Favre 42 Cardinals 28 Mets (Kaibashed)

It's Monday Night, already. In a single day, Brett Favre tied Joe Namath's 36 year-old Jet record for touchdowns in a game, while the Mets showed once again why they are Fate's pet monkey. Favre's heroics against the equivalent of a Junior Varsity NFL defense were admirable (but was it necessary for us to allow the Cardinals to score 28 points?). I'm grateful that the Cards' Anquan Boldin is alive and well. I was glad too that the Jets' Eric Smith was fined for the hit he put on Boldin, even if the hit also rendered Smith unconscious as well. What a thing to wake up to. You're out 50 grand and you may have paralyzed another human being. Frankly I would rather be out the money, even if it's very close to my annual salary.

I myself have never been unconscious from anything other than experiences rendered through sheer exhaustion or extraordinary intoxication. I've blacked out, sure. I remember passing out in the middle of the Our Father in Mass as a boy, but not for any shady reason. My hangovers in Mass didn't begin until I was in college, which might explain why I eventually stopped going to Mass. Ah me.

Mom still goes to Mass. Yesterday, while the Mets were flailing for their lives, she was waiting in the parking lot of her church. She and Dad had just driven eight hours from a strange trip to South Carolina back to Virginia yesterday and hadn't even bothered to go home yet. There was enough time to make the last Mass of the day, so that's where they were. She called from the parking lot on her cell, wanting an update on the Mets last game of the season.

"What are you doing?" I asked. "Why aren't you at home?"

She didn't answer. I knew what she meant by this. This is what real loyalty looked like. Going to Mass on a wet, late Sunday when the Church still offers dispensation for missing Mass to its weary travelers was what real faith looked like. She had been traveling north for hours, allowing herself to linger in the dusky haze of not knowing how the Mets were doing, dreading and hoping without any news at all. Mom and Dad do not have call waiting on their home phone, nor do they own anything so contemporary as a cell phone with access to the interweb. These were the last people on their block, God bless them, to own a VCR. Was I watching? Yes. The Mets were losing on TBS, even while the Jets were far ahead of the Cardinals - the most beleaguered of NFL franchises - a team whose owner looks like a dilapidated patrician Philosophy professor. It was 3-2 Marlins in the 8th. She wanted an update before she went into a 5 pm Mass.

"I'm sure it would be OK with God if you just went home, Mom."

"I'm going to call you again when Mass is over," she said, without responding. "Tell me how it ends."

When she came out, I had to break the news that not only did the Mets fail to rally, but the Brewers had also rallied against the Cubs. Yet another Mets season had come to its improbable, excruciating end. Shea was now finished for good, left behind in a fog of terrible voodoo, the structure itself now marked by the nightmares witnessed over its two final Septembers. But there was my Mom, obviously crying on the other end of the phone in a church parking lot in Virginia. I felt awful for her and guilty for abandoning a God that she had gone to that day with an open heart. I half think that she went inside church with the same kind of faith that all true fans have. Maybe this time. I've been so loyal for so long that it's got to work out this time. It's got to. It's just got to. Please.

****

While going to my classroom this morning, a colleague accosted me with the newfound generosity of spirit some Philadelphians are showing Mets fans. It's temporary. "My heart goes out to you," he said. "Thanks," I replied. "But maybe it's just time to destroy Shea." I said this with only a slightly veiled anger, ignoring New York State's prohibitions against demolition by implosion - ignoring too (much to my appalled realization seconds later) that the colleague to whom I was speaking is named "Shay."

****

Perhaps this vision of a victorious Brett seriously intends to stay, even if I'm wary of feeling good about his big day. How great was it to see Brett Favre throwing in the uniform of the failed ur-Jets - the mighty blue and mustard incarnation of New York's Titans? I predicted they would be 2-2 by now. But questions abound. Does Favre need to play only in yellow pants in order to win? Can somebody get this man a pair of canary slacks?

Brett Favre's Learning Curve

There are several issues to discuss with respect to the upcoming game against the Cardinals, but really the one issue that most Jet fans are wondering about is Brett Favre's acclimation with the playbook, or the complete absence of it. As I've said before, whereas great baseball teams have won the whole shebang with either mediocre pitching or mediocre hitting, it's absurd to think of a winning football team without a superlative signal caller. Even the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, at the very least, had Trent Dilfer. Then they immediately ditched him, attempting to prove ever since that they don't need any more than a cardboard cutout or an wounded man at the position. They have been wrong.

If you listened to the prognosticators all summer, the Jets were right. They picked a known commodity at quarterback whose only known wound was to his ego. All the experienced Jets fans out there felt wary, but we were told that such wariness is just typical of our pessimistic nature. More of us reacted with the temporarily restorative adrenaline that a terminally ill patient feels when a big name star visits him in the hospital. Regardless of our first response, we all figured that something had to come of a player as great as Brett Favre. As far as I recall, a person was an expert in his field after years of experience similar to Favre's in duration. If I got a job at a different high school teaching English, I know I would be able to bring my experience to bear upon the new task. I've been teaching mostly blue collar to barely middle class kids for nine years, but if someday I started teaching upper middle class, entirely college bound adolescents, I know I would have to make some serious adjustments to the new environment. I'd have to learn to cope with intrusive parents, constant online classrooms and students who believe that I am their butler. Still, kids are kids. Theoretically, though, a classroom is a classroom, and a kid with an iPhone is still a kid. I guess I would know what to do.

