NY Jets #54 - Part 3

When I was eight, my parents took us to Disney World, which was the biggest trip of my life to that point. It was the beginning of February, the gloomiest month for anyone who lives in the northeast. It was my first trip on a plane, and I remember being amazed by the idea of leaving behind an horrendous snowstorm at JFK Airport for the warmth of the sun only a few hours later.

Disney World's greatest attraction back then was Space Mountain, which had opened two years before.  The ride simulated the build-up to a NASA space-launch, with authentic-sounding Mission Control banter in the background as you rode a moving platform to your destination, which was frankly paradoxical. "Space" and "Mountain" are two concepts that are a little disconnected. You can find a mountain in space, but usually on a planet moving through space. It was called "Space Port" or "Space Voyage" when the ride was first conceived in the 1960's, but I gather that "mountain" conveys more the sense of a human adventure, so there you are. It was and still is an indoor roller coaster ride in the dark (here with the lights on) simulating what in reality would be considered a really bad ride in space.

I remember the ads quite vividly (at the link, enjoy the animation, the futuristic font, the control panel lights, the yellow turtleneck on the guy riding it and the Dorothy Hamill haircut on his date). It was advertised as a dangerous ride. As Dad and I moved along the moving walkway toward space, there were warning signs letting people know that this was not for everyone. An attendant stopped a woman on the way toward the roller coaster and told her that expectant mothers were not permitted on the ride. The woman looked indignantly at the young man. "I'm not pregnant," she said. "I'm just fat." Dad, who was always encouraging me toward more adventurous, mannish pursuits, thought this might be just the thing. Never mind the fact that I hid through most of Haunted Mansion ride and that at eight, I still slept with a stuffed ocelot every night. His name was Ozzie.

I mention all of this reference to Steve Poole #54 for two reasons. One is simply because I have no real statistics on him, other that in 1976 he played nine games for the Jets, recovering two fumbles, one of them a touchdown recovery of a blocked punt against the Bills on Halloween. He is on the University of Tennessee's professionals list between between "Gordon Polofsky" and "Peerless Price." But I remembered his picture from a Jets' game program, and I always thought what an odd name it was - Poole. It registered with me because I was afraid of the pool as a kid. In his continuing efforts to have me experience a moment of bravery, Dad tried to coax me off the diving board, but I wouldn't do it. I refused to put my head underwater. What was it like to have a name that conjured something so fearful to me as water?

Somewhere in the transition from the hotel where we were first staying and the Magic Kingdom, Ozzie went lost. I do not recall the moment I realized he was lost; I just assumed that he would appear some time. He did not. By the time we reached Orlando we were a couple of hours from wherever Ozzie had been left behind, in a Florida motel. I tried to enjoy Disney World as best I could, but the simple truth was that my best friend, an non-animated figure made of artificial fabric, whose intestines had been filled and refilled again, whose cheap manufacture necessitated that my grandmother in Brooklyn redesign a neck for him made out of one of her opaque medicine bottles, was no longer with me.

I have always been troubled by an inability to let go of things - my football team, the past, the people I hurt and who've hurt me, the towns I left behind, my drinking, the jobs I've had, the women I kissed and so on, so much so that my life sounds like a Woody Guthrie song when it most obviously is not. If Dad at first thought this was a moment of serendipity, he was probably soon compelled by the gnawing look of gloom I wore in the Magic Kingdom to go on a mission to bring Ozzie back. And this, despite his own hopes for toughening me a little, is what he did. While I went on rides and posed for photographs with disarming-looking mascots, he traveled hours back and found Ozzie in the possession of a Mrs. Poole, a maid in the motel where we had stayed. She had found Ozzie in a laundry basket wrapped up in the sheets to be delivered down for the wash. I scarcely think he would have survived the ordeal.

Steve Poole then became associated by a highly associative child with something larger than the fear of the many, many things that seemed to threaten his childhood. He became associated with someone who saved one of its symbolic protectors, which Dad was only glad to redeliver, hoping I suppose, that my day of manly reckoning with fear would come some other time.

***

Jamie Rivers #54 LB

Jamie Rivers #54 played middle linebacker with the St. Louis football Cardinals before he came to Jets in 1974. This does not surprise me. The Jets of the late 70's (with all due respect to Jamie Rivers) were a hodgepodge of old players, traveled veterans from mediocre teams and blossoming players (very few talented young players were on the 1974 team, except for Jerome Barkum and, of course, John Riggins). The best explanation for Rivers' arrival on the Jets is that his coach in St. Louis was Charley Winner, who was later Head Coach of the Jets from 1973 to the middle of 1975, which was Jamie Rivers' last season in the NFL. He had a good run.

Still, I love to play a game to which I will someday devote a multi-part entry called "Infinite What If's" (just made the name up; we'll consider something else) that re-imagines outcomes for the Jets teams of the past. I have argued before that the 1974 team is one of the most compelling to study. (Commenter Michael said he was interviewing members of the squad, so I'm curious about that.) This is a team that won their last six games of a 14-game season, two of which were against division rivals who were going to the playoffs. Had they defeated Buffalo earlier in the season (they lost by 4) they would have won the Wild Card. If they had also won an additional game (against the middling Oilers, most likely) they would have won the division. Jamie Rivers played for the Jets that year and the year after, seasons which were quite different; for some reason the 1974 club had the breaks going their way. Teams like that get lucky, like the 2002 or 2004 Jets. I like to think we're beyond that point now, especially since those lucky Jets teams, like all such teams, didn't make it as far as the conference championship game.

Had they won the Wild Card in 1974, they would have played eventual champion Pittsburgh in the playoffs. Had they won the division, they would have played the Wild Card Miami Dolphins at Shea or the AFC West champ Oakland Raiders at Oakland, which means we would never have known the Sea of Hands, which would have been a loss to the history of the game itself. But such considerations have no merit in Infinite What-If's. At least the Jets would have been in the playoffs, even if they probably would not have gotten any further. In a little boy's mind, it would have made the possibility of a winning team seem less impossible.

Does this look like a
linebacker?

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Actor Peter Gallagher went to my high school, as did the late Laura Branigan, whom no one would remember if you didn't hear this on the radio all the time. My best friend in grammar school has become reasonably famous over the years, but there comes a point where you stop mentioning aloud, to whomever is around, that "I went to school with that guy." In all of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' appearances on TV over the years, at what point did Jim Waskiewicz #54 stop telling people that he "went to school with Bob Gates?"


