NY Jets #61 - Part 1

Is there anyone out there who's interested in New York Titans cuff links? I don't have any to sell, but that's not the point. The question is rhetorical. In Islam, conspicuous consumption and greed are defined by having so many possessions that you cannot stand upright. Of course, Ben Franklin also rightly said that an empty bag can't stand upright, either. But is a man at the upper levels of society likely to buy Titans cuff links? Would Titans cuff links be a good addition to the board room? Isn't it too ironic to impress anyone? Irony doesn't impress anyone the way cuff links are supposed to. Irony is the refuge of those who will never know what it means to win - those who will never stand upright because they have nothing.

What can any of this can tell us about Dan Callahan #61, who played for Titans at guard from 1960-61? Twelve men walked on the moon between 1969 and 1973; roughly 150 men played for the New York Titans, an AFL organization run by a former sportscaster who drank himself to death. Some men are in the right place at the right time; how you want to define "right" in this instance is irrelevant. If anything, Callahan was unique because of his time and place. Rich or poor, or somewhere in between, if he's still alive, Dan Callahan may be the right person to buy cuff links that commemorate his specific time in a specific place. So there's your answer.

Frank D'Agostino may have been the first Titan to wear the number 61, before Callahan. Other than that, I only see that he played for the Eagles in 1956. Or maybe it was Leon Dombrowski #61 who wore it first. All three men are listed as starting in 1960. I'm not sure the cuff links will mean anything to them, but I might be wrong. Just keep in mind, they cost $60. Cuff links could hardly be said to encumber anyone, but whether I made such an investment for myself or received them as a gift, I know I would be psychologically burdened by what a rip-off they are.

Dan Ficca's 1965 helmet

On the other hand, would you like to buy Dan Ficca's (#61) helmet? That's also a rhetorical question because the bidding is over, and now the auction is just an online memory. It sold for $940, which is pretty cool. Check it out here, and you'll see how rudimentary a football helmet was in 1965, Ficca's last year with the Jets. A mere pad at the top of the head and canvas straps on the side protect the head from the outside blows. It's almost quaint to imagine something like this protecting anyone from anything, and whether they meant to be humorous or not, the sellers put quotes around the word padding, possibly to suggest that its structural protection was always purely symbolic.

The truth is that while wearing a helmet like this, Dan Ficca had to reckon with people like the legendary behemoth defensive lineman Ernie Ladd of San Diego. In Ed Gruver's American Football League, Ficca says the following about Ladd:

He broke my nose, and then he broke my cheekbone. Then he broke the cheekbone on the other side, but by then, my head was numb.  

(On the same page, Gruver writes that apparently the only way to soften Ladd's imperious power was to "compliment" him, as former Patriots guard Charley Long did. "What could we do?" Long says, sounding like a helpless member of an animist tribe about the wrath of a god, "I told him how great he was - just praying that he wouldn't get mad and hit any harder.")

Against a 6'9" monster like Ladd, the helmet above stood very little chance. The industrial-gray face mask looks like a relic from the late 50's, but this must have been Ficca's preference. The white-on-green football logo is slanted decidedly upwards, as it was throughout the 1960's, headed toward the sky like so many things optimistically were - jets, satellites, space capsules. Click on one of the images at the link, and you can happily magnify each one to needlessly large dimensions - the old Riddell tags and the handwritten "61" in blue ink inside. It's old, but back then it must have looked as fragile as the delicate human head it is meant to protect, and since we now know that no helmet is adequate against head trauma, the one we see above is testimony to the carefree optimism of its time.

Apparently Dan Ficca was traded to the Jets from Oakland at the beginning of the 1963 training camp, and, in a move that may have started the antipathy between the two clubs that decade, Al Davis apparently neglected to tell the Jets that their new guard still had six months of military service to perform. The Jets should probably have checked that out ahead of time. Ficca played at guard for the Jets for three seasons, from 1963-65. There are bits and pieces of contemporary news about his whereabouts in his native Pennsylvania, in what is known as the Lower Anthracite Region, most specifically Mt. Carmel, which sits near the center of the commonwealth. As a local boy done good, he seemed to have been feted in newspapers in the years after leaving town, even having the birth of his first child mentioned as a news event in 1966. In 2009, he is back in his home town, where he has probably lived since retiring from the game. We see him hosting the Mount Carmel Area Athletic Alumni Association's scholarship awards for high school seniors. In 2011, his face is shown among residents at town meeting that addressed the community's fears about people using bath salts to get high. Such is small town life.