One wonders, though. How long does it take to make adjustments to a new assignment? In America, what you do is who you are. So how long does it take to be at home in a new home? Some people said that Brett Favre was temporarily flummoxed by the playbook, some suggest that the problem runs deeper than that. What I could not believe was that Ron Jaworski suggested during the Jets' loss on MNF that any quarterback needs at least six to seven years to adjust to a new system, regardless of experience. Six to seven years. Six. To. Seven. Years.

Which is absurd. Not even in the hottest pitch of my most horrid nightmare fever dreams would I believe that a quarterback would need six to seven years of experience in one system before being thought of as competent. I mean, I know that Matt Ryan is an anomaly. Vince Young has learned the pain of inconsistent success at the position. Maybe Jay Cutler is the next great quarterback ever, but most likely he will go the way of Jake Plummer. I certainly hope not. Such things were once said of John Elway: "He'll go the way of Art Schlichter, even without all the gambling problems."

Face it, though - we're not training any of these people to become Jesuits or bone surgeons. It took my wife a total of eight years to get both her Master's and PhD in English. Though discerning among five or six audibles is more challenging than the mind work Johnny Unitas did on the field after flinging his sideline parka at Don McCafferty, no one expects any these folks to be able to know how to manage a complicated border dispute in the Middle East. Without any deep threats, though, Brett Favre will be able to do just so much, even when he gets his honorary doctorate for mastering Brian Schottenheimer's overly complex, underachieving offense. Via cum dois, Brett. Better yet, et in arcadia ego.

Feel My Pain

I've written before about the peculiar position of being a Mets fan in Philadelphia. Obviously I keep a lot of it to myself, and I also find myself caring a great deal for the Phillies, a team that even a Latin American junta leader could learn to love ere long. That being said, I want both the Mets and Phillies to make the post-season, and, in keeping with their traditional character traits, each is being coy about whether or not they actually want to be there.

But it's the Mets who are the most enraging, the most imponderable, the most astoundingly self-destructive of the two. Last night's incredible loss to the Cubs was a work of fiction. How could anyone's bullpen be as bad as theirs? Do the Royals have a bullpen that bad? And if I'm not mistaken, the cumulative number of men the Mets left on base may very well have outnumbered the number of hits they got. Aside from a testimony to the Cubs' poor pitching, it's also obviously a sign of a home team that has PTSD. I think we know where the rest of this story is going.

And I'm having deja vu all over again, too. (That phrase, you know, is so hackneyed that it has entered the mainstream, left it, stuck around like an elderly loner with to do nothing such that nobody remembers where or when it came into being; someone corrected me the other day, saying, "You know, people say that all the time, but they often overlook that it's a redundancy..." Alas, poor Yogi.) Wasn't it last year that I was going through a personal reckoning as to "how long a season it is going to be" for the Jets, even as I watched the Mets implode? Is this where I came in? I have argued for the spiritually purifying fire of watching your favorite team lose, but this, I believe, may be ridiculous. Contemplate the perceived depth the Jets have at the quarterback position, and yet know that Favre doesn't know the playbook at all. Feel the frustration of watching Carlos Delgado's grand slam came to naught. Listen to the fans who haven't left in extra innings boo the Mets lustily at Shea (what a fitting closure to my favorite stadium). Come November, when Obama loses the national election to a geriatric has-been and his Fundamentalist Christian running mate, the sense of watching my teams lose will finally be complete. Then I can watch somebody else in the Super Bowl. If Fate still has a sense of humor, it will be the Giants again.

Even my most vituperatively anti-New York colleague at work stopped me and admitted that maybe, just maybe, he could feel my pain. If you know anything about Philadelphians and their almost Balkan sense of loyalty, you have to be overwhelmed by a gesture like that.

Jets vs. Chargers - First Half

9:35 pm EST

I'm exhausted. My wife's away in Portugal on business this week, and, at the risk of sounding like I'm asking for people to make the appreciative sound of awwwwwwwww, I'm having difficulty sleeping at night without her. Yeah, yeah. Is it possible that this game will keep me from my appointed ride down the dark and narrow tunnel of sleep? We'll see. Right now, it's 24-14 Chargers. The way the Bolts move the ball, it'll probably be more before the end of the half. Favre has now thrown two interceptions.

I am planning on adding an addendum to the "Epic Ode to Chad Pennington" with a congratulatory note to the man in question, even though Ronnie Brown practically beat the New England Patriots single-handedly. But it's the thought that counts, and it's a bittersweet thought at that (for the Jets fan these are the most redolent). I cannot blink from the contrast between these two circumstances - Chad's and Brett's. But tonight it's not just Favre. Look at what's happened already tonight. Do you use the onsides kick against an offense that runs the table? I guess. It's a gutsy risk that rarely works. I see plenty of missed tackles, missed coverages. The Jets defensive line are holding on for dear life, like Gene Hackman's obnoxious character in The Poseidon Adventure (was that not the clumsiest cinematic analogy I could draw? I am tired). Despite a delightful return by Leon Washington, during which he may have actually split in half not once but twice, I still have a familiar sinking feeling.