Jim Waskiewicz graduated from Wichita High School in Witchita, Kansas and then went to Witchita State, which inducted him into their Hall of Fame in 1981. Witchita State is known more for baseball than football, and their teams are the "Shockers," but did you know that the full name is "Wheatshockers?" I didn't. You husk corn in Nebraska but shock wheat in Kansas. Now I know. At any rate, he played linebacker for the Jets from 1966-67 but didn't get a Super Bowl ring the following year because he was on the 1968 expansion draft for the Cincinnati Bengals, though I do not see him on their roster. He played the year after that for the Atlanta Falcons, which was his last in the NFL. From the vault of a someone named Meteorite Guy (online, we are all becoming Brazilian soccer players) who apparently collects high school yearbooks of famous people, we see junior year Wichita High man Jim Waskiewicz (above right) in 1961 not looking much like a football player.

Go to the link, scroll down and find Waskiewicz sitting (at left) with his awkwardly bare chested high school wrestling squad.  He resembles a geeky kid anxious to get the approval of everybody around him, which traditionally is not the attitude of the stoic high school jock who prefers to blend into a wall against which he hopes a pretty girl will lean.

But in the above link you will also see that one of of Waskiewicz's classmates at Witchita High from that year was senior "Bob Gates," who is, indeed the outgoing Defense Secretary of the United States. To be honest, young Gates really does look like someone who will become the leader of the Young Republicans at William and Mary and then join Washington's elite, working for the CIA. He was a flunky for William Casey, he probably knew a great deal about what happened during the Iran-Contra Scandal, and yet he has survived cannily enough to be Defense Secretary for two Presidents from different parties. Perhaps you really can see the future in high school yearbook photos. If he doesn't jump out as a linebacker, Jim Waskiewicz still doesn't look like he would lie to his mother to cover up his knowledge of a trade of arms-for-hostages in what he believed was inevitably going to protect national security. Am I wrong in thinking, on the other hand, that young Bob Gates already looks as though he would?

NY Jets #54 - Part 2

When I go the gym, I find that I don't have the enthusiasm that people have when they work out. The people who grunt and wheeze when they lift more than their own weight. People who do handstands against the wall. People who do those crazy things with the heavy ropes. People who do pull-ups far beyond the point it seems possible. People who take up a lot of room doing exercises. People doing that spinning thing. I run on the treadmill and then work on the machines for a little while and sweat so much that people sometimes look at me as if to say, Are you OK? You look like you're going to die. And I don't like pain. I don't endure it well. If it hurts even vaguely, I stop doing it and go home.

Once I went a little too far with the running and began to have horrible weakness and nausea and felt myself disappearing. I don't know what was going on with me, but I decided that the best thing for me to do was to follow the example of a wounded dog and find a private place to die. In this case, a bench in the locker room was the best place. I lay down, hoping that someone would find me and bring me to the hospital. I tried to call out for help, but no one was there, and I didn't have the strength. Then in about five minutes, I found that I could get up again and walk out of the gym, acting like nothing had happened.

Maybe if I had a trainer like Dwayne Gordon #54, I would know what I was doing. But then male trainers at gyms tend to flirt with beautiful women while they're supposed to be counseling you about how to perform an exercise on the machine without ripping your muscles out of your shoulder. I don't blame them. What else are they supposed to do? They advise people about working out. It sounds a little dull, frankly. They try to communicate essential information about working out correctly with people who, for the most part, have unrealistic expectations about why they are there. And there you are, strapped to a Pec Dec machine that you're supposed to be using to turn your distressingly flabby pectoral muscles into something resembling a man's, and your trainer is pretending to talk shop with an inquiring blond who is pretending to be talking shop with him, and no one's noticing that you're letting your arms go way beyond your line of peripheral vision. Ah, what the hell, you say. This must be the right way to do it. Two months later, an equally disinterested orthopedist informs you of your partially torn supraspinitis. You hope the trainer got lucky.

Maybe Dwayne Gordon is different.  He is described as the Fitness Trainer at 24 Hour Fitness in the Bronx, and that is where you'll find him. He played linebacker for the Jets in the late 1990's, ending his career in football and beginning his career in fitness in the vicinity of where his life began, in White Plains, NY.  I'm sure he does a good job.  

Olrick Johnson does a good job singing the National Anthem at professional football games. He too has found an avocation after football. In this video, he sings "The Star-Spangled Banner" quite briskly before a Vikings game in his old Vikings uniform. The announcer has to clarify at the end of his performance that "Olrick played for the Vikings in the 1999-2000 season" because you sense that the crowd at the Metrodome asked, in their various clanging Northwestern, Scandanavian-American tones, "Ol-what-who Johnson?  Sure doesn't ring a bell with me."  The speed with which he gets through the song is advisable for television, but it's also the secret of singing our National Anthem in public.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" has tonal changes that seem ridiculous.  The lyrics are a series of run-on sentences and its overall structure is that of a wandering, searching, appositive-filled question. "Is it still there?" it basically asks. "With all the shit that's happening, do you still see it?" That's it. If you stop to think about what's being with each digression of thought, about when and how often we hailed the flag, amid rockets and bombs, how it inspires you in the midst of terror, you find yourself wandering with these parenthetical ideas, and this, I believe, is where people get off track, forgetting lyrics, repeating verses, going off-key. Don't think about it, move quickly before you realize what's happening, add embellishments to the ending notes of the late verses, and get the hell out of there. Like life.

Johnson was listed at the Jets All-Time Database as a #54 but on the Pro Football Reference Database, he wore #52 for the Jets. If we missed him earlier, then we're making up for it now. As a pro, he suited up for the Vikings, the Jets and the Patriots for what appear to be no more than 28 games over two seasons. He also has what appears to be a gospel/R&B album called Bless My Soul. There are categories we have in Infinite Jets for pros who went artistic after football, though it's rare. George Nock #37: sculptor; Al Woodall #18: artist and gallery owner of a sort (to my delight, I found that Nock advertises on his old teammate's website); John Riggins #44: actor, radio personality, alien abductee. Bless my soul, indeed.

****

After playing football in the AFL for the Oilers, the Jets, the Dolphins and Broncos, Edward "Wahoo" McDaniel #54 became one of the country's most popular professional wrestlers in the late 60's and early 70's. Professional wrestling today is filled with cartoonishly huge, steroid-addled monsters who bellow and preen the way wrestlers always have. Their stunts are less humorous than they were long, long ago, and certainly the WWE wrestlers today are more athletic than I remember them in the past. My brother recently took his son to a WWE bill at the Westchester County Center, where back in 1983, he, my cousin Will, Dad and I once saw Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka square off against his nemesis, the Magnificent Muraco.

