NY Jets #52 - Part 1

There is nothing quite like the name that sounds incomplete, or whose surname sounds like a name for short. Tommy John, Billy Joe, Billy Joel, Nicholle Tom, Adam Bob #52. That's right. Adam. Bob. He played linebacker for a single season with the Jets in 1989. Drafted out of Texas A&M that year, he is listed as suiting up for five games at linebacker for the Jets, without apparent distinction. We find him again in 1992 playing for the Montreal Machine of the World League of American Football (WLAF), a league which later became NFL Europe once its North American teams like the Machine folded, which the Machine did the year Adam Bob joined them. Montreal improved their fortunes, though; they got their Alouettes back into the CFL when the CFL Baltimore Stallions failed to revive the spirit of the NFL Colts and moved back north. 

Is Adam Bob this comedian? Only Adam Bob knows.

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Are you this angry?  

Never burn bridges. Always make a friend. Cal Dixon #52 did in 2001 when he was brought in to play for the Orlando Rage, one of the franchises belonging to the mercifully brief XFL. You remember the Rage's logo (left), don't you? No?  Well, it's worth a look.

After all, don't you have days like this? "All the time?" you say. No, no, really, take a look at that face. You're not angry all the time like that. No one could be. You'd die. Maybe that's one of the reasons, among many, many others, that the XFL failed. The logo represents a cartoonish rage that even the angriest of us have to admit is unapproachable, except of course if it is feigned in an equally cartoonish bit of combat, like professional wrestling, the XFL's cousin. Did Cal Dixon look at the logo on his teammates' helmets after coming back to the huddle and say to himself, "You know? I'm just not that angry."

Dixon played center and guard in #52 for the Jets from 1992-95, and then for the Dolphins from 1996-97, retiring with back problems. Galen Hall, Head Coach and Director of Operations for the Orlando Rage, actually coached Dixon at the University of Florida and then brought him out of retirement years later. Hall had been Head Coach at Florida in the late 1980's, and he remembered Dixon fondly from Dixon's college days. The circle gets even smaller between these two men and their relationship to the Jets. Our all-too-brief study of the curse of #17 made mention that Galen Hall wore #17 for the Jets in 1963. Hall played behind Dick Wood and threw three touchdowns and nine interceptions in two starts during that season. After he was let go by Florida as a coach, Hall had second a chance in yet another  struggling league, as a Head Coach with the Rhein Fire in NFL Europe, and then of course with Vince McMahon's XFL. So then he gave Cal Dixon the same second chance.  And then the league folded the year Cal Dixon joined them.  Today, Galen Hall coaches the offense at Penn State.  Where is Cal Dixon? 

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Follow this link to a 2007 JetsInsider forum on Onzy Elam #52, linebacker for the Jets from 1987-88. To a certain degree, the content is pretty much what you'd expect.  The source of the discussion is the question plaguing one man: "Jets S Abram Elam related to ONZY Elam?" I'll bury the lead here by telling you that the issue is never resolved. Abram Elam #27, of course, is the controversial defensive back who currently plays for Cleveland and who started out in the NFL with with the Jets. Onzy Elam might have been Abram's Dad if only because he was old enough (17) to father Abram, and both men were born in Florida, but that's still not enough evidence, even for people who only limit their searches to one or two web sites (I'm looking at you, man in the mirror). The forum includes a few discussions about how Onzy Elam was a highly touted draft "sleeper" who essentially "busted." I don't remember Onzy Elam; I can't be held responsible for remembering the promising draft picks of 1987 when I was in the middle of a series of late adolescent crises, some of which wouldn't even seem manageable to me today. However, I've learned now to permanently redirect and channel my emotional anxieties toward the ups and downs of my football team. That's what it means to grow up.

Jack Elam 1918-2003

My favorite contribution to the forum, however, is from "Badniss," who says, "By the way, NO posting of Close-UP PICTURES of JACK ELAM please! I KNOW he aint related!!!!!" Maybe I judge the participants in forums harshly, as the same kind of people whose comments at the bottom of news stories on the web make us wonder whether humanity is worthy of its dominion over Earth.  I mean, how many of us are willing to reference a longtime actor in Westerns who played mostly villains and sidekicks? Very, very few.