The Chargers are threatening again. Each time San Diego puts LT to the line, the Jets move further and further back.

Ah, voila. San Diego up, 31-14.

Right now I'm teaching the kids Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard's play about two characters whose secondary importance in Hamlet merits them a fate that is paradoxically certain and yet unknown to them. No matter how they try to approach their situation, no matter how they try to ascertain their own significance in the universe, no matter how they try to make sense of it all, it always ends the same way. Hamlet's pals always end up with the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

But recall that like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we all come into a world with a certain end, yet we remain uncertain of how the end will come. And how many of us are willing to grasp this concept without diving into numbing intoxication or falling to our knees in half-considered prayers of mercy to a higher power? Ah, but the fan of a chronically losing team has had plenty of experience envisioning a bad end before the end of a game, even without knowing the final score. Such are a Jets fans thoughts at the end of the the first half on the first night of autumn. The Jets fan cannot help but feeling like he is watching a play he has seen before. It's all good preparation for seeing one's life come to an end, if you ask me. The Jets fan can see it; he's learned to brace himself for the worst all these years, knowing that the end will come in a loss. I guess we are more prepared for the plummet into mortality than any damned fan of the Cowboys, or the AFC East Division Rival Of Whom We Do Not Speak. How surprised by the Final Act can we possibly be?

Jets on the Cover of Sports Illustrated (Part 2)

Joe Namath enjoyed his share of SI covers - eight in all, including one a couple of years ago in advance of Mark Kriegel's biography. We see in these the gradual evolution of the person of Namath, from charming youth, to phenomenon, to counter-cultural dreamer, to Gatorade-sucking champion, to teetering legend, to weeping outcast, to Hollywood hack, to a permanently jittery Joe. We also see the transition of an era from Brillcreme to hairspray, each on either side of things like assassinations and Stonewall. Namath was present at the evolution of a more frank and contemporary New York, acting as its slouching and limping pied piper.

Here is Joe Namath, December 1968, on the brink of the greatest moment a football player of his era will have. As the cover suggests he "eyes the Super Bowl," but apparently he does so with eyes colored a suspiciously garish azure blue. He looks like an Atreides who's ingested a little too much spice before riding the sandworm of Dune, or maybe just a barbarian gazing hungrily the spoils of civilization at its gates. The article doesn't bother with a serious evaluation of the Jets near the end of their best season to date, nor with anything about Namath's extraordinary turnaround that year from promiscuous passer to disciplined captain. No. Instead Edwin Shrake writes a satirical piece entitled "Champagne Party for Joe and Weeb," which imagines, even before the playoffs start, the ludicrous idea of the Jets beating the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, 27-21. So improbable and lampoonish does such a notion seem that the Jets are reduced to charming cartoons of their selves; the only illustration for the piece is a drawing of Namath in Visigoth furs and a Fu Manchu mustache suspiciously reminiscent of Genghis Khan, smashing a bottle of champagne over Weeb Ewbank's head. The world wasn't ready.

I was always befuddled by this one. This is Joe in victory. But am I missing something? Is this really the culminating portrait of a man who guaranteed and then executed his greatest victory? Why is this the image we're supposed to conjure? I remember playing Pee Wee football with those bottles. You'd squeeze it and like a nested bird, you'd open your mouth nice and wide and be sated by the watery lemonade-feel of Gatorade entering your system. I have just consumed something that will make me a champion today. What makes him a Super Hero, a Super Joe here? Is it his unquenchable thirst for the drink that restores the minerals lost to the human body in sweat? Super Hero, Super Joe, Super Thirsty.

He came, he bought a bar, he wept, he left, he returned. I've written before about Bachelor's III and its impact on the imagination of a man like myself who travels in the distant wake of his own sauced ravages. As this piece from Modern Drunkard attests, the sentimental attraction to such a person is endless, even after silly old Joe tried kissing Suzy Kolbert. Plainly put, the simple pleasures of having one's cake and eating it too were first honed to perfection by the co-owner of Bachelor's III. Bo Belinsky and Mickey McDermott were mere Robert Burnses to Namath's William Blake. Namath was a professional drunk and star in the one, half Sinatra, half Graceland-era Elvis. In light of Pacman Jones, Rozelle's grievances against Namath seem ridiculous. Namath appeared to enjoy himself in his cups and never needed anyone more than Ray Abruzzese and other such Crimson Tide cronies to help him find the door. When Rozelle told him to cut out the bar business because a bunch of shiny suits were Bachelor III customers, Namath wept. Any man who loved pleasure would have. Love me or leave me, world. I yams what I yams.

When he "returned" that same preseason for a meaningless encounter with the College All-Stars - a promotional show previously enjoyed by the Packers - it appears that Joe and the team were thwarted by the likes of Bill Bergey and Greg Cook, both of whom would go on to play for the fledgling Bengals. The Jets were looking at the future, the one with winning NFL teams staffed by many of the college players on the other side of the ball. This was the future that would crush the Jets in the 70's. In my early childhood reading, I ran across a profile of Greg Cook which relayed the story that the young quarterback went to the preseason matchup looking forward, above all, to meeting his idol on the other team, another #12, the most famous in sport. But Namath blew him off, much to Cook's eternal scorn. To quote Updike on Ted Williams, "Gods don't answer letters."