Back then, wrestling was somewhere between worlds. Many wrestlers still looked like bar bouncers, with whatever they lacked in muscle matched by just their sheer size. Snuka, though, looked like the buff trainer who unselfconsciously who flirts with the blond at the gym. Muraco looked like the guy whom the gas station manager forces to come over to explain to you the work that's been done on your car. Snuka is considered by many to be a pioneer of the modern WWE look.

The Tomahawk Chop vs. the Figure Four Leg Lock

As a native Fijian, he might have taken inspiration from Wahoo McDaniel. It would seem that from the moment Ed McDaniel was born into the Choctaw-Chickasaw tribe in Oklahoma, the son of a man known as "the Big Wahoo" (making him the "Little Wahoo" for a while before finally settling on the simpler "Wahoo") he understood that success would come by way of the barely harnessed power of his large personality. In this way, professional football was at the right time in the right place, but professional wrestling was his true calling. In a genuinely good young adult biography on him by G. Neri, McDaniel is described as discovering, while playing games with his white classmates, that the Indian was always tied up and killed. To some degree, that lesson must have always resonated with him. In a changing world, where She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was eventually replaced by Little Big Man, McDaniel wore his nickname on the back of his pro football jersey (which they eventually did for most players in the XFL) and then wore his feathered headdress into the wrestling ring. He "played the Injun," as Neri says, but he wanted to be the Lone Ranger. He never lost the label of the former, but he insisted on taking the top billing of the latter.

In this way, he was also in the right place for Jets' owner Sonny Werblin in the early 1960's, a man who preferred his marquee players to be independent-minded attention-seekers. At the University of Oklahoma, McDaniel chafed under the disciplined style of Bud Wilkinson much as Joe Namath sometimes did under Bear Bryant. At OU, he was as large as a Native American legend.  According to Neri, he ran 36 miles on a bet for $100. On a dare, he ate a pile of jalapeno peppers and washed it down with - and I am quoting directly here - "a can of motor oil." Phantom reader, like professional wrestling itself, the point here is not whether or not any of this is true. Werblin understood the power of myth in the circus show, and so he brought the large person of Wahoo McDaniel over to the Jets from Denver in 1964.

Wahoo McDaniel is the ur-Jet. Where the New York Titans had merely tried in vain to replicate the success of the Giants, the Jets were different from the corporate style of the Big Blue. They had pom-pom cheerleaders, a go-kart Jet car, fan giveaways, halftime spectacles and, for a time, a man named Wahoo. Because there was no Super Bowl, the goal was to put otherwise unsuspecting circus fans in the seats, and give them a show. Apparently Wahoo did. As a former Jets season tickets holder, my father has distinct memories of watching McDaniel play. It didn't matter if he played well or not; his name was "Wahoo," which is fun to say in unison with tens of thousands of other people.

Sept. 12 1964 - NY Jets 30 Denver 6

On the evening of September 12, 1964, the Jets played their very first football game at Shea Stadium. It was my Dad's first Jets game there, too, and the home team won 30-6. It was also Wahoo McDaniel's first game as a Jet, and it was against his former team. Several sources have corroborated this, including Dad:  apparently McDaniel recorded 23 tackles in that one game. I haven't been able to find anything to show that this constitutes a record. People are right to say that tackles are hard to pinpoint and track because they involve so many assists, though we know how many tackles, overall, players amass each season. For perspective, since 2000, the NCAA record for tackles in one game is 26. I'm inclined to think that Werblin found his temporary marquee in the man who made 23 on opening day.

Dad remembers  that at some point during the game, as McDaniel was in on one play after another, the Jets announcer began to join in on the carnival atmosphere of Shea. I wonder if Werblin gave the announcer $50 to do it. Neri writes:

When Wahoo became unstoppable, the announcer got the crowd going by shouting “Who made that last tackle?” The crowd would chant back, “Waaa-hooo!”

Dad remembers that this went on for a couple of games, and the announcer then went on to say, "Tackle by you-know-who...," and the crowd would respond in kind. To my knowledge, Wahoo McDaniel never had a game like that again, but you never have quite another game quite like the game of your life. They put his name on the back of his jersey, which was doubly profane by the standards of the corporate NFL Giants who never allowed anyone that distinction until long after it had become standard practice elsewhere.

This wasn't enough for Wahoo McDaniel, though. He became an early marquee player for the 1966 Miami Dolphins. Then in 1968, according to Neri, he punched out a San Diego cop even before he got to put on a Chargers uniform. The novelty of "Wahoo" on the back of a jersey had worn off. Joe Namath had re-written the rules of conventional sports. By beating the Colts, Namath made the AFL circus the industry standard and, unwittingly, had helped enable pro football to become even more corporate. But Wahoo McDaniel's secret passion for professional wrestling, that most unconventional of professions resembling sport, was his logical next step. In his time he straddled both worlds, the mythical and the real, like the land between the Chickasaw and the Choctaw.

He passed away in 2002. But Wahoo McDaniel lives in each and every one of us who love the Jets. Perhaps we forget the greasepaint and slapstick our forefathers embraced when they decided to stop waiting in line for Giants tickets and started going to Jets games at Shea. If you are sometimes fatigued by the absurd, outsized circus barker personality of Rex Ryan and his traveling show of troubled overachievers, just remember where we all first came from. We are not Titans pretending to be Giants. We are Jets fans, born to live and die lying on the bench near the precipice of insanity, torn between the world of sport and the world of entertainment. We are all Wahoo McDaniel.

Wa-hoo.

Let the Anxiety Commence

Back from Paris, where my wife and I spent nine days. The trip was wonderful. Parisians are friendly people. With the exception of a snippy little man in an information booth in Gare de l’Ouest, every person I came in contact with was thoughtful and kind. If you try a little French, they appreciate it, and all I possess is the ability to create broken sentences with verbs in the present tense. Hello, thank you, I'm sorry, please, and good night were pretty much the only things I said. It was like being a robot programmed for only politeness, or maybe a simple child.

There are no fat people. It's extraordinary to visit a place where overweight people are the exception to the rule. And a walk down any busy street in Paris for an American is striking because very few people are on their cell phones. Very few are playing with their iPhones. In a city as large as Paris, there is excellent, efficient and predictable public transportation. Big book chains are the exception in Paris. Small bookstores are everywhere. In Philadelphia, we are down to barely a handful of really good, small bookstores while the colonizing force of Borders has retreated, leaving a desolate browser’s landscape in its wake.