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On the books, Jim Eliopulos #52 played linebacker for the New York Jets from 1984-85. He was drafted by the Cowboys but played his first year for the football Cardinals of St. Louis. His head shot from his Cardinal days is a bit more dashing than Jack Elam's. He is looking into your soul, whereas one of Elam's eye is looking at the wall.  What's funny is when you search for a former player on the internets, and you discover that a retired player has a Facebook page. And Jim Eliopulos has a Facebook page, just like I do. It's like we're in the phone book together. "Where's Jim Eliopulos? Well, I'll just look him up in the phone book." Remember how thumbed the phone book was? Remember the phone book? I'm always hesitant to "friend" any of these guys because I'm a fan, and fans don't run with the team. Look what happens when they do. So, Jim Eliopulos will continue to exist as part of the mythical memory, although I have to say I don't remember anything about him.  So much for myth.  

But then ask John Galvin #52 linebacker for the Jets in 1988 and in 1990-91, and he'll tell you about myth.  His name also doesn't ring a bell with me, but that's irrelevant. His Wiki is intriguing for the part I will quote below. Galvin was born in Lowell, Massachussetts, the place where Jack Keruoac was born and where Kerouac died. Galvin went to Lowell High, he went to Boston College, was drafted by the Jets, then played for the Vikings and returned to the Jets when they lacked an outside linebacker. Remember the days when the Jets had massive holes in their defense? As is noted, he got the game ball in a 1990 game against the Patriots, at a time when I might just as well have been taking a civics class on Mars as watch a Jets football game. It was the lost years.

Just before meeting the Patriots in 1988, though, someone from the Times quoted Galvin on the twilight of his great leader from Boston College, Doug Flutie, a small man for whom so many Homeric tales have been written. Today when the Jets and Patriots face off against one another on a national stage, they conjure moments from Thucydides, where fate and hubris are usually the undoing of one side or another. Back in the Walton and Coslet years (1984-93) both teams were scrambling rather half-heartedly (and not as mortal enemies, as they are today) for the scraps the Buffalo Bills left behind.  Usually both teams stayed home for the holidays to see the Bills lose in the postseason. About Doug Flutie, Galvin is quoted as saying:

He's not the player he was in college...He took over a game in college. Sometimes I didn't even know if he needed the rest of the team.

When I was in high school, that's the way I felt about Jack Kerouac - he carried a game all by himself.  Then I went to college, and I read Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Forster and Morrison and Fitzgerald and Chaucer and Ellison, and I suddenly understood what Truman Capote meant when he said that On the Road wasn't so much writing as it was typing. I still love Kerouac. For a moment in time, when American literary culture was threatened to be devoured by the very commercialism and militarism that the Beats despised, Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg conjured the transcendentally mythological, and though Homeric odes about sports figures are also easy to type, and even easier to lampoon, you cannot help but long for the mythological when you watch your favorites succeed; that transcendence is so patently missing from our world of reality television, where everyone is performing in a vast, cruel carnie show.  "The rich," as Leonard Cohen says, "have their channels in the bedrooms of the poor."  There was a time in my youth when it felt like Kerouac, a standout football player at Columbia, could carry the weight of our need to understand this world all by himself.  As Kerouac himself says, "Praised be delusion, the ripple..."

NY Jets #51 - Part 5

"I just sent the woman we want to dogsit a photo of Jonathan Vilma."

Has this ever happened to you? You're struggling with returning to the work of naming and describing what you know of every player who's ever played for your beloved football team so that you can return to your famously unread blog, and you download pictures to put, without attribution, on your site.  But you're frustrated, blocked and you find that the higher the numbers, the more you have to say, the more you've got to say about the players, your life, the state of humanity, the end of the world, the non-end of the world.  You forget on which computer you've downloaded one of these pictures - is it on yours or your wife's?  Then you forget about doing it, entirely.  Will you ever get back to it?

When my wife e-mailed photos of Bill, our shepherd mix, to the woman who will be watching him over the summer while we are on vacation, she also accidentally sent a photo I had obviously put on her desktop of Jonathan Vilma #51.  The quote above was not intended as a simple declarative or as a confession of her lack of care about selecting files, but rather as something subtly critical of her husband's carelessness.  This is just like the shoes I leave next to her side of the bed day in and out when I return from work that she has gradually placed in a corner of our bedroom, at one point spelling out my name with them.  I never notice.

The dogsitter, a very bright young artist recently graduated from college, came by for us to meet for the first time.  "So I got pictures of Bill," she said, "and a football player.  Which was great."  She smiled understandingly, without understanding.  I felt obligated to explain that I have a blog where I name all the players of the New York Jets throughout the team's history, with something unique about each one of them, all the while hoping as well to find indelible commonalities.  I say that by doing this, one can perhaps find the limbic bonds that transcend both our own misunderstandings about this life and our need to quantify the dollar value of human life in trades, signings, and free agency.  As an artist, I hoped she understood.  We really need someone to take care of Bill.