By the time the Jets were well into the 1972 season, a different AFC Eastern Division team was worth more of the print. Nevertheless, the 1972 Jets - a team a little better than their 7-7 record, made it to the cover for what would the last time for 11 years. And for what? For being quixotic. For being beguiling. For being "jittery." Recall that the Jets nearly beat the Dolphins in the Orange Bowl, falling by a score of 28-24. Jitters, I guess - that and a Cliff McClain fumble in the fourth quarter.

My brother Charlie (a Giants fan) reminded me that in the early part of 1986, the city's two favorite narcissistic head cases on defense appeared on a cover of SI that suggested that one New York team more than the other always got the mother load of Mackintosh apples. At the time of this cover, each team was actually setting the NFL aflame. I remember now that when I first saw this cover at the ripe old fan's age of 17, it never occurred to me that New York was a Giants town more than Jets town. Seriously. I mean, I had heard Dad's stories about being heckled by Giants fans at his office when he told them about his latest Sunday outing at Shea. Dad had also told me he had been the original kind of Jets fan, one who couldn't get Giants tickets at Yankee Stadium. In high school, my Giants fan friend Doug treated me like I was a leper with running sores when we talked about football. But still, I had always assumed that Namath's victory in Super Bowl III and the subsequent 1969 preseason trouncing of the Giants at the Yale Bowl had made us equals in the eyes of the city, if not in God's. This despite the fact that even during the miserable 70's for both teams, the Giants sold out every Sunday while the Jets couldn't show games on local TV. But then what did I know? As a little boy on Long Island, I had also assumed that the Earth was populated with nothing but Catholics and Jews. It stood to reason.

The 1986 SI article attests to the Jets' promise, particularly after an enormous 51-45 win over Miami, but the cover is more prophetic. As so many of our years in the playoff rounds, it all ended gruesomely. By the end of the 1986 season, I understood my place in the universe well enough.

Patriots 19 Jets 10 - Week 2

Aaron Rodgers' offense scored 42 points in Green Bay, while the Jets scored 10 against Those Of Whom We Do Not Speak. It was a bad day for Brett, a bad day to be a Jets fan. Granted, Brett has to learn more of the playbook, but when he lead the team to a quick snap inside the five in the fourth quarter for which his colleagues were not prepared, he looked genuinely disappointed. "It's like we invited Brett Favre to our house," my wife said as we watched the Jets lose 19-10, "but there were no beverages to offer." Everywhere Jets fans seemed to wait for their team's timid offense to wake up and play. It did not. After a while, it was difficult to watch, a strangulation, a long march toward solemn defeat.

But watch it I did. I saw a limited running attack; a few good runs from Leon Washington and Thomas Jones, both of whom constitute the Jets' ground game. Many of our receivers were inactive for the game. There was a lot up the middle. My wife has been watching football with me for a while now, and I have patronizingly endured her complaints about how useless it is to run up the middle. Sometimes I feel the same way, but I always think there's a good explanation for it. But I felt the same way as she all game Sunday. All game. I didn't see Jay Feely's missed field goal in the first quarter because I was in the restroom. My trip was a result of a mistaken impression that his was a veritable chip shot through the posts. J-E-T-S.

Three runs up the middle in the first quarter went for naught. It's the mantra swarming the bare coverage the Jets will get this week in the New York media. We have the most explosive elderly quarterback in the game, and we keep going up the middle. Meanwhile New England ran screen passes to Wes Welker that the Jets appeared entirely unprepared to handle, which is ridiculous because we've all seen the Patriots run them before. These are the kind of plays that wear down a team down, but even more, they wear down the fan. This was the home opener, and by the midway point of the mildly distracting fourth quarter, the Jet faithful were already gathering as traffic on the Turnpike.

Kerry Rhodes had a great game, calling a sensible timeout that snuffed out a potential New England touchdown. Darrelle Revis played well, and the pass rush looked good. Our defense in the red zone looked good. Imagine if the defense had not been able to stop the Patriot touchdowns that were held to field goals: 35-10.

Listening to CBS didn't help. Jim Nance's recent memoir features pictures of the two George Bushes in the background, which makes sense. He sings with the winners. Shall I take the bitter pill? Hell, why not. His co-celebrant at the altar of Those Of Whom We Do Not Speak, Phil Simms, mispronounced Dustin Keller's last name as "Kellner." Ah well. Dustin's only a Jet.

"Well," I said, consoling myself, as Thomas Jones started picking up the running game a little too late, "the Jets are still kind of making a game of it."

"That's the spirit," said my wife.

I still don't know why she endures watching Jets games with me. She can obviously see that I don't actually enjoy it. I can't wait for it to start, but I can barely watch without sounding like a lost dog. Often I watch the game with a slackjacked expression. Even as I saw Laverneus Coles make that impressive gain in the first half to set up three successively unsuccessful runs up the middle, she must have seen me wordlessly moving myself to the edge of my chair and opening my mouth with a silent offering of devotion and hope - a "please" or maybe "don't drop the ball." These phrases really do crystallize the parallel emotions of a Jets fan as his team is driving. The closer they get to the goal line, the more that one feels that a turnover is imminent. The Jets' success is the bell; my anticipatory fear is dread's salivation.