This was apparently one of two helmets that Ficca auctioned off. The other, auctioned on Ebay at some point, was probably more valuable - the 1964 helmet with the green-on-white logo that the Jets had for just one season. I suppose when I look at the one at left, my eye is drawn to its outdated shape and the slight bulge at the ears, but I can't help staring at the little football resting beneath the streamlined JETS. The little football at the base of the current logo has large laces pointing outward. Here the laces point up. The old logo was also a brighter green than the current one.

But what always gets me is ghostly "NY" behind the team's name. When I was four, my parents gave me a little kid's Jets football helmet with the logo, and I used to just stare at it. The logo on top of the initials made me think about infinity, about layers and layers of things ad infinitum and about how nothing is ever quite known without knowing what's behind it. I once had a Giants fan tell me that the Jets logo looks like a bad high school art project, but that's no matter. That has no bearing on the things to which you attach yourself as a child, when all you desperately want is to belong to something greater than yourself. Obviously, as an adult, I see myself as being greater than my own fandom, but then such realizations belongs to the realm of adulthood, a place where ideas are less permanent, less stable, less certain and always more malleable than they were when you were a child, when everything pointed optimistically upward.

The Jets and the NFL Bounty: Declarations of Dependence

I've been reluctant to write lately, here or anywhere. I'm on vacation this week and am still exhausted by work. Usually the months between football seasons are filled with making up for lost time with respect to the Infinite Jets. There's more to discuss because there's only so much time you can devote to real life and the draft before it becomes all too redundant - the commute to work, the usual looks of reluctance and disdain on the part of my clientele, the same commute home, walking the dog, making the same dinner, having the same conversations with everyone. A single human life is dull - ask anyone who has one - but, as the late Harvey Pekar would say, who am I kidding? What would I be without my routine?

So it's not life getting me down or any of that. I have medication to thank for getting me through what Harvey calls his daily life: "a major struggle." No, I think I know what the answer is.

First, it's the Jets, naturally. I know I'm not supposed to be talking about this anymore and that we're all supposed to be moving on. The nice thing about the trauma induced by fandom is that it's not real trauma; real trauma takes actual psychological help to undo. It cannot be fixed by forgetting alone. Fandom's trauma can be undone by forgetting, even when, as we all know, none of us ever really forgets. Still, it's all going to be OK.

The disparate outcomes of the two teams that claim New York in 2011 was sort of like having my wife leave me for a guy whom I was forced thank after he punches me in the groin. That's actually never happened to me, but being humiliated by the Giants on Christmas Eve and then having no choice other than to root for them against New England in the Super Bowl was fairly close.

At my college, about 25 years ago, the majority of my friends were from New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. New Yorkers and Connecticuters were solidly Giants fans and then split their affiliations in baseball between whichever New York team did better, which varied differently back then, though that may be difficult for younger readers to believe. The Mets made the postseason in 1986 and '88. The Yankees did not and would not for several years to come. Guys from Mass were solid Red Sox fans out of practice and tradition, though they harbored a little hope of seeing the Patriots return to the Super Bowl, but they loved basketball because it meant rooting for the Celtics. Like the Puritans of old, my Massachusetts pals felt justified when their teams' fortunes eventually changed for the better.

My friends followed winning teams. I was a Jets fan. I walked around the dorm in a kelly green t-shirt with the Reagan-era streamline JETS logo, and guys looked at me like I had joined the Hare Krishnas. I lived with guys like this; they liked me, but they didn't understand me, and that was fine. They studied finance, marketing and law, the disciplines of winners. I was an English major. No one wins in literature. People get married in the end of comedies, people die meaninglessly in tragedies, and otherwise everybody else learns sobering lessons about how hard human life is. That's not winning. This year's Super Bowl was like wearing that stupid t-shirt again, being reduced to the losing circle in every way. Jets suck, Roche. Great. Tell me something I don't already know. Welcome to my life. Just remember, if I didn't have this routine to go through year in and out, I wouldn't be anything at all.

