NY Jets: #10

With updates....

Erik Ainge (#10)

At the moment, the New York Jets fourth string quarterback Erik Ainge, formerly from the Tennessee Vols, formerly #10, may yet spend his career riding the bench the way quarterbacks do, this time wearing #3. Yes, he is Danny Ainge's nephew, which could happen to anybody. Erik Ainge is still waiting for his big chance. I have chosen to co-opt the photograph to the right as a representation of his life in limbo - as being half up on his own feet, half down by someone else's power. Now that QB Kevin O'Connell has been brought over from the Patriots, the wait continues. We are all waiting, I suppose. Where will the axe fall? Before it does, I would like to offer a numbers tribute to Erik Ainge. It's the least we can do. Tune in....

Pat Ry

Pat Ryan? Yes, the man who nearly rescued the 1986 season from certain ruin after playing years as a backup. And then came certain ruin. He was injured in the January 1987 Divisional Playoff against the Cleveland Browns after starting the game off by throwing a magnificent flea flicker touchdown to Wesley Walker. What happened? Did he not stretch before the game? Even after the mortifying humiliations and shame of my Irish Catholic childhood, the worst thing that ever happened to me by the age of 17 was Pat Ryan's groin pull in the January when the Giants first won the Super Bowl. What a desolation.

Jack Trudeau

Now for the tens who make less of a dent in the memory. Like Jack Trudeau. He was supposed to be the next big thing for the Indianapolis Colts, and then, in turn, he was not. He was a star at the University of Illinois. I remember Illinois playing UCLA in the Rose Bowl as I sat in the little Italian restaurant in Pleasantville, and Jack Trudeau was quarterbacking. I wandered away from my family into the restaurant bar and gaped up at the TV there, ignoring the stares of the lonely New Year's night drinkers, ignoring the sensation of misery of knowing that I was 15 and eating dinner with my family in a small town and that Christmas vacation was over. Ah, youth. Trudeau played one year as a backup for the Jets in 1994, but there are no pictures that I can find of him in green. It was his second-to-last season in the NFL. Last year, Trudeau had to pay a fine for serving alcohol to minors at his child's high school graduation party. Twenty years ago, he punched a cop in an Indiana bar. Can there be such a thing as a promising quarterback without a behavioral problem?

by Marty Domres

Marty Domres was another big hope at quarterback for the Colts. Of course, he was from Dartmouth, so it makes sense that what he was better at was writing than he was at quarterbacking. He's the guy who played for Baltimore between Johnny Unitas and Bert Jones. And while we're at it, we could spend days tracing the history of failed Jets quarterbacks, but look at the Baltimore/Indianapolis Colts' QB's over the years before Manning arrived: Art Schlichter, John Elway (who never arrived), Mark Pagel, Gary Hogeboom, Jack Trudeau, Jeff George. It's a hard life being a fan sometimes.

As with Jack Trudeau, there are no photographs of Marty Domres in a Jets uniform. He backed up Joe Namath for one season, in #10. However, if I'm in a second-hand bookstore and I get a chance to find his book on his first year of playing in San Diego, I will be sure to skim its yellowing pages, even as they fill my lungs with paralyzing mold. The cover alone is a piece of the past, a picture of a time when any book on any subject required the depiction of a busty stewardess, sort of like the one (if you squinted your eyes) who was serving you a bloody mary on your Eastern Airlines flight to an insurance convention in Omaha.

There's something about
the Colts and our #10's.

Cary Blanchard played two seasons with the Jets toward the beginning of his career. He came and went. I don't know why. He is the first kicker of the post-Pat Leahy era, and I suppose the chance to nab Nick Lowery was just too much for the Jets. Or they were too cheap to hold onto Blanchard. Then he went to have a successful career with - wait for it - the Colts. Must be something about the #10.

The same year the Jets were trying out Blanchard, Jason Staurovsky was also used as a place kicker. It was a brief career for Jason, starting with the St. Louis football Cardinals; it continued with the woeful New England Patriots of my college years, and it ended with the Jets. Nothing beside remains. This is Jason Staurovsky's entry on Wikipedia: "He is the uncle of Garrett and father of two. He is also a tutor to many children." OK. Fair enough. But why does Garrett get named in the entry but his own kids don't? Oh God, never mind.