She wouldn't understand - how could she? - that no matter how successful the Jets may or may not be now, their defense might have been even more effective had draft choices like Jonathan Vilma, John Abrahams, and James Farrior been kept on the team.  In all fairness, they departed for wealthier climes during the purgatorial Edwards/Mangini years, but to be a Jets fan is to understand what our dogsitter could not be expected to; that photograph of Jonathan Vilma is a portrait of a franchise's frailty.  For every Darrelle Revis and David Harris, we have to remember the larger absences these excellent players have been expected to fill, like patching the ozone.

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It has been ages since the football team for the high school outside Philadelphia where I teach has won any major championships.  And even if they did, no one would notice since no one goes to the games – not teachers or students.  It’s a shame, because the model for life in Friday Night Lights does hold true in places like Florida and Ohio and western Pennsylvania, where football is no so much an after-school activity as it is a town's gathering place in a world where communication is impersonal.  No wonder that in such towns throughout the less populated parts of our beloved nation, grown men will go back long after graduation to talk about That Championship Season, without irony or rancor. 

If you would like to read a Q and A with Matt Finkes, former #51 with the Jets in 1997, then it’s here.  He returns to his Piqua High School in Piqua, Ohio, a decade after leaving there for Ohio State and then for eight games of professional football with the Jets.  The preface to the interview says, “Everyone seems to remember Piqua’s Matt Finkes.”  Isn’t that beautiful?  If I went back to Wampus Park High School in Cromryn, NY, would anyone remember Martin Roche?  Of course not.  But then I don’t think anyone there would even remember the name of our big football star, or even if we had one.  The question to ask would be "who was the top scholar and valedictorian?" and the answer to that question, my friends, would be the man who rented out an entire section of the side of a Manhattan high rise to propose to his girlfriend. Yes. Suddenly a nice interview on a high school’s web page years after graduation doesn’t seem so desperate; it seems like returning home to find some normalcy.


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Before his coaching career, which includes the currently unenviable task of being defensive coordinator for the Redskins, Jim Haslett played in #55 for the Buffalo Bills from 1979 to 1985, which makes him as persona non grata to us as Lars Von Trier is to the Cannes Film Festival.  But he did suit up out of retirement in 1987, hoping to collect a few dollars as a scab before returning to playing obscurity again.  In this brief tenure as a Jet, he wore #51.

NY Jets #51 - Part 4

James Darling

Number 51 generally belongs to linebackers.  I'm not sure if I mentioned that obvious point earlier.  Dick Butkus.  Bryan Cox.  Before Vilma, James Darling #51 played linebacker for us from 2000-01.  I remember him as selected by the Eagles in 1997, just as Ray Rhodes was beginning his final descent as coach with the team.  He arrived with the Jets just after Parcells left.  He finished with the Arizona Cardinals before they made it to the Super Bowl.  I'm sure he doesn't think of his career this way.  In fact on Wikipedia, he is still mentioned as a free agent, though his career in the NFL nominally ended in 2006.  He is on the "inactive" roster for clients of Schwartz and Feinsod, a list for which Darrelle Revis is naturally "active," though Revis is not actually actively preparing for a future football season any more than James Darling is.  And one does wonder how an inactive free agent can feel any better than an active one in the middle of a Lockout.

Quincy Stewart is not a free agent any longer.  He's a teacher.  He played at linebacker in #51 during the Jets' disappointing 2003 season, but then went on to play for the Edmonton Eskimos team that won the Grey Cup in 2005.  How does it feel to win at something that your own countrymen do not even know is happening?  To be honest, I don't know who won last year's Grey Cup.  Considering that the Edmonton Eskimos were the team that I lazily adopted while watching NBC's coverage of the CFL during the 1982 Strike, maybe I ought to get reacquainted with wider fields, larger end zones, 12 players and three downs.

At any rate, as I mentioned, Quincy Stewart is no longer waiting for that call.  He has followed the path of a predecessor at the number, Ralph Baker, and become an educator after professional football.  I've often spoken about how many broken people there are in the world of NFL retirees, but there are also many cases that I've found of people returning to being role models through coaching in school and in the noble profession of teaching itself.  At Spring Woods High School in Houston, Stewart teaches Biology.  His recent schedule reminds me of why I prefer block scheduling in my job.  He's got to wait until the very end of the day for his prep.

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Don Jones #51 has a name that's so innocuous that it seems limitless in its possibilities.  Who is Don Jones?  Who was he?  What's in a name?  He could be anybody, but he is a somebody, just like you or me.  Or not.  Whatever that means.  

