NY Jets #63 - Part 4

The position of offensive lineman is often staffed by stoic, thoughtful, cerebral men who spend their careers getting their cerebrum bashed. JP Machado #63 played three seasons mostly in a supporting role with the Jets. I came across a Times article about the sober season of 2001, when Machado got a chance to start: the Jets' offensive line is having its usual health problems, requiring some stitching and patching to keep it together. Machado is called to fill in for Randy Thomas, who has a bad ankle.

As Gerald Eskanazi writes that year on Machado's being called up, offensive linemen "regard themselves as tough guys who like to think." There is a paradox to the position - linemen defend a line of attack. They are defensive in an offensive effort, protecting what the offense has in an effort to take what's not theirs. You get the idea. Or else, as Kevin Mawae put it in the article, "We are the only unit on the entire team that has to rely on the guy on either side of you." Mawae says in the article that it puts extra pressure on Machado who had only been in two or three games his entire career up to that point. I'm not suggesting Mawae was a professor of philosophy when he said that, but it shows a level of metacognition that usually just gets bashed out of a player's head by the time he's 30.

More interesting to Eskanazi than Machado himself is the level of accountability to which lineman hold themselves as a result of this interdependence. Just because Machado is relatively inexperienced does not mean he can have any leeway. He must perform as effectively as Mawae, the Pro Bowler. In order to police themselves, Eskanazi asserts, the line has their own kangaroo court, which meets at a local restaurant but is otherwise supposed to remain a secret.

When asked about it, Mawae says,"gruffly, 'What kangaroo court?'"

*
When I arrived at college in the late 80's, I belonged to the last wave of freshmen to still be without the Internet, the World Wide Web, cell phones, texting, and cable TV in the dorms. The concept of these things did not yet even exist in ordinary peoples' minds. An ex-girlfriend went to Dartmouth while I was in my senior year of high school and reported that each student was given a Macintosh computer. A friend of mine at Harvard, in his senior year, mentioned to me something about e-mail, and I hadn't the foggiest idea of what he was talking about. Neither did most people. When I first got a Hotmail account some years later, my father thought I had joined some kind of gay porn network.

The world to which I belonged back then is entirely different from the world of my current students, and it was really only a quarter of a century ago. I sometimes feel today as though I am a different middle aged man, born in the age of Model T, walking around at the 1964 World's Fair, trying to ascertain what exactly has transpired. My father started the car with a crank. Now I see that Bell Telephone is suggesting I will someday be able to make a phone call through a television screen. Now I'm wandering into the Saarinen's IBM Pavilion at Flushing Meadow; I write my name on a television screen, and a computer correctly reads my handwritten birth date: May, 25, 1925. Now the computer is printing out a New York Times article from that date for me:

John T. Scopes indicted in Tennessee for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.

When I arrived at college, I had three roommates - Michael, who wore all Ralph Lauren Polo all the time, right down to his underwear; Will, who plastered the walls with posters of sweaty women in thong bikinis, and Dennis, who stood at 5'6", red-faced and impish. Dennis was a wrestler in high school, and whenever he had the chance, he would grab someone in the crudely paneled study lounge in the basement and put them in a near-arm/far-ankle breakdown. The first night of school, Will found a party and then came back to the room so drunk in the wee hours that he fumbled blindly to the bathroom, only to be awakened by a piercing scream which belonged to Michael, whose bed Will had mistaken for a urinal. I, fortunately, had arrived too late on the first day to claim the bottom bunk and slept safely sat up top.

Michael spent most of his time at the college radio station, while I spent most of mine at the library, searching for research through the card catalog or on the shelves, book by book, in a building that was finished the year I was born and, I recently see, has already been replaced by a new library. Will and Dennis both joined the rugby team, and most of their first months of school were spent there. At night they stumbled back to the room, either beaten to a pulp or legless drunk after a rugby party. They talked about people named Gonzo and Ash, Bleedy and Fingers. They drank and vomited at the matches they played in. They traveled to colleges like Villanova and Notre Dame and were summarily banned from ever returning because the moment they stepped off the bus, the entire squad would go on a plundering campaign of property destruction and public nudity. They were among the least talented and most reviled squads on the east coast. Along the brick on I-95 exit ramp to the college itself, you can still see parts of a spray-painted graffiti, impossibly large:

BLEEDY - WHO LOVES YOU BABY? - GONZO

Will and Dennis had this compulsion to run into walls drunk, which was apparently a pastime of the team itself. Dennis ran into a wall when his first college girlfriend broke up with him. Will ran into a wall as a punishment from the team's kangaroo court for some kind of offense for which he was found guilty. He happily complied, and after sixteen stitches to his scalp, he lay bleeding in his bed back in our dorm room, out cold.