Speaking of silence, how about the cavernous quiet of the Meadowlands in the fourth quarter? How quiet? The stadium was so silent that as the Patriots drove into the red zone for what would eventually be their last field goal, one could hear a lone manic whistler somewhere in the crowd. Like a shouting child in a parking garage who tries out his echo, the whistler seemed amazed at how his noise bounced around the vast space. It was mad in its endurance. At first it stood out in the same way that certain crowd noises do, and maybe the frustration I felt with the game forced it to the foreground of my brain. But how could anyone near the whistler have endured it for the five real minutes it went on and on? So sharp and piercing was the sound that one could not do anything but conclude that its owner had lost his mind. The agonizing game left the whistler with nothing to do but make a sound normally used by desperately stranded hikers in the mountains who are trying to attract the attention of search parties. It was intermittent only so that whistler could come up for air, and once he did, the piercing sound renewed again. It was a maddening cry for help. It went on and on and on.

Jets on the Cover of Sports Illustrated (Part 1)

I've been scrolling through the impressive vaults of Sports Illustrated, making many personal and socio-political observations to myself that will ultimately be fodder for a pithy blog entry at some point in the near future. What else would you expect? But I would be remiss if I did not point out this week's landmark of Brett Favre appearing on its cover, the first such Jets-related cover in very nearly 10 years.

Favre's appearance is a little late coming. I understand there was something called the 2008 Summer Olympics, with the swimming guy with the mutant-sized torso and the slick bathing suit, and the two blonde American dancing gymnastic dwarfs, and the portrait of a genocidal maniac overseeing the passing of the marathon, and the sight of Kobe Bryant getting a gold medal, and the extraordinary use of human beings as totalitarian art in the opening ceremonies. I heard about it. They did not have the tension, the soul-searching, the bitterness and regret associated with the arrival of a living legend to the Eugene O'Neill play known as the Gotham Football Club. Maybe it's me. But SI finally got on board with the big story. Thank you. Very. Much.

I don't know why this is such a big deal to me. It was certainly a big deal when I was little. I suppose that having grown up a suburban kid who looked forward to the Thursday delivery of the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, the magazine has always had a monolithic quality to me. But it did to everybody. SI was the industry standard that stood the test of time. Sport tried to be more like Esquire, but by the time the nation elected Bonzo's pal President, nobody liked to have monoliths wryly critiqued anymore. It was un-American, and SI remained very American while Sport lost its focus.

And during those formative years, circa 1978-1983 - which for me was late grade school to freshman year of high school - I was still unaffected by adolescent narcissism and therefore very much interested and curious about the world, its impressions, and values. I was still too young to know what any of it meant, but that to the extent that the world placed value on something, I was willing to pay attention. If the world at large valued the New York Jets for something - perhaps in the form of putting one of its players on the cover of America's biggest sports magazine - I was impressed and honored. I wanted the world's approval, so if the world paid attention to my football team for a week, it was a big deal.

And I mean featured on the cover, for the Jets made a cameo appearance for their loss to the Browns in the Divisional Playoff game of January 1987. But that's not what I'm talking about. That's related to an entirely other kind of psychological issue to which, I might argue, this entire blog is devoted.

Unfortunately for me, the only Jet featured on the cover during those years was Richard Todd, here being shown unloading the bread. Just as with the Brett Favre-Jets story, this August 1983 image comes a little too late to the career of Richard Todd, the successor of Joe Namath. The caption indicates that Richard Todd's career is reaching its crescendo, but Fate has already deemed it that he is done. The 1983 season ended with the Jets finishing injured and below .500, with Todd throwing 18 TD's to 26 INT's. I put the picture on my wall at home and even waited until Todd was traded to New Orleans to take it down. Had I been a little bit younger I might have left it up, for then Todd might have represented the achievement of the world recognizing that the Jets existed, that I existed. I had waited long enough. But I was already 14. I found that I couldn't control a brain addled by hormones and possessed of an inexplicable, unpredictable impatience with the world at large. Now, two words sprang to my lips every time I experienced a frustrating obstacle: Fuck it. The end of the 1983 season was both the end of Todd's career with the Jets and the end my childhood innocence.

Only two other players in Jets history have made it onto the cover. One is Keyshawn Johnson, here seen retrieving a pass in his great performance against the Jags in the Divisional Playoff game of January 1999, the game that sent the Jets to the AFC Championship. Why is he is there and not Vinny Testaverde or Curtis Martin? Because Keyshawn was the guy who, two season before, had professed a desire for the damn ball. Here the ball is just barely there, and with it the Jets are a long shot to go to the AFC Title game, their second since the merger. The rest is silence, a commodity that Keyshawn has never quite been known for, bless his undersized, ball-hogging, team-ditching, Parcells-loving soul. He made a great fumble recovery in that game that is still branded on my grateful brain. My first and only reaction to this cover during that week - among the happiest weeks of my life, I'm not ashamed to say - was why couldn't they have gotten a better picture of the helmet?

