New York Jets cornerback Sauce Gardner is rich and famous, usually the center of attention when he’s out in public. Unless he’s with rap star Ice Spice.
The celebrity couple recently spent time in Lake George, a popular vacation spot in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. If Gardner expected a quiet getaway before reporting to training camp, he was mistaken. The couple’s presence sparked a frenzy on the streets of the town, not to mention on social media.
Gardner embraces Ice Spice’s celebrity.
“It’s pretty cool,” he told Otis Livingston of CBS New York in an interview that aired Sunday night. “It takes some heat off me, too, especially [if] you have little girls who probably don’t even know me for real.
“So it’s like, yes, they know her. It’s pretty cool. It’s definitely good to spend time with somebody.”
Gardner, 24, and Ice Spice, 25, who was born and raised in the Bronx, have been spotted around New York in recent months. After finalizing a four-year, $120.4 million contract extension on July 15, making him the NFL’s highest-paid cornerback in history, Gardner wanted to celebrate by doing something different.
So they drove north to Lake George for a few days of boating, fishing and relaxing. But word got out quickly, and soon they were tracked down by TMZ. When they walked around at night, the power couple attracted a throng of cellphone gawkers. Gardner said his mother sent him a video that had been posted.
“It got to the point where there were like hundreds of people following behind us,” Gardner said. “It was just crazy. I don’t usually walk around.”
“I was just like, ‘We’re in Lake George, I’m at a lake for the first time, let me do something I haven’t done probably since I was in high school or something like that.’
“Obviously, it didn’t go the way I wanted it to go, but it was still pretty cool. I wasn’t worried about nobody doing nothing. We purposely didn’t take no security. I was the security, you know what I’m saying? I wasn’t worried about nothing.”
