NY Jets #83 - George Sauer, RIP

George Sauer #83

The poster of George Sauer #83 in my childhood bedroom was one of the first objects over which I can remember ruminating. Mom hung it there to introduce me to football, the sport of boys and men. George Sauer is therefore the first football player I remember, and my first New York Jet. It's a 1969 Sports Illustrated poster, but the picture was taken during the 1968 season, during the Jets' 21-13 loss to Denver.

The picture is a strange amalgam of different aspects of life at Shea Stadium. It's taken from the ground level, and Sauer is catching a Namath pass somewhere in midfield. He's a lone figure on a hazy autumn day, except for Drake Garrett (#23), a rookie Denver defender arriving too late for the catch. In the background, looking off to their left, two Jets cheerleaders sit, waiting for something to cheer for. Bob Cleveland's bandstand directly behind them is adorned with green bunting. Above the band is a framed structure that was used to amplify the sound on the field, and through its rafters one can make out the image of a warehouse near Flushing Bay. The field is brown and green as a leftover from the New York Mets' season. Sauer's eye is on the pass, and he's puffing his cheeks.

Since I had the leisure of time to stare up at the poster from the vantage of either my crib or my first bed, I tried to understand the single moment captured there. How close were the band members to the field? What did they sound like? What were the girls looking at? Maybe I was using it to understand life as I had lived it so far. As a measure of what kind of sense the infant mind makes of things, I looked at George Sauer's outstretched fingers and wondered why he had mashed potatoes on his right hand. Mashed potatoes are exactly the kind of thing that children eat, and so often food ends up on a little child's hand. Mashed potatoes stick rather well to your hands.

Another erroneous
childhood observation

The fingers of Sauer's right hand are splayed out, ready for the pass, and his thumb is pointed upward in front of a flash of his white striped sleeve just behind it. As a little boy, I read the whole arrangement of sights, shapes and colors wrong, in much the way that children see reality all wrong when they first look at it. I swore he had mashed potatoes on that hand, something he had to shake off in order to do something else. I understood that. Rather than be an introduction to the world of men, the image was a way of seeing world as I was trying to understand it, which I suppose is what being a sports fan has always been for me. And I was a fan of George Sauer before I was a fan of anything else. He was on my wall, after all.

***

George Sauer and Willie Brown
in the 1968 AFL Championship

I'm working on the Infinite Jets book, and my plan was to leave wide receiver George Sauer for last. But George Sauer died of a heart attack last week after struggling with Alzheimer's disease. Suddenly the blog entry I've been planning to write for so long has become more important to write than any other. Sauer is one of the great mysteries of a great game.

Two Texans - Don Maynard and George Sauer - were the primary core of Namath's passing offense. Maynard was fast and sinewy. Sauer was graceful and fluid. The Times' obituary includes a photograph of Sauer (right) looking as if he is bobbling a pass while being covered by the great Willie Brown of Oakland, probably during the 1968 AFL Title Game. Sauer was one of the most feared receivers of his time. He was already well on his way to becoming a legend. But as many people have already pointed out in similar obituaries, George Sauer had a different plan, one over which he had been ruminating for some time before finally making the decision in 1971 to leave the NFL for good, and with it, the violent world of boys and men.

***

There's a DVD that accompanies the NFL book on Namath's life, which I own of course, and it's filled with the usual highlights of Namath's career - the great, soaring pass to Maynard in the 1968 opener against the Chiefs; the pass to Maynard to set up the winning touchdown against Oakland in the AFL Title Game. There's also his pass to George Sauer over Lenny Lyles' head in Super Bowl III which Sauer catches with a leap in the air to set up the winning field goal. The real find is at the end of the disk, a five-minute feature on Sauer that includes an interview with him. What happened to George Sauer?

The crucial thing is that he was George Sauer, Jr. He was the great son of a great University of Nebraska player from Waco, Texas - George Sauer, Sr. Born into the world of football, Sauer, Jr. felt he had no choice but to meet the expectations of the man who shaped his life. Sauer's story reads like a heavy-handed allegory out of a 1950's movie. He was given a scholarship to the University of Texas from the moment he was born - literally. Andy Barall at Fifth Down discusses this unique story, one that could never happen today:

Sauer was offered a football scholarship to the University of Texas on the day he was born. His father, George Sr., had played for the Longhorns’ coach, Dana X. Bible, at the University of Nebraska in the early ’30s....When Sauer (George, Jr.) finally decided to go to Texas, his mother showed him the letter they received from Bible all those years before. “As for George Jr.,” it read, “don’t worry. I’ve got a uniform reserved for him here (in) 1961.” “It was as though something was driving me from behind to do those things,” Sauer said.  

So he played for Darryl Royal's University of Texas squad, just as he was destined to. He had to have wondered, as many children do, if his own decisions were really just a product of his parent's expectations and designs, or if there was indeed something else inside of him, unformed, longing to come alive? Then, a few years afterwards, his father, a manager of player personnel for the New York Jets, made sure that that George the younger would play for the franchise, and so George, Jr. left Texas before his senior year and he became a Jet. He went on to be named AFL All-Pro four times.

Where does one's sense of obligation to one's parents begin and end? Sauer says that he shook hands with his father in the locker room in Miami after Super Bowl III and knew that he had fulfilled every one of his expectations, and now he hoped free himself from the life of football. It took two more seasons. It's interesting to note that after George Sr. left the Jets front office to briefly become the General Manager of the Boston Patriots, George Sauer, Jr. then left football for good the following year. As he says on the DVD segment, the original letter from Dana Bible about a scholarship at birth had stayed in his mind so long that it was eventually the thing that convinced him to abandon football altogether. From now on, he would be the captain of his own fate.

When he did leave in 1971, he wrote the following in explanation, which resonates now:

"Pro football does not do what it claims to do...It claims to teach self-discipline and responsibility, which is its most obvious contradiction. There is little real freedom. Instead the system – the power structure of the coaches and the people who run the game – works to mold you into something they can manipulate."

Obviously he echoed many of the same ideas of young people the late 60's and early 70's. But every person who trains idealistically for something will ultimately have a realization where he sees how things "really work." The most popular literary theme students always know by the time they reach me is "illusion vs. reality." If you think about it, that motif could apply to any story worth telling.

But very few people leave their work at the peak of their success with such discontent. A former colleague of mine said he left teaching because he hated the "politics" involved, as if education were supposed to be apolitical. I also happened to notice he wasn't particularly good at teaching. George Sauer was a particularly good wide receiver. More than once Don Maynard has said that he believed that George Sauer was a better receiver than he was, and it's not crazy to believe, if his career had lasted into the 70's, that Sauer would have ended up in the Hall of Fame.

But the other thing to remember about George Sauer is that he was a writer and a poet who was expected to play a game that has little use for for truth and beauty. In the DVD segment, Sauer says (in a voice that's feathered with a gentle Texas drawl) that in retirement he was laboring over a novel, one that would convey his sense of the contradictions between the promise and reality of football. I thought about how at first he must have been eager to finally bring into a work of fiction the truth about a game that had shaped his life, but not his soul.

I wonder how he felt when North Dallas Forty was published. If fiction is a retelling of fact - as it apparently was for Peter Gent of the Cowboys - then the author is compelled to relive something true to his life, and that may have been complicated for him. The Times obituary quotes John Dockery as saying that Sauer "walked away from money, from everything, because it was too painful for him." To encapsulate that pain into a work of fiction must have been a great challenge.

The novel never materialized into print that I know of, though according to the Times, Sauer wrote "several novels, plays and literary reviews." I would give anything to find something of his in print. I think how often my wife has nudged me to write what she feels would almost certainly be a bestselling novel about being a public school teacher in a time of enormous flux in the profession, and I dismiss the idea every time. First of all, it wouldn't be a bestseller. Secondly I've actually tried to write it - more times than I'd like to admit - but it never gets done.

The one novel I've ever written - unpublished, naturally - was about the city of St. Louis in 1965. As long as you don't mind the research, it's easy to write about something you've never experienced. But even through the props of fiction, it's particularly painful to bring to the surface words, thoughts and deeds that all are emblematic of your own conflicts between illusion and reality. I always wondered if Sauer felt that way, or whether it was just the vast difficulty of writing a novel that made it (if it was) a struggle for him.