The only Jet left to mention had eight covers, and that would be Joe Namath, of course. As I've said before, Joe was bigger than the Jets and very nearly bigger than the sport he played. A story so large that only the silver screen could hope to contain it, albeit in the person of Jake Gyllenhaal. Yeah, right. Anyway, here is Joe's first SI photo in 1965, holding the soon-to-be outdated '64 Jets helmet. According to Mark Kriegel in Namath, the subject arrived very late for this photo shoot in Times Square. I'm imagining that afterwards the evening maintained its resilience under the increasingly gaudy neon light of mid-60's New York, complete with bar-hopping, club-tripping, taxi-jumping, stewardess-scooping - all still performed in the Jets uniform.

THE WOMAN: You play baseball?
BIFF: F-football.
THE WOMAN: Me too.

Or how about this one, portraying the crasser, more frank excess of the sexual revolution? Though this is meant to capture Namath cast as Captain Hollis in the forgettable 1970 western The Last Rebel, it really speaks to the perceived and real characters of Joe Willie. This is the Namath of the 70's. Who needs stewardesses? Now, nobody's making a secret out of it. Everybody's out to get laid. Everybody wants a piece of the big guy. I think the magazine wants to portray Joe as hating the thought of returning to practice; he's having so much fun, right? But I think that's Madison Avenue's misreading of the time. Come on, he seems to suggest, weighted with the fatigue one feels in the wake of extraordinary excess, Is this all there is? Existentially, Joe, perhaps not. But for the Jets, it's all downhill from here.

Click here for Part 2...

Can We Party Like It's 1999?

I've avoided thinking about this all week. I've avoided experiencing the strange, cruel elation that lurks within me when I think about it. I'm not a good person, really, when I consider that another person's misery is at the source of my happiness. But being a fan leaves you no other option. You are so reliant upon the well-being of other people whom you'll never meet in your life that it is inevitable for the fan to wish as much ill on his team's biggest rival as he does hope for a win each week. When the most important player on your biggest division rival goes down, it's a big deal. A big, terrible, happy deal. Nowhere else but in sports are you allowed (is that even the right word?) to wish ill on others.

The Patriots. Their position as dread rivals, their salaries and ancillary air of hubris drain all the sympathy from us when they fall. I will not lie. Tom Brady's agony last week was like a Christmas gift that you finally got but have given up wishing for, thinking that it would never come. In fact, last year I had this premonition of Brady's blowing out a knee in the opener, an experience that I suggested may have cursed the Jets in their first game against the Pats last year (as if the Pats needed a curse to be placed on their 2007 victims; they didn't even need to spy on the Jets). I remember what it was like, sitting in with a bunch of Patriots fans in 1999, dreading another day of student teaching on Monday, spirited by the notion that the Jets might repeat a division championship, watching their opener against New England. Then Vinny Testaverde's Achilles' tendon snapped, and with it every plan for success that season. The Jets went 8-8. I don't talk anymore to the friends/Patriot fans I was hanging around with that day. Their instinctive vitriolic joy at seeing Vinny on the ground writhing in agony made me sick to my stomach. These were guys with whom I had eaten in college every day, people with whom I had gotten drunk every weekend. I just walked out on them, and I have never looked back. As I've said before, some things are more important than the semblance of friendship.

Some people have suggested to me that it was a shame to see Brady go down because fans wanted to see how the Patriots rebounded from February. But I feel none of that. Let the mighty fall. No, I don't like wishing misery on someone else, even someone like Brady whose sense of his own infallibility blinded him to how effective the Giants' pass rush was going to be last February. (Ha!) But it was not enough. His humiliation was not complete. It is a terrible thing to say. It is: I feel satisfied that Tom Brady is out for the year. It has soothed the feelings of disappointment that have bothered me since September 1999. It may be unfair that I have lost sight of his soul in all of this. He's a fucking human being; I know this. But with its masks, its padding, its vastness, its excess, the sport encourages us to dehumanize these players to this point. It's a crap excuse, but if you're a football fan, you know it's true.

I blame football. One player makes all the difference in football, and he is the quarterback, the player on whom too much depends. Crushing the the quarterback's spirit has always been the objective in a sport that rests so precariously on that focal point. And this is a fault in the game, one even Vince Lombardi brought up again and again. Too much rests on a guy who would have benefited from a graduate course in Statistics at Rutgers, which lately is what a good QB needs. The Jets were not going to be successful with Pennington at QB, nor will they be with Favre if the old man comes up lame. The question of the Vikings' future rests with the growth of Tarvaris Jackson, which will probably never come. Matt Leinart is not going to cut it the way Jim Plunkett eventually did. Like Michael Vick, Vince Young is showing that a singular ability at one aspect at QB cannot account for the wealth of spontaneous decision-making he needs on the field. It was too much for one man when the quarterback called the plays himself; it's too much for one man now when he needs to memorize three other people's play calling. Just ask Billy Joe Hobert.