Julian Fagan also ended his career with the Jets - in 1973, his only season kicking with them. By the time he was done with them he was already practicing law in the off-season back home in Mississippi. I'm only curious about this because as a graduate of Ole Miss, he belonged to one of the first classes to graduate African-Americans, which, as a white man himself, must have been an interesting experience. After college, he kicked for the New Orleans Saints. Can you imagine what it was like for a Deep South boy to suddenly play in Queens? Is that why he decided that practicing law in Jackson was better than kicking into the Flushing Bay swirl? Did playing in capital city of the East Coast Intellectual Elite (albeit one of its residential boroughs) drive him back home? Did he work for Trent Lott's campaign? Kirk Fordyce's? Yeesh.

Julian Fagan and friend

But have you ever seen a more telling photograph than this one at right, courtesy of AP? We just recently finished our long tribute to John Riggins, one of only four legendary Jets to get his own Infinite Jets profile - a tribute for which every pro Jet longs, no doubt. No doubt. Here is Fagan on the sideline of an exhibition game with Riggins during the latter's brief '73 holdout. There are two worldviews at work here. One appears to appreciate sportsmanship, knowing your place on the totem pole, showing up, not making a display of yourself, and getting in line just like everybody else. The other is clearly carving his own face on the totem pole. I've already adequately explained why John Riggins needed to wear this version of "authentic" Native American wear. Was he moved by the weeping Indian? No. He was following cosmic advice. But Julian Fagan is looking southward, back to the place where he imagines this kind of weirdo stuff is not so important just yet. He's looking toward a refuge unspoiled by the need for self-expression, where people follow rules and stuff like that. As if it were that simple.

****

Bobby Renn?

I know this is very likely the Bobby Renn who died in 1971 but played in #10 for the New York Titans and the Jets. He got to be on the cover of the Florida State's yearbook because he was an exceptional player, the kind that college fans love because he was all heart. I mean, let's face it, working for nothing is a Southern thing, and that's still why college football is a Southerner's game. Good ol' Bobby. Sounded like a great player. He was a sixty minute man, playing both running back and defensive back, a position eccentricity that was already fazed out of the game by the time he was starting at the same positions for the Jets in 1963, his only season with them. My wife still thinks that football should be a two-position game, which will give you some idea of what our household chore assignments are like.

But why did Bobby die before his time?

NY Jets #44 - John Riggins (Part 2)

About four minutes into the NFL Films interview with John Riggins, the real reasons why my favorite footballer of all time left the New York Jets are explained. He had come to hate the losing team the Jets had become. Most of all, though, he knew he was never going to be granted pay parity with Joe Namath, and with a passing attack (or whatever was left of it) at the core of Namath's game, John Riggins felt entitled to more. I was crestfallen. I didn't get it. I wrote him a letter, begging him to come back. He had been my football hero for such a short time, and now he belonged to some other six year old.

It's absurd to think of Namath getting more money than Riggins when the latter's Hall of Fame career was ahead of him and former's long behind. But times were what they were. Our quarterback would hobble through a final season with the Jets. Even with Riggins, the Jets would still have finished the 1976 season 3-11. They were a terrible team, and I cannot imagine how he would have endured Lou Holtz as Head Coach. Becoming a free agent in an era when the concept was still novel in sports meant that Riggins was merely fulfilling the expectations of his own self-defined unconventionality. Still, for years and years afterward, I kept the poster of him that Mom once got for me while he was still a Jet. In that picture, he is forever playing against the Dolphins at the Orange Bowl in 1972. When I would come back from college or from a visit wherever I was living afterwards, he was still there on my wall, looking for a hole, grasping the ball on either of its sides as if it were a brick. On my wall, he was forever a Jet.

****

The story is fairly well known. A man recently hired to coach the football team located in our nation's capital had a piece of unfinished business left over from his predecessors. Specifically, he needed to locate a player of some exceptional talent who was once rumored to have been transported by aliens to another dimension or something like that and had recently vanished back home into the anonymity of Kansas. He had refused to play in 1980 for a contract that he felt beneath him. The coach was a racing enthusiast and a Southerner, but hardly the sort of man to believe in such wild stories. Instead, the coach believed in the power of God's salvation. A man was with God or against Him. This strange man existed for some reason, so maybe the coach could make some good of it and trade the player for somebody who fit his model.

