NY Jets #62 - Part 4

Bob O'Neill #62 played as a lineman for the New York Titans in 1961 and was a Notre Dame alum. The question, "What happened to Bob O'Neill of Notre Dame football?" goes unanswered at Lost Lettermen. We mentioned him previously when we catalogued the few number of Irish players who've been Jets, but no other detail can be found online. While you're at it, at the Lettermen link you can also click on the self-described "Best of the Web," which, when I saw it, featured things like the "Top 15 Hottest Women in Conservative Media," or "Constipated Olympic Diving Faces," which only serves to further our understanding that the adult American mindset is essentially white, male, and between the ages of 11-13.

A similar search on Lost Letterman produces information about guard Bill Bain #62, who retired with the Jets in 1986 after playing 11 seasons in the NFL. He played well for USC during their championship seasons of 1972 and '74. He lives in California still and has four daughters. At the link you can also find out which are the "Most Cliche'd Facebook Profile Pictures." I'm guilty of the Facebook "Fanboy" profile picture, making me an internet cliche - probably not for the first time - and it's a reminder that the Interwebs reveal us to be nothing more than hopelessly narcissistic and vainly self-conscious 13 year-old girls.

Al Atkinson #62 (image Presswire)

The most famous of NY Jets #62's is Al Atkinson. Between 1965 and 1974, Atkinson played linebacker for the Jets, his only professional team. He played alongside Larry Grantham, Gerry Philbin, Verlon Biggs, and Ralph Baker on defense. Born in Philadelphia, Atkinson attended Cardinal Bonner High School for boys in Drexel Hill, which is an arrow's shot from where I used to teach, and then he went to nearby Villanova. Today, I think he works in Springfield, Pennsylvania, not far from there.

I suppose he must have been happy to see that Bonner was recently saved from being closed through the petitioning and donations of many alumni, and maybe he participated in that. Of all the Catholic high schools in the region, I feel that Bonner has a quality of toughness about it that the others in the area do not much have. It is a stern and resolute place, much more like the movie version of a Catholic school, where the ubiquitous detention period known as JUD ("justice under God") is no formality; it is a sentence. Their school colors are green and white.

I had hoped to ask Atkinson for an interview since I'm so close by, but I wasn't able to contact him. I would have asked him about being on a Villanova squad that went to the Liberty Bowl in 1962 (the Wildcats fell to Terry Baker's Oregon State). I would have asked him about playing at Bonner and about how Bonner has changed. I would have asked about football in the 60's, about the mystique of the AFL. What was it like to play alongside Grantham, Rochester, Baker, et al, and to play for Buddy Ryan on defense? What was his most memorable game? How has football affected him physically now that it's long done?

And how on Earth did he play the second half of Super Bowl III with a dislocated shoulder? Between John Schmitt's pneumonia and Atkinson's shoulder, how on Earth did the Colts lose?

But I would also have asked him about his brief decision to announce his retirement in 1970, as a reaction to Joe Namath's reluctance to report to training camp on time.

In the first year of the merger's application, the NFLPA talked of a strike, and Pete Rozelle and the owners swiftly responded by locking players out of training camp. The players just as quickly backed down. But times had been changing quickly; this was a hallmark of the struggles to come, much of it coming out of a revolution that Namath had helped herald - one where individual players had the capacity to be much bigger than the game.

These shifts in how athletes saw themselves were reflected in each man's attitude toward the strike. According to Mark Kriegel in his Namath biography, Atkinson was one of two teams member not to attend its labor meeting because he disagreed with the intention to strike. The other player who wasn't there was Namath. He didn't disagree with a strike; he just didn't show up. He was busy doing Joe Namath things.

Kriegel writes that there was nothing new about Namath not showing up for training camp; he had "quit" the year before over Bachelors III. The new wrinkle in 1970 were his noises in the offseason about not being as interested in football as he used to be, especially in the face of the new commercial opportunities open to him, ones that were mostly unprecedented for any athlete. He appeared to be on strike altogether, from the team, from the game, and busy instead with just being Joe Namath - a talk show, TV commercials, movies, appearances. He also probably didn't relish another year of horrible pain.

In response to his attitude, the defensive captain Al Atkinson went on strike himself. He "retired" as a protest against Namath's lack of commitment. Kriegel writes:

Like Namath, Atkinson was a twenty-seven year old bachelor who had played through painful injuries... but all similarity ended there; for Atkinson, a Philadelphian who once considered a career in the priesthood, belonged to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

I love the fact that Atkinson is immediately distinguished as a "Philadelphian," as if it were a notable mark of sternness. I also found out from a Bonner grad that Atkinson's brother was a longtime respected priest and teacher at Bonner. Drexel Hill, a town over from West Philadelphia, is a traditionally conservative area, generally Catholic even as neighborhoods change, and highly cloistered from the surrounding areas along the Main Line. Kriegel points out that Atkinson was tired of laboring away in spite of an offensive leader who was not expected to adhere to principles of team unity. Kriegel says that Atkinson actually believed Namath's lack of focus cost the Jets the December 1969 playoff game against the eventual champion Chiefs.

I've written before that Namath was a team player, but in this respect this was obviously not so. But Atkinson's objection to Namath's behavior goes beyond that, to critiquing Namath's self-centered, relativistic world view:

As far as (Atkinson) was concerned, Namath's newfangled credo masked old fashioned selfishness. "It used to kill me," said the linebacker, "to see this guy sit back on his TV show and think everything he does and stands for is justified so long as he comes right out and says it. He thinks it makes indiscretion correct if you admit to it." 