Will the peerless machine of New England get back into gear? Yes, and at the expense of the Jets, most likely. And don't forget Buffalo - they'll win the division if the Patriots don't. But now at least I feel that with Brady out, I can at least stop blaming Fate for a lack of trying. And even if this is not the beginning of the end of the Patriot Dynasty (and it is not) I can at least take comfort from the thought that maybe my old friends from college remember how rotten they were to Vinny and to me that day of seeming promise in September 1999.

Jets 20 Dolphins 14 - Week 1 (Part 2)

To see Brett Favre dance like an untrained firewalker after throwing his first Jets touchdown to Jerricho Cotchery was an unfamiliar sight to me, and not just because I still can't believe Favre is quarterbacking for us. I think I'm actually getting used it. It was Favre's well known joie de vivre, his pure trademark sense of joy that accompanies his play that has been almost altogether absent from my career as a Jets fan. It was something new cloaked in something, by football standards, quite old. It signaled in so many signs that there was a better way. It's still worth being very suspicious, of course. The team went through an exhale that turned into the equivalent of falling asleep on the couch in the fourth quarter.

Push 'em back,
Push 'em back.
Waaaaaay back.

And where was I? My parents were in town, so I obliged them by watching the Phillies-Mets game with them on the plasma set in their hotel room. Mom's a big Mets fan. I had already coached myself into following the Jets game on my wife's BlackBerry, down by down. I know I sound like the worst kind of phony by saying that, the biggest yuppie bastard. Can any man call himself a real fan, a real man, even, if that's the best he can do? Make his team a tertiary priority? But here's the thing. I live in a state with two teams - the Eagles and the Steelers - better known during World War II as the "Steagles" - one AFC team on CBS, one NFC team on Fox. If CBS feels generous, we get the Jets, but Sunday it was obviously feeling a bit on the miserly side what with Brett Favre's opener and all, and so no Jets game. Again, I do not own NFL Network. Again, sue me.

And Mom's devotion to the Mets is the real thing. It started somewhere in the early 80's. I'm not sure how, but there were a few odd days where suddenly Mom was paying more attention to baseball than she ever had before. She had been a Brooklyn Dodgers fan so the association was a completely authentic one. And coming as it did with the arrival of my awkward years, I don't really remember what started it exactly. I was probably too busy staring in the mirror that the feeble mustache under my nose that she assured me made me look "retarded."

And it wasn't that she jumped on a booming bandwagon. She started paying attention to them in about 1982/83, the George Bamberger to early Davey Johnson years. Instead of Gary Carter, Ray Knight, Lenny Dykstra, Darryl Strawberry and Kevin Mitchell, the Mets had Hubie Brooks, Mike Fitzgerald, George Foster, Dave Kingman and Ron Gardenhire. They were barely .500. Yet she got attached. Really, really attached. On the last day of eighth grade, I walked out of school ready for summer and to my surprise, Mom stood in front of the school bus and told Charlie and me to get into the car. Dad sat behind the wheel over in the parking lot. He shrugged at us.

"We're going to see the Mets tonight," she said. "Get in the car."

It's been pretty much like that ever since. Several years after the Mets won their last World Series, I was living at home right after college, doing a job interview over the phone which had to be interrupted so that I wouldn't have to speak over my mother's blood-curdling screams and curses coming from the other room. Gregg Jefferies had done something stupid at short.

And though Dad got me on the Jets in the first place, it's Mom whom I most resemble as a fan. She and I share the same feel for the omnipresent doom that circles our teams. Not again. Oh God. How could you do this to me? she asks as the Mets lost their way in the first game of the doubleheader against the Phillies. Pedro Martinez continued his long death march into oblivion, and the Mets simply refused to hit against the Phillies, the team that joyfully won the division last year. The game could not be mistaken for anything but a metaphor for the Metsies' howlingly insane collapse at the finish line of the NL East last year. Not again. God, no. No, no, no...

So what better time to check the score of the Jets game than when the Mets were losing bad? The damn BlackBerry froze on the Jets leading 20-7 with 11:00 left in the fourth quarter. It was getting late, and I knew - just as Mom knows the Mets might well blow the playoffs - that Miami had probably scored again and were threatening, with Brett Favre probably looking on helplessly from the bench. Sure enough, I managed to distract their attention and turned to CBS, who had decided to show the end of the game. I was right.

Pennington was on the 18 with three attempts to go and two timeouts. Now that seemed familiar. What the hell did you guys do? What happened? Damn it.

Blow the lead,
Blow the lead.
Please not again.

Within a few seconds, I am curled up in a ball on the end of my sofa, and no one - not my wife, my Mom or Dad - notices anything strange about the pleading sounds emanating from this ball of bones. Not again. Oh God. How could you do this to me? Not again!

Even Darrelle Revis' interception of the next pass looked like the usual portent. There was a flag on the play. You want to be released from the ball of tension on the sofa, but the little detail in the corner of the scoreboard onscreen reads "FLAG" in yellow. Sort of like the flag that fell on Mark Gastineau when he late hit Bernie Kosar; sort of like the flag that greeted the late hit on Drew Brees in the 2004 playoffs; sort of like the holding penalties and offsides flags that nullified about a season's worth of touchdowns by Wesley Walker in the 1980's.

