NY Jets #48 - Part 2

They wouldn't let linebacker Brashton Satele #48 return to college after four years. Neither would my parents. Ultimately, my loss was not so great because I went to school in Rhode Island, and though I have a special place in my heart for the Ocean State, there was not much to recommend it other than its easy access to Massachusetts. Satele's alma mater was the University of Hawaii. Unlike most players who took the opposite approach, perhaps he thought he could enhance his potential for the NFL draft by playing one more year in college. And why wouldn't he want to return to paradise?

At six feet, he went undrafted in 2010, but showed up at Hofstra and was signed for a three-year deal with the Jets, though I don't remember seeing him play much this season. He is a local hero, and I have a soft spot for guys like that, which is why I liked Danny Woodhead. I have no idea what plans are for him, but if Vernon Gholsten still has a chance, doesn't Brashton Satele? The media in Hawaii rooted for his success, so why shouldn't we? And shouldn't all local news be delivered in Hawaiian shirts?

****

The truth is that strong safety Brian Washington #48 played for the Jets during some empty spaces in my fan memory. I was at college, working at my first full-time job, then in love, then going to grad school and teaching for the first time. It was an Important Time in my life, a time I was using to evolve into the human being I am today, whatever that means.

In one's early 20's, everything appears to hinge on every decision you make. And to a certain degree, I guess it's true. How would I have known to move to Philadelphia - a city I had only visited only in seventh grade with my Dad - to go to grad school if I hadn't met a guy at a party in college who said he was going to move to Philadelphia for his program? A year and a half later, when I thought about a grad school, I remembered the university that my old classmate had mentioned and just applied there, on a whim. Eventually, it was the only program that took me. If I hadn't seen him at that party that seemingly insignificant night I would never have thought of applying there, I would never have moved here, I would never have met my wife, and so on. It felt like a time when Fate was guiding me. I guess It was.

But then it wasn't, quite. Maybe things just happened, as things are wont to do. But in such an atmosphere where Serious Moments seem to be happening everywhere, one is compelled to think that each relationship, each friendship, each trip to the supermarket, each day at work, each conversation, each day is filled with Portent. It gave me panic attacks.

Anyway, Brian Washington played for the Jets for those five seasons, my forgotten years, 1990-94. Among them, the one inspiring moment for the Jets that stands out is the 1992 recovery from paralysis of Dennis Byrd, the defensive tackle who went down against the Chiefs at home. His return to normal life after a paralyzing collision with teammate Scott Merseneau remains a moment of spiritual energy, a miraculous well to which the team can return again and again as needed. No one is permitted to wear #90 on the Jets anymore. Rex Ryan asked Byrd to speak to his players before the playoff game against the Patriots this past year, and the players carried the #90 jersey onto the field with them as they met their presumptuous rivals midfield for the coin toss. In 1992, Dennis Byrd arose and walked by the power of his will. And the Jets beat the Patriots.

Byrd's injury is a prime example of how disoriented I was about all my priorities during the '92 season. That weekend of his injury I was in New York staying over with my luminous and kind girlfriend. We were both lovely people. It was exciting to feel like we were that much in love, even when we didn't really know one another; all that was there were hormones and the incomparable human wish for something eternal, even in the face of hard truths.

We weren't broken up yet, though. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving, and I stayed over and then caught New Jersey Transit at Penn Station on Monday back to Philadelphia. I will never forget where I was, walking from the main entrance of the station, when I saw the Daily News headline about Dennis Byrd's condition. I hadn't even paid attention to the game the day before. Dennis Byrd would almost certainly never walk again, it said. I recall staring at the picture taken of his collision with Merseneau. The Jets had lost 23-7 to Kansas City, but they had long been out of the playoff picture, having lost their first five games what with Ken O'Brien's holdout and the legendary coming and going of Browning Nagle.

I hadn't been paying attention all season. I had been pretending to study to become a college professor. I had been pretending to be in love. I was practicing to become an adult, and mature people who were interested in going into academia didn't care about football. When I stared at that headline, something felt cold and neglected inside of me. It wasn't just the loss of yet another player that season, nor even the notion that the man's life as he knew it was in disarray. I had spent so much time away from my team, and with everything they had been through that year, I felt I had abandoned them. I felt I had made them endure it all alone. Why had I left behind the team of my childhood in their time of need? And for what? For the opportunity to play-act the life of an adult person? What kind of life was that? What kind of a person would do that? What kind of a man flat-leaves his team?

The following week I think I went back up to the city and and stayed with my girlfriend. Our weeks together were numbered. In the meantime, the Jets played Buffalo in a cold, meaningless game at Orchard Park, and they won on an interception for a touchdown near the end scored by Brian Washington. I don't remember watching it or reading the headlines about it on the passing newsstands of a railway station the next day. But Brian Washington united his team in the midst of their funk. It was their last win of their lonely season.

