NY Jets #43 - Part 1

On April 23, 2005, Mike Brim #43, who played cornerback for the Jets from 1991-92, was murdered by another man outside his home in Virginia. At present, the only thing I can find about his death is that it was the result of an "argument over a woman." When people die young, there is always a question of a suicide, an overdose, an accident, or a murder. His violent death is familiar considering how many athletes who, through their own fault or someone else's, go well before their time. Last year Steve McNair was killed by a woman, while Mike Brim was killed "over a woman," reminding us once again that a crime of passion is more likely to involve a mere injury any other society where owning a gun is not perceived to be an inalienable right endowed by one's creator. I was shaken by McNair's murder last year, but the event has already entered into our consciousness as just another unfortunate event with nothing to do with our society's pathological love of bearing arms. It enters into our minds with the same bland acceptance as massacres at schools.

The above link from Bassett, and the comment that follow, both speak of Mike Brim's fine play. His best years were as a Jet; other than a Jet lifer, who else can we say that about that we've looked at so far? His best season was 1992, especially with a touchdown (on one of his six interceptions that season) against his former team, the Detroit Lions. His career from 1988 to 1995, with five different teams, seems parabolic. Football is not like life; in life, moments of joy may be sparse, but they're distributed over a broader spectrum than a football career provides. For a football player, life is Hobbesian - nasty, brutish and short. Joy is always a peak on the graph.

****

Why do I read the marriage announcements in the New York Times in the Sunday Styles section? Even I don't know. Who do I think I am, some kind of old Dutch family squire? And what am I looking for? I saw one person that I graduated high school with who ended up there about fifteen years ago, but that's it. It's a Sunday habit. I also go copiously through my college bulletins to see what's happening to the people of my graduating classes (there's not much, actually). I've stopped looking to see who's gotten married, and now I'm on to seeing who's having their third kid. I have two ex-girlfriends who are published writers, so I'm always curious to read about their exploits even though I have no intention of contacting them. I do not imagine that I will end up in anything they write. Which is good, believe me.

But pretty soon I'll be looking there to see who's died. I'll become one of those people who look at the obituaries every day. We're all just perennial browsers, making note of all the recorded ceremonies of birth, school, work and death - marking time in the family of humanity.

The only trouble is my family and my friends are spread out in many places, and there's very little sense of community that I have with anyone out there, largely due to my own introversion. I am a quintessential kind of American, a lone soul successfully disconnected from the points of community, who's actually not as self-reliant as he'd like to believe. I shop at all the same stores as everyone else. I eat the same food as you. I watch TV when I could read, and when I read, I read things that you're probably reading. I drive when I should walk. With the exception that I refuse to do Facebook, I am principally average.

John Dockery

On Valentine's Day this past year, I saw in the Styles section the notice for the marriage of a Ryan Kaple and Ciara Dockery, and I wondered aloud, "I wonder if that's John Dockery's daughter?" And by God, it was. If you watched a football game between the late 1980's and the 1990's, it's very likely that you saw John Dockery #43 on the sideline of a college football game, usually reporting for CBS or NBC . But John Dockery was also part of the crew that ran around with Joe Namath back in the day and played cornerback for us from 1968-71. I believe he still reports from the sidelines for Westwood One on Monday Nights.

Dockery graduated from Harvard and was on his way to studying Urban Planning at Columbia, according to the Jets' 1971 Yearbook. But clearly he had a view that football glamor led at least to some speaking parts on the margins, so that career in building things fell aside. He had a big season with the Jets in 1969, with a team-high five interceptions and had a single shot at playing both ways with one rushing attempt for seven yards in a loss against Denver. It must have been a great time to be a Jet, waltzing into Bachelor's III with the man himself. When Dockery started doing TV with Bill Mazer (on Channel 5?) in New York when I was little, I remember my parents independently pointing him out to me as a relic of a Jets' past that I had just missed. It was sometimes hard to imagine someone as a Jet if he wasn't standing right there, in front of you, in the green and white. I was jealous of their memories of a time when the Jets were good, when life was good for the Jets and John Dockery's name was called at games. If the Jake Gyllenhaal biopic of Namath ever happens - and I'm starting to doubt it will - then who will play John Dockery? He and the man himself currently run a football camp that shares their name. All things total, it has not been a bad life for John.