In the wake of it, Sauer's life after football leaves us with lots of questions. The Times mentions that he was married "several times," but he doesn't appear to have had any children. According to Bob Wolfley in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the Wisconsin-born Sauer became an assistant coach for Oberlin College's football team in 1973 (which is a little like being a Unitarian chaplain at the Air Force Academy, though Oberlin might have just been the right place for his kind of football). He received no pay for this position.

His Wikipedia page mentions that he lived in "St. Paul," by which we assume Minnesota and that he worked as a textbook designer. Yet he died in Westerville, in the center of Ohio. He did actually briefly return to the very same sport he called a "grotesque business" in 1974 when he played for the WFL New York Stars at old Downing Stadium, wearing #9, for whatever reason. Evan Weiner mentions on Dave Pear's Blog that news of Sauer's death and struggles with Alzheimer's comes just as players are returning to training camps, seeking to impress their coaches even at the risk of their own lives. Yet we have no indication that Sauer's disease was brought on by the hits he received in football.

***

By the time I was five, Sauer was replaced on my wall by a poster of John Riggins, who was then replaced by Wesley Walker in 1980. George Sauer, the poster, was dispensed into the bins of garbage accompanying our transitions from one age to another, from Queens, to the Island, or maybe from the Island to the little town 30 miles north of the city we moved to by the time the Jets finally made it back into the playoffs in 1981.

After I first watched the five minute George Sauer segment on the Namath DVD, I immediately went on eBay and bought another copy of the Sports Illustrated poster that I once kept in my room as a little boy. When the new version of the old poster arrived at my place in Philadelphia, I hung it up on the wall in my classroom, alongside the pictures of famous writers from many ages past. When students ask about him, I tell them that the player in the picture was someone unique, a football player who was also a writer. One student recently said that it wasn't that unique and that Tim Tebow had recently published a book. I just shook my head. I'm more than happy to explain the difference.

But the picture that stays with me is the one to the left, of George Sauer and Willie Brown, the same men in the picture above, bidding farewell and good luck to each other at the end of the AFL Title Game. Sauer believed that the game of football did not engender a sense of comradery or brotherhood but rather demanded a dehumanizing conformity from its players. So this is the image I like to think of when I imagine George Sauer. At the end a bitterly fought AFL Title matchup, he and the man who has been covering him all game now greet each other as colleagues and equals. There still lingers in this picture a sense that the men who play a violent game have more in common with each other than not. According to Wolfley, when Sauer left the Jets in 1971, Weeb Ewbank bemoaned, "He will be missed very much, both as George Sauer the player and George Sauer the person." As an Infinite Jet, we honor him as both, too.

NY Jets #64 - Part 3

Trevor Matich played for the Jets from 1990-91, and for almost all of that time, he wore #64. But throughout his NFL career, Matich was apparently known for his versatility, so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise when, after wearing the number for a season and a half, he then traded it in for its inverse - #46 - and, temporarily, became a tight end, and scored on the game-winning touchdown pass from Ken O'Brien in a 28-21 victory over New England in 1991. Since we didn't mention this back when we were talking about #46, we mention it here.

Randy's Radar supplied me with this information, and he wrote about it in a discussion of past offensive linemen in Jets' history who scored touchdowns, either by stealth or luck. It came up in one of his articles immediately after the Jets' 2010 loss to the Denver Broncos because, in that game, Matt Slausen on the offensive line scored the lone Jet touchdown, the recovery of a fumble in Denver's end zone. It was the only Jets touchdown on a miserable night that ended with Denver's Tim Tebow - the quarterback whom we would later pick up the following season for absolutely no reason at all - scoring the unfathomable, winning touchdown. That was a horrible, horrible night.

It was a Thursday, and the Jets, in my mind, were at that point at least in vague contention for a Wild Card. I remember following the game online since I don't have the NFL Network, and their lifeless, unimaginative, crushingly dull performance was like Gregor Samsa's struggle to get off his own back. Even when he manages to get back on his own six feet, Samsa barely makes it out the door when his sister launches a hard apple into his gelatinous, soft underbelly, leaving him with a disabling reminder for the rest of The Metamorphosis of how grim his prospects for happiness and success in his world really are. Early Thursday evening, November 17, 2011, was the last time I felt like the Jets were playoff contenders. It was the last time I felt any level of ease.

As the Jets wheezed and groped their way to a laborious seasonal death, I uttered a moan so audible that it woke up my wife right next to me. Normally, she shares in every part of my love for the Jets; it's our love, starting out as mine alone and then one we share for better or worse. It belongs to us. But I woke her up accidentally, and she looked up, warily.

"What's going on?" she asked, annoyed and concerned.

"Jets just fucking blew it," I said. "I can't believe it. They played like shit. They're horrible." I added, "This is a total disaster."

She shook her head and rolled over. "Right," she said. " A disaster. Just like cancer."

Cancer. The potential disaster, the personal one. Your football team is personal, as personal to us as is Justin Bieber to several of my ninth grade female students. It does feel that real, close and personal, but the guys on defense who failed to tackle Tim Tebow on his way to the Broncos' game-winning touchdown that weren't thinking about me any more than Justin Bieber considers the happiness of his Bieberites, or whatever they're called. The Jets didn't care about my broken heart. Cancer, on the other hand, when and if it comes to do battle with you, is personal. It is your own special case of it. Mentioning cancer was supposed to put me back into the real world, where an adult person can distinguish between real and imagined disasters. But I would have none of it. I stood my ground.

"No," I corrected her. "This is worse than cancer."

But back to Trevor Matich, sometime commentator on ESPN's college football coverage and for the Redskins' pre- and post-game shows. Apparently while playing for the Colts in the early nineties he was named the "Hardest Working Player in the NFL," a loose epithet given to him for warming up incessantly before and during games. James Brown was and still is the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, even in death. To signify it, while singing "Please Don't Go" with him, members of his band would try to adorn the man with the cape of glory he richly deserved in a choreographed fit of exhaustion, only to have him run back to the microphone to give the people who came to see him that much more of his God-given soul. I've suggested that Curtis Martin deserves the football title of the Hardest Working, but Trevor Matich deserves some recognition here for returning to a football season as a tight end after playing on the line. And while it's one thing to be given a new number after playing in one for some time, the new number he was given was the old one in reverse. This must stand for something, or maybe for nothing. If, as Juliet suggests, we are not our names, then how could we possibly be our number, or its reverse? But we are. At least here, we are.

***

Pete Perreault's sideline parka, circa 1963-67

Pete Perreault #64 is the first Jet to wear the number, and he did this from 1963-67. He played for the expansion Cincinnati Bengals and then returned to the Jets after their Super Bowl championship, for the 1969-70 seasons. He died in 2001. A few years later a wide variety of his things began appearing online for sale - his helmet, his jersey, and his sideline parka. I'm partial to the parka, myself. Here it's not so much James Brown's cape of mournful glory, but rather one worn in the state of waiting.

When I was a kid, I used to watch Jets games late in the season, standing in front of the TV, wrapped in a blanket. I would stand by the TV set, in one of the afghans my grandmother made (the ones so many of our grandmothers made) and I'd watch the Jets usually lose, all while hopping up and down, much the way the players do on the sideline trying to keep warm. I'm not sure why I identified myself with the people on the sidelines; it seems a little too metaphorical, I'll admit. But I didn't play the games I loved; sometimes I tried to, but out of either my own timidity or fear of failure, I never tried hard enough. So I danced on the tips of my toes in front of the game and wore the paraphernalia of people paid to usually stand and watch from the sidelines. Perhaps, in this way, I was a born blogger.

Perreault played sporadically in the 60's and started more frequently later in his career, or so it would seem for what I'm able to find. That's a lot of time with the Jets, during periods where the franchise went from being fresh and new, to being the zeitgeist of sports, then quickly to becoming a bland afterthought, hardly worth all the fuss. Like Max Headroom. But as for Pete Perreault, we don't really have many others comparable to him, other than Winston Hill and Randy Rasmussen, the ones who who also blocked for Boozer, Snell, Mathis and Namath. Like many of the large men of the offensive line who make the paths for others, he recedes without fanfare into retirement and beyond. All we have left are his pieces of equipment.