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Though the United States gropes even more blandly toward the precipice of total economic collapse, at least the National Football League and its players have come to an agreement. And although I was hoping that Brett Favre would start flirting with his final disaster by thinking about the Oakland Raiders, his story has gotten even better now that he appeared recently in a Phillies hat, signaling that he's interested, perhaps, in playing backup to Michael Vick here in town. Just when I thought Andy Reid had done all he could to court collective dysfunction, he does me even prouder. What can anyone say? He's like a woman who picks all the bad men and knows it. The ego of Favre and the personality disorders of the Eagles' fans would make for awesome combination. Alien versus Predator. I only hope it happens. And now we watch to see which receivers the Jets will hold and which will leave. How much disorientation has there been to the offense due to the impasse? Let the great anxiety commence.

Before getting back to work, I will first tell you of two stories from my trip. I saw a surprising number of Parisians walking around in Yankee hats. While dropping into a park along Boulevard Haussman, we came across two people being entertained by a guy who looked crazy wearing one. Seeing an obvious tourist, he came up to me and, much to the entertainment of others, began kidding me in French, knowing I wouldn't understand. I pointed to his hat and said, "Yankees?" He stopped and stared at me, blankly. "Monsieur," I said, tsking and shaking my head. "Mets." I don't think he knew what I meant, but then I don't either.

This man doesn't know that he's confused.

Then there's this. You might think this is a photo taken on an autumn day in any major American city, but the weather in Paris was wet and cool all week. This is a Parisian and not an American. Crossing Boulevard Sebastopol, he is wearing a bastardized Patriots jersey; you might not be able to make out that instead of Tom Brady's name on the back it reads, "New England." His hat reads, "New York;" you see the Yankees logo in the right hand corner. It's kind of like an American wearing a Real Madrid baseball hat and an FC Barcelona basketball jersey. That was worth stopping in the middle of the street to see. I live with a lot of contradictions; most of us do in some way or another. Are we any better off for knowing what they are or why they exist? Do we benefit from really knowing which were given to us by Fate and which we chose for ourselves to carry around? Does it really do any good for us to know that others see them as easily as I was able to see his from across the street? At least he lives in a culture where this particular paradox doesn't matter. He's lucky. Would that I could live with such contradictions, so blithely and untroubled, going about my day.

I'm Out of the Office

Another work-stoppage, but this time I have a legitimate reason.  I will be going on vacation for a little over a week starting tomorrow, and will have very little or no access to the Internet.  And no, I am not going to prison.  They have internet there.

We are in the midst of #54, and if you know anything about the history of professional wrestling, then you know that we still have to discuss the somewhat mistrustful looking man depicted at left, and we will.  The numbers keep going up.  There is no other way.  I hope that when I return there will be an agreement to end the lockout because my inner clock is telling me that I need to begin thinking about how to parse out my emotional breakdowns so that they be gradually distributed through another football season.  I also hope that the Oakland Raiders will begin wooing Brett Favre.  I also hope the Jets manage to hold onto one good receiver.  If, phantom gentle reader, you can do anything about any of these issues, I would be grateful.  See you in about nine days.

NY Jets #54 - Part 1

I started collecting football cards when I was six, just after I saw my first Jets game with Dad.  My collection wasn't that large.  I remember that the most important players I got from the 1975 Topps season were Coy Bacon, Mel Gray, and Randy Vataha.  Not a Jet in the bunch, which was heartbreaking for a small child, but familiar in the order of things.  I was a Jets fan, after all.  I assumed football cards had the same significance in the world as baseball cards, and it took me all of four more years of collecting to see that this was not true.  "Why do you get those?" Jake Walsh, a classic know-it-all friend, would ask in that way that was intended to remind me that I was stupid.  In 1978, Jake followed the Red Sox until the end of the summer, when suddenly the Yankees hit their stride.  Then he was with the Bronx all the way.  Eddie O'Fallon kept the dream alive, though, and we constantly bought and traded football cards in front of the deli on Merrick Avenue, between Orchard Street and Old Mill Road during the summer before the start of the season.

Sometimes you'd see distracted men coming into the unwelcome sunshine from the Lucky 7's Cocktail Lounge on the corner of Old Mill Road.  They seem like they were awakening from their sleep, tilting and reeling, listing like wounded ships.  I remember how one of them tried to chat with us in a voice that registered as a growl as we stood there, straddling our bicycles, going over our loot.  You guys got cards, huh?  What you got?  Who you got?  When we wouldn't answer or would just stare, he quickly renounced his offer of friendship and told us we were ungrateful children for the world we had inherited.  I couldn't help but notice the Lucky 7's windows, diamond shaped, colored and frosted, concealing the bleary light within.  Today, my old football cards are somewhere in my house, in a narrow box, kept from the light and the world like those afternoon drinkers, and I wonder where Eddie's are today, or where he is, rather.   

I gave up collecting football cards by 1979, though I had made my best collection that year.  I had become weary of the poorer characteristics of Topps cards.  They didn't show a great deal of action, and even when they did, the cards had no logos on the helmets.  Here Jake Walsh may have had a point; at first I assumed that there were some games during the season when teams played without logos on their helmets; maybe they were out being cleaned, or maybe players were sometimes asked to pose with a blank helmet.  I didn't realize the lost art of touching up the photos on cards, in the same way Stalin would have portraits touched up to remove people from reality.  Topps had a less pernicious reasoning for editing out the logos - to avoid copyright infringement.  That never happened on baseball cards, except when an entire mop-up revision needed to be done to convey a change of team for a player, as with Oscar Gamble in 1975.   

This is still better than my college roommate's fake ID

This looks like #54 Troy Benson's driver's license, but it's his 1989 NFL ProSet card.  It just happens to do something that I have never seen; it puts his face on the back of the card, alongside the statistics. As the write-up points out, Benson posted fairly good numbers in tackles, finishing "alone in second" in tackles on the team for 1988.  Now that's a phrase, isn't it?  "Alone in second."  It really conjures a sense of being a Jets fan.

Anyway, this might as well be Troy Benson's driver's license photo for 1989.  He has the look of a man who has been waiting on an unconscionably long line, being commanded by perpetually angry people to sit in one area, move to another, then go back to another waiting area because he has not completed his paperwork in full.  Other than that, he looks like an average football player I knew in high school, with his nose wide and flat, his large chin taking up half his face, and his eyes far apart and dull.  His hair sits flatly on his head with a fashionable part down the middle; he has the signature blond mustache of the era, with the look of a man you will run into when you both coincidentally need to pick up a case of Bud Light at the Circle K - that is, if you didn't live in Troy Benson's home state of Pennsylvania, with its Blue Laws.
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Stan Blinka, LB

Stan Blinka #54 is looking up at us as if we are twelve feet tall.  Perhaps he is looking up at the football gods, asking for some help.  Blinka was a fairly accomplished linebacker for us from 1979 to 1983.  He played one season alongside with the Denver Gold in the USFL.  I found him on Facebook, and he looks healthy, happy and satisfied.  I suppose that's how I look on Facebook.  Does anyone ever offer up a Facebook page filled only with images that conjure the bleakness and fear inherent to the human condition?  At the risk of sounding like George W. Bush talking about Vladimir Putin, I looked at Stan Blinka's picture on Facebook, and I thought I saw enough of him to say that this man has a good soul.  On the NFL database, I found only statistics on interceptions (he had three in his career) but sadly nothing on his tackles or assists. 