So when I saw his daughter's marriage listed, I reacted as the perpetual loner living in his imaginary village, half-heartedly search for community. I thought, How great for John Dockery. I'm happy for him. What an auspicious match! I wonder why I wasn't invited. This is why being a fan is an essential part of being a human being. Simply by assigning our loyalty to a club, we are suddenly a member of a community that can exist to whatever degree we like within our imagination. As if being a Jets fan is, in some ways, a network of belonging that defies logic, opening doors to belonging the way that being an actual Jet did for John Dockery. If it hadn't, then perhaps he would have been an architect.

NY Jets #42 - Part 4

We're finally getting through #42. But not before we talk about Maurice Turner.

He wore #42 for one game in 1987. Having said that, the first thing that should pop into your head is "replacement player." And that he was. He played a season and a half with the Vikings and was traded near the end of 1985 to the Green Bay Packers. Then, two years later, Maurice Turner played one game for cash in a strike season. He was a replacement player, easily replaceable.

Why do we include replacement players in our roundup of all the players who've ever played in a Jets uniform? Aren't we just rewarding corporate fraud? Mom always told me as a kid to never to cross a picket line. Aren't we just suggesting that all of us are replacements in this life, with replacements of our own waiting for us, as the fictional Langley Collyer suggests in E.L. Doctorow's recent novel, Homer and Langley?

About Langley's "theory of replacements," Homer tells us:

...I remember thinking there as something collegiate about it.

I have a theory, he said to me. Everything in life gets replaced. We are our parents' replacements just as they were replacements of the previous generation...

I said, Langley, people aren't all the same like dumb bison, we are each a person. A genius like Beethoven can't be replaced.

But you see, Homer, Beethoven was a genius for his time. We have the notations of his genius, but he is not our genius...Besides, it's not what any of them achieve but how they stand in relation to the rest of us. Who is your favorite baseballer? he said.

Walter Johnson, I said.

And what is he but a replacement for Cannonball Titcomb? One of the constructions is for us to have athletes to admire, to create ourselves as an audience of admirers for baseballers. This seems to be a means of cultural communizing that creates great social satisfaction and possibly ritualizes, what with our baseball teams of different towns, our tendency to murder one another. There will always be in America for as long as baseball is played someone who serves the youth still to be born as Walter Johnson serves you.

The notion is chilling, especially when we think about how replaceable all athletes are, from the Walter Johnsons of our time (LeBron for Jordan) to the monstrously nameless multitude - the rest of us - who play out our positions and our roles ever without distinction, and fade away from the cosmic memory. When one considers the great numbers of college football and basketball players who will never graduate, let alone play a professional sport, you begin to appreciate why Doctorow uses sports figures as object examples to illustrate Langley's theory. You begin to comprehend reasoning like Langley's. The fact that one man wears a departed player's number simply reinforces this lugubrious train of thought all the more.

But everything depends on the view one brings to things, and though blind, Homer Collyer also recognizes in Langley's voice that his brother is probably making up his theory as he goes along. Homer also comes to suspect that the Theory of Replacements is merely a product of Langley's "bitterness of life or despair of it."

****

Rashad Washington played in #42 for the Jets from 2004-07. I try not to be lazy about these things, but if you really want a beat on Washington's career with the Jets - which encompasses his NFL career - then take a look at his page on the all-time roster, which features all sorts of unmoored statistics on his work in special teams. The basics are these: injured at the end of 2004, he saw frequent action in 2005, and then some in 2006. Then less in 2007. There are few statistics that really give dramatic worth to the role of special teams player, but Washington's lends a hand with phrases like "special teams tackle," which are "recorded," "tallied" or "notched" (always curious synonyms for "made"). One of Randy Lange's articles on the Jets' web site from the beginning of the truly disappointing 2007 season concerned Washington's ability to roll with change and, implicitly, disappointment. He did not finish 2007, and though he recorded 24 tackles the year before, he managed only four the following year. Either the competition to which Rashad Washington alludes in Lange's article got to be too much or he was simply out of gas. The numbers don't lie, but they don't tell very good stories, either.

But what I want to know is Clyde Washington's story. This #42 played at defensive back from 1963-65. According to his page on the Jets' all-time roster, he had come from the Patriots to the newly revised Gotham Football Club and "pleasantly surprised" Weeb Ewbank. The last detail on him from the 1964 New York Jets Yearbook indicates that "still single, the 26-year-old Washington lives in Carlisle, PA," a rural college town. Still available, ladies of 1965, and very much interested in a long-term commitment.

But after that, there's the little one line paragraph that follows:

"Clyde passed away Dec. 28, 1974."