When Joe Gibbs found John Riggins outfitted in a camouflage hunting outfit, hitting the sauce, he was appalled:

He had been hunting, him and a buddy. He had a beer can in his hand. It was 10 o'clock in the morning and he's meeting his coach for the first time and I'm thinking [sarcastically], 'This guy really impresses me.' But I went in there, and halfway through the conversation he says, 'You need to get me back there. I'll make you famous.<sup>[13] 

I thought to myself, 'Oh, my God, he's an egomaniac.' I thought, 'I'll get him back and then I'll trade him. I'm not putting up with a fruitcake.' So I fly back to Washington, and two days later he calls me. He says, 'Joe, I made up my mind, and I'm going to play next season.' I thought it was great. I've got him back, and I'll trade that sucker. But then he says, 'There's only one thing I want in my contract.' I ask what it was. He says, 'A no-trade clause.'[13]</sup>

Egomaniac, fruitcake. At first, to Joe Gibbs, John Riggins could be understood no other way. But he would obviously come to know just how famous John Riggins would make him. In Gibbs' offense, the pass and the run balanced beautifully, but John Riggins was special - simply a force of nature. Riggins simply did not fit into the world view of anyone who believes that he exists either in God's mercy or without it. He carried the whole thing himself.

From 1981 on, John Riggins's statistics become the work of an epic storyteller. As I turned into a teenager, my mind's picture of him as a Jet began to blur and fade. The world was now parceling out its realities to where nothing could ever make me completely happy the way a Jets Super Bowl victory once promised. I was forced to take my joys where I could, and following John Riggins throughout his career became one of those diluted pleasures in a confusing world. I knew what Joe Gibbs only half-suspected when he took the fruitcake on his team. John Riggins had the capacity to carry the whole thing across the line. I had seen it with my own eyes, and John would do it with panache in Super Bowl XVI.

The Super Bowl that year was personal for me, and not just because of him. Miami's Dade County had destroyed my 13 year-old's faint hopes for a Super Bowl appearance by not putting down the tarp the night before the 1983 AFC Championship between the Dolphins and the Jets. They played in puddles of water, and the Jets were shut out and kept out of the Super Bowl against Washington. I don't think I hated a team any more than I did the Miami Dolphins, with their nickel and dime quarterbacks Strock and Woodley, their little running backs, their Killer B's. I wanted to see them destroyed, which I really didn't believe could happen.

They weren't, but what happened was even more beautiful than that. Midway through the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, the Redskins were down 17-13 at 4th and 1. The Dolphins called a timeout, knowing that the ball would likely be given to John Riggins. When play resumed, the plan didn't change, but Riggins ran off-tackle, carefully extricating himself from the grasp of Don McNeal, whose efforts to get to the outside fell short with a slip on the turf. Once he was free, Riggins ran for daylight along the sidelines, charging and pumping his body, almost running through the grandstands at the end zone's edge. He had put the Redskins ahead in the game for good and created an image that still stands as one of the singularly important moments in Redskins history, when their team was suddenly no longer an also-ran and runner-up to the likes of Dallas. They were the champions.

John Riggins' breakaway, which I remember watching on TV with as much excitement as if he were still in green and white, is a moment that all fans wait for - the transformative moment when you realize the team you love is now about to enter into immortality. I see it in Flyers' fans right now around Philly; I mean real ones, not fair-weather hockey fans like me, but ones who've been following every game this season and every one before it. As they await Game 1 of the Stanley Cup, they wonder, Is this the year? Riggins' mad scramble on fourth and 1 answered the question. For all the Redskin fans who survived the 35-34 Thanksgiving loss to the Cowboys in 1979, the answer was clear: Yes. This is your year.

Beating Miami that day was like getting the plastic action figure version of that feeling. Though he broke my heart, John Riggins showed me what it might feel like. Now I'm also grateful that the Jets didn't win the Mud Bowl in Miami because my heart wouldn't have been able to bear the sight of John Riggins running off-tackle over Bobby Humphrey on fourth and one. No, thank you.

****

The story is very well known. My memory tells me it happened right after the Super Bowl, but I may simply be mixing up events where I read that John Riggins showed up somewhere in top hat and tails, which he did often. At a black tie affair attended by the nation's political elite at the Washington Press Club in January 1985, John Riggins drunkenly collapsed during (what he says was) Sam Donaldson's speech (other reports suggest it was then Vice President Bush's). But it was what he said just before entering the land of nod that was true to his nature, even if that nature happened to have been absolutely snackered at the time. Seated next to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, John Riggins offered a bleary-eyed piece of advice to America's first female appointee to the high court, one that may or may not have changed the course of legal history:

"Loosen up, Sandy baby. You're too tight."