NY Jets #24 - Revis Revised

"Who? I don't know who that it is. Once I step on the field it doesn't matter who's out there. I don't pay attention to numbers or names. I go out there and I focus on what I'm supposed to do. That's not a slight on him, or whoever he is. I just go out there and play football."

- Terrell Owens, quoted in Newsday, November 21, 2007

"Who?"

"We are accustomed to Bill Romanowski speaking ill of us and then pounding us in the divisional round. Revis' interceptions are like works of leaping, pirouetting choreography. He is a star. We have so few in the history of these numbers and names. This is what one looks like. This is no Albert Haynesworth. This is Darrelle Revis. That's who, Terrell. That's who...

"For so long, on any given Sunday, 11 men seemed to make absolutely no difference whatsoever. So why would one? This isn't a logical thing...So I wish they had signed him back sooner than Labor Day 2010. The club that keeps track of its conscession (sic) stats even in preseason should have been able to dig very, very deep much earlier and given one of its best investments exactly what he richly deserves. Yes, a contract is a contract, but as the white collar parasite CEO's of America will tell you (between taking sips of infant blood in diamond-studded carafes) there are always exceptions for people who are deemed indispensable."

- Me, September 5, 2010

Back then, another AFC Championship appearance was still on the horizon. Giving the very best what he richly deserved seemed like the right thing to do. Revis is to the cornerback position what Lawrence Taylor was to the position of linebacker - a player so gifted that entire offenses needed to shift their strategy in order to manage him. No person in any field can ordinarily expect himself to fit that kind of criteria. At best, most of us are just good at what we do. More often than not, we simply strive for adequacy. Darrelle Revis is the exception to most things.

At some level, he must have known it would come to this, that he would be gone; in fact, he probably wanted it this way. It was time to get off the clown car. As for the metaphor of The Revis Island, it remains an ironic state of affairs. For every pass Darrelle Revis has broken up, there have been twenty more that never even took him onto the equation. More than once has a writer decided to make the literary allusion to John Donne's warning in Meditation XVII that "No man is an island entire of itself..." Indeed, the complete resignation that offenses have shown to Revis' side has also changed the nature of his efficacy. Warren Miller's New Yorker cartoon is more applicable to Revis Island:

A version of something that Jon Gruden could have said about Darrelle Revis, but probably didn't.

Darrelle Revis remains unique. Modern baseball is a sport that rewards individual expression and performance on the field yet stresses uniformity of mind in the locker room and on the street. It's rare to find a true individualist in style and manner in baseball the way there was once a Bill Lee or a Dock Ellis. On the other hand, football's sense of uniformity and team identity on the field (think in terms of how novel were Penn State's players' names on their jerseys) seems to encourage an ironic, self-expressive eccentricity of an Ochocinco or a Polamolu on the sidelines. But it's rare to find a athlete whose performance is so very unique as to make him beyond category, and that's what Darrelle Revis is.

But this distinction is now a disservice. Now, for his exceptional play and even greater reputation, no one throws at him, and he has, one could argue, become irrelevant. I suppose his season-ending injury last year means that offenses will be tempted to throw in his direction again, but if he is able to do this kind of thing again, they won't for long. So I'm ready to let him go, knowing that we're not better off without him, yet probably (and I mean this with all the respect he deserves) no better off with him either.

***

I have a particularly sleepy-eyed student in one of my classes whose first words to me as we gathered yesterday were, "Hey, Mr. Roche. Are you aware that your team was completely destroyed today?"

"Come again?" I asked, noticing that he was relishing this a little more than I would have liked.

"That Darrelle Revis signed with the Bucs?" he said.

I knew it already, but if I hadn't heard the news, I would already have known it in my heart and soul - the way I always knew it would happen over the past few months. The ridiculously vapid way the Jets have handled his status with the team - similar to the red-light, empty streetwalker glances they gave John Riggins before letting him go in 1975 - the general atmosphere on the club about the future built into what we all know is a ragtag effort at free agency acquisition - all of these things spelled his end with us months ago.

"You just let your best player go," he said as if to reinforce it. At least he used the you to represent me and my team, as if I had done it. "Your season is completely ruined."

I looked calmly into his eyes. There are so many things I could say. "Oh, I wouldn't worry," I said. "I'm a Jets fan. It's much worse than that. The season was ruined already." I smiled and narrowed my eyes to make my point. "I'm in the for the long haul. I've been doing this for a long time."

"How long is a long time?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Maybe someday you'll find out."

"Probably not," he said, honestly.

"No," I said, looking away, half in disdain, half in envy. "Probably not."

****

During Darrelle Revis' 2010 holdout, I suggested that I was so desperate to bring him back to the team that I was willing to offer up my 1995 Toyota Corolla (still my only existing source of transportation) as a gesture of loyalty. He could bring it to his estate, gather his friends and entourage around for an expensive celebration, and light it on fire as a sacrificial sign of his power and glory.

When I mentioned this idea to my friends at work back then, a colleague of mine photoshopped the little piece of glorious creation you see above. Today, you can read into the image of the car whichever metaphor you like - the lost years we spend rooting for our teams, the money, the energy, the love, the blind desire we possess for someone else's victory at the expense of our own. "I can get up an hour early each day and take two trains to work," I said. "I just need the Jets to have a shot at the division before the 2011 lockout. As I travel on my morning commute and watch each station pass on the sunrise elevated subway blue line and stare out of its yellow windows, I will think to myself, "No, no. This is right.  He can have my car. This is good. This is as it should be."

And now, he's just another Infinite Jet who wore #24. Contrary to what I once thought, he will certainly not be the last #24 in our club's history. We'll just wait and see who'll be the next one to wear it, even as Darrelle moves out of the picture, leaving forever the now charred remains of the clown car in his wake.

NY Jets #64 - Part 2

I was very grateful to get news that my New England friends were all at home and not anywhere near the terrible scene on Patriots' Day, April 15. I malign those guys often, for reasons that seem very petty and stupid right now - just because of their football team. I love them and am happy they're safe.

I figured that I would have to soothe the worries of my young 14 and 15 year-old students these last few days, but they seem curiously inert to the kind of uneasiness that permeated my entire adolescence in the Cold War. I don't understand how or why they think that what took place in Boston is a part of our national and cultural reality, but they do seem to accept it. They're a generation surrounded with the constant news of innocent civilians all around the world who are targeted by people who seem to think they are called upon to play with history as if it were a toy. My students are not blase about terror. They feel it's unspeakable for people to be maimed as they were in Boston, but they also seem to expect that such things can happen and will continue to happen here and all around the world. Maybe that's what's most depressing.

So what did I decide to do? I came here, hoping to distract myself with the ridiculous, if not the sublime:

***

I've always wondered if players take it as an insult when they are unceremoniously traded from one team to another and given an entirely different jersey number from the one they've been wearing for several years. As a regular starting guard for the Miami Dolphins for five seasons, Harry Galbreath wore #62, which he then had to trade for #76 when he went to the Green Bay Packers in 1993. Which number did he prefer? Did it matter?

To me, every ten sets of numbers represent different set of characteristics in football players. Those who wear numbers in the 20's tend to confuse fans as to whether they belong on offense or defense, but they spend a great deal of time staring at their teammates' backsides, regardless. Players who wear the 30's are defensive backs with a lean, hard expression of contempt. Players wearing the 50's are linebackers, shifting and changing as needed; sometimes a lineman, sometimes a player in the secondary, they are never quite they seem. Players who wear the 60's are world-weary, silent witnesses to the endless struggles of the offensive line. Players in the 70's seem less interested in keeping their miseries to themselves and are more intense and violent. I have no idea what statistical evidence I can use to prove any of this, but I've never been the kind of fan to pay attention to such things.