There are two things on the Interwebs I found about him. Though he was born in Columbus, Ohio (day-dreaming of playing for Woody Hayes, I presume?) Blinka went to Sam Houston State in Texas and was then drafted by the Jets.  Here's a good article on his return to his alma mater in 2010, along with many other SHS alumni, to inspire last year's players as they took the field at Reliant Stadium to play rival Stephen F. Austin University (the Lumberjacks).  The players left the tunnel with old SHS players standing in a line, rooting them on, which is nice.  I wonder if any other players there would be labeled "NFL stars," as Blinka is in the article.

The next set of stories though are a little less flattering to Blinka, but I would argue that they represent a larger problem that defenders are dealing with even now.  After the Jets' 15-13 victory over the Green Bay Packers in 1982, Packers Coach Bart Starr filed a complaint with the NFL over a hit Stan Blinka leveled at Packers' receiver John Jefferson.  Here is the New York Times story on it.  Here are more stories on its immediate after-effects.  It seems to me that the hit, which I do not recall, was one of those that makes officials, coaches, players, reporters, and league executives mindfully stop and reflect (or more likely pretend to reflect) on the true nature of the game.  What can be done to stop football's worst brutalities? they ask. So Blinka was fined and briefly suspended for the hit.  If you scroll down and find Dave Anderson's article on the issue (which has two grainy photographs of the forearm hit to the head) Anderson notes that the league claimed that, up until that hit, it had been 63 years since anyone had been similarly fined and suspended as Blinka was that week in 1982.

Anderson is right to point out the hypocrisy of this decision.  He gets Pete Rozelle to look at Stan Blinka's record of penalties to show that Blinka was, to that point, statistically a clean player - especially, Rozelle admits, "for a linebacker."  Anderson also maintains that it is difficult to believe that the league would really require 63 years to find as egregious a hit as Blinka's apparently was.  Without any real precedent, the punishment seemed fairly arbitrary, except that the Blinka hit occurred only three and a half years after Darryl Stingley had been paralyzed by Jack Tatum.  The league felt that it could concretely deal with the inevitability of paralysis.  They did not even realize that someday they would also have to devise a strategy for understanding the long-term psychological, physical, and emotional effects of even ordinary week-by-week contact; of course, they still don't know how to respond to such realities today, though they claim to try.  The league tries again and again, often in vain, to reduce the number of horrors that the game, by its very nature, creates.

What stays with me most, though, is that in trying to find out specifics about Stan Blinka's career (other than those from my own memory, of hearing Spencer Ross say his name on WCBS) I discovered only information about this now largely forgotten moment.  How little we really know of each other from the Internet, yet it is fast becoming our sole source of all knowledge.  It behaves like our own memories, holding onto only the fragments of things we would otherwise soon forget or enhancing those things that we have sugarcoated into believing about ourselves.  There is much more to Stan Blinka's career - the career of an otherwise clean player - than the one moment we find in cyberspace.

NY Jets #53 - Part 4

(We thought the rest of the season would be like this.)

Cody Spencer #53 was a linebacker for the Jets from 2006-08. He comes from Texas where I suspect a lot of guys are named Cody. He went to North Texas University and had a decent year in 2008, which was the Brett Favre season. He seems not to have an NFL career after his 2009 season with the Detroit Lions. I confess I don't remember much of his playing but I do recall that 2008 season, and I remember thinking how strange the world seemed, what with the hometown Phillies winning the World Series and Barack Obama becoming President-elect, and Brett Favre leading the Jets to an 8-3 start. At the far right of this picture you see Cody Spencer celebrating the away victory over the Patriots that year.  Things seemed just great.

The world seems like it is spinning back into more familiar territory now. The Phillies can't win the World Series without regular hitting, Obama is on borrowed time as President, and the Jets are as distant a memory to Brett Favre as he is to us. Sports and politics are the easiest way to gauge history simplistically.

But Cody Spencer is special because research on him produces one of those Wikipedia moments that is priceless. Recently I saw Jimmy Wales interviewed by Stephen Fry, and Wales talked about the extraordinary, simple beauty of Wikipedia as an information organization checked by volunteers. He said that it was remarkably American because it was started and maintained by ordinary people. This is all true, and though I tell my students not to rely on Wikipedia for their research, I do tell them that it's a great place to start. If I had been able to access it as a kid, I would have either done better research because I would have known where to begin, or I would fallen down the endless rabbit hole of links that Wikipedia often enables. Either way, I would have been happier. The world would have been more open to me.

But nothing - certainly not Wikipedia - is foolproof. Cody Spencer's Wikipedia page includes the following:

Spencer attended Grapevine High School in Grapevine, Texas where he taught Tommy France all about the hot boudin. As a junior, he helped lead his team to the Division I Class 4A State Championship.

There two bits of information here, but which is the more valuable? Which do you think - the bit about Tommy France, or the throwaway thing about Grapevine High School?  What are the essential qualities of a person? I don't know if someone should notify a Wikipedia volunteer, but then why bother? Isn't it important for readers to know that he taught Tommy France about the hot boudin? And what is the hot boudin? Is that a euphemism for something? Did Tommy put that there in Wikipedia, or did Cody? The Encyclopedia Britannica never allowed, however temporarily, for inside jokes, and maybe that's a shame. In real life, the hot boudin is spicy sausage indigenous to Cajun country. (And how did I find that out? You guessed it.) Is that all the hot boudin is to Cody Spencer and Tommy France? The world may never know, but if the world visits Spencer's Wikipedia page, where he exists in terms of two kinds of information juxtaposed together, they'll be presented with a complex picture of a person, at least until the Wikipedia volunteer edits out the most interesting part.

****

Jim Sweeney #53 came from Pittsburgh, he went to Pitt, then he ended up retiring with the Steelers in 1999. Today he apparently coaches high school football in the Pittsburgh area.  But he was a center for the Jets for a long time.  