He's been asked about it many times. He was asked about his drinking around the same time, the twilight of his career. Did he have a drinking problem? "Only when I'm hanging from the rafters by my knees." That's a drunk's reply. But since finishing his career, after being inducted into the Hall of Fame, Riggins became an actor, however briefly, on soap operas and on stage. He is an eloquent critic of the circus program that is Dan Snyder's Washington Redskins, and he seems rather well put together as a human being right now. We cannot ever really know the extent of what the acid aliens did to his brain, but I am grateful for their work. John Riggins defies the expectations of the No Fun League, with its squads predictably filled with nothing but bland religious zealots and illiterate, borderline sociopaths. John Riggins would have had no fun there.

But I argue his influence is lasting. The question remains: Did Sandy baby actually loosen up? Is it merely a coincidence that Sandra Day O'Connor, nominated by Ronald Reagan, became one of the more reliable moderates on an increasingly strident, conservative court? Could John Riggins have had something to do with it? Are we to credit the influence of peyote-eating extraterrestrials and their Sioux captives? I think it's very, very possible.

NY Jets #44 - John Riggins

There are rules for being a fan, but they are mostly held and maintained by people who are loyal to one team and can't fathom changing sides. Contrary to what some people might tell you, it's perfectly acceptable for a fan to love two teams, even three, at once, though he or she will probably lack the sense of tribal kinship intrinsic to the entire experience. I think your likelihood to play the field in sports is directly related to the love of the sport in question. I follow more than one baseball team but only one football team. I'm on a hockey team's bandwagon right now, but that will not last through the playoffs. I don't even recognize basketball as the game that used to be played by Bird and Magic. In football, I wish Andy Reid's grim-faced soap opera in Philadelphia well because I've lived here for eighteen years. But the only football team I could possibly have followed outside of my one and only were the Washington Redskins from 1976 to 1984, and for only one reason: John Riggins.

Perm, handlebar

In a fan's life, a person can become attached to one player for whatever reason; he follows the player's career regardless of where the player plays. Sometimes this attachment arises from some personal sense of belonging stirred in you. For some peculiar reason, you can feel it. The player belongs to you. You aren't about to camp out in front of his home or write letters to his children, but he becomes the embodiment of everything you need to believe about the sport. If he is traded or departs of his own volition, he sticks to your heart such that you can live, spiritually, in two places at once. This is what happened when John Riggins #44 became a free agent.

From 1971 to 1975, he played for the Jets, and if you don't mind, aside from the handlebar snapshot above, John Riggins will here remain a Jet. Drafted out of Kansas, having broken all of Gale Sayers' records, John Riggins was seen as the kind of player who might be able to replace Matt Snell. He did that and more. If anything, he possessed an eccentric streak that was decidedly less cosmopolitan than Namath's. It was a bravado born of the prairie, an odd, middle American anarchism that represented nothing in particular - no politics to speak of (other than posing with a gun in a 1980's magazine ad for the NRA or needling Sandra Day O'Connor), no commercial products - nothing other than a zest for shocking and appalling ordinary people.

Mohawk, beads

In fact, we could write exclusively about the subject of John Riggins' hair. For a long time, it was his primary mode of self-expression. Consider his early 1970's mohawk. This came with a leather vest and Indian beads so as to express Riggins' unhappiness with his contract. In Kay Iselin Gilman's Life Inside the Pressure Cooker: A Year in the Life of the New York Jets about the 1973 season, there is a photograph inside of Weeb Ewbank sitting down for a chat with Riggins and his mohawk, and they so obviously represent two generations separated not so much by time but by the contortions of outer space. Riggins looks like a man abducted from Lawrence, Kansas by hallucinogenic-ingesting aliens just before his college graduation and brought to a radiation farm on a planet located in an anterior galaxy where he was apparently adopted by a contingent of the Sioux nation who themselves were abducted a hundred years before and stayed ageless due to constant light speed travel. Centuries passed, but within a twilight of our own time, Riggins was returned to his home planet in order to shift his shape, play football and practice whatever he managed to glean from his Sioux teachers. He didn't speak their language, which made his whole interstellar experience a little frustrating, but he returned to Earth a new man. In the picture, Weeb Ewbank looks like the chubby, FBI man, obviously near retirement, who has been brought in to debrief the time-space traveler.