The Times wrote:

"Drawing strength from the faith that Byrd had displayed, and lifted by the news Saturday that Byrd had exhibited some voluntary movement in his legs, the Jets pulled out an improbable 24-17 victory over the Bills to cap what had probably been the most anguished week in the team's history.

When strong safety Brian Washington intercepted a pass by Bills quarterback Jim Kelly and zigzagged 23 yards through the outstretched arms of Buffalo players to score the game-winning touchdown with 1 minute 41 seconds to play, it did seem as if some kind of divine destiny was working for the Jets.

As Washington lay on the frozen turf in the end zone underneath a pile of his teammates, cuddling the football, his mind flashed to Byrd at the hospital.

"When I fell down in the end zone, I just said, 'Yes!' " Washington recalled. "In reflection, we look at Dennis and we look at what happened. He wants us to be strong, because he is very strong. We definitely drew electricity from him in this game today."

Does "divine destiny" work on us, or do we read into the work of our own will the intentions of something greater than ourselves? Does it matter to know one way or the other? Dennis Byrd's legs had begun to move that week. The Jets beat the Bills. He was beginning to rise and walk again.

It would be inaccurate and frankly disrespectful to a man's great achievement to say that I was likewise coming out of my fog with the Jets. The Jets would finish 4-12, then go 8-8 in 1993, a year where Brian Washington would nab six more interceptions. I wouldn't really come back to them until about a year later, when I was dating someone else who understood just how much they once meant to me - my wife. By 1995, hard-hitting Brian Washington and James Hasty joined the Kansas City Chiefs, leaving the Jets with even less than they had to offer the year Dennis Byrd went down. It felt like starting all over again. It felt like home.

NY Jets #48 - Part 1

In 1976, a year for the Jets when everything seemed to end before it began, Clifford Brooks #48 finished his career with us, at defensive back. Clifford Brooks was at least partially like Roscoe Word in that both he and Word played for the Bills and the Jets in 1976. It may even have been they were traded for one another. As usual, I have no idea.

Brooks' rookie season in the NFL was 1972 - his only playoff season - with the Cleveland Browns. Very few people, other than Browns fans (and probably few Browns fans at that) might recall that the 1972 Browns lead the unbeaten Dolphins by a score of 14-13 late in the fourth quarter of their Christmas Eve playoff. I mention this only because the man who who caught the go-ahead TD pass from Browns QB Mike Phipps, the man who briefly put the Dolphins' Perfection in jeopardy was a wide receiver named Fair Hooker. Yes. The man who might have been the impediment standing between the Dolphins and history (other than the 1972 Jets, as I have mentioned before) is a man whose name is synonymous with "Reasonable Prostitute."

As for Clifford Brooks, all I can say is that his Wikipedia entry is short on football and long on business achievements, which doesn't help us. It says things like, "In 2000 became part owner of an ambulance company. Assumed 100% ownership in 2002. Sold the company in 2007." I try to be curious about things like that, but then I'm not. Why an ambulance company? Did he make a profit?

Ah well. The reason why I am where I am, doing what I'm doing at this very moment - sitting up in bed, not sleeping, writing a blog no one will read just hours after watching a Mike Leigh film in a theater where my wife and I were basically the youngest people in the audience (I'm 41) - is because I'm not like Clifford Brooks. I have never taken an interest in running a company that specializes in inspecting hydraulic apparatus for oil and gas drilling. Metaphorically speaking, I am a Fair Hooker, a brief bubble of unexpected circumstance only to be popped again and put back into place by the forces of Perfection.

****

Cornell Gordon #48 played defensive back for the Jets from 1965-69. We presume that he still owns the Super Bowl ring he earned. His middle name is Kermit. He had to play at a variety of different secondary positions for the 1968 squad to compensate for team injuries. I believe he was one of several team members ordered by AFL President Milt Woodard to shave off his moustache that year. Like a number of players from the '68 squad, Gordon left the Jets after the 1969 season. As I recall from his book Gang Green, Gerald Eskanazi suggested that the rotting of the Jets in the 1970's germinated in the exodus of good players from that year on. Eskanazi suggests that Weeb Ewbank's miserly ways as General Manager were largely to blame. Whether Gordon was a part of this or not, I cannot say. He went on to play three seasons with the Denver Broncos.

On a whim, I decided to look him up on Facebook, and I think I may have actually found him. Maybe. Or maybe not. I found a man named Cornell Gordon. Do I friend him? I mean, what if it isn't the Cornell Gordon I'm looking for, and he agrees to it, and I am simply friends with a man for no reason other than the fact that he is named Cornell Gordon? Are the conditions of that friendship any different than they would be if he actually were the former Jet?

Does it matter?

Gus Holloman

The Internet changes our understanding of what it means to know someone. This also holds true for former Jets defensive back, the man who replaced Gordon at number - and possibly at position - Gus Holloman. At defensive back from 1970-72, Hollomon came from Denver to Flushing just as Cornell Gordon was going to Denver. Was that a trade, like Brooks for Word, or vice versa (if that was a trade, too)? His statistics reveal very little, other than the fact that he blocked a put for the Broncos in 1969 - obviously not the one Steve O'Neal sent deep into the thin air of Mile High for the NFL record that year.