I asked him the next day what had happened. He told me the kangaroo court had found him guilty of some misplays in a match, but that his real punishment was as a result of losing a game of quarters and then spilling beer out of the soiled and fetid rugby shoe out of which he was told to drink, which in itself was a kangaroo court punishment for an earlier offense.

We exist within structures that themselves have unregulated checks and balances, and while most of the world doles these out in protracted gestures of passive hostility that will take years and years to manifest themselves, the kangaroo court - a covert attempt for a group to police itself in ways that may or may not be sensitive in spirit to the Eighth Amendment - gets the work done much more quickly, without allowing for lingering resentment or for protracted guilt and shame that drift in the wake of our trespasses (and those against us).

Most people I've known who've played rugby eventually experience the kangaroo court as a part of the whole deal. A 1997 video of the Golden Lions in South Africa reveals at least the degree to which odd wigs and binge drinking - albeit with some dignity for the cameras - are combined for such an event. Accept your punishment like a man and move on. Imagine the pain I could have been spared if most of my relationships in my 20's had used this model.

"But don't tell anyone I told you that," Will said about the court, as he lay in bed, trying to distinguish the pain outside his brain from the pain within. "Nobody's supposed to know about the court. It's a secret."

I sat by his bedside. "So what are you going to tell people when they ask you about, well, this?" I gestured to the blood still caked on the locks of his parted hair.

He shook his head, unconcerned. "That I was drunk and got hit by a car." He closed his eyes. "Should be fine."

*
Where are they now?

I don't know where Michael is today; I thought I heard his voice on a radio station somewhere in Pennsylvania. After screwing up their schoolwork with rugby, Will and Dennis each blew out their knees, gave up rugby and settled down to study. Today Will makes a recession-proof fortune on Wall Street, and Dennis is a Vice President for a food company that makes cookies that you most certainly eat. JP Machado was featured Randy's Radar during this year's tributes to new Hall of Famer, Curtis Martin #28.

John Neidert #63, LB 1968-69

I'm not interested in going to reunions, myself. It's been 21 years since I graduated from college, and it seems that the alma mater has given up on me, too. I no longer receive copies of the college magazine; I receive no more dinnertime telephone solicitations for alumni gifts from by hungry-sounding work-study students; notices of the class reunions come no more.  

John Neidert #63, linebacker for the Jets between 1968-69, does go to reunions. He's shown at left in a photograph taken by his son from 40th anniversary reunion of the 1968 squad. He's holding the award of awards for Jets fans - the Lombardi Trophy, before it was known as such, for Super Bowl III. If I held that exact trophy in my own hands I would probably cease to exist in this mortal form. I would be filled with a nameless, vibrating euphoria. I would probably instantly transform into an entirely different spiritual being, a Star-Child, or a seven-year old Brahmin Hindu boy. It would be transcendent. For John Neidert, it's just part of his history. He's an Infinite Jet.

A distant and nearer past, week 7, 2008

There's some great pictures here at the GangGreen.com's message board, taken by Neidert's son for the 40th anniversary in 2008, an event that took place almost exactly four years from today, during the week seven Jets home game win against the Chiefs. It would be the first of five straight wins that would compel many people to suggest that the Jets were the AFC's best team. We know the rest of the story. They would go 1-4 after that.

Neidert the younger came along with his own young son to witness the reunion. At one point you see a picture he took (above right) of the old players gathering in the tunnel preparing for halftime, and in the far distance, there's Brett Favre still playing on the field in the first half. You feel this sense of hope, now lost, in that one time and place, and of the perpetuating, uneasy aspirations that accompany our history as a team, or maybe as a species.

Someone on the message board asks,

"On a side note, someone should post how many days it's been since the NYJ have won a championship." 