That was the same year my grandfather died, but he was 76. Clyde Washington was all of 36 years old when he died. Three days on either side of Christmas and the New Year, how and why did Clyde Washington die?

I've looked and found nothing so far. We become so accustomed to the notion that the Interwebs will reveal everything we need in order to sate our desire for something, anything we want in the moment (usually it's something morbid, like the reason for people's deaths) that we assume there isn't anything we can't know. But the truth is that no matter how powerful it becomes, the Web can only scratch the surface of human meaning. It loves facile things that are destined to be replaced out of memory by newer yet equally facile things. Its existence is the product of desires that belong to a people with low expectations for human knowledge. And no matter where I look, I can't find anything about Clyde Washington's death. There is a town called Clyde in Washington State, though.

This has been bothering me for weeks. What happened to Clyde Washington? If anyone knows, I'd be grateful to find out. This is more than just a passing whim or a moribund itch. If we go by the number itself, Randy Beverly was eventually the replacement for Clyde Washington, sort of like Johnson for Titcomb. Looking at him there in his 1964 Topps card, he stands steady on his feet and hunched ever so slightly in the manner of the defensive back who is ready to move backward at the snap of the ball. But the more I look at it, the more I notice that he also looks strangely undecided, as if he feels like the play isn't really going to get off. Clyde Washington appears vaguely prepared for whatever is next, just as we all imagine ourselves to be in our life's work. But he also stands as a solitary figure against the yellow void, suddenly looking vulnerable, reminding us that in the end all men die alone, destined to be replaced.

NY Jets #42 - Part 3

I was in Memphis, visiting my parents when I saw the news that Ronnie Lott #42 was joining the New York Jets. This would be summer of 1993, after my horrific first year of graduate school that saw at least one major anxiety attack and certainly one nervous breakdown. Some things just look like good decisions from the start, and even though most of my professors thought I was wholly unprepared to do what I was trying to do, I was deluded into thinking they were wrong. I'm not sure that has anything to do with Ronnie Lott, but I was similarly deluded into thinking that when we signed Lott, Leonard Marshall and Art Monk, the Jets were trying to do something that other people thought they couldn't either, like make the playoffs.

And it didn't work out. Neither did grad school. Well, that's not entirely true; I got my degree, so technically it worked out. The Jets? Not so much. That's been the story of my life, I suppose. My life has more or less worked out so far, though I've spent an awful lot of time unconsciously wishing for my team's success, even to the point of half-willing away my own happiness. As the poet says, "May no fate willfully misunderstand me/And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/Not to return. Earth's the right place for love."

Anyway, instead of being like the 1990 San Francisco 49ers, the Jets ended up looking more like the 1962 New York Mets, gathering future Hall of Famers - and NFL All-Time Team members, I think - like Monk and Lott who were at the tail end of their efficacy. As I recall, upon being signed, Lott said something to the effect that he hoped other talented NFL players would take the offers of the Jets' free agency cash. Ah, I always liked Ronnie Lott. Maybe he thought the Jets would make the playoffs in 1993. But younger, talented players around the league demurred. He pulled an average year in 1993 and started 15 games in 1994, a legendary season among Jets' collapses. Duke Snider is in the Hall of Fame as a Dodger, Richie Ashburn as a Phillie, neither of course as a Met, despite (or because of) their sporadic appearances in the 1962 lineup. Lott is in Canton as a Niner. Monk is there as a Redskin.

****

There was once a time when the New York Times allowed you to read any of their articles online for free so long as you were a member. Obviously those days are over, and I half convinced myself that a downloading binge I went on two years ago was responsible. "There's some idiot in Philadelphia who's pulling up every article on the New York Jets' seasons in the 1970's, and we're not seeing anything in return!" Obviously that's not the case, but I'm a serious person. When I was 13 and apparently friendless, or at least certainly without the possibility of anything resembling a girlfriend, I spent most of my free time in my high school library, trolling through spool after spool of Time magazine on microfilm, reading back issues going back at least 20 years. It was as if I had returned to consciousness after a two-decades long coma, trying to find out about all I had missed. More likely I was what I was - a baffled child in the Reagan years of nationalist sleepwalking when all the country was ignoring the wake of cultural revolutions that were making it seasick. I'm not sure Time really helped clarify all that, but, again, I was 13. And there was no Interwebs.

Anyway, I just paid the New York Times $4.50 to double-check some information on Cliff McClain #42, Jets' running back from 1970-73. Maybe it's an extravagance when for the same amount of money I can buy myself an afternoon's on-street parking in Center City Philadelphia, sure, but bear with me. Cliff McClain might have been part of a moment that could have changed the course of professional football history. As with anything else, it all rests with the little things.