Naturally this caused some consternation until I realized that what I was looking at was not Hollomon's NFL page but his HFL page. Sadly, I don't understand physics in the way that Hugh Everett III did, but I do love the concept of parallel universes, especially when they apply to football. The Historic Football League (HFL) would seem to be an alternate historian's dream come true. Imagine for a moment that your team - let's say the New York Jets - actually made all the right draft choices year in and out; yes, yes, I know, but let's just admit that it was at one time it was statistically possible that this could have happened. Let's imagine that you travel back in time and, in the 1976 NFL Draft, instead of choosing Richard Todd, Shafer Suggs and Greg Buttle (and who could have blamed anyone for choosing Todd and Buttle?) your hindsight enables you to choose instead, say, Jackie Slater. Now imagine such a transaction occurring without you, in a parallel universe. In our universe, Jackie Slater was picked by the LA Rams in the third round that year and played 20 Hall of Fame seasons in the NFL.

But in a parallel universe of the HFL, he plays his second season in 1977 for the New York Jets, alongside Dan Dierdorf; he blocks for OJ Simpson, who is a Jets running back (apparently Juice was traded for someone in this bizarro universe). His quarterback on the Jets is Bert Jones, who throws to Cliff Branch. Just like I remember it. Only not.

Some things don't change in any universe, though. The HFL Yearbook for 1978 suggests this about the Jets' performance during their 1977 HFL season:

The Jets continued to confound the experts, limping to a 3-7 start. The club won five of their last six but it wasn't enough to overtake the Patriots, meaning another year out of disappointment and another year of watching the playoffs on TV.

How about that? I feel like I lived in that parallel universe as a child, though I actually didn't. What's the point of wanting to be a different version of yourself somewhere else, in a parallel universe, when really the results seem to be the same? Maybe in that parallel universe I never became a Jets fan. There, in the third grade, I'm interested only in studying math and science so that someday I will be buying and selling ambulance companies, or becoming an inspector of hydraulic equipment.

But the business of who Gus Hollomon is doesn't quite end there. Google anybody, of course, and you get someone's known business there in the foreground, but you also get the bits and pieces of a person's past, perhaps a part of someone's life you were never intended to know. One of my students looked me up on the Google and found me in a 1990 YouTube clip in a college play. If you don't mind, I won't link to it.

Gus Hollomon's name comes up briefly in the comments under a two year-old blog entry for what appears to be a Princeton, NJ-based blog called TigerHawk with lots of conservatism laced throughout. This entry, dated from September 2008, which was a very different time and place for the hopes and ambitions of conservatives, includes a commenter named dawnfire82 who talks about living in Beaumont, TX and experiencing racism against white people. He writes, "It was accepted as a fact of life that you couldn't stand up to this like your daddy always told you to because if you popped one obnoxious black kid in the mouth, all of his co-ethnics would show up and beat the hell out of you if not then, then later." He refers to African-Americans as "co-ethnics." He's an angry white man, a person who is mostly a dime a dozen in the United States.

But then someone else in the comments named DEC asks dawnfire82 if, having grown up in Beaumont, was dawnfire's high school principal a man named Gus Hollomon. If so, DEC says, "he's a friend of mine."

dawnfire82 (who also has a blog disturbingly called "Black Faced Sinner") replies that he remembers he had a Principal who had a Super Bowl ring. He then provides the URL to Gus Hollomon's HFL page, the same one I provided above, thinking that this was the real Gus Hollomon of the NFL. Why would Hollomon, living we presume in our reality, have had a Super Bowl ring when he never even saw the postseason once? Did Gus Hollomon have a Super Bowl ring from an alternate universe? Was it Cornell Gordon's?

Then dawnfire also provides the URL for the link here, to show a Gus Hollomon retiring from the position as Beaumont's Superintendent.

DEC says that the Gus Hollomon he remembers "played for the New York Jets (with Namath) and the Denver Broncos. That was the one who became superintendent." Which is more correct.

I don't blame these fellows for not communicating clearly. They probably both have the same man. Recall what I said in only recently in a prior entry about athletes and school administration. dawnfire82 doesn't quite have it right about the ring (looking at his blog, I'm not surprised he's incorrect about a lot of things. Yeesh.) but then it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the imaginary worlds we create (and those created for us) from the real ones we live in, especially if they coexist online.

NY Jets #47 - Part 2

Last night, the Jets lost their second straight AFC Championship. They played the first half against Pittsburgh horribly, right down there with the worst of their play this season. They didn't tackle properly; at least three interceptions that could have been. I can't even really articulate all of the frustrations. The second half was less horrible, and had the game gone on for another minute and a half, they would have won, the way they did several times over admittedly lesser teams when the game seemed out of reach. But they didn't do it. Time ran out, the Steelers got their first downs, the game ended.