By the end of his career, Harry Galbreath became one of many, many New York Jets in 1995 or 1996 who arrived a bit too worse for wear to fill in gaps left open by the injuries and ineptitude of Rich Kotite's two terrible seasons as our professional football coach. When Galbreath did arrive, the Jets gave him #64, sending him back to the world-weary numbers. He retired at the end of that season.

There are two things that stand out about Harry Galbreath that expand beyond the ordinary career of a recent New York Jet. One is that he passed away in 2010 of a heart attack at the age of 45. He is mostly known for his collegiate career in football; in the link above Coach Johnny Major said that Galbreath was the best run blocker that he had ever seen. But he also majored in human services, which might be some sort of equivalent to social work. A search for him pulls up multiple obituaries from different directions, most of which seem to point to his humanity and sense of serving others. Perhaps his early death made his life more notable to people, but I'd like to believe it's because he was a good person.

Chuck Hinton #64 played defensive tackle for the Jets in a similar way, near the end of his career, and he also died relatively young. For seven seasons he played guard for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and in 1971 (Chuck Noll's second season in Pittsburgh) he signed with us. Afterwards, Hinton played the 1972 season with the Baltimore Colts.

I can't help but wonder if some players feel regretful about being born to play for the wrong era of certain teams - 49ers, Steelers, Patriots, or Packers. If Chuck Hinton had been ten years younger, he might have been a part of Pittsburgh's dynasty in the 1970's, rather than the 1960's, when the team consistently failed to break even. These were the Steelers everyone wanted to play. Yet here is a 1967 Steelers Yearbook article on Hinton that suggests that good fortune is an absolutely relative, subjective notion.

"Three's the charm" is an age-old axiom related to the trials and tribulations of luck and superstition. Many people will scoff at such believer (sic). Chuck has to believe in it. Chuck Hinton, defensive tackle for the Steelers, is one such believer. Chuck has to because for him it's the story of his professional football career. 

We might feel he was unlucky to land on Buddy Parker's Steelers and in an age where a player would also have to work offseason at Sears or, as Hinton did, as an "interviewer for the Youth Corps." The truth is, Hinton was just happy to work as a football player. Drafted by Cleveland, the Browns immediately cut him, as did the Colts. "The story, however," as the above link says "was the same: "'I wasn't scared,' (Hinton) relates, 'just so nervous that I botched things all up. I knew I had no experience, but no one really tried to help me get it.' Baltimore made the same decision as Cleveland and Chuck was released."

It's rare to hear someone admit that he was so nervous that he failed at something he loved. And since he comes across in the above link as self-effacing and modest to the point of shy, Chuck Hinton reminds me of students I've taught whose own absorbing sense of fear and anxiety made the very thing they feared most come true. In a haze of constant anxiety, I see their minds fixed to a dreaded place where nothing can be seen, nothing can be heard, except the sound of their own heartbeat. Or maybe I think of myself. I think of working at a desk job years ago and being given an assignment by a supervisor who was often entertained by my mishaps, and so would offer me very little guidance when I needed just a little more.

Just a fuckup, aren't you? I'd hear.   

Did I hear it from my boss? Did I hear it in my head? It's almost as if my anxiety took me out of myself, so I was watching me, moving in slow motion, unable to finish a project on time, unable to to figure a solution to a simple problem, unable to answer the phone without stammering. Now I can digest food and not feel my heart racing when I lay down to sleep at night, mostly because of good medication. I don't know if Chuck Hinton felt any of those things, or whether he was just like everyone else, striving to become something, and struggling.

Chuck Hinton died in 1999 at the age of 60, and I'm curious, in the morbid way I've been conditioned to think about the Infinites, what toll the game, or maybe life itself, took on him. Maybe the end came quickly in a fleeting accident. There's nothing else I can find online about the football Chuck Hinton, other than the fact that he won the 1981 NFL Alumni Golf Tournament - the paperweight-sized ring for which he was awarded pawned online in 2005 - and the fact that he is frequently confused with the Washington Senators' Chuck Hinton (who, in 1964, was the last Senator to ever hit .300. How is that even possible?).

Morris Berman's famous photo of YA Tittle, 1964

But there's one interesting footnote to photographic history to which Chuck Hinton belonged. At left you see one of the most iconic images in all of professional football, one of the last dramatic moments of YA Tittle's career. It's the beginning of the 1964 season, and the Giants are playing in Pitt Stadium against the Steelers. Having been beaten soundly across the head by Pittsburgh defender John Baker, YA Tittle now kneels in his own end zone, bleeding from his head. The hit apparently "cracked (Tittle's) sternum, pulled his rib cage muscles and caused a concussion." The pass Tittle was throwing when he was hit was then intercepted and returned for a touchdown by Chuck Hinton, producing the only score of Hinton's career. Consider the alphas and omegas at work here. Because of these injuries, Tittle would play sparingly for the rest of '64 and then retire, while the interception for a touchdown came in only the second game of Hinton's entire NFL career. The photo was taken by Morris Berman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and as the above link makes clear, Berman lost out on what should have been a Pulitzer for the picture because an editor did not see it fit to include the picture in the next day's edition, and yet the image has lingered for so long in the sports imagination that prints of it are commonly signed by Tittle himself in old age.

When I was a boy, I saw this picture in a book somewhere, and I asked my father what had happened to YA Tittle such that he looked this way. Tittle kneels, almost supplicating, yet amazed all the same by the enormity of what's happened to him. His face registers an awe that transcends his pain. Parts of him are now completely broken. Only moments before he had been fine and now everything has changed, and he is caught here in these vivid moments afterward. It may be that what we see here lasted no more than a second, but his pitiful gaze is something that we wear in those unexpected moments when we are suddenly faced with a gruesome truth. It's a brief sensation that marks us for a lifetime. We didn't know it could be this bad. And now it really is this bad.

What happened to him, Dad?

Dad smiled. Was he trying to protect me? Was he just messing with me?

"Tittle used to do that," he said. "If something bad happened to him, if he didn't like a play or a call against him, he got down on his knees and rolled his head around in the grass. And, if he was playing in mud," he said, making a funny face, "then he did it even more."

NY Jets #64 - Part 2

My searches through the world of Infinite Jets usually yields five things, one more than the Godfathers' song suggests - birthplaces, education, football statistics, retirement life after football, and sometimes mortality. It has all made me not a little philosophical about life, and given me a sense of the ephemeral quality of everything. I feel that if you're a Jets fan, you're inclined to think this way, anyway. How else can you explain a football team that goes from two consecutive AFC Championship appearances to being the laughingstock of the league two seasons later? Have I introduced you to the team that is the permanent object of Bill Belichick's personal curse?

If you're a Jets fan, you see cycles and patterns to everything, the way oppressed peoples sometimes derive a sense of edification from being cursed by suffering. Or maybe being a Jets fan simply makes you more cognizant of the cycles of the human experience. Birth, school, work, death. There is no success without failure, or without what might be eons of mediocrity. Such is life.

Martin Cornelson wore #64 for the Jets for three games in 1987, which means that he was a replacement player, otherwise known as a scab, during the work stoppage of 1987, also known as a strike. He graduated from NC State in 1983 and played linebacker at college, I think. For three weeks or so in a season no one remembers, Martin Cornelson played professional football. Then, ten years later, JR Conrad #64 played the entirety of his professional career for the Jets in 1997. He was drafted out of Oklahoma in the seventh round by Pete Carroll's Patriots and then presumably cut and taken on by Parcells' Jets. He is listed as playing center, tackle and guard for 12 games.

Birth, school, work, death. I have three of the four for each man. Each was born in a city approximately 200 miles from where he went to college (Cornelson, born in Clinton, SC, some 284 miles from Raleigh; Conrad born in Fairland, OK, a little over 200 miles from Norman, OK). Their work was brief. They are each still alive, and by virtue of what they did, they are, Infinites. Are we anyone's Infinite?

Tom Budrewicz, future Titan, leading the way.

Then, here is a lone image I found of Tom Budrewicz, an offensive lineman who was the first man to wear #64 in our franchise's history. Like Martin Cornelson he played three games for us (or, in this case, for the New York Titans) and during 1961, the year that Martin Cornelson was born.