As of this writing and the end of this day, the answer is 15,996 days. This means that on November 1, 2012, the New York Jets will have gone 16,000 days without another Super Bowl win. You, gentle reader, can use this information any way you like. You can discard it, disregard it, and find it as useful as your own appendix. As I watch the Jets haplessly lose to the tepid Dolphins today, I find myself sentimental for a few weeks of happiness, like the ones that accompanied the autumn months of empty promise in 2008. 

John Neidert, Joe Namath, John Schmitt,
and Don Maynard's sleeve

Athletes must have interesting relationships with time. Show up for your kangaroo courts and for the days on the sidelines. Then when your career ends, life can at times seem even richer. Will's life is better now, as is Dennis', as John Neidert's probably is too, with children and grandchildren of his own.

What of the fan? John Neidert can hold the 1969 trophy, but we live with the unending hope that someone on the team that we root for might someday hold another one aloft. Until that day comes, our team's history is really told through the thousands of nameless days that have passed since January 12, 1969. It's the same story retold, always promising to end differently this time, maybe next time, or whenever, or never.

NY Jets #63 - Part 3

Lamont Burns #63 played one season in Parcells' first year with the Jets, in 1997. The year after that, he played one season with the Washington Redskins. After that, he played the one and only season of the cartoonish XFL for the Las Vegas Outlaws. His player page for the Outlaws is filled with the usual stuff that Vince McMahon probably encouraged his people to include in bios. It's mentioned that his nickname "is 'Dirtbag.'" The final analysis is that he was "a very versatile lineman with great size and solid technique. He is a tough mauler and presents a problem for defensive linemen."

The other day I was driving with my wife, and we noticed a particularly aggressive guy driving a Mercury Marauder, a very lowbrow modern version of a muscle car that could not possibly compete with the beautiful yet loudly powerful 1968 Cougar. It was black, with blackened windows, a car whose features were clearly chosen to cultivate some kind of primitive sense of fear in people driving at the speed limit. Why a person - well, a man between the ages of 18-40 - requires something like this in order to satisfy some unmet childhood need, as opposed to owning car that simply attracts women, is completely lost on me. "Oh dear," I said blandly. "Not the Mercury Marauder."

"Isn't a marauder supposed to be some kind of plundering rapist, like a soldier in some sort of raping army?" she asked. She looked it up, and indeed, one definition suggests that a marauder goes "around in quest for plunder;  make a raid for booty."

At the war's end the country had been marauded by returning 
bands of soldiers.

That's not good. It's the the "returning" that scares me. Sort of like Soviet soldiers on the Eastern Front of World War II. The kinds of guys who actually make war look even worse that it already is.

The "mauler" is a little gentler. First, a "maul" is originally a word for a large, sharp hammer, not unlike an axe, which then turned into a verb, as nouns invariably do in the English language, to mean "striking with blunt force," "to batter or lacerate," especially "with a heavy weapon." A "maul" in rugby is also "a loose scrum that forms around a player who is holding the ball and on his feet." No wonder that a football player is called a mauler on the line, but in the larger sense, it would seem that a marauder would need to maul in order to do his business, and that at times a mauler and a marauder can be interchangeable.

This is obviously getting us nowhere, unless you remember that Vince McMahon once referred to the NFL as "pantywaist" football, even if his threats to turn America's Game into Rollerball ran out of money very, very quickly. I only mention this because anyone who has played the game will tell you that it is already intensely violent. I was pleased to see that Lamont Burns checked in on the excellent Dave Pear's Blog in 2010 to ask a question about the class action lawsuit filed against the NFL regarding group licensing agreements, officially launched by NFL Hall of Famer Herb Adderley. Pear's blog is a constant work of eloquence about the various injustices surrounding ex-player treatment, especially when we consider the mauling done to players' minds.

***

The first official New York Jet to wear #63 was Bob Butler at guard, in 1963. The terrific Coffin Corner overview of the Jets' first season mentions Butler as a former Eagle who started one game that season.

Carlton Haselrig #63 returned to football in 1995 after signing with the Jets - this after three great seasons with Pittsburgh that were followed by bouts with addiction and legal troubles. Then toward the end of a ruinously bad Jets season, he disappeared altogether and lost out on his opportunity to remain in the league. But Haselrig is one of those people who manages a return from the metaphorical dead, when people have given up on him, or have written the kinds of narratives that usually accompany guys who fall into the miseries of substance abuse and jail. Perhaps it's possible to be the kind of person he is, a phoenix, especially if you're smart enough to imagine yourself in a variety of guises in the world.