I have been here before, and not because they were in last year's AFC Title game. My first Jets playoff game was an exact primer for watching how quickly a playoff game can spin out of your team's control. Such was the case with the 12/27/81 Wild Card Game loss to the Buffalo Bills, where the Jets were down 24-10 at halftime, fought back and then lost within the last minute.

Unlike last night, it actually looked worse for the Jets in the second half of the 1981 playoff. In the image below, courtesy of Corbis, Jerry Holmes #47, defensive back, is trying in vain to chase down Bills' running back Joe Cribbs, who is about to score on a 45-yard touchdown run, making the score 31-13 in the third quarter. I remember this. I remember the sense of frustration that only a 12 year-old can feel when he believes that the gods are serving up his hopes to the dogs. The Jets would respond with two touchdowns after Cribbs' score but then would mythically fail on an a Bill Simpson interception Richard Todd pass intended for Derrick Gaffney. I was filled with awe at how terrible it felt. I felt a little of that last night, but my wife and I had friends over, and that was a good distraction from the kinds of things a lonely boy once felt almost thirty years ago when Joe Cribbs added insult to injury.

If you looked closely and see into the eyes of the fans there in the background at Shea Stadium, then maybe you'd see the same expression of horror and haplessness among them. But is that what Jerry Holmes himself is feeling at this precise moment?

This is happening. It is. It's vanishing out of sight. We waited all season, and now this.

I was listening to NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me two weeks ago, and their guest was former Ravens lineman Tony Siragusa, the large guy who stands at the end zone and provides whatever insight that a big guy in the end zone can provide, which, to be honest, is something I don't think I really understand, but Fox does; and that's not a statement I make very often. Anyway, he was asked whether he rooted for the Ravens in the playoffs, and he replied that if they still paid him, he would root for them, but no.

Can Jerry Holmes really feel what the fans are feeling right now, in their knit green hats? Who knows. Maybe not there, not then. Still, we all feel it somewhere. That sense of loss. There it goes. It's vanishing. It's gone. Gone for good.

After the 1983 season, Holmes went to play for Walt Michaels and the New Jersey Generals and then for the Pittsburgh (wait for it) Maulers, both of the USFL. (I believe Mike Rozier played for the Maulers.) Holmes left a good thing with the Jets at a time when better things outside the NFL seemed possible. On the verge of next season's lockout, we now know that the NFL really is the only game making a wholesale profit in America, but Jerry Holmes didn't see any of that way back then. How could he? So he had to try.

According to the vast black hole of information, after his playing career, he went on to become the Head Coach at Hampton University in 2008, turned the team around and then was fired for shopping himself around informally for a better coaching job in the NFL. By publicly shopping around, he apparently hurt the school's recruitment for the following year. Still, he had to try. Now he's a secondary coach for the Hartford Colonials of the UFL, which still exists, I believe. Remember when we talked about the Colonials, earlier? Remember? The former New York Sentinels, whose home was in Hofstra? Ah, the UFL.

Makes me kind of feel bad for Jerry Holmes, although right now I'm liable to recognize loss and misfortune in any given situation. We're all searching for that moment when opportunity will shift our way. We chase after it - it's a job, a love, a piece of serenity. But all things are elusive in their own way, and some objectives are in fact the very ironic source of our undoing. We either watch it evaporate from the stands or on the field, and I don't know which is preferable, for the sense of loss is palpable either way. There it goes. Gone for good.

Whereas sometimes the objective seems impossible to begin with, even as it rips right past you. Tommy Marvaso, #47 played defensive back in 1976, statistically one of the Jets' worst seasons, particularly on defense. After that, he falls off the statistical map, gone for good from the professional world of football. He has one lone, dubious moment in a quick wrap-up of the NFL Films' week 13, below. At about the :20 mark, veteran tight end Jean Fugett is running alongside Marvaso and then suddenly gets behind him and open for a touchdown from Billy Kilmer.



In this case, two people watching helplessly in the stands were Mom and Dad, while the Jets lost 37-16. It was their last game. They didn't get divorced; Dad divorced the Jets after that, giving up his seasons tickets. Like a lot of people, he didn't even go to the last home game against the Bengals. It was a sensible thing to do after a second consecutive 3-11 finish. He had been watching the Jets' fortunes vanish out of sight since 1969, losing season after losing season, and he decided there wasn't really a point to watching it happen anymore.

But in Tommy Marvaso's case, he may not even have had enough time to watch it vanish completely out of his view. There may have been only a quick moment of recognition to see Jean Fugett there, and then not there. Where the hell did he go? he wonders as he looks to see Fugett with the ball. How the hell did that happen so fast? Gone for good, Tommy.

****

Try to grasp this one. Roscoe Word #47 played at cornerback for four different teams over nine games in the 14-game season of 1976. This means that Marvaso replaced him in the secondary in number, if not at position. I'm not sure where Word finished the season, but he had the most traveled single season I have ever seen in the NFL. He began his career with the Jets in 1974. It's difficult to tell where and when he ended up first in the '76 season; it may be that it started with Buffalo, but then he either went to the Giants or back to the Jets, getting his old #47 back, I guess. Then he traveled to that legendary island of misfit toys, the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Here his journey came to an end. Which games and where and when, I cannot say.