Budrewicz is seen above as a member of Brown University's football squad, leading the way for running back Paul Choquette in 1960. The staged photograph should not be seen as a commentary on the Brown Bears' absence of fans or players. These two are here depicted as the standout offensive stars of that season, both doing what they do, one man running behind another. But taken out of the context of an actual game or play, Tom Budrewicz looks almost like the personal detail of another man's life. Wouldn't we all like to have a Tom Budrewicz running in front of us, blocking us from false dreams, illusions, and bad decisions?

Playing as he did for just three weeks for the Titans, Budrewicz could have been offered something better by the Fates, like three games with the Green Bay Packers, or even three games with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Though Art Rooney's team won one game less than the Titans that season, he probably managed to make good on all the paychecks he issued to his players. If I didn't know any better, I would actually say that the above photo appears to be taken from an actual Titans game, although the field does look like it's in too good a condition. No, Tom Budrewicz probably deserved better than three games with Harry Wismer's misbegotten club, but then we go where we go in this life. Even with a Tom Budrewicz in front of him, Tom Budrewicz might have ended up where he did. An offensive guard doesn't lead you to daylight on every play.

It got me to thinking about another player from Brown who was originally a standout running back at my high school when I was a freshman in the early 1980's. This one guy wore my favorite number 44 on our football team, and as a senior, he ran through offenses with a terrifying grace. He was the top player in the region. He would practically score on every drive kick, or kick field goals and point afters. This was the one time in my life that I was witness to the manifestation of a Golden Boy in my own backyard, a Paul Hornung - the one of a kind of player who seems to float through the hallways, existing in an ethereal realm that transcends normal high school life, one filled with the awe and adoration of others. Midway through his senior year, the New York Times actually did a small feature story on him, and in the accompanying photograph, he can be seen sitting on a bench, lacing up his shoes with one of his teammates, not knowing that he is actually leaning against my gym locker. I don't think I was ever so proud.

Paul Hornung was the only player to successfully navigate Vince Lombardi's melancholia, simply by being himself. Our Golden Boy was also the only one who could bring a smile our perniciously mean-spirited high school football coach, a man frequently compared in his sallow-eyed darkness to the Dark Lord of the Sith. Our Golden Boy was handsome, powerful, pensive-looking and brilliant. It was as if the Fates had granted him as many Tom Budrewiczs as he needed to navigate the complexity of a world that otherwise seemed so completely overwhelming to a thin, wispy little boy like me. The Golden Boy went to Brown, which, I believe, does not give out athletic scholarships.

And yet, with Google, there are no more masks and no more mythologies. This past week, I typed his name with "Brown University" into the computer, and within a second, Google Images produced a slight man, probably as tall as I, staring back at me through designer eyeglasses, looking strangely humble at the bottom of a list of investment strategists working in a small office in Connecticut. Now obviously there's nothing wrong with that. He certainly makes more money than I, and he probably enjoys a good life for all I know. But the curled Athenian locks of old are gone, and his hair is shaved closely and has receded. I had always assumed that since I never heard his name again after his graduation that he had committed some terrible transgression or had suffered some kind of calamity that had somehow kept him from being as great in the larger world as he was to us schoolkids, when the waves parted for him in the hallways of my little high school. But instead, with or without a thousand Tom Budrewiczs, our Golden Boy simply graduated from college and became a normal person. No more masks. No more mythologies.

NY Jets #64 - Part 1

Guy Bingham #64 (image from Spokeo)

Several things have kept me away. One is the depressing state of our team. The second is my job, which pays me more than ever but keeps me busier than ever, too. And the other is the work on the Infinite Jets book, which is about a third of the way done. Meanwhile it's been nice to know that black marketeers selling knockoff handbags and cheap auto insurance spam are both keeping the Internet hits to the site high. Thanks for that! 

Leisure and time are such that only a few players at a time can be discussed. So here we go:

Guy Bingham #64 was a center for the Jets, starting on and off for nine seasons, 1980-88. For much of that time, Joe Fields was the regular starting center. He grew up in Aberdeen, Washington and attended JM Weatherwax High School. I mention this for two reasons: one is that the name "Weatherwax" is wonderful to say. It sounds like the surname of a medicine show doctor who has claims to provide the antidote, my friend, to balding, the croup, and flakiness of the skin. But Weatherwax was a real high school in a real place, and just to make it real enough for you, here is the most detailed note of Bingham's life on Wikipedia. Charming and poignant all the same:

"On September 25, 2009 (Bingham) donated back a football to J.M. Weatherwax High School during half time at the high school's football game. The football was signed by him and his team mates (sic) when he played with the New York Jets. He signed this football during a game against the Seattle Seahawks. Bingham and former NFL Pittsburgh Steelers player Mark Bruener who also graduated from J.M. Weatherwax High School were made honorary captains at this game.

Why do I feel as I do about this? In truth, that signed football may have meant something to him, seeing as it was a single object left over from his most active years in the NFL. Or maybe not. Guy Bingham didn't sell it on Ebay; it's hard to tell what it would have been worth there if it had been signed by the Jets squad in 1987, the year Bingham saw the most starts for us, the year of football's worst work stoppage. But then it could have been a ball from 1985, 1986, or better yet 1981 or 1982, and to a Jet fan that would actually be highly valuable. I could probably name everybody who signed it in either season, provided they were starters. But Guy Bingham gave the ball to Weatherwax, or Aberdeen High School as it is known. In truth, much of the Weatherwax that Bingham knew from his schooling days burned to the ground in a fire in 2002. He was made a co-honorary captain in exchange for the ball.

But it's the methodical, detailed quality of what's written above that gets to me. Written with care, it presents the events of that day in the context of a larger time. It gives us a date, and a specific moment during a game, at halftime when the exchange was made. Where did the ball come from? From his days with the Jets. The writer even goes so far as to name the game itself, a game against the Seahawks, which could have happened during any season in the 1980's because as we know, the Jets played Seattle every season except 1982, so there you go. Why we need to know who the Jets were playing seems not at all significant unless we consider that the Seahawks are Aberdeen's professional home team. The ball has more symbolic resonance then, I guess.

In fact, the ball's magic might likely be greater if it had been signed before or after an away game at the Kingdome, which means that it was signed by the 1981 team, or by the 1986 club. I'm going to guess the latter - a year when Bingham saw more action as center - the year the Jets were 7-1 going into Seattle, and we promptly trounced them, 38-7. Consider how often the Jets lost to Seattle from 1977-84; we were sometimes forced to play them twice in a season ('81) for reasons that escape me, and we dropped seven in a row before finally beating them at home in 1985. That the ball might have been signed amid a victory makes it that much more magical to someone like me. Weatherwax and Aberdeen should treasure that ball. I certainly would.

But one little note to consider is that Guy Bingham was born in Japan, which probably means he lived in an army family. Specifically, he was born in the Gunma Prefecture, near the Soumagahara Army Training Base. Bingham was born in 1958, a period of enormous controversy for the training base because of the "Girard Incident" in 1957, when an enlisted man in the US Army evidently shot and killed a middle aged woman who was collecting brass shell casings around the base for scrap. If Bingham's father had been stationed there he would have known of William Girard, the man who shot and killed a mother of six, Naka Sakai, apparently out of fun. The report from 1957 is harrowing:

"Maybe as a warning, maybe out of boredom, Girard had his companion, Spc. 3rd Class Victor N. Nickel, throw some empty cartridges out on the firing range. As Sakai and the other scavengers scrambled to pick up the precious brass, Girard fired a warning shot: a spent casing from a grenade launcher mounted on a borrowed M-1 rifle. But the casing struck Sakai, killing her..." 

He claimed to have been told to clear away any Japanese in the nearby vicinity who might have interfered with range shooting, but apparently no evidence of any such order existed. Though sentenced to only three years in prison, Girard returned home to the United States a mostly disgraced man with a Formosan-born Japanese wife. A link here goes into greater detail about the "incident," including reports from writer John Hersey about the trial and its aftermath. As much as I malign the laptops that my students can barely tear themselves away from, I have to admit that being only three clicks away in either direction between the life an an army brat turned professional football player and a meaningless death of an innocent, hungry woman now long ago forgotten is abundantly strange. Does this speed of information make the connection that we all share as creatures in the universe more precious, as it should, or does it make it our lives and deaths that much more mundane, ordinary and forgettable? I have no idea.