Don Jones

He apparently registered one sack with the Jets and Vikings between 1992-94, the years of his career at linebacker in the NFL. But no matter how short your career, one can be a positive influence after it's done. Jones is now apparently a member of a Florida-based organization that trains young football players while "raising funds and awareness for the mission of Operation Homefront-Florida," which provides aid to families of active service people and wounded soldiers. I don't really know what that means, but it certainly sounds admirable. It's not something you would do in combination with soccer; football is, as George Carlin would say, like war, so one might as well use that resemblance to help with monies or with understanding for the people who are bravely enduring the endless, uncertain wars that go on elsewhere while we sit around mourning the loss of football. So there is that.

But Don Jones owns a more personally significant similarity to me.  He and I were both born the same exact day in 1969.  Some 450 miles apart - he in Lynchburg, VA and I in Woodside, Queens - we were brought somewhat simultaneously into this ridiculous world and have each experienced our lifetime's experience, one could argue, in an identically temporal way.

Or have we?  Has he known time more slowly than I?  More quickly?  Has he slept less or more than I?  In his study of how our brains react to and gauge the passing experience of time, David Eagleman suggests that we experience time more slowly if we are experiencing new things, which might explain why most of us feel as though childhood and adolescence lasted much longer than adulthood - assuming, of course, that you aren't still in childhood and adolescence.  Or that you exist.

According to the above link for Touchdown for the Troops, Don Jones has three children.  That must have been time-changing, and it's something I haven't experienced, but does the second child slow down time as much as the first?  Does the novelty wear off?  I quit drinking seven and a half years ago, but in the uncertain years of sobriety that have followed, I feel I haven't slowed my sense of time, even when I've lost the experience of blacking out.  But in the last three years, the Jets went to the AFC Championship two years in a row, I voted for a black President, the home team won the World Series, my wife and I bought a new house, and we got a dog.  So, yes, the last year and a half certainly seem to have slowed down for me.  What has Don Jones done in his adult life that has slowed things down?  Where has he experienced life in a new and more gradual way?  Has Don Jones' life been literally more memorable than mine?  Or have we lived life at the same rate?  

Where Have I Been?

I didn't think that the Lockout would deplete my love of writing needlessly about my favorite sports team, but it has.

But it's more than that.  I live in a state whose governor shifted millions of dollars for higher education to the state's prison system.  I work in a school district that is millions and millions of dollars in debt and is consequently cutting jobs and will be cutting more deeply next year.  Meanwhile football is in the midst of an impasse that only reinforces our understanding that even the best-paid workers in the Western world have no leverage in the modern era against management.  Just as the owners would have it, I have been rendered apathetic in the face of it, prepared to go without, planning on getting Fox Soccer Channel, considering some kind of drastic lifestyle change to distract me from the crushing depression of Sundays that's there whether football is or not.

Yet I didn't think I'd want to stop writing the blog.  And I will again, eventually.  I'm trying to find something to say about the last of the #51's, but every time I've tried to get close to it, I just feel like I'm updating a Facebook page for someone who's been dead for a year.  Life should be for the living, and though pro football will be back one day, I feel like part of it has died for me.

I'm probably just being dramatic.  Did I think that football was not a perversely corporate enterprise?  Did I not remember how owners replaced players with scabs in 1987?  I remember a long time ago when I was working on a house rehab crew with a foreman from Queens who stared at my green Jets hat and said, "I'm glad you're not a Giants fan, but for me, I can't root for corporate sports.  No offense."  None taken, and I tried seeing things from his understanding.  I could conceptualize it in its entirety.  I could understand it rationally.  Yet I could not feel it molecularly.  What I love is a part of my nature.  I suppose that I'll be back when football is back.  I always have been.  But I hope the owners are surprised at how angry, galled and unmoved a great preponderance of economically strapped fans really are.  I hope they get a chance to see how appalling their craven greed for more than the lion's share of cash truly is.

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Anyway, in terms of numbers, I'll leave you with this - a small tidbit on the web I found while reading about Buffalo Springfield, whom I wish I could see this summer.  Here's an August 1974 photo of David Crosby on stage with Stephen Stills, who frequently wore NFL uniforms at his shows.  You will notice that toward the left, Stills is actually wearing the jersey of Jets' safety Steve Tannen #21.  With seven interceptions in 1972, Tannen should have gone to the Pro Bowl.  Neither Crosby nor Stills probably knew that, but I feel like Crosby probably thought what my foreman at did; that pro football was an ordinary person's game for suckers.  Of course, Crosby quite possibly does not remember 1972 or 1974.  The Jets broke even both seasons.  I wish I could say the same for fans this year.  Ah well.  Stay tuned, if you're there.  I'll be back.  As will this sucker's game, eventually.