If you cannot show a respect for a man who was witness to such an allotment of losing over one season, then I do not think you have a heart beating inside you. Consider that the 1976 Jets (again one of our worst squads on record; a team whose own coach quit on them before the season ended) were not even the last place team in the AFC East. That distinction belonged to the Buffalo Bills who, after finishing 10-4 in 1975, finished 2-12 the year later. The Giants finished 3-11 while the Bucs established the industry standard for ineptitude and went winless. It is statistically possible that on his journey, Roscoe Word may not even have encountered a single victory.

Did it matter? Perhaps no more to Roscoe Word than it did to Jerry Holmes. We assume he collected a paycheck wherever he went. His only complaint may have been having to collect all the W-2's. But it's the idea that maybe he finished his career with those legendary 0-14 Bucs that intrigues me. To be a benchwarmer, a replacement, a cog in as mightily broken a piece of machinery as the Buccaneers were that year must have been a humbling experience or, possibly, surreal. Perhaps he saw himself as a fly on the wall, a witness to history. If the great affair is to move, then the trip ought to be interesting.

All I know is that he made a late-game interception in 1974 that made my Dad exhale with a violence of joy that only a man in the throes of passion can truly express, as the Jets held onto a 21-16 victory over the Patriots at Foxboro, keeping the Jets' winning streak on track that year. I have written of this before; it's my ur-Jets moment. The Jets were out of the playoffs by the time Word ended the game, but Dad went to the following week's game against Miami at Shea, which Word helped end yet again with a late-game interception of Bob Griese. Dad came home buoyant, willing to renew his season tickets another year, willing to believe all over again. In two weeks, I saw him become a boy again right before my eyes, and because of this, I think Word is the man most responsible for making me what I am today - a convert, a Jets fan, a neurotic, a wreck, a shell of a human being who fights against high expectation each week after a win and who finds reassurance of humanity's innate ridiculousness with each Jet loss, the naively felt possibility that comes with each Jet win.

Thank you, Roscoe Word. For better or for worse, you have made me who I am. And because the human soul's limitless capacity for faith cannot be measured in a statistical value that I yet know of, I am left only with the option of referring to you as an infinite Jet.

I Know It's Over

It has been a wonderful season, but as was the case with last year's conference championship, I am utterly heartbroken. And now I begin the process of letting go of the pain. There are people who die needlessly each day. There are people who never get a chance to deflect their anxieties upon the fortunes of a football team because they live impoverished under repressive regimes (I'm looking at you, North Korea and Myanmar), or in shacks under the eye of the Chinese government, or maybe in North Philadelphia, where every day is an embodiment of where the American Dream has failed.

It doesn't matter. People I know from all around the country whom I have known over the years know exactly what the last few weeks have meant to me. I am deeply proud that my team made it is as far as they did, but when the party is over, a part of you dies, too. This has been a great season, not just because it is the first time the Jets have gone to the AFC Championship two years in a row; no, I am happy because this has not really been a typical Jets season. Or maybe it was. Nothing has been taken for granted, except for the fact that Rex Ryan has made this season all about him. By doing so, his team has reflected what was best and worst about him.

In this single year, Jenn Sterger revealed the intimate self-portraits of Brett Favre, followed by the Jets being sued for sexual harassment (again, thanks Brett), saw a sideline journalist get harassed without legal ramifications, witnessed the hiding in plain sight of Ryan's love for his wife's feet, the impact of Sal Alosi's knee. Rex Ryan is not responsible for all of the above, but he is, above all, a lightening rod, like Sarah Palin. Only Ryan is actually talented. Is he a great coach? I'm not sure. He is either a genius, or a dumb, lucky lummox; maybe something in between. Either way, he said my favorite line of the year; no, not the one about the goddamned snack. He said, "Same old Jets. Going in the AFC Championship second year in a row." I've been waiting a long time for someone to sarcastically respond like that to the worst voices in my head.

I only know that the Jets never had the sense of this game's tempo. There were outplayed in a way that they would never have allowed themselves to be against the Patriots. Why did they throw on fourth down when they should have run? I don't understand it. But it doesn't matter. I know it's over.

NY Jets #47 - Part 1

Solomon Brannan played defensive back for the Jets and the Chiefs from 1965-67, without much more distinction than any other member of the secondary in the mid-60's. It's an area of the field with an extraordinary rate of attrition. But Brannan is noted here for the weirdness of being in a four-way card collection without having a card of his own for the 1968 season. This might be because he's in a 1967 Jets uniform but listed as playing for the expansion 1968 Cincinnati Bengals, which he never actually did. I believe he retired a Jet.