Sandy afro, mustache

I've written before on the subject of John Riggins' departure from the Jets. I remember how often Dad spoke about him during the seasons he was on the Jets, as if there was something transformative about him, and when I looked through my next door neighbor's discarded books about modern heroes of the NFL, I noticed that Riggins' appearance changed from year to year. Short crop, mohawk, sandy afro, dark brown bouffant. It was similar to how John Lennon transformed with every Beatles' album cover, from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road. In that era of weird freedom, the greatest artists were shape shifters, constantly displaying on the outside an impetuosity that accompanies the creative mind. So too John Riggins.

But I have to clarify something that I realize now. I mistook my first epiphany of hero worship to be his performance in the 1975 home game against New England. It wasn't. It was the late season away game at Foxboro. I had already watched him run off-tackle, but until late in the season, there was still only one Jet hero worth all the attention, and he wore #12. Everyone else remained a supporting cast member. I see myself clearly sitting on the sofa with Mom and Dad watching the cold game at Foxboro on NBC. I see John Riggins scoring not just once, but twice. The first was a 37 yard run for a touchdown, while the second was a 6 yard touchdown I see being scored in my mind's eye by Riggins, carrying two or three defenders across the line all by himself. That last one was the clincher, not just for the Jets, who would hold onto a 30-28 win, but for me, for my absolute devotion.

The Jets had lost eight games in a row up until that point, two of which I had seen at Shea with Dad. I was no less a fan than when I started out at the beginning of the year, but I had also become aware of the fact that being a Jets fan would demand a great deal of my young, developing soul. This was not a passing thing. This was a life's demanding and spiritless work. Today I think I am able to greet my unreasonabe, irrationally reluctant 16 year-old students each morning because I have been rooting for a losing cause for so long. I'm not sure what it's doing for my circulatory system, but being a Jets fan from a very early age has taught me a patience at the molecular level, albeit with teeth and fists clenched. Alright, the spirit says, here we go again. You know the drill.

So when I watched John Riggins help the Jets to win over the Patriots late in the 1975 season, I felt like I was watching a man single-handedly pull the Jets into the end zone. For at least one more game, and for the last time that season, the Jets would win. By virtue of his sheer will, Riggins would see to it. He was the man. And in my very immature sense of personal mythology that he was also now The Man. I had found my own football hero, perhaps in much the same way that Dad had once found Namath. John Riggins had done it all himself.

The only trouble is that he had also made himself that much more appealing to the free agent market. And having been instructed in the importance of sharing and pitching in at public school, how could a child possibly be expected to understand the real principles of Ayn Rand's self-interest on which his society rested? Well, he would find out.

To be continued...

NY Jets #44 - Part 3

When John Riggins left the New York Jets as free agent at the end of the 1975 season, there was no one really left on the team who possessed his qualities of speed and power at running back. Clark Gaines was speedy, certainly, and had several good seasons with the Jets. No one else would come close again until Freeman McNeil was drafted in 1982. Before then, at the very least, Tom Newton replaced John Riggins in uniform #44, from 1977-82.

I remember him most vividly from the 1978-79 teams, and I wasn't sure why until I looked at his statistics from 1979. He gained 145 total yards rushing but scored six touchdowns, which must mean he was regularly brought in for short yardage situations close to the goal line. As the Jets' talented backfield coach, the late Bob Ledbetter put it in the Jets' 1980 Yearbook, Tom Newton had "that old knack of smelling the money at the end of the line," which, really, sounds like a line from a pulp novel. It obviously meant he was also a regular blocker, too.

It's hard to recall these things clearly, but I must be thinking of him fondly, as I sit here, writing. Pavlov would obviously see the combination of elements at work here. Newton scored touchdowns in three of the eight precious wins the injury-ridden, confused squad had in 1979. And he scored a 51 yard touchdown in one of the worst losses I remember from that season, the 46-31 loss in Buffalo, a game that revealed that we were much worse that we thought and that Buffalo was much better; they would ultimately win the division. For years Buffalo had been a reliable win for us, even through the 9-33 seasons from 1975-77.

But the worm turned at the halftime of that game. In the first half, Tom Newton took a breakaway touchdown, and then followed it with a one-yard run, giving us a 17-6 lead. Anything seemed possible. Yes, this most definitely must have left its mark somewhere in the abandoned rooms of my childhood museum. And he wore #44. How can I not feel instinctively good about Tom Newton?

But then the Jets buckled in the second half, and Tom Newton and the Jets became human again. Perhaps as the understandably human inheritor of the #44 - the number that had previously belonged to a peerless, grunting mass of offensive power - Tom Newton embodies the pain that comes when the belief that our illusions will live on forever finally dies.