What is it about centers?  The center has the opportunity for a long career, but with very little recognition.  The center never talks smack. He never taunts. He is, according to tradition, the guy who touches the ball first, the keynote and the keystone.  
Jim Sweeney is right up there with seasoned NFL offensive linemen. Draw a through line from Jets centers like #'s 52 MIke Hudock (1960-65), John Schmitt (1966-73), #65 Joe Fields (1975-1987) and you reach Jim Sweeney, who became the regular center for the Jets after Fields left, starting from 1984 to 1994. For better or for worse, that's a pretty remarkable record of stability at one position for such unstable Jets teams. 


Obviously there were other guys at center during the years 1960-84, like Wayne Mulligan and Warren Koegel, but the center is often the steady influence, the rock in the stream. Everybody could use a center, a person on whom you can rely to snap the ball with unerring regularity. He returns to the huddle with you, seeing you shake your head. What was I thinking? you ask yourself. Am I really as untalented as they say? Are they really saying that, or is that just in my head? 

No.  Get out of your head you say. I keep telling myself not to care about what anyone else thinks, but it just gets in there and drives me nuts. The center just stares at you and knows he's got to pull left or right or get in and push forward. He isn't plagued by your doubts; he has mastered the art of not listening to the constant trash talk from defenses come and gone, trying to distract him. He looks at you and simply waits for you to call out the next play. Get out of your head, he seems to say to you. You're not doing any good there. Between 1984 and 1994, amid adolescence and the unsteady transition to adulthood, like a quarterback drafted early on with great expectations, I could surely have used a Jim Sweeney. In that time, he snapped the ball to Ken O'Brien, Pat Ryan, Tony Eason, Browning Nagle, Boomer Esiason, Kyle Mackey, Mark Malone, and Jack Trudeau. That's a lot of disparate personalities struggling at the most public spot on predominantly losing squads.


****

How bad is it?

Linebacker Bill Zapalac #53 is also known as Willie Zapalac, Jr, the son of longtime NCAA and NFL assistant and coach Willie Zapalac, Sr. The Zapalac name may have been unknown to most Jets fans between 1971-73 when Zapalac the younger played for us, but in Texas, the Zapalacs are/were a football family. The elder attended Texas A&M, was a coach there and at the University of Texas, which is a little like coaching for the Jets and the Patriots (which, as we know, people have done). Willie Sr. built offensive lines at those schools, but Willie Jr. played defense at Texas while his father was assisting under Darryl Royal, which must have been interesting. Did he prefer defense just so that he wouldn't have to play under his Dad? Was he "Willie Jr." at Texas, or "Bill?"

He graduated from the Texas School of Applied Architecture and apparently helps run a construction company in Austin. Though there are no defensive statistics kept from his years in the NFL, other than starts at linebacker and defensive end, we can consult his 1974 card and consider the expression on his face. Is he wondering skeptically about the impending electrical wiring and concrete support system problems at Shea Stadium? Somebody would need to, eventually.

NY Jets #53 - Part 3

Al Palewicz and the Winnfield

Since I check my lists for each number with the Jets' All-Time Roster, I get a view of what's to come, and I've been waiting to write about Al Palewicz #53. And yes, the reason why is because of that facial hair. Obviously, that's just one picture and not the whole of the man. It's a profile shot taken on the sideline at Shea Stadium in 1977 while he wasn't looking. From here he looks like a guy who might not take kindly to your gentle assertion that your date is only dancing with you in the road house. He also looks like the guy in that very same road house who challenges a shorter Burt Reynolds to a fight that initially seems to a mismatch, but Burt always manages through charming guile and luck to eventually put the bigger man on his back. And with that, yet another bar room brawl in a Carter-era, country-fried car movie commences. As fists and chairs fly about him, the man with the facial hair occasionally sits up, struggles to see what's happening, but collapses once again when he takes a fake bourbon bottle to the head. 

You might be tempted to call that facial hair the Fu Manchu. However, according to Dyers' Extended Beard Chart, it's more accurate to call it "the Winnfield," named for Julius Winnfield of Pulp Fiction. The Winnfield strikes fear in the hearts of extremely mild-mannered men like me, who realize that charming guile and luck are not going to do you any good when you're confronted by its wearer in the real world. "Say what again," the man in the Winnfield says. "I dare you, I double dare you...."

Al Palewicz was born in Texas, played for the University of Miami, and after the NFL became an English teacher. Yes. Today, though, he has what looks like a fine real estate business in the area in and around Miami. His bio on his company's page shows a successful-looking man in a sharp blue suit standing in the legendarily beautiful sunshine. Someday I would like to think I'll have an opportunity to buy a house from Al Palewicz. The canvas for the Winnfield is still barely visible on his face, but Palewicz has certainly moved on.  He's joined a better groomed world that the big guy who fought Burt Reynolds in the road house would probably only visit in order to steal copper piping for meth money.

Carl Russ' Winnfield,
with soul patch

Palewicz played linebacker for the Jets in 1977 after apparently being out of football for a year. Linebacker Carl Russ #53 joined the Jets in 1976 and then played another year for us, this time wearing #58. One thing is for sure - he too is sporting the Winnfield. His chops are a bit more formidable than Palewicz's, and Russ has the added panache of a soul patch. This combination could also be called the "Shaft," named of course for the character whose facial hair might well have influenced the development of the Winnfield in the first place.

According to his write-up for the Muskegon, MI Area Sports Hall of Fame, Russ played for the Atlanta Falcons his rookie year of 1975, and then the Jets the following year. He sprained his knee in 1976 but returned in 1977 to find that Al Palewicz was now wearing his former #53. He finished the season and retired at the ripe old age of 24. The Muskegon page doesn't say anything about Russ' life afterwards, but it talks about the real reason for his induction. Coming from Muskegon, Russ became a starter for Bo Schembechler at the University of Michigan after joining the team as a walk-on. This kind of story has a place in the heart of an America that I have never really understood, a place where the loyal eyes of half a state's fans can make a young man feel like a god each week. I suppose I've always valued the professional game more than the college one because in my own life I prefer to be treated like I am worth something at the bargaining table as an individual who earns for himself and his own well-being first. Schembechler's famous speech on the ideology of subordinating the self in favor of the team is sentimentally appealing, but it's hard to take seriously now. The various NCAA violations, particularly at Ohio State, indicate that favoritism, money, and material gifts to players complicate the supposedly purer way of football, and they probably always have.

Today, it's going to require the Stockholm Syndrome to enlist me into a fanatical cult, though I'm certain they could have gotten me with a good song when I was between the ages of 18-22, when I wanted to prove to the world that I was capable of sacrificing myself to a goal that was purer than just finding out what I wanted to do for a living. Is it really that much of surprise that I have so little recollection of following the Jets while I was at college? I had already reached the fourth stage of life, "the soldier," as Shakespeare's Jaques calls it,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth...