Haselrig was an unbeatable college wrestler at Pittsburgh-Johnstown, then a Pro Bowl guard in 1993 for the Steelers after never playing football in college. When his career in the NFL was officially over, he would go to prison a few more times, and would be estranged from his wife and children. But then as recent as 2009, he was a mixed-martial arts fighter, apparently finishing with a record of 3-2.

Now he is remarried, and listed at the above Pitt link from 2009 as having nine children, a responsibility that seems impossible, unmanageable even for someone like me with a very limited relationship with the law (may it remain so). To quote a friend who recently spoke so well at the funeral of a young student, it seems that as adults we lose the desire to pursue new things. With our many responsibilities, with our desire for well-defined roles in society, with obligations we seek out and then speak ill of because they exhaust our energy, we miss the point of being capable of recreating ourselves and our lives. The whole point of living a full life is having the imagination to do as we are told as children, and to imagine ourselves as whatever we want to be and then to go out and be that thing.

**

While looking for anything on John Hennessy #63, who played linebacker for the Jets from 1977-79, I actually came across something a bit more interesting - a story of what is apparently the NFL's first female scout, Connie Nicholas Carberg. Her story is here. She insists that much of her inspiration came from watching former interim Jets' coach (and Boston Patriots' coach in the 60's) Mike Holovak, whom, she says, as Personnel Director, was most responsible for the Jets' long-desired success in the early 1980's. The breakdown of picks over 1976-77 is here, and John Hennessy, who started every game in 1978, is mentioned there. It's convincing evidence of a time when the Jets got the draft right. It was not always thus, and it would not be thus for many more years. In fact, we could use a little Holovak and Carberg right about now.

NY Jets #63 - Part 2

The last two weeks have been reminders of seasons past where we've gone 4-12, or maybe even 3-13. A Pyrrhic victory over Miami has been followed by a shutout against San Francisco that not only proves how badly prepared we are for this season, but also how much better the NFC is than the AFC. I know the San Francisco game was a torrent of fail, but at least one of the two teams played well, and in the presence of actual NFL referees. As for me, I was spared the pain of witnessing it because I was driving back from my parents' place in Virginia, and the carnage was reduced to an occasional update during the Carolina-Atlanta game or to a mere refresh of the game tracker on my iTouch, propped on my dashboard. When you just watch the numbers increase in a shutout without having to experience it in any sensory manner, it remains a cold, emotionless series of numbers, one big, one a zero. Just ordinary numbers.

The third week Miami game was one of the very worst football games I have ever witnessed, just short of the 7-6 mid-season loss by the St. Pat's Little Knight's to the Whipporwill Peewee Warriors at Crittenden Middle School in 1980. Nothing - not coaching, not player performance, not (of course) officiating - was unaffected by the stink of human incompetence. In the midst of this meaningless struggle, our star player - a Jets' star who has that rare distinction of being a living NFL legend - was felled by an ACL tear. Darrelle Revis was untouched when he went down. He plays and falls, as his own island.

If Poseiden Adventure were an existentially desolate experience where there was no hope for anyone surviving - imagine a universe where Gene Hackman actually died mid-movie, leaving everybody in the clownish leadership of Ernest Borgnine - well, I guess that's what the Miami game was like; that's what watching Revis limp off was like. Things were so bad that when he was helped to the sidelines, I experienced an eerie, dead calm understanding that he was surely gone for the year. The next day, my co-worker, a virulent Jet fan, walked across the hall to my room and informed me that Revis would need season-ending surgery; I said I knew it already. She asked if I had read the news, too. No, I said. I had already accepted it as an unpleasant truth without actually knowing it for sure. I am a Jets fan, of course.