****

It's also football. American football, the game you and I love. And before I become overwrought, let me first make clear, I'm not declaring independence from anything. I made my bed, and I'm sleeping in it. I have loved football for as long as I can remember being human, and I have been a Jets fan for at least that long. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with myself if I don't watch football this year, and there is no other team I can call home. So that's settled, and everything will inevitably return to normal.

Yesterday, while listening to recordings of Gregg Williams' tirade before the playoff game against San Francisco, I was struck by his emphasis on three points:

1) "The NFL is a production business," he says. "Don't ever forget about that." There isn't a single NFL coach, assistant, or executive who wouldn't disagree with that, and the degree to which that production involves sacks, tackles, assists, or legs, heads and spines is, in American football, a source of confusion, for both players and fans, and it's a confusion that we know we live with all the time. As long as you win, you will be paid. You are paid to win. Winning means killing. Ergo?

2) "Kill the head and the body will die." It makes me think of Frank Rizzo. I may be attributing far more distinction to former Philadelphia Mayor Rizzo than he deserves from a bleeding heart, but I think one of his mottos was Ego frendo caput capitis, which stands for pretty much Gregg Williams' philosophy on why his defense was so good. I've always said that moving to Philadelphia a year after Rizzo's death was like moving to Spain a year after Franco. Suddenly there was air to breathe again; you were no longer being told that the reason why the city was a great place to live was because you were being protected from some horrible element by a military-styled government. Here I take the blogger's cue to expand my musings - the head is the source of imagination, creativity, wisdom, inquiry and reason. The body will die without it, but the head makes us human. And like other violent exercises - coercion, terrorism and warfare - the goal of a good defense is to do nothing else but to make the noble mind think twice because it's suddenly beset by fear (Yes, phantom reader, another link to Dune) the mind-killer.

I remember a briefly poignant moment in Bill Buford's gripping Among the Thugs where a police officer in Sunderland asks Buford about fan violence in American football. How many people attend football games in America? he asks. Buford says about 50-60,000, sometimes 80,000. The constable blanches at the thought. And there's no significant violence to speak of? he asks. No, Buford says. The constable looks vexed and perturbed. How can that be? he seems to ask. Buford doesn't supply the answer; the point is that he is trying to say something about the violence endemic to the English people - it's ageless and elusive, at the heart of every human person who spends time on that island nation. But American tribes of violence are priced out of sporting events. Yes, fans get stabbed at Raiders games. Mostly, there are armed gangs outside the arena, weaving their own mythologies of loyalty and manhood the same way that hooligans do from station to station. Even then, even if no tribe will have you in America, you need only a gun and a state law written for a backward-minded people that suggests you can interpret the right to stand your ground for yourself and kill another human being.

3) "It's a great game. It's a production business." It's sort of repeat of one. Every sport is the symbolic gesture of its culture's anxieties and conflict. Hockey belongs to the hatred of English to French and vice versa. Soccer transcends them all, possibly because it's so maddeningly sublime that its suspensefulness is too much for the racked mind, and while clubs have largely priced hooliganism out in England, the beautiful game engenders a fear that everything or nothing can happen in 90 minutes, and this can bring out the most guarded resentment absolutely anywhere.

It's a great game because it's a production business. American football allows others to act out that rage for us. It pays handsomely for men to destroy one another, and we all know it. It's the American way: as long as you're being paid, what do you have to complain about? We already know that money justifies everything. The logical extension from being paid to win to being paid to kill in order to win is something we all know from our own values. It's what tobacco companies do, what distilling companies do, what oil companies do, what drug dealers do, and it's why all of these groups are so successful. We all accept the trade; in order to win, you have to kill. In order to enjoy this sport, people must be disabled, must fall apart and die an early death. That's what they're being paid to do. Human life is cheap.

Which brings me to musing at long, long last about what this means. It means nothing. I will still be grateful for football's return, and I will be (just as I am now) overly optimistic about the Jets' chances (seriously, they're not as bad as everybody thinks). Remember the father of our head coach is the poster child for the bounty. I will watch every NFL game I possibly can because I would rather watch a football game than anything else on TV, even Mad Men. I have no choice in this matter (other than, say, reading or exercising). I have already accepted the reality of this larger agreement among men and machines, that this game is what it is and that bounties are surely omnipresent because they are a logical extension of a game and the culture that produced it. I am merely a part of it all.