And yet, upon closer examination it looked unequivocally like offensive pass interference. Revis made a great catch. It was never a question. The referees thought how lucky they were to have thrown a game-ending flag for a foul so flagrant. How lucky could they get? Another harrowing Jets win, and then it was quickly back to the Mets game, where the whimpering sounds of powerlessness could persist again unabated from a different part of the room. As mckeown.ian mentioned about his own experience on Sunday, "I had a terrible day today watching the Jets win." Agreed.

Jets 20 Dolphins 14 - Week 1 (Part I)

It's a shame that our disappointments resonate with us more profoundly than our joys and achievements. We seem to learn early on to mark our memory with humiliations, harsh correction of youth almost as if to steel ourselves against the unmet expectations of a mature life. One becomes unnaturally dependent on disappointment; it leaves us without a worry about the future, other than needing to brace for the next big blow against our good fortune. It's our armor. As a Jets fan, one gets accustomed to this stuff as if it were a threadbare childhood blanket on which a grown man might still rely when all else fails him in his insomniac wee small hours of helplessness, panic and fear. Surely there has to be a better way.

Someone asked me during the week, "Who do I pick?" They meant the football pool, of course. Even as we speak, all around my beloved country people are circling the winners for this week's football pool. In a nation that has made football - baseball's Harley-riding bastard half-brother - as its favorite, the game has become just another opportunity to build better bonding in the only really game that truly matters in America - your corporate job. Football players build their bodies into a state of fitness appropriate to their position to win the American salary lottery and die young. Meanwhile, the office pools that follow the results of their performances enable office people to feel as though they can endure yet another day in each other's company. It is a worthy sacrifice.

So, my co-workers ask me, as a Jets fan:

"OK, Roche. Miami-Jets. Who do I pick?"

Here comes that feeling of nauseous self-defeat building up in me - that hellish green effervescence of fear and loathing. This is no ordinary matter of which they speak. Can't I just indulge their simple request? It doesn't mean the same to them, and why should it? What's the big fucking deal?

"Ugghhh," I say, as if they have asked me to recite the Nicene Creed. "Yeeeah, um... Jesus. Miami, I guess."

They look at me with a look of surprise. They don't get it. "But,...you're a Jets fan."

I can't elude the sense of ominousness, the feeling that it's all for naught. I'm already thinking 0-1. This is the feeling that season openers always bring.

"Yeah, well, whatever." And that's the best I can do.

Earlier in the summer, there were the Fantasy Football people - the people for whom a single football team is not enough. No. Fantasy Football people imagine themselves as hiring mercenaries to do their work. They amass a hearty band of flamboyant wide receivers, tree-stump-legged running backs, and a bunch of underachieving young quarterbacks who operate with the same guile as little guys in the neighborhood who borrow their big brothers' cars.

"Right," says one co-worker, a Fantasy Football person. "OK." He shakes his head, expecting me to explain the meaning of it all. "Uh, OK. I had to pick one of your guys in the Fantasy draft, I think. A guy with a really freakin' weird name. I wrote it down." He produces a crumpled notepad paper that looks as though it has been retrieved from the back pockets of several pairs of pants. "Jerricho Stuckey." He looks up from what was probably a drunken scrawl, searching for his original reasoning. "So...is that...good?"

He doesn't know what he's talking about, but it's not his fault. Until Brett Favre came to the Jets there was literally no one outside of Gang Green Land whom anyone knew. He's talking about two separate human beings who will ultimately be responsible for two separate touchdown catches in the Jets' first victory of the 2008 season. It's not his fault that both men have unusual names. "Jerricho Cotchery" sounds like a distant cousin of Uncle Jesse on the Dukes of Hazzard, while "Chansi Stuckey" has a name that a grade school kid might give to a stuffed animal. But still. One can't help but be mischievous.

"I think you mean Chansi Cotchery, don't you?" I ask.

"Wait," he says, producing a pen. "Lemme write that down."

To be continued....

Best case scenario: 10-6

Worst case: 6-10

GU 63

The GU 63 on the field and on the uniforms for Gene Upshaw in tonight's opener between the Giants and the Redskins speaks to the justified respect the former NFLPA leader felt from both players and owners. The game would not be what it is tonight - a juggarnaut in American sport - were it not for his ability to find the common ground between the workers and their bosses. He endured the leadership of Pete Rozelle, Paul Taliagbue and Roger Goodell. Obviously Upshaw's legacy is, in part, affected by his hostility to the idea of compensating retired players whose debilitating handicaps are a direct result of football's violence. Tagliabue said that Upshaw thought about the larger picture of the game rather than the smaller issues. Rival offensive lineman Joe Delamielleure had another view, that the players were the game, unconditionally. His muted comments on Upshaw's death reflected a more critical view of Upshaw's legacy:

"The reality of life for all the guys who played in the NFL, including Gene, is that we have a short life span. It's just the way it is," he said. "I have sympathy for his family. I have sympathy for his wife and children. I didn't know Gene personally. I just knew him professionally."

Delamielleure is so fixated on his righteous point that he doesn't even bother to distinguish that Upshaw died of a long bout with cancer. Upshaw once said off the record that Delamielleure's activism on the issue of retired players' compensation made him want to break the former Bills' guard's neck. Delamielleure had the last word.