NY Jets #63 - Part 5

Dewayne Robertson, DE

I've always wondered about that look on a first round draft choice's face when he is chosen. He's ushered to the stage to be awkwardly embraced by the Commissioner (can you imagine Pete Rozelle embracing anyone?). He places the team's hat on his head, and he stares out into the Radio City crowd, wondering if they put all the Jets fans in the balcony to keep everyone else safe. He is usually 22 years old, solid and strong, and by all expectations, despite all historical precedent, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Such was Darrelle Revis. Such was John Abraham. Such was Jonathan Vilma. But such too was Vernon Gholsten; such too was Dewayne Robertson #63.

By definition, most players in any league are failures because they can never quite meet the potential and hope built into the long preparation for a professional life. So we choose not to think of it that way, just as we choose not to think of a single life as a failure because it ends. But a first round draft choice is a cursed spot, and the expectations placed on a first rounder are absurd to the point of cruel. Failure in school is anywhere between 0-69%, so the definition of one's failure can vary. Still, an "F" is an F. You failed. Can you honestly suggest that Dewayne Robertson is a bust in the same way as Vernon Gholsten? No, I don't think you can. But here we are in Wikipedia:

Robertson's career with the Jets was labeled as a bust, considering the high expectations and the Jets efforts to trade up to draft him.

Who writes such a thing? Certainly not Robertson himself. Who, then? It's a fair statement, to be sure, in light of all the expectations that are placed on a first rounder. But I want to know about the life and experiences of the person who awakes one morning and says that, among all the other things he needs to do with his day, he feels he must make note of the fact on Wikipedia that Dewayne Robertson "was labeled as a bust." That's what boggles my mind.

Amassing 278 tackles and 16 sacks over five seasons in the NFL might be the average for the average player, and the plain truth is we know that most first rounders are remarkably average. So why the need for this lie of an idea, these high expectations that seethe inside of us and then energize into a rage when we think of how we've been cheated by the player, by his supposed failures, by a team that can't win the big one, by circumstance, by life - all when we label someone a "bust?" It's as if these are our own children whom we've raised, cheered on, nurtured, on whom we've placed the only collateral the fan can bring - hope - only to be abandoned and forgotten by them. Do any of these people deserve that much misplaced devotion, or pressure? I don't think so.

...And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse  
But, oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?

***

Travis Roach 1950-88

I think this is a picture of Travis Roach #63, a guard who suited up for one season in 1974, which was probably the most exciting of all the Jets seasons that decade. I have very limited information on him, except that he attended the University of Texas in the early 70's and also died in 1988. According to his obituary in the Houston Chronicle, he played the 1973 season with the CFL Vancouver Lions and then 1974 with us. After receiving a law degree from Baylor, he moved to Austin, became a sports agent and, apparently, authored a bill in the Texas Legislature that intended to protect young athletes from "unscrupulous sports agents." He died of a brain tumor at the age of 38.

I've always been curious about the differences in spellings between Roches and Roaches, about what they signify. What does it have to tell us about where we all came from and who we all have in common? We Ro(a)ches all tend to have our origins in the southeast of Ireland, and apparently we got our status from the medieval establishment of Norman villages on that coast. So maybe we're all originally French, too. Travis found himself a Roach, born in Texas. I became a Roche, born in New York City. Stretched across the vast republic, we are each subject to the business of history and the finality of death. Yet amid all my recent cautionary words about the devolution of our national culture, I guess Travis Roach lived the version of the American adventure, one that suggests that we are formed by nothing else other than the power of our own will. Before he passed so very young, he made his mark. From the very limited vantage point, from a great distance in time and space, I somehow sense his short life was active and vibrant.

Two years after Roach died, Dave Zawatson #63 was playing guard and tackle for the Jets in the battered season of 1990, one of those years where injuries basically rendered the team inoperable, and we went 6-10 while the Giants won their second Super Bowl. Zawatson was signed on to replace some empty spots. He played just that one season and then went on to Miami the following year. A fun article in the Times by Al Harvin from that year mentions a fight in practice in which Zawatson was involved. "It was a fair fight," Bruce Coslet said back then, mostly because while Zawatson had three inches and 50 pounds on Demetrious Douglas (#?), Zawatson was fighting with a broken hand. He narrates the fight as follows:

I already knew that the hand was broken. The X-rays were just a formality, but since he pushed me in the back on the previous play, I felt obligated in that situation to do something, so I just grabbed his face mask and kind of swung him. I went back out and finished working. 

"I finished working." I like that. Lineman always have a gift for euphemism when describing something like a facemask-swinging.

Drafted by Chicago initially, Zawatson's size and strength suited the Bears of Ditka's time. But the thing that intrigues me is the bit of information at the very beginning of the article. Zawatson had broken his right hand before the practice, but as he shrugs it off by saying he is "ambidextrous." He was a born lefty, but while going to parochial school in Cleveland, "the teachers at St. Angela's Catholic School insisted that everybody do everything right-handed." One broken hand didn't keep him from anything. Perhaps even when the world seeks to thwart us, we can both adapt to the world's roadblocks and transcend the original vision. This year's Jets were as about as successful as the 1990 squad in following that example.

Send In the Clowns

It wasn't that long ago that I rationalized to myself that the clown car the Jets were driving down the street would do just fine in the race for the playoffs. Say what you will. A clown car is still a car, and it runs, however unsteadily.

But then we know about clowns. No one really thinks clowns are funny, and nobody likes a sad clown. Angry clowns can be funny, but they're not meant to be. I don't even know what an angry clown is for, except to populate our persistent nightmares. No, nobody has much use for clowns, and when they do their pratfalls and spills, the only people laughing are little children, and that's because little children will laugh at other people's misfortunes. They don't know any better just yet. When I see a clown at a mall or at some kid's birthday party, I turn the other way. What was I thinking, getting into a clown car?

Like a grown child, I could take refuge in the baleful, excruciatingly sarcastic laughter that Mark Sanchez has provided for all of us. But then that's like laughing at your own inept kid messing up again and again on the local soccer field. It's really like laughing at yourself, and as a Jets fan, I've done that all of my life. I've always said that their persistent, remarkable gift for ruining their own success has blessed me with a keen sense for life's absurdities, its empty promises, and delusions. It's enabled me to enjoy the plays of Samuel Beckett. It's made me a natural skeptic. So I'm never quite disappointed.

***

I've been away, but I've been checking in on the blog occasionally, too, half expecting someone else to fill the empty space. Instead, to my absolute freaking delight, I see that a Chinese black market for UGGS has been filling my comments with passionate, incoherent hyperbole. I spend too much time focusing on the diction and syntax of spam comments, but when it comes to ineptitude in English translation nobody beats our capitalist neighbors in Asia. I love the English language like I love the Jets, but if it's going to be fumbled, let it be done artfully and creatively, like Sanchez colliding with his own lineman:

If you normally use official dress in, then you would most possibly be known as a respectable and graceful individual, though trendy garments show that you are contemporary and present-day. Apart from this, the pick of the sneakers is also very necessary in recognizing individuality of a individual. From time to time, you may acquire the sneakers which appear quite neat, but are not at ease when you place on people. Therefore the assortment of footwear should be finished with ultra treatment. Branded and standard company wears will not only improve your exhibit, but also will present you with ease and comfort and rest.

Blogging is screaming into the wind, or screaming at the top of your lungs over a thunderously dissonant wind. It's a pointless exercise, except in what it reveals to you (the only certifiable audience) about yourself. But if you don't fill the space, it's nice to know that someone speaking errantly into the howling wind will be happy to pick up the slack.