My brother once told me that I frightened him when he came to visit me at college. We went to see my college basketball team play, and I quickly devolved into a wild, drunken, screaming fanatic right before his eyes, sudden and quick in quarrel. I remember going to those games, losing myself in the frenzy of overtime wins, crushed by avoidable losses. I would have done anything to help us win, when of course I could do nothing. I would have given my life, which sounds insipid to say, and it is, but that's the blind fanaticism of the fourth stage. I'm just glad the Unification Church didn't get a hold of me. I look back on it now as a fever dream of chemicals, very little sleep and unexpressed hormones, the perfect recipe for a cult conversion. It makes no sense to me now. I don't even know what my school's basketball record was last year.

Still, I think about it.  The Jets do nothing for me now personally except make me feel like I am loyal to something, even when each game has the potential to hurl me into an anxiety attack, so maybe I'm not so different now from someone who roots against Auburn but will never have occasion to send any of his children to the University of Alabama. But would I ever poison the trees that line Bill Belichick's home? No. No, I would not.

So anyway, there you are. One number, two teammates, bearded like the pard, playing football in a stylized decade that was progressive in everything, except Jets football.

NY Jets #53 - Part 2

There is an extraordinary pipeline that runs back and forth between the Jets and the New England Patriots.  Since 1997, they have traded coaches and stars back and forth.  Most of it, of course, has been to the benefit of the good people of West Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont (I guess), Rhode Island and Massachusetts and all other bandwagoneers.  Belichick was defensive coach for both teams, Parcells was Head Coach for both, and so was Pete Carroll.  Eric Mangini was Belichik's protege.  Curtis Martin went from New England to the Jets, making him the most valuable acquisition we've gotten out of the pipeline, but of course New England has enjoyed the greatest benefits in the larger sense.  Belichick - whom Parcells presumptuously appointed as Jets Head Coach when the old man "retired" to become GM in 2000 - takes a perverse pleasure in snatching up our seconds and making them firsts.  Like Danny Woodhead.

Former Patriot Larry Izzo #53 came to us in 2009.  Izzo was one of those players whom you hoped would turn Belichick's stomach when he was dressed in green, but then Izzo was found to have a spine injury that forced him to retire a couple of months later.  It was not to be.  I liked Izzo because he represented a kind of player for whom no opportunity is ever turned down; in other words, he is a special teams man with more special teams tackles than any human being alive.  We assume that this would apply to anyone in the CFL.  No offense, fellas, and no pun intended.  Finally, the famous story about Larry Izzo is that at training camp in his rookie year with Miami (1996, undrafted) Coach Jimmy Johnson said that only two players were guaranteed to make the team - Dan Marino and Larry Izzo.  No one knew who the second guy was; they do now, mostly.  But I think Jimmy Johnson liked to say the name - "Larry Izzo," with its connotations, sounding like some guy fallen off a truck, like some nobody whose name sounds like "zero." His name has been bothering me for a long time because I could not remember the larger significance of it.  But now I remember.  Though there is no known relation, "Izzo" was Vince Lombardi's mother's maiden name.  Pedigree asserted, albeit nominally.  Larry Izzo was the omega to Marino's alpha.  Each of them would make it to opening day.  In the universe, one cannot exist without the other.

****

The 1975 Topps card of center Warren Koegel #53 immediately reminds me of a Presidential portrait, or even better, the famous painting of William Blake.  It's the image of a noble personage, a man looking hungrily beyond the the renderer's view.  Maybe that's the way he wanted it.  There weren't many "action" shots for that year's Topps cards.  Most of them were retreads from the years before or were reflective shots where the Jet players were asked to look off in the distance, and the players vacantly obliged.  Some have hands casually on both hips.  One or two try the lame, posed action shot - always amusing, for who are they defending against?  One or two look like they were taken during warm-ups at Foxboro the season before.  Among them all, Koegel's image looks like it belongs to a man who with a vision.  

His nickname was "Moose;" according to a rather detailed article on him for Coastal Carolina University in 2001 (where he was athletic director at the time), this nickname derives from the fact that he wore #14 as a Little Leaguer, the same number as "Moose" Skowron of the Yankees.  His Little League in Seaford, NY was very near the one I played for in North Merrick; what's incredible is that for someone as detail-oriented as I  (and about only a handful of things, mind you) I have no idea what numbers I wore in Little League, or even if I had a number at all.  That's bizarre.  It's another one for my mental health care professional.  

At any rate, Koegel (pronounced "ko-ghel," by the way) was director at Coastal Carolina and is apparently now in the same position at Jacksonville State.  Koegel was the offensive captain for Penn State in the late 60's and early 70's, with Jack Ham as defensive captain.  In the Coastal Carolina link above, there is an interesting detail about the end of Koegel's career in 1975.  He blew out his knee just before halftime in the away game against Kansas City, one of only three wins for the Jets that whole season.  His knee was repaired by Dr. James Nicholas, the eminent Merlin to Joe Namath's Arthur, the sports physician who enabled Joe to play longer than he could or should have.  "I haven't had any trouble with my knee since," Koegel says.  The irony is that Koegel's knee gave out before Joe's heavily braced ones did, which may be a testimony to Nicholas after all.  With the exception of John Riggins, the good doctor was sadly the most talented and able member of the team that year.

****

Out of Michigan State, drafted by the Jets in 2000, #53 Courtney Ledyard's KFFL profile through news releases looks like a journey back in immediate time.  In an instant, we know all the history we need to know, but nothing essential about the man - only the "transactions" of the quickly summarized past.  No looking through microfilm for us, or scrolling through the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, searching for "Ledyard, Courtney."  Those days are gone.  One link, one source.  That seems to be what it's all about.  At the above link, we begin with NFL Europe, where he was consigned in September 2001, and then to injuries earlier at the August 2001 camp, then his earlier re-signing in the spring of that year.  Such is Courtney Ledyard, whose name sounds like a band that toured with Lynard Skynard and Molly Hatchet.

****

Mike McKibben #53 arrived at Kent State two years after the shootings that marked the university in the historical mind.  What was it like then, and how did the jock culture at Kent State imagine itself in light of the countercultural community that the Troop G attacked?  How quickly did people need to move on there in order to move on with their lives?  Was it just a peripheral thing after a while, the way it is, probably, for students today?  People pass by the Prentice Hall parking lot to get to class and get on with their destiny.  