At any rate, I found inspiration for today's entry in one of Mark Sanchez's 24 incompletions against Miami. About seven minutes into the second quarter, at the beginning of a long drive, with the Jets trailing 10-0, Sanchez threw out-of-bounds, and the ball landed in the hands of offensive tackle Jason Smith #63, who was standing on the sidelines. I instantly knew that I was witnessing a moment that might eventually crystallize the entire Jets season. Smith was traded to the Jets for Wayne Hunter, whose name filled all our hearts with fear and loathing throughout the preseason. If we wanted to believe it, I suppose we could have lied to ourselves that we were trading up. After all, if we just got rid of Wayne Hunter then we'd be OK. Or maybe you felt it, too - that eerie calm that I mentioned above; maybe it namelessly descended upon you too. It can be easily dispelled for the moment by a convincing victory, like our opener against Buffalo, but it creeps right behind your heels again, a bit like my neighbor's black cat, which she refers to simply as "Stealth." You leave him behind in one room, but suddenly you look down and with a start you see that he is at your feet again, looking ominously up at you, his tail twirling ever so slightly, almost appearing to see right through you.

Though the NFL game recap indicates no such thing occurring, somewhere in the second quarter of the game in Miami, feeling the heat of the defensive rush, Mark Sanchez threw the ball away, and it landed in the hands of Wayne Hunter's replacement. A strange completion, yes - technically an incompletion - yet with it, the season seems prematurely complete.

****

Roy Kirksey #63

Here we can speak of premature endings in another way. Sometimes an injury is the true ending of a career that moves on past the injury, but never with the same high expectations. In 1971, Roy Kirksey #63 was a promising rookie offensive guard whom the Jets drafted in 1971 and were using on kickoffs and punts. According to a curiously vague PDF on his career, Kirksey's promise was cut short that rookie year when he tore ligaments in his right ankle during the second preseason game.

The story takes a curious turn when we go back to the actual origins of the injury, to an allegedly dirty hit by Apollo Creed himself, Carl Weathers, who played in #49 for the Oakland Raiders in 1971. Later in his career, Weathers would also play for the British Columbia Lions, and in his CFL Scrapbook bio, which quotes from a 1979 article by Jim Proudfoot in the Toronto Star, the matter of his "cruel elimination of Roy Kirksey" is taken up.

Sounding almost like a mounty, the writer insists that Kirksey "was one of those reckless chaps who dashes madly downfield under punts and kickoffs." Indeed, my good man. However, in a rookie season not yet even formed, Kirksey had already caught the attention of the Raiders, who played the Jets in the second preseason game. There's enough evidence in the article to suggest that the Raiders - those paragons of fair play and human decency - had put their special teams on notice that Kirksey showed speed and good pursuit on kickoffs and would be singled out for punishment because of it. Drafted in 1971, in the eighth round, Roy Kirksey was about to have his dream cut short. As he went after the man with the ball, Kirksey was hunted from behind by Carl Weathers, who hit him low to the ground and wrecked Kirksey's ankle.

Proudfoot says:

Weathers never denied that he’d deserved a clipping penalty (for the hit), though none was imposed. He’s also admitted he’d been costing Raiders so much yardage, game in and game out, for clips that coach John Madden had threatened to fine him for his next offence. And he finally confirms that Raiders had decided, after watching films of Jets at work, that Kirksey would have to be singled out for special treatment.

Does a bounty need to be formal to be real, or is football just a game that necessitates that "somebody stop that guy," regardless of how he is stopped? The fact that Weathers did what he did would be typical of the way the Raiders did business back in those days, but it also smacks of what football is - a war of attrition, a game of elimination.

The "cruel" part of the elimination is that because of the ankle injury Kirksey never saw his potential realized. He played sporadically for the Jets and the Eagles afterwards. What does it mean to know that everything you have heretofore worked for can be eliminated in a single moment that was, in many ways, brought about because your opponents actually recognized your talent? "I think about Weathers every day when the weather turns cold and that ankle starts hurting," Kirksey is quoted as saying. "I think about how that one play messed up my whole career. I saw the films on it and how No. 49 followed me all the way and went for my legs." He might have been reminded of the pain of it again if he ever watched Action Jackson, or maybe if he ever watches the four Rocky films in which Apollo Creed appears. I cannot help but feel that if he ever sees Rocky Balboa going to work on Creed in I and II, or when Drago finishes him off in IV, that Roy Kirksey may have a special desire to see Carl Weathers brought low, if only in a fiction, as Shakespeare puts it, in a dream of passion.