had signed a free-agent contract. Since then he’s been on the field, seemingly unencumbered by his gruesome injury, practicing each day just a few miles from where he was raised.
“This is a dream come true for me to play professional football in my backyard,” he said.
Not only for him but his tight-knit family. When he spent two years in Seattle after going undrafted out of Stony Brook, he saw them only once or twice a year. Now the whole crew — his mom and dad and two brothers, Garfield and Garrison — can drop by and see him at practice in training camp any time they like. On Saturday, in fact, a few of them did just that.
If things continue to work out, perhaps they’ll be making future trips from their new home in Connecticut to East Rutherford to see Heslop play.
The Giants have been playing him at his natural position of outside cornerback. He’s looked sharp, running reps with the second- and third-string units and breaking up pass plays on a fairly routine basis.
“I’m just taking it day by day, trying to be the best version of myself,” Heslop said. “I’m getting back in football shape. My first day playing football [since the injury] was on Wednesday, so I think I’m doing pretty well for myself so far . . . I didn’t think I’d be playing this soon. I thought I’d be ready around midseason. I just thank God I got another opportunity to play the game I love.”
When he was on the field in Houston surrounded by the medical staff with his leg zig-zagging in all kinds of unnatural directions, Heslop said he knew the toughest part of his recovery would not be the physical strain.
Sure, the injuries wound up being onerous, with a metal rod and screws now running from his knee to his ankle and months of rehab work required to build back the muscle around it. But somehow, in that dreadful moment, he said he knew the most challenging hurdle would be the mental one. It’s why he tried to stay as positive as he could.
“I was saying to myself: ‘You’re gonna get back, you’re gonna get back, you’re gonna get back,’ ” he recalled.
He had no idea how right he would turn out to be, or how far back he would be going. All the way to New York, where he first thought of playing in the league before following through with doubt-busting tenacity at Stepinac and Stony Brook.
Said Heslop: “I’m home.”
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