Cliff McClain

You see him here in a small photo courtesy of WireImage against the Cincinnati Bengals in the last game of the 1971 season. The Jets won it, 35-21, but more importantly, Cliff McClain scored one of his two career touchdowns in it, a 63-yard run. I suppose this was his highlight as a pro. Otherwise, Cliff McClain had a fairly ordinary football career; at the risk of offending the subject himself, one might even go so far as to say his career was not particularly successful and that he probably saw little play time. He gained around 400 yards over four seasons, and he retired a Jet.

On November 19, 1972, the Jets traveled to the Orange Bowl to play the undefeated Miami Dolphins. By this time the Jets were 6-3 while the Dolphins needed only one more win to clinch the AFC East. The Jets had been a split-personality team in 1972 - a "jittery" one, as Sports Illustrated called them. The truth is that they were almost a good team, certainly not a great one, playing what most people believe (not me) was the greatest team of them all. And by the start of the fourth quarter, the Jets were winning, 24-21. One of the hallmarks of the Dolphins that season is that when they went down, they always came back, and they did come back and win that game, 28-24, clinching it on a Mercury Morris touchdown. No surprise.

No surprise either also that the Morris touchdown was enabled by a Jets turnover in Miami territory, in this case, on what is reported to be a muffed handoff between Namath and Cliff McClain with the Jets ahead. It's the little things. We are free to place blame all around if we like. I'm sure there are ways of finding out what happened, but it's true that this particular turnover midway through the fourth was the start of what eventually sent the Jets to the showers. Instead of placing blame, let us suggest instead that Cliff McClain was simply witness to a piece of history, a crucial turning point. Once the Dolphins rallied, they would then go on to win every remaining game of the season handily and saunter into the playoffs. The Jets were their last real challenge before the postseason.

Now, imagine if the handoff had actually gone well, and then a variety of almost reasonably fortunate circumstances eventually led to a remotely possible Jets score - let's say, even another Namath touchdown pass, maybe to Rich Caster or Don Maynard. I know this is unlikely, but work with me. History is filled with options and possibilities that, reason tells us, could have happened. It is the responsibility of historians to find those turning points in history and see how much really rests on them. It's also the responsibility of a loyal fan of a traditionally losing franchise to waste countless hours of his thought conjuring all such similar moments, especially when such things provide an assurance that it's not just Fate, but luck - and bad luck, of course - that has traditionally kept your club from its appointment in your lifetime with destiny.

Thus, a Jets touchdown later in the game would have meant that the Dolphins would have had to have mounted an even greater comeback- which, in all likelihood, they would have - in order to win. According to what I know, there was enough time.

But imagine if they hadn't succeeded. The possibility is remote, I grant you. The Dolphins' third touchdown earlier in the game is indicative of how remote it would have been. This was scored by Earl Morrall, on a 31-yard bootleg. Morrall was 38 years old by that point, which means he was older than the number of yards he scampered on the play. According to Al Harvin's article in the Times the following day, Morrall said, "I think that must the longest run of my career," adding, "I think I ran 25 yards in college once." If Earl Morrall could find that kind of hole, how much more would the Jets have given up to a rallying Miami offense late in the game? So again, I grant you.

But consider the possibility of Cliff McClain not fumbling and suddenly you are taken down one circuitous route of conjecture after another: the Jets might have held on to win at the Orange Bowl, and then the 1972 Miami Dolphins would today be simply regarded as a great team but second to the 1985 Chicago Bears (whom I feel reign supreme) as the greatest ever, and they would never have held the one true record that has eluded the Patriots and the Colts in our era - that of complete perfection from September to February. The mind reels. Just as in high school, the mind evidently has nothing better to do.

NY Jets #20 - Part 2

As we first determined when we first set down to write this history, to flatter no man, but to guide our pen throughout by the directions of truth, we are obliged to bring our heroe on the stage in a much more disadvantageous manner than we could wish; and to declare honestly...that it was the universal opinion of all...that he was born to be hanged.

That's roughly page 93 of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. The sentiment befits the hero because young Jones is nothing but a troublemaker from the start. This does not describe Thomas Jones, the now released running back for the New York Jets from 2007 to 2009. But I feel that "born to die" is the nature of the running back position, so much so that I feel more sympathy for this Jones - now a Kansas City Chief - than I do for most of those who come and go.