****

That's right: Bert Rechichar #44. The first of his number, playing for the New York Titans in 1961.

Here he is in his glory days, looking as if he's steadying himself against a possible tremor. Back when men were men and they drank Ballantine because it's made with Brewer's Gold. Actually, until Tom Dempsey kicked a 63 yard field goal with half a foot in 1970, Bert Rechichar set the record with 56 yards for the longest placekick in 1953 while with the Baltimore Colts. Kicking was obviously an imperfect science back then, even with all of one foot, usually requiring a simple head-on doink to the ball. There was probably more to it than that, but it became so much more complicated with the arrival of Pete Gogolak and Jan Stenarud, and men named Raul. Doink was all that was required. Linemen could be kickers, running backs could be kickers. Men were men, women were women, but anyone could be a kicker. It was the 50's one public allowance for promiscuity.

Moving on, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, I would like to congratulate Bert Rechichar with having a last name that's funny for sounding like something you should never do.

But we're also fortunate to have this testimony by way of Alex Hawkins, a 1950's and 60's Baltimore Colt of impeccably eccentric character with his assessment of Bert Rechichar:

Bert carried all his money with him, leading the other players to call him the "First National Bank of Rechichar." No one knew where he lived. When Coach Weeb Ewbank finally released him, Bert asked Hawkins to give him a lift to pick up his belongings. Alex jumped at the chance to finally learn where Bert lived. Instead, Rechichar directed him to half a dozen back alleys and side streets where he picked up a pair of pants in this building, a jacket in that one, a couple of shirts here, a pair of shoes there. After an hour of this, Bert said, "O.K., that's it." Hawkins concludes: "Would you say that Bert Rechichar was a totally sane man?"

No. But is that a problem? Again, no. The New York Titans had him for one season. Obviously, it seemed like a role he had been waiting to play all his life. A man who keeps his pants in odd places should play for a man like Harry Wismer who couldn't cover his checks.

Finally, there's Lonnie Young, the Grover Cleveland of #44. He played for Bruce Coslet from 1991 to 1993 and then returned to the Jets again for the Kotite years of 1995-96. What on earth did he do to deserve that? His better years with the Jets were in #31 when he recorded 102 tackles in 1992, but when he returned, he was given #44 and recorded 32 total tackles over two seasons, with one interception. I won't even bother to find out where and when it happened. Do any of us really want to relive 1996, and I mean for any reason? Think about it. Honestly.

But here again, I must turn to the wild and the wacky. I confess I know nothing about video games, and it seems as though this Wikipedia entry is talking about something older than dirt in the gaming world, but it makes for great reading anyway. Here goes:

Lonnie Young appears on the Phoenix Cardinals roster in Tecmo Super Bowl for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nobody knows exactly why, but he has the highest running speed attribute of any player. Robo Lonnie Young is an Ultra Beast.^{[citation needed]} Some believe his elite starting speed is due to a programming error or glitch. It has been a mystery to Tecmo fans since 1991, when the game was originally released.

All of us should be so lucky as to have our best abilities, even in the simulated world, be as a result of a glitch. My glitch is depression. So what's the deal? Why did the Glitch Fates pick Robo Lonnie Young to be so fast? Why was he made an Ultra Beast? Why can't I be an Ultra Beast?

NY Jets #44 - Part 2

The other day I joined Facebook. I suppose the feeling I had when I saw my face, name, personal information - my identity, essentially - on the screen for all to see was probably similar to the mixed feelings my grandfather in Brooklyn had when his first TV set arrived to his family's railroad apartment in the early 1950's. I had just joined the century with the rest of America, but it didn't mean that I thought it was any good for me.

The analogy is an admittedly poor one. Facebook is interactive, while television was not, and is not. Facebook has an impermanence in your life based on your need to express yourself in the moment. TV renders us passive and dull and is served to us, cold. But like TV, Facebook is oddly addictive - a rather facile mode of self-expression in a society that values facile self-expression and encourages addictive behavior. I suppose blogging is just as similar, only I thought by blogging, I would change the world. I was so very wrong, of course.

I'm not too sure what any of that exactly has to do with #44 Trent Collins, safety for the New York Jets during the NFL Players' Strike in 1987. But I sometimes think that when I sit down to write, I feel the way Trent Collins must have felt taking the field for three replacement games. He made a pro career out of returning one punt for three yards and, apparently, recovering a fumble. The Jets of the replacement games of that season did not win any fans, and the futility of the entire exercise must have been obvious to Collins. There were empty seats in the Meadowlands and very little opportunity for the players who made it onto the strike squad to extend their career beyond the three games. I remember watching bits and pieces of replacement games that season, with unfamiliar players playing in familiar numbers, not the least of which was #44. I nearly game up on pro football right then and there. Suddenly college sports seemed appealing, the way it does to so many of its fans - as a supposedly purer manifestation of a game. That didn't last long.