***

This has been a bad year for professional football. There is a suicidal haze falling over the game. With every week, the league tries to move beyond the wreckage that the game brings to the lives of its players. And then something like what happened in Kansas City to Javon Belcher, his girlfriend and their families occurs, and you cannot help but feel that this bleeding is a natural manifestation of the game that we all traded baseball for as our favorite so very long ago. The game and the country are oddly suited now. Fiercely devoted to guns, millennial religion, apocalyptic storytelling, Americans naturally view the notion of a "fiscal cliff" as an acceptable reality. We may be the first post-industrialized nation with an undiagnosed existential problem, a national death wish. And it has been a season of death.

If an amendment to our nation's constitution is interpreted such that the ownership of a weapon that obliterated a classroom of children can be regarded as a fundamental right, then perhaps our country really is experiencing an existential crisis. Football seems oddly suited to this. If the very element of brute force that makes the game what it is also makes it unappealing to play, then football too is experiencing a similar crisis.

Maybe football doesn't make any personal sense to me at the moment. For the first time in a long time the Jets' ineptitude does not coincide with any personal miseries. I started a new and better job in September, and that's where all my energy has gone. And it's been quite wonderful. It's been a refreshing change that I desperately needed, and while the Jets have been managing to find ways to make us all so miserable, I've been a little self-content with life in a way that doesn't feel like a delusion. It's played havoc with my writing, obviously. I get up at 5:30 am, I go to work, teach for the morning and afternoon, work on grading through the rest of the day, go home, walk the dog, make dinner, stare at the TV with my wife, and go to bed. I don't write, which doesn't seem to bother much of anyone, certainly not a bunch of black marketeers in Shanghai.

*

I'll be back this or next week, if anyone's still there. The numbers will continue. They always do. Now that the Jets have forcibly removed themselves from contention, we can all breathe a familiar sigh of relief, presenting us, as UGGS promised, with ease and comfort and rest. So send in the clowns. Wait. Don't bother. They're here.

NY Jets #63 - Part 4

The position of offensive lineman is often staffed by stoic, thoughtful, cerebral men who spend their careers getting their cerebrum bashed. JP Machado #63 played three seasons mostly in a supporting role with the Jets. I came across a Times article about the sober season of 2001, when Machado got a chance to start: the Jets' offensive line is having its usual health problems, requiring some stitching and patching to keep it together. Machado is called to fill in for Randy Thomas, who has a bad ankle.

As Gerald Eskanazi writes that year on Machado's being called up, offensive linemen "regard themselves as tough guys who like to think." There is a paradox to the position - linemen defend a line of attack. They are defensive in an offensive effort, protecting what the offense has in an effort to take what's not theirs. You get the idea. Or else, as Kevin Mawae put it in the article, "We are the only unit on the entire team that has to rely on the guy on either side of you." Mawae says in the article that it puts extra pressure on Machado who had only been in two or three games his entire career up to that point. I'm not suggesting Mawae was a professor of philosophy when he said that, but it shows a level of metacognition that usually just gets bashed out of a player's head by the time he's 30.

More interesting to Eskanazi than Machado himself is the level of accountability to which lineman hold themselves as a result of this interdependence. Just because Machado is relatively inexperienced does not mean he can have any leeway. He must perform as effectively as Mawae, the Pro Bowler. In order to police themselves, Eskanazi asserts, the line has their own kangaroo court, which meets at a local restaurant but is otherwise supposed to remain a secret.

When asked about it, Mawae says,"gruffly, 'What kangaroo court?'"

*
When I arrived at college in the late 80's, I belonged to the last wave of freshmen to still be without the Internet, the World Wide Web, cell phones, texting, and cable TV in the dorms. The concept of these things did not yet even exist in ordinary peoples' minds. An ex-girlfriend went to Dartmouth while I was in my senior year of high school and reported that each student was given a Macintosh computer. A friend of mine at Harvard, in his senior year, mentioned to me something about e-mail, and I hadn't the foggiest idea of what he was talking about. Neither did most people. When I first got a Hotmail account some years later, my father thought I had joined some kind of gay porn network.

The world to which I belonged back then is entirely different from the world of my current students, and it was really only a quarter of a century ago. I sometimes feel today as though I am a different middle aged man, born in the age of Model T, walking around at the 1964 World's Fair, trying to ascertain what exactly has transpired. My father started the car with a crank. Now I see that Bell Telephone is suggesting I will someday be able to make a phone call through a television screen. Now I'm wandering into the Saarinen's IBM Pavilion at Flushing Meadow; I write my name on a television screen, and a computer correctly reads my handwritten birth date: May, 25, 1925. Now the computer is printing out a New York Times article from that date for me:

John T. Scopes indicted in Tennessee for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.

When I arrived at college, I had three roommates - Michael, who wore all Ralph Lauren Polo all the time, right down to his underwear; Will, who plastered the walls with posters of sweaty women in thong bikinis, and Dennis, who stood at 5'6", red-faced and impish. Dennis was a wrestler in high school, and whenever he had the chance, he would grab someone in the crudely paneled study lounge in the basement and put them in a near-arm/far-ankle breakdown. The first night of school, Will found a party and then came back to the room so drunk in the wee hours that he fumbled blindly to the bathroom, only to be awakened by a piercing scream which belonged to Michael, whose bed Will had mistaken for a urinal. I, fortunately, had arrived too late on the first day to claim the bottom bunk and slept safely sat up top.

Michael spent most of his time at the college radio station, while I spent most of mine at the library, searching for research through the card catalog or on the shelves, book by book, in a building that was finished the year I was born and, I recently see, has already been replaced by a new library. Will and Dennis both joined the rugby team, and most of their first months of school were spent there. At night they stumbled back to the room, either beaten to a pulp or legless drunk after a rugby party. They talked about people named Gonzo and Ash, Bleedy and Fingers. They drank and vomited at the matches they played in. They traveled to colleges like Villanova and Notre Dame and were summarily banned from ever returning because the moment they stepped off the bus, the entire squad would go on a plundering campaign of property destruction and public nudity. They were among the least talented and most reviled squads on the east coast. Along the brick on I-95 exit ramp to the college itself, you can still see parts of a spray-painted graffiti, impossibly large:

BLEEDY - WHO LOVES YOU BABY? - GONZO

Will and Dennis had this compulsion to run into walls drunk, which was apparently a pastime of the team itself. Dennis ran into a wall when his first college girlfriend broke up with him. Will ran into a wall as a punishment from the team's kangaroo court for some kind of offense for which he was found guilty. He happily complied, and after sixteen stitches to his scalp, he lay bleeding in his bed back in our dorm room, out cold.

I asked him the next day what had happened. He told me the kangaroo court had found him guilty of some misplays in a match, but that his real punishment was as a result of losing a game of quarters and then spilling beer out of the soiled and fetid rugby shoe out of which he was told to drink, which in itself was a kangaroo court punishment for an earlier offense.

We exist within structures that themselves have unregulated checks and balances, and while most of the world doles these out in protracted gestures of passive hostility that will take years and years to manifest themselves, the kangaroo court - a covert attempt for a group to police itself in ways that may or may not be sensitive in spirit to the Eighth Amendment - gets the work done much more quickly, without allowing for lingering resentment or for protracted guilt and shame that drift in the wake of our trespasses (and those against us).

Most people I've known who've played rugby eventually experience the kangaroo court as a part of the whole deal. A 1997 video of the Golden Lions in South Africa reveals at least the degree to which odd wigs and binge drinking - albeit with some dignity for the cameras - are combined for such an event. Accept your punishment like a man and move on. Imagine the pain I could have been spared if most of my relationships in my 20's had used this model.

"But don't tell anyone I told you that," Will said about the court, as he lay in bed, trying to distinguish the pain outside his brain from the pain within. "Nobody's supposed to know about the court. It's a secret."

I sat by his bedside. "So what are you going to tell people when they ask you about, well, this?" I gestured to the blood still caked on the locks of his parted hair.

He shook his head, unconcerned. "That I was drunk and got hit by a car." He closed his eyes. "Should be fine."

*
Where are they now?

I don't know where Michael is today; I thought I heard his voice on a radio station somewhere in Pennsylvania. After screwing up their schoolwork with rugby, Will and Dennis each blew out their knees, gave up rugby and settled down to study. Today Will makes a recession-proof fortune on Wall Street, and Dennis is a Vice President for a food company that makes cookies that you most certainly eat. JP Machado was featured Randy's Radar during this year's tributes to new Hall of Famer, Curtis Martin #28.