But he returned to his alma mater Morris Brown University, an institution that is known as Historically African-American. As far as I can see he is still the Head Coach of the football team. This is what some men do. They go back to find a new life in the old.

But it's been a long time for Sol Brannan at Morris Brown, and times are not what they used to be for Historically African-American schools. Like other such colleges, Morris Brown has been hit with particularly bad economic times, and this extends to the increasingly thin football program. According to Wikiwiki, Morris Brown has lost its funding from the United Negro College Fund and its accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Its former President and its Student Aid Director - who had worked together at other institutions - pleaded guilty to charges of embezzling Federal Aid. The defendants claimed that much of the Student Aid money was used to keep the university's basic functions working; its water was shut off briefly in 2008. There were other indications that the embezzled cash went to private uses too, like trips. I could use some embezzled money right about now.

A single five-year old clip of Morris Brown football, coached by Sol Brannan includes the following message:

This is a clip of the Morris Brown College Football program. This institution is in need of your help. Financially, it can use an infusion of funds. This is a great school, but has ran into differences (sic). Please help me to promote its talents.

Mike D'Amato #47

Brannan's successor at both number and position was Mike D'Amato, though D'Amato was also a returner. A Brooklyn native, he attended Hofstra and was drafted by the Jets. His single season with us was the 1968 season. Imagine your lone year in the pros is spent with a championship team, or rather the championship team of the AFL era. Here we see a picture of him traveling with Weeb Ewbank back to the locker room in Miami at the end of Super Bowl III. His arm is around the old man. Somebody else's arm crosses into the picture, and the man on the left with the mustache is Bake Turner #29, one of the oldest Jets on the team. Mike D'Amato has just finished playing the last game of his professional career, though he probably doesn't realize this. I suppose he is experiencing a kind of euphoria that can only last as long as your wildest dream. I hope he had fun that night and the night after. Today, apparently, he works for Hofstra. Is this what I need to do? Do I need to give my alma mater a call? What skills could I possibly hope to bring? My talent for stealing food from the cafeteria?

****

Is there anything more depressing than Jim Earley's statistics in 1978, at running back, in #47?

****

I've noticed that quite a lot of my colleagues are former graduates of the high school where I teach, and those in particular who were athletes back then eventually go on to become administrators. At first they gravitate to the classroom but often find its four walls a little too confining. Athletes don't thrive in desks, chairs, or cubicles. When they grow up, and often grow fat, they remain drawn to the idea of having a free reign to eventually go where they please. They like giving instructions to their peers. They respond well to discipline, but they have too many good memories of exchanging that good behavior for having the run of the place. Call it the Peter Principle; call it by Biff Loman's name if you like. Athletes like to be in charge. They remember how fun it looked when they watched the coach tell someone to run laps.

I have no way of knowing of this was true for Scott Frost, who was quarterback for the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1998. When I first saw the Jets play in their new-old uniforms in preseason against Philadelphia that year, the first player I saw on the field was Scott Frost, and because I was about as unsure of Glenn Foley as everybody else (miss ya, Glenn!), I figured that since they had drafted him, then perhaps Frost was a QB in the making. No dice. He was #47. Bill Parcells had made him a free safety. His best season was with us in 2000, with 19 tackles.

After the pros he then gradually became an assistant and is most recently the wide receivers coach for the University of Oregon. No small thing. Frost is now heavily desired among Cornhusker fans who want to see him as their offensive coordinator. They want him to "come home," as they say. College football is religion in the sense that people witness something they construe as pure and true, untainted by earthly needs and all their empty promises. But we know religion is never so pure, and neither is the college game. That discussion is not even worth having. I know I would like to go back in time to my college days in order to experience one night I passed up with a young woman with fascinatingly long hair, and I would also like to drop that useless journalism class in favor of one in the classics. Scott Frost went back to school in his own time, perhaps because it's where his best memories of the past come from. Like this one: The Flea Kicker. I kid you not.

And few people know that it was Frost who managed to pull the now-Buccaneer, then-Duck LaGarrette Blount off of the opposing fans who had just seen Blount punch Byron Hount of Boise State as they were all leaving the field. Wikirama says:

"As he was escorted to the locker room, Blount confronted Boise State fans who were jeering at him after seeing the video replay.^[36] Blount says that one Boise State fan brandished a chair at him and another punched him.^[37] Two police officers and Oregon assistant coach Scott Frost^[36] restrained Blount and escorted him into the locker room. Video of the incident spread rapidly on the Internet.

Here is that video. I see no chair, but stick around until about :32, when you will see a still-boyish, red-haired Scott Frost, escorting his insane player off the field. Frost is doing what every good former athlete, Flea Kicker-turned-administrator-coach invariably must. There is room to roam on the sidelines, but he must still vainly compel young men to behave themselves. They forget; that's the hard part.