But it didn't stop Trent Collins, obviously. Though we know our efforts will hardly even raise an eyebrow, we are entitled to try, anyway. What the hell. Was it a thrill for Collins? Once the itch for professional play was scratched, did he walk away feeling sated, even while knowing a public address announcer would never compete with the noise of a real crowd to call out his name?

****

Having recently graduated from the University of Texas in 1965 (and playing against Joe Namath in the Orange Bowl), Jim Hudson joined the New York Jets and was given the #44. The next season he switched to #22, the number he wore through the rest of his career with the Jets. This raises the inverse question that confronted us two years ago when we first wrote about #22. After leaving the New York Jets in #22 and joining the Oakland Raiders wearing #44, Burgess Owens multiplied his standing in the world by two, which is why it seemed appropriate that he celebrated the Raiders' interceptions in January 1981 after years of mediocrity with the Jets. He wasn't twice the man he was before, but he found his good fortune increased. Whereas though he divided his number by two, Jim Hudson found his fortunes increased and he also celebrated his own Super Bowl interception in January 1969. So, no. Or, yes. I forget what the question was.

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I'm a little gratified that the reporters who cover the NFL allowed Brian Cushing of the Texans to keep his Defensive Rookie of the Year Award. This wasn't their intention, but by doing so they are not allowing the league to duck the question of whether performance enhancement is everywhere in the NFL. It's everywhere in the NFL, and the more we remain open about the fact that football (and our love of it) develops these physical monsters on the field, the more the league will have to address its priorities in allowing to openly happen. There's nothing more I'd love than to believe that the NFL is clean. I love football. I love the football season. I love winter Sundays, and at the end of a long day of following the before, during and after Jets games, I am exhausted. I love it. But this kind of passion helps produce a game that is actually prone to physical absurdity. I don't want to believe that bigger is better in the glory game, but it's true.

Which is why when you're asked to look at Luke Lawton #44 as "the typical steroid abuser," look again. The NFL would probably like to point at Lawton because traditionally he's only been a practice squad player in Buffalo, the Giants, Atlanta - that is until he started playing for blackhearted Oakland. Since playing there, he has had a regular job in the backfield but also tested positive. He had a short spell with the Jets, Colts, and Eagles, but with Oakland, he became a fixture in the manner that, once upon a time, castoffs had been given a place in Al Davis' Alameda County. Did steroids help with that? I guess. But he's also an easy target. He's the screw-up who finally got an 85 on his chemistry test and showed everybody he could do it. However, the teacher thinks he must have cheated, and, turns out, he's right. But before he closes the books on the case, the teacher should also see if the "A" students in his class cheated, too. Hint: they always do.

Whereas #44 Joe Todd, who played one game for the Jets in 2001, is a pro nobody, but he has gone the route of becoming linebackers coach at both University of Rhode Island and later at Staten Island's very own Wagner College. Note to Trent Collins and Luke Lawton: those who can't do, teach.

NY Jets #44 - Part 1

There are many reasons why numbers are so important to sports fans. Whether it be about scores, statistics, years, schedules, prices or uniforms, numbers are immutable, honest, a rock of certainty in a world that unsuccessfully tries to shake off its postmodern nature. Players lie about their performance enhancements because winning always invites a level of human cheating; the numbers merely reflect the truth about human nature. Management lies about their loyalty to cities and about their financial dealings because it's their franchise, not the fans'. When they raise your tickets, or have to sell off players you love or let players go, or move your team to a different city, it is because the sport you love is actually a business, guided by numbers. The numbers don't lie. People do. Numbers are often our undoing, but fans know we can trust numbers to tell the truths that people cannot.

People also have favorite numbers, not quite the way they have favorite colors. One establishes a relationship with a number because of something or someone attached to it. For me, as a child, the number 44 was my talisman. It didn't lie. I suppose it would have been simpler if I had just loved the #4, but #44 would not be denied. It seemed important enough for a cough medicine, so it must have been a lucky number. At Syracuse, it is such a tremendously important number that they have now retired it, in large measure because of the too-weighty expectations that accompany wearing it, the way Jim Brown, Ernie Davis, Floyd Little, and Derrick Coleman all did. When he played football for the University of Kansas, John Riggins wore #32, but when he was drafted in the first round by the New York Jets in 1971 he got #44 because Emerson Boozer wore #32, and the rest is history - his and mine, for it was my lucky number because it was his. So I've been waiting for #44 for a while. Maybe my whole life. Here it is.