John Neidert #63, LB 1968-69

I'm not interested in going to reunions, myself. It's been 21 years since I graduated from college, and it seems that the alma mater has given up on me, too. I no longer receive copies of the college magazine; I receive no more dinnertime telephone solicitations for alumni gifts from by hungry-sounding work-study students; notices of the class reunions come no more.  

John Neidert #63, linebacker for the Jets between 1968-69, does go to reunions. He's shown at left in a photograph taken by his son from 40th anniversary reunion of the 1968 squad. He's holding the award of awards for Jets fans - the Lombardi Trophy, before it was known as such, for Super Bowl III. If I held that exact trophy in my own hands I would probably cease to exist in this mortal form. I would be filled with a nameless, vibrating euphoria. I would probably instantly transform into an entirely different spiritual being, a Star-Child, or a seven-year old Brahmin Hindu boy. It would be transcendent. For John Neidert, it's just part of his history. He's an Infinite Jet.

A distant and nearer past, week 7, 2008

There's some great pictures here at the GangGreen.com's message board, taken by Neidert's son for the 40th anniversary in 2008, an event that took place almost exactly four years from today, during the week seven Jets home game win against the Chiefs. It would be the first of five straight wins that would compel many people to suggest that the Jets were the AFC's best team. We know the rest of the story. They would go 1-4 after that.

Neidert the younger came along with his own young son to witness the reunion. At one point you see a picture he took (above right) of the old players gathering in the tunnel preparing for halftime, and in the far distance, there's Brett Favre still playing on the field in the first half. You feel this sense of hope, now lost, in that one time and place, and of the perpetuating, uneasy aspirations that accompany our history as a team, or maybe as a species.

Someone on the message board asks,

"On a side note, someone should post how many days it's been since the NYJ have won a championship." 

As of this writing and the end of this day, the answer is 15,996 days. This means that on November 1, 2012, the New York Jets will have gone 16,000 days without another Super Bowl win. You, gentle reader, can use this information any way you like. You can discard it, disregard it, and find it as useful as your own appendix. As I watch the Jets haplessly lose to the tepid Dolphins today, I find myself sentimental for a few weeks of happiness, like the ones that accompanied the autumn months of empty promise in 2008. 

John Neidert, Joe Namath, John Schmitt,
and Don Maynard's sleeve

Athletes must have interesting relationships with time. Show up for your kangaroo courts and for the days on the sidelines. Then when your career ends, life can at times seem even richer. Will's life is better now, as is Dennis', as John Neidert's probably is too, with children and grandchildren of his own.

What of the fan? John Neidert can hold the 1969 trophy, but we live with the unending hope that someone on the team that we root for might someday hold another one aloft. Until that day comes, our team's history is really told through the thousands of nameless days that have passed since January 12, 1969. It's the same story retold, always promising to end differently this time, maybe next time, or whenever, or never.

NY Jets #63 - Part 3

Lamont Burns #63 played one season in Parcells' first year with the Jets, in 1997. The year after that, he played one season with the Washington Redskins. After that, he played the one and only season of the cartoonish XFL for the Las Vegas Outlaws. His player page for the Outlaws is filled with the usual stuff that Vince McMahon probably encouraged his people to include in bios. It's mentioned that his nickname "is 'Dirtbag.'" The final analysis is that he was "a very versatile lineman with great size and solid technique. He is a tough mauler and presents a problem for defensive linemen."

The other day I was driving with my wife, and we noticed a particularly aggressive guy driving a Mercury Marauder, a very lowbrow modern version of a muscle car that could not possibly compete with the beautiful yet loudly powerful 1968 Cougar. It was black, with blackened windows, a car whose features were clearly chosen to cultivate some kind of primitive sense of fear in people driving at the speed limit. Why a person - well, a man between the ages of 18-40 - requires something like this in order to satisfy some unmet childhood need, as opposed to owning car that simply attracts women, is completely lost on me. "Oh dear," I said blandly. "Not the Mercury Marauder."

"Isn't a marauder supposed to be some kind of plundering rapist, like a soldier in some sort of raping army?" she asked. She looked it up, and indeed, one definition suggests that a marauder goes "around in quest for plunder;  make a raid for booty."

At the war's end the country had been marauded by returning 
bands of soldiers.

That's not good. It's the the "returning" that scares me. Sort of like Soviet soldiers on the Eastern Front of World War II. The kinds of guys who actually make war look even worse that it already is.

The "mauler" is a little gentler. First, a "maul" is originally a word for a large, sharp hammer, not unlike an axe, which then turned into a verb, as nouns invariably do in the English language, to mean "striking with blunt force," "to batter or lacerate," especially "with a heavy weapon." A "maul" in rugby is also "a loose scrum that forms around a player who is holding the ball and on his feet." No wonder that a football player is called a mauler on the line, but in the larger sense, it would seem that a marauder would need to maul in order to do his business, and that at times a mauler and a marauder can be interchangeable.

This is obviously getting us nowhere, unless you remember that Vince McMahon once referred to the NFL as "pantywaist" football, even if his threats to turn America's Game into Rollerball ran out of money very, very quickly. I only mention this because anyone who has played the game will tell you that it is already intensely violent. I was pleased to see that Lamont Burns checked in on the excellent Dave Pear's Blog in 2010 to ask a question about the class action lawsuit filed against the NFL regarding group licensing agreements, officially launched by NFL Hall of Famer Herb Adderley. Pear's blog is a constant work of eloquence about the various injustices surrounding ex-player treatment, especially when we consider the mauling done to players' minds.

***

The first official New York Jet to wear #63 was Bob Butler at guard, in 1963. The terrific Coffin Corner overview of the Jets' first season mentions Butler as a former Eagle who started one game that season.

Carlton Haselrig #63 returned to football in 1995 after signing with the Jets - this after three great seasons with Pittsburgh that were followed by bouts with addiction and legal troubles. Then toward the end of a ruinously bad Jets season, he disappeared altogether and lost out on his opportunity to remain in the league. But Haselrig is one of those people who manages a return from the metaphorical dead, when people have given up on him, or have written the kinds of narratives that usually accompany guys who fall into the miseries of substance abuse and jail. Perhaps it's possible to be the kind of person he is, a phoenix, especially if you're smart enough to imagine yourself in a variety of guises in the world.

Haselrig was an unbeatable college wrestler at Pittsburgh-Johnstown, then a Pro Bowl guard in 1993 for the Steelers after never playing football in college. When his career in the NFL was officially over, he would go to prison a few more times, and would be estranged from his wife and children. But then as recent as 2009, he was a mixed-martial arts fighter, apparently finishing with a record of 3-2.

Now he is remarried, and listed at the above Pitt link from 2009 as having nine children, a responsibility that seems impossible, unmanageable even for someone like me with a very limited relationship with the law (may it remain so). To quote a friend who recently spoke so well at the funeral of a young student, it seems that as adults we lose the desire to pursue new things. With our many responsibilities, with our desire for well-defined roles in society, with obligations we seek out and then speak ill of because they exhaust our energy, we miss the point of being capable of recreating ourselves and our lives. The whole point of living a full life is having the imagination to do as we are told as children, and to imagine ourselves as whatever we want to be and then to go out and be that thing.

**

While looking for anything on John Hennessy #63, who played linebacker for the Jets from 1977-79, I actually came across something a bit more interesting - a story of what is apparently the NFL's first female scout, Connie Nicholas Carberg. Her story is here. She insists that much of her inspiration came from watching former interim Jets' coach (and Boston Patriots' coach in the 60's) Mike Holovak, whom, she says, as Personnel Director, was most responsible for the Jets' long-desired success in the early 1980's. The breakdown of picks over 1976-77 is here, and John Hennessy, who started every game in 1978, is mentioned there. It's convincing evidence of a time when the Jets got the draft right. It was not always thus, and it would not be thus for many more years. In fact, we could use a little Holovak and Carberg right about now.