Divisional Playoff: NY Jets 28 New England 21

Over the many years I've looked in the mirror, the same ashen expression of wan care has been there to greet me. There is a sinking face there, a boy turned into pale middle-aged man who seems to be looking through his reflection, over his shoulder for the next terrible, imaginary thing that threatens to ruin whatever piece of mind he possesses. Written into the contours of my face are the usual litany of avoidances, the fatty, reassuring foods, staying up late, alcohol, avoiding humanity except at work; we neurotics find ways to comfort ourselves with the very worst choices in order to stave off the pain of losing what little we imagine we never quite had.

Buddhism suggests rather strongly that what a human being needs most is found at the very seat of his soul. What he needs is already there; he needs only to call upon it through meditation and be present in a moment of acceptance of what already is. But having grown up with the mixed bag of ideologies and faiths belonging to the Western tradition, I have both a powerful sense of individuality and yet a deep sense that what I possess is intrinsically flawed. Perhaps if you dig into the DNA of people in Belgrade, Moscow, Munich, Glasgow and Everton, you will find this same worried look, the same basic absence of serenity. Some turn to religion to fill the space that the soul finds so cleverly absent. But I suspect that many like-minded people in all those places do as I have over the years and maintain an unconditional belief that somehow, someday, some way his football team (whichever football) will make it all OK.

It's an illusion. I felt elated when they beat the Patriots last night, but this morning I felt like killing people. I left a Starbucks this morning, suggesting within earshot, that I wanted to destroy all the Starbucks in Philadelphia, which (and I want to say this to anyone surfing the Internet at Homeland Security tonight) I do NOT intend to do. It's the understaffing, the chipperness of the barrista that really conceals a perceptible hostility, it's the ridiculously overrated food, the paralyzing range of beverages with names like no-whip macciato, two-whip latte, a vivano smoothy with a shot of expresso, a soy frappacino, a misto, a red eye, a creme brule latte, and other things that are probably also available at Dairy Queen, only with soy. All I want IS A MEDIUM COFFEE AND THE NEW YORK TIMES, DAMN YOU ALL. AND NO. I STILL HAVE NOT LEARNED WHICH SIZE WITHIN YOUR EXCESSIVELY COMPLICATED SIZING LINGO DERIVED FROM FAUX ITALIAN CONSTITUTES A "MEDIUM." YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT BECAUSE I AM USING OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE. GIVE IT TO ME.

I merely use this as example of how ephemeral and meaningless joy is when it is associated with something not intrinsic to our being. And when the Jets beat the Patriots 28-21 in the AFC Divisional Playoff (and I say this with a residual tingling sensation at the base of my scalp) I felt a euphoria that, all the same, could only last the week, if not a day. It's a hard truth we must all face. We are only as happy as our own willingness to accept and to seek serenity through understanding what constitutes the true realities of our existence. But then I look at this.

Well, enough of that. Let's just relish some of this happiness...

****

Let me begin with a confession: at times last night I might not have been rooting for the Jets quite as much as I was rooting for the Patriots to lose. Some of my New England friends (and my own Patriot bandwagon students!) seemed to approach this game with a haughtiness that was uncharacteristic of the New Englanders I knew at college back the late 1980's when I went to school up there. On days when we felt flush enough, my housemates and I would go a McDonald's in Providence whose walls were adorned with New England sports heroes of a distant time. There were faded images of Carlton Fisk, Bobby Orr, Steve Grogan, all sharing uncomfortable space with their only successful champion of the 80's, Larry Bird. And with bone spurs in his heel, Bird's star was beginning to fade. I felt sad and sympathetic for New Englanders. Aside from the NBA crowns, they never won anything that made them feel like winners.

And especially the Patriots - a team that didn't even manage a winning season in my four years at college. The Rhode Island live sports call-in Sunday night TV show with Chuck Wilson was a bleak, sad place to find yourself after the Patriots played miserably hours before. This may sound apocryphal, but the show actually fell into disrepair when my roommate managed to get through live and asked Wilson, "Hey Chuck, what's with the cheesey stache?" He created a monster. All the calls that followed week after week basically imitated him and digressed from there, and soon Wilson was gone. I think he went on eventually to have a good career on ESPN radio, so there we are. But the point was there was nothing to talk about in the New England autumn, except the premature end of the Sawx season and the start of the B's and the Celtics. I remember this. I was witness to this. I remember when you guys were nothing.

I don't think I'd recognize my old Boston and Warwick friends today. Their streets are paved with gold, their clothes are made from the finest silken hair of virgin maidens. Perhaps their silence after tonight's game is a sign of what all good Americans are taught to say when they lose: Forget it; it didn't matter, anyway.

But I know it did matter. The Patriots lulled you people into believing in your team they way they did during the Perfect Season. And now they haven't won a playoff game since 2007. Belichick handled this loss the same way he handles them all, the way he handled his loss to the Giants in the Super Bowl. He simply made it clear that his team didn't execute or make the right plays. The thing about HAL 9000 is that the he lacked the human element of acknowledging weakness and error, so he had to kill all the human onboard the ship; Belichick's programming, which looks a great deal like narcissistic personality disorder, prohibits him from saying that his opponents outplayed him. Hal, Bill. Bill, Hal.