Remember that for many years to come, Thomas Jones will be remembered as the man who took the ball on 4th and 1 against the San Diego Chargers in the second round of the 2009 playoffs, and gave the Jets the first down late, late, late in the game, and with it, the right to only their fourth conference championship appearance. Lance Mehl intercepted Jim Plunkett to win a comparable playoff game in the strike year of 1982; Keyshawn Johnson recovered his own fumble for a first down against Jacksonville to send the Jets to the AFC Title Game in 1998. But when Rex Ryan was seen to say, "Fuck it. We're going for it" on fourth down, Thomas Jones was the one who did the deed. Now the only thing he has to show for it is the money he earned, the right to play a little longer somewhere else, and a memory.

Now, place yourself in the Jets' Irony Machine. LaDanian Tomlinson's last gain on the other side of the ball in the same affair was emblematic of both his futility and the Chargers'. Now he is replacing Thomas Jones. I still believe this is a mistake. Not a terrible mistake - not the kind I think the Phillies made in not keeping Cliff Lee - just a bad mistake that will look dumb. Not the way Chad Pennington made us look dumb while Brett Favre heaved interceptions at the end of 2008, but a mistake. It will be an expensive one, one that sees the rapidly declining Tomlinson make slightly fewer yardage in the backfield for us, and it will make the man who cried "Fuck it" look foolish. I do believe Jones will have a better season than LT next year.

I'm going to remember Thomas Jones fondly. When he was asked about the lack of handoffs in early 2007 - a miserable season among our many - his reply was that he was, above all, a team player and that more yardage was to come. He was correct. He gained 1,000 in consecutive seasons. But like all talented, medium-sized running backs, Thomas Jones is now fallen to the fate of so many of his contemporaries. His slowness toward the end of the 2009 season opened the door to Shonn Greene's great performances at the same time. Easy come, easy go, particularly at a position with a such an attrition rate. I know that a thousand dittoheads can argue with me about this, but I feel like the Jets should have kept Jones another year. He is been a strong locker room presence, and not a negative one. I feel he got the shaft; all running backs get it before even they realize their legs have given out, but to be honest, I think he had one more year in him, and it is a year the Jets will want to have back.

So it goes.

****

Look anywhere on the web for Dennis Price #20, and you'll be very likely to find an actor of some repute in British cinema who appeared very briefly in the nearly unwatchable 1969 film, The Magic Christian, which qualified in its time for biting satire. I've never made it through it, no better than I did How I Won the War or The Ruling Class. Basically, it's one of those late 60's absurdist British films that tries to mock every possible class distinction but ends up incoherent. The only reason to see it is Yul Brynner in drag. Yes. Dennis Price plays Winthrop, a corporate lackey to the mischievous Sir Guy Grand.

In New York, Jean Shepard did dramatic readings on WOR from Terry Southern's original novel of the same name in the early 60's, putting particular stress on the story of Guy Grand buying up up a hot dog vendor's entire stock at a railway station with $100 but expecting his change even while his train pulls out of the station. As the vendor vainly chases the train down, fumbling around for the right bills, Grand puts a pig mask over his face.

By the way, this Dennis Price I mentioned earlier is no way to be mistaken for the defensive back that the Jets picked up at the end of the 1991 season after he was released by the LA Raiders. This Dennis Price played out the entire 1992 season with one interception, and though his career with us was brief before his knees gave out, he still finished with as many Jets playoff games under his belt as anyone else whose career with the team spanned any number of years between 1987 to 1998, which is the equivalent of one playoff game, a loss to the Houston Oilers in the 1991 postseason that practically nobody remembers. And so it goes.

NY Jets #42 - Part 2

What do these two men have in common? Are they New York's most relentless crime fighters? Its trigger-happiest detectives? Anzalone and Harper?

No, but they do wear the same uniform.

Not just the same number, but the same name and number, which no one else so far in our journey can claim for himself (or for someone else) - unless he can somehow lay claim to meeting himself, maybe in Milliways, which, as the Guide points out, is fairly embarrassing if not, of course, completely impossible.