Mike McKibben graduated at a good time to join the Jets.  It would have been a good year for my Dad to join the team, and he was 41.  The jobs were available.  In 1979, McKibben's rookie year, the Jets broke even but could have done much better if not for the injuries that wore the team down to a nub.  Missing Pat Leahy alone cost them at least two games.  Mike McKibben became a starter very quickly, and it looks like he played at linebacker in all 16 games of that season.  He played less the year after that and then was out of the NFL.  He then played for Pittsburgh and then Denver in the USFL a year or two later.  Or vice versa.  

Oh c'mon, don't act like you remember their names right off the bat.  The Pittsburgh Maulers and the Denver Gold.  There you go.  There are no stupid questions here.  No one's judging you.  The interesting thing is that the Denver Gold practically replicated the Pittsburgh Steelers' uniform, while the Pittsburgh Maulers' purple logo looked like something out of the WPA.  Remember that the only stupid question is the one not asked.

"Ledyard, Courtney"

NY Jets #53 - Part 1

Which of these 1974 Defensive All-Americans
is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?
Hint: the Jets didn't pick him

With a few exceptions, number 53's on the New York Jets do not exactly charge the memory. The names are like a list of car dealerships in the Tallahassee area. But in the worlds from whence they come, all of these #53's are famous to someone somewhere. The professional football world is as unforgiving to a college football star as it is to the thespian who wins a copy of Stanislaski's An Actor Prepares on awards night at a local high school and finds himself five years later asking for your order at a McDonald's in Manhattan.

Can you spot the Hall of Famer in the Playboy 1974 All-American college football defense? Hint: He was not drafted by the Jets. Another hint: That's not a very good hint. He was actually drafted by the Dallas Cowboys. At the top left hand is Randy White #94, defensive end out of the University of Maryland. The others photographed here, to greater and lesser degrees, had careers in the NFL, but none with White's success. But this is the way it is in life. The player depicted here from Auburn is #53 Ken Bernich, All-American linebacker. He was drafted by the Chargers and then suited up for the Jets in 1975, recovering one fumble, though I don't know in which game. After that, he was done in the NFL. Today he recruits for Auburn even still and is apparently a high school football coach, presumably in Florida.

For me, the only really galling thing is that, again, the only guy above in the Hall of Fame is the guy the Cowboys drafted. It's sick, actually. The Jets did not draft in 1975 until the second round, and they drafted Anthony Davis, the Heisman Trophy winner. I don't think many people know that. I don't know if Davis would have really helped them much, but they did not want to give in to his contractual demands (they had a fairly expensive, wobbly-legged quarterback who had actually won the last last six games of the Jets' 1974 season), so Anthony Davis went on to play for money in the short-lived WFL. The next year, the Jets would draft a first-round quarterback, at long last.

****

Khary (pronounced "Cary") Campbell #53 was linebacker for the Jets from 2002-03, out of Bowling Green. He played sporadically for us and then became a regular with the Redskins at a time when Jets players went to DC like panners to the West. He finished his career with the Texans in 2009. He was a special teams captain with the Redskins, as is depicted as such in the fascinating "men in suits" shot Jim Zorn insisted upon during his brief tenure as Washington's Head Coach. He wanted his captains to exude a look of professionalism which Campbell described as "gangster." (Another teammate preferred to describe the look as "deacon.") Campbell is second from the left.

In February 2009, Campbell took the floor dancing the Macarena at a Redskins fundraiser which featured, yes, former Lt. Col. Oliver North selling raffles table to table. Campbell appears to be a good guy, not really doing the Macarena but dancing to it in order to keep an otherwise dull team obligation a little amusing for everybody. But now I'm wondering what I would do if Oliver North came by my table asking if I'd like to buy a raffle ticket. I'd ask him a couple of questions, maybe. The first would be, "Who the hell let you in here?" The second would be, "Didn't you knowingly divert United States resources to make worthless contacts with military elements in a terrorist-sponsoring nation?" The answer to the first question, of course, would be to some degree former Redskins coach Joe Gibbs and ultimately Daniel Snyder. The answer to the second question is, of course, yes.

****

"Often times, 'overachiever' is code for something like "This team is so bad, they've got Cascadden logging serious time." Slow, unskilled, overwhelmed - the model Jet of his era."

This is how Jeff Pearlman describes linebacker Chad Cascadden #53, who ranks 99th in the Top 100 Worst NFL Players Of All Time, on Deadspin. I'm happy to remind you that Jets players make up 10% of the list. Cascadden is technically the best of the Jets' worst, whereas their worst of the Worst on the list remains Johnny Lam Jones. This is all debatable and frankly skewed. Many, many players in the NFL try their best, but many, many players have no business suiting up. To continue the analogy above, how many actors have you seen in any medium whom you realize simply cannot even find the paper bag out of which they are supposed to act? As a teacher, I've seen a lot of bad teachers. I haven't been pulled over for speeding by many cops but when I have, two out of three have been - by this taxpayer's measurement, at least - really dumb, inarticulate cops. Many of us in this world are slow, unskilled and overwhelmed.

The trick of Pearlman's list is trying to discern the absolute draft washouts (like Lam Jones, theoretically) and/or hyped superstars (like Anthony Davis, who figures at #46!) from pure incompetence cloaked in feigned praise. Actual Underachievers vs. "Overachievers." I'm not sure Cascadden deserves his ranking, though as Pearlman points out, the "overachiever" was often the model Jet during the Kotite era. He had three tackles in eight games in 1996 and five tackles in four games in 1998. Back in the day when our expectations were so low, an "overachiever," which is exactly what I thought of Cascadden during this time, was our hero. It was hard for a Jets fan of the 1990's to judge who was and was not the worst. Our best were often the ones with the best attitude, and on a 3-13 squad (1995) and a 1-15 squad (1996) what the hell else can you expect? By this measurement, Wayne Chrebet was just as good at his position as Chad Cascadden was at linebacker, which of course is not actually true. But when your team is bad for a long time, it's hard to tell real talent from the untalented guys who just work hard.

And while we're back to the topic of draft choices, does anyone know what makes Barry Gardner #53 special? Drafted in 1999 in the second round by the Philadelphia Eagles, he had the benefit of less scrutiny than the top pick, Donovan McNabb. He played three seasons with the Eagles, two with the Browns, one with the Jets in 2005 at linebacker, and apparently one with the New England Patriots where he broke his leg at the start of the 2006 season. Today he is listed as a free agent even still, which means, I believe, that he's retired. His numbers don't put him on any lists of worsts or bests, but that's probably as much as any of us can say for ourselves. This is the way it is in life.