Yet the Jets did what the Giants did when they beat the Pats that fateful night. They pressured Brady into making very bad decisions. On at least three occasions, with either Calvin Pace or Shaun Ellis in his vicinity, Tom Brady actually flinched, even ducked, even when opponents were still a few steps away. He looked frail and confused. He blamed rookie Aaron Hernendez when he threw behind him. That's the Brady I've been waiting to see all year; the Brady I remember watching buckle under pressure before. The Patriots will continue to build, build, build teams that will keep me miserable for years, but they will never be The Team Of Destiny that they pretended to be for eight solid weeks this season. Brady's star is beginning the stages of fading over the horizen. Is that an overstatement? Yes, probably, but it is fun to say, isn't it?

And to all my dear friends in New England who are talking about injuries, excuses, the way Belichick did the year Brady got injured two seasons ago at Kansas City, let me suggest something I hope you'll find as unpleasant as it is meant to sound: your insistence upon remaining, in your own minds, the only team to beat, even when your team is staying home for the conference championship for the second year in a row, is making you sound like the very creature you were taught to despise from the moment you were brought into this ridiculous world. You sound like Yankee fans.

****

Now, let's look ahead.

There aren't many Steeler fans I know, but there are a few. They live like an uneasily welcome minority in Pennsylvania's more cosmopolitan city of Philadelphia. Sure, Philadelphians are a notoriously crude bunch. Santa Claus, Michael Irvan - Philthies don't really like anyone. Even in a 1969 biography of Vince Lombardi, documenting his only season coaching the Redskins, one sees an illustration of a Sonny Jurgenson effigy hanging from a Franklin Field rafter. "Philadelphians," the caption read, "doing their thing."

But ironically, Philly people view folks from Pittsburgh as mildly civilized Hill People, while Pittsburgh fans in this city seem to brood out of a gloomy sense of their own tragic superiority to their adopted city. Philly is American history's cradle; Pittsburgh was America's blacksmith - until it wasn't anymore after the mills closed. They lost their place their in American history, yet they are made of harder stuff than the Philadelphia snarl. We settled the west, their looks seem to say. We dealt in iron and coke; we built the nation, we provided the material to free the world from Fascism, and then they took it all away. In exchange for our jobs, a sympathetic God made us football champions, time and again. You walk around in period dress. You have Andy Reid. Who the hell are you?

Here are four Steeler fans I know. One is an author and scholar from Western PA who now a college professor in Michigan. He is that rare thing: an academic with an actual knowledge of a sport that produced only about two advanced minds that I can think of: Dr. Frank Ryan, Physicist and Browns championship quarterback and Alan Page, Purple People Eater and Minnesota Supreme Court Justice. He left me a one-line message today: "So, we meet again. Old friend." By "again," I know he's referencing the January 17, 2005 playoff game against the Steelers, when Doug Brien missed two field goals that would have sent us to the conference championship. Nice.

There's my cousin in Pittsburgh. I threw a few friendly salvos across the bow. When my brother reminded him that he was born in Wantaugh in Suffolk County and not Western Pennsylvania, my cousin informed my wife that she was married to a "soft" man and had a "wimpy" brother-in-law.

There was also a guy who used to live down the street from our old apartment who was a Steelers fan. He kept his Steelers banner outside all year. His car was covered with Steeler regalia. He even pasted Steeler stickers on his ground floor window, which is usually the sign of an unhinged mind, or a five year-old. He was the former. He kept a sign on the driveway gate between his building and his neighbors that read "Parking for Steeler Fans ONLY." The only thing is I think he meant it. Parking was shared between the homes, and he appeared to fight over it; or so it seemed when I would hear his neighbors complaining to police. The neighbor was gesturing to her marble front stoop, which had been covered, a la Jackson Pollack, with gobs of black and yellow paint.

Finally, there is a long-term substitute teacher who's been sharing our lunch period with us, and she's a Steeler fan, a farm girl from the west country of the Commonwealth. She's built like a rural, pretty, sturdy, hearty, optimistic gal, the kind who says, "Bless your heart" when you make her laugh. She is about as out of place in our snarky town as, well, a country girl. She is so very young but married, and her Christmas present to her mister was to stand in the freezing rain at Heinz Field and watch the Steelers beat the snot out of the Bengals. But just when you think you've put her into a convenient stereotype, you mention the Steelers' loss this season to the Jets a few weeks ago, and her eyes take on an unfamiliar darkness filled with solid dedication. "They didn't have Polamalu," she said. "They will next time."

I didn't know there would be a next time, but she apparently did. She's been giving me dirty looks all week. It's explains my cousin's uncharacterstic smack. She speaks almost as if to say that she knows the Steelers will win (so do I) but she also resents my team (or any team) coming to town to challenge the integrity of the deal the Universe made with these proud people, and the world that was taken from them. We all root for our beloved teams for our own reasons, to serve our own demons.