But first, let's talk about everybody other than John Riggins who's worn #44 on the Jets.

We begin with defensive back James Ihedigbo (right), the present wearer. Here is his website. Here he trains. Here are his tats. Before they had their own web sites, players advertised chain saws, cigarettes, spark plugs, "smokeless tobacco," foot powder, soap, snow tires, mufflers. Now, in the post-Norman Mailer era, they have only to advertise themselves. I don't think any of us are in a position to talk about whether or not this a good thing. Almost all of these web sites advertise the accomplishments of a players and the charities to which he contributes. Here, Ihedigbo shares his "views." I'll cut to the chase. He believes that "cardio, cardio and more cardio" are the key to a strong belief system. Can anyone whose whole life has been devoted to a career in athletics be expected to know or believe in anything else? Other than Jesus (no offense to Jesus)? Not everybody can be Frank Ryan.

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Keyshawn's helmet (top right)

Submitted for your approval: for the benefit for the offended Lions fan who said that Jets fans "were all bad" compared with Giants fans: the tail end of the hit that former Detroit Lion Corwin Brown laid on Keyshawn Johnson in 2000. You will note that the former Jets receiver is bareheaded, in large measure because his helmet has left his person and is on a trajectory to go beyond the top right hand corner of the frame. Before he was a Lion, Corwin Brown was Jet.

And, briefly, a Jets defensive backs coach. Corwin Brown #44 belongs to the continuously revolving axis surrounding Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick and Eric Mangini, all silently brooding, uncommunicative men. The fourth horseman awaits his day in the black hole sun. Is Corwin Brown the next One?

Parcells, Belichick and Mangini are men who bristle ambiguously with resentment, and they foster a sense of lingering disdain wherever they go. Brown recently became Belichick's defensive coordinator after playing in the Dark Lord's scheme while playing for the Jets in the late 90's. Prior to that he had played for both Parcells and Belichick while on the Patriots.

But Parcells and Belichick are different kinds of men. One is open with the press in a wholly negative fashion, like a bellicose dad who is indulgent with all your hangups, problems and gripes until he lashes out at you, and then leaves for good. Thanks, Dad. See you at Christmas. I guess. The other is your creepy next door neighbor about whom you are clearly jealous: look at all that cool lawn equipment he has, look at his wife, his achieving kids - how did he get that way? Until you realize he's watching you move around your house with his high-powered Minolta lens. Last year, while coaching defense at Notre Dame, Corwin Brown showed something of this weirdness. He got mad at Navy's head coach for speaking with tepid disparagement of the Irish's defense after Navy finally won one in South Bend. Brown's retort is part Parcells, part Belichick - part spleen, part paranoia.

As you can see from the story, Brown's reaction was a little over-the-top, but among these kinds of men, slights are everywhere. If anything, Brown is a sore loser, a misunderstood person in the world of sports if you ask me. I've been nothing but a sore loser for years, and we have feelings, too. Corwin Brown sure does. But now that he's back with Belichick, I wonder. Perhaps he's not just just a bad loser? Maybe he's exactly their kind of Nixonian archetype. Who can tell? I wait and see. I wait. And see. But remember - you heard it here first.

For What It's Worth

If you care about your team, the draft week was an opportunity to shop for dreams. As one person noted, it's like Christmas morning, opening up gifts, thinking you know what you're going to get, but knowing you might be surprised, happily, or with grave disappointment. It's mostly silliness, a spectrum of projected aspirations for better things.

A humorous NPR report briefly referenced the Jets fans' role at Radio City as the permanently disgruntled. As one Lions fan points out, "I meet a Giants fan and they're all nice guys, like guys I'd want to hang around with. I meet Jets fans and they're like...like they're all bad. We're the worst team in the league. How do you boo a Lions fan?" Obviously the man in question never grew up on Long Island.

We got two running backs, a defensive back, and a guy named Vlad. Altogether, not a bad draft, except that for USC's Joe McKnight, we gave up Leon Washington to former USC (and Jet coach) Pete Carroll. I haven't yet met a Jets fan who feels that losing Leon was a smart move.