First, the man on the right. This is Bruce Harper, who wore #42 from 1977-84 and is considered a universally loved Jet. Players like Bruce Harper are permanent fixtures in the memories of longtime Jets fans because, like Wayne Chrebet, they represent something of the indispensable underdog. In a franchise that ritually backs into the playoffs, such persons are always important. Bruce Harper is best known as a return man for the Jets; his 82-yard punt return just before halftime in a 1978 home game against the Bills at Shea was one of those moments that helped us to believe in a turnaround season when we saw one. Harper blazed down the sidelines. I was visiting Jake Walsh in Sag Harbor at the time, so I didn't see it on TV (I don't think the Jets sold out that season at Shea until the Patriots game, anyway), but I saw the replay the following week on This Week in the NFL, with Harry Kallas narrating the play, with the run documented in slow motion, taken from a camera positioned atop the right field upper deck. How do I remember such details. It's sad. But Bruce Harper had arrived to my world.

And he made himself indispensable. Though he was a return man, the 1978 runback was his only career return for a touchdown. Look at his statistics, and you see that he gained more on pass receptions than from the backfield, and he scored touchdowns on more pass plays than on the run. His career is even more impressive when you consider he was all of five foot eight. And from little Kutztown University in Central Pennsylvania. And a New Jersey native and current resident, no less. You couldn't have a better formula for a Jets hero, unless you were a walk-on from Hofstra. Bruce Harper is a man who represents the team's spiritual core. A six foot player is an underdog. Bruce Harper came from beneath the underdog. We are all Bruce Harper.

This might then explain the other man in the picture above. He is Ed Anzalone, or Fireman Ed, the Jets' "superfan," official fan of sorts, and universally recognized supporter of the beloved Green. He wears Bruce Harper's jersey. Why? I don't know. I guess I want to believe he wears it for the same reason that I think Bruce Harper represents the essence of who we are as a team.

We don't have a mascot, thank Christ. Instead, we have Fireman Ed, one of many such superfans around the NFL. Each team theoretically has one. Usually this person is a fan whose excess of spirit has made him a character of some local color who becomes so empowered by the subsequent attention that he develops into a self-appointed cheerleader. Every stadium has one, and if they are like Ed, they garner a following that the team then co-opts, hoping that they are not dealing with someone who has a severe mental illness. As we know, Fireman Ed hoists himself atop a larger man and leads the now famous cheer than anyone who finds out that I'm a Jets fan offers to me as if it were a lodge greeting. According to his bio, Ed has been leading the cheer since 1986, but I remember hearing it at Shea Stadium as far back as 1980; who knows when it began. Heard in full throat by the tens of thousands, it's highly formidable, almost like what totalitarian dictators crave when they stand on a balcony in platform shoes, hands on hips. The fact that the cheer is a four-letter word repeated thrice for those who missed it the first time, makes it - in my humble opinion - that much more charming.

"What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a teacher, actually."

"Wow, what's that like?"

"T! E! A! C! H! E! R!" TEACHER! TEACHER! TEACHER!!"

Nope. Doesn't have the same ring to it. When last we heard of him, Fireman Ed was going to be publicly roasted by Chad Ochocinco in the Jets' season finale, which didn't happen of course because Darrelle Revis is the finest cornerback in the world. Apparently in order to compensate for making Ed a part of his ongoing Vaudeville program, Ochocinco offered to fly the superfan out to Cincinnati for the Wild Card game. The oracle of Wiki tells us of Ed that, "though he was appreciative of the offer he declined to take (sic) on the moral ground that he did not think it was right to be flown out to the game by the opposing team. He did however say that if the Jets made him an offer he would take them up on it, though no offer has been made." Only men named Barrel Man, Chief Zee, Crazy Ray, Colonel Joe, Horse Lady, Arrowman, or Sign Man can see in such a circumstance the potential absence of moral judgment. They are something more than their team. They have their own reputation to uphold.

Perhaps when a famous fan's attention to his work begins to eclipse his team itself the fans and the world at large begin to turn the worm. Under "Everyone hates Fireman Ed," there's the usual rant from a Jets hater on Deadspin; I beg to differ. A superfan is a superfan, whether he's in it for his own fame or not. I write a blog no one reads. If someone made me a superfan of the Jets, such that under the New York Giants' guy named "Big Blue" you saw a new New York Jets superfan named "Martin Roche," I'd be flattered. What am I going to say? No? Probably. Still, Fireman Ed is less convoluted than Arrowman; he's less flabby and disturbing to look at than Barrel Man. He is what he is. If he weren't the superfan, some other person would be. Someone always is.

But the Deadspin rant offers an interesting wrinkle to the uniform riddle. Apparently Ed's favorite player growing up was Paul Warfield of the Cleveland Browns and, most damningly, the Miami Dolphins. The trouble is, do you know what number Warfield wore? It's the same as the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything:

42.

You see? Like I say: I want to believe.