It might seem strange for a player to question the philosophical basis for a teammate's actions, but this was a new time. If the player makes himself bigger than the team then maybe he needs to be assessed on a different scale, with new dimensions. Namath's indiscretions pale in comparison to Brandon Marshall's, but whether he intended to or not, Atkinson was also pointing out something we take for granted about American popular culture - that if you are famous, you are held to a lower standard of behavior, or maybe you are held to a level that suspends the fans' judgment, the way the gods were free to deceive and manipulate the Greeks who worshiped them.

And Namath was no immortal. The 1970 season proved it. According to Richard Sandomir, at the beginning of the first Monday Night Football telecast between the Jets and the Browns in 1970, Howard Cosell - "his hand trembling" - interviews the two team captains, Namath and Atkinson. Side by side, their respective retirements now over, the two then went on to play to a 31-21 defeat, brought on by an interception of Namath's final pass of the game. It is an iconic moment for Jets fans, one that makes me consider the upcoming season all the more; it was the start of an era Namath had helped usher in, but it was also the beginning of ten straight losing seasons.

***

Kriegel writes that after practices in the 1970 training camp, Namath and rookie cornerback Steve Tannen would get in Tannen's VW bus and drive up and down the Hempstead Turnpike, smoking dope. As Tannen says, smoking pot "was like being a murderer" back then, but it worked as much for pain then as now. For anyone who's driven it, the turnpike is flat, punctuated by strip malls, parking lots and fast food restaurants. Tannen says that they would drive an hour in either direction and finally stop at Jack in the Box for the munchies. What might be a high school kid's ideal Friday night out sounds like a purgatorial sentence for the biggest football player in the United States. In either direction, the open road presented no more than the same thing, over and over. It seemed to stretch on forever, but it was the beginning of the end.

NY Jets #62 - Part 3

I've been leery of late to dig too deeply into the background information on each Infinite Jet. I've begun to feel like I'm peering into people's dining room windows, hoping to catch a glance of their most private and telling interactions with one another, all in order to find clues to the hidden mystery of their nature. Then I remember that I'm staring at a machine that offers mostly the prepared and edited versions of people's lives on the web. You're not looking at something into which have sneakily peep; you see is what people are putting on their front yard. Still, you shouldn't linger, staring at someone's yard from the sidewalk.

After a little bit of digging, I discovered that Eric Coss #62 played center for the Jets for three games in 1987, which I presume means (let's say it all together) he was very likely a replacement player that season. He graduated from Temple University, though I don't know how many years before. The stories of the replacement player always intrigue me. It's a dream lost and found and lost again, one suspects. A little bit more digging finds Coss living in Arizona, working for the state in some capacity, possibly as a teacher, possibly as a state trooper. That's all that appears on his lawn, and I feel reluctant to look further. So that's where I stop and move down the block.

What are we leaving behind for people to find on our lawn? This has also been on my mind lately. This summer I've gotten a new job, one that's closer to home and pays a little bit better. Until now I've been teaching for 13 years at a large high school outside Philadelphia and have been very happy doing a job that is honestly the only thing I'm really good at. I teach English, and I love it. "It's hard, but the kids are great." It's such a cliche thing for teachers to say, but it's true all the same, as so many cliches are. But it was time for a change, and though they they treated me very well there, I'm leaving. I'm moving on. It's time to go.

This past winter I had an inkling it was going to eventually happen, and during the rest of the year, it would occasionally strike me that in its long history, the high school where I worked had seen countless numbers of teachers. Its turnover during the past decade alone has been staggering, and I've had to be reminded of the many teachers who came and went in our English Department. Who was the guy with the initials? T.J.? No, I'm thinking of D.J. There was a Kristi, a Christa, a Christine and a Kristine, a Christin, and a Kristen. And Christina. People came and went like it was bus terminal.

And then when you look into the old yearbooks, you see so many teachers who must have mattered to someone somewhere in time, but they have now been reduced to a series of black and white images. A woman in an outdated bouffant hairdo and cat's eye glasses. A grim-looking man in pleated slacks, a nicely tailored white shirt and thick lenses, leaning with an quiet impatience with his back against the blackboard, waiting for an answer from the class that he already knows is not going to come. Those are pictures from the 1973 yearbook.

The pictures at least document a person doing his or her job. I discovered pictures of the woman who taught in my room that year. She seems to have taught for several years through the 70's, though I can't find her any later than that. She was an English teacher, too - pretty, with a very tight smile, made more uncomfortable by the tightness of her hair pulled back. In the pictures she dresses as my mother did back then, in pretty blouses and jackets, ribbon in her hair, in turtlenecks or with patterned scarves around her neck. Maybe she eventually got married and left for good as so many women did when I was a student.

It occurred to me that I was just another faceless person who had worked there. One year as a gag I grew a mustache for my little teacher portrait in the yearbook, but no one remembers that. The mustache didn't last any longer than the picture; my wife insisted that I shave it off before she came home from work that day, and I obliged. I've never met a woman who liked to kiss a mustachioed man. This year, when the yearbook director sent out a call asking if anyone wanted to have their class photographed for the upcoming issue, I volunteered mine because I wanted someone someday to know that I was there once, that I existed there, that I worked in that room, and that I did something poorly or well. I was there.

Which brings me to Ed Cummings #62, who played linebacker for the Jets in 1964 and then for the Broncos in 1965. As the Broncos "By the Numbers" site puts it, Cummings had no discernible statistics over 14 games with Denver. He appears as a faceless number from an era where players were paid little, in a league still perceived to be the lesser. He came and went. By all accounts, he was there.

But looking more closely at what's arrayed on his lawn, you see that Cummings was inducted into Stanford University's Hall of Fame in 2005. Today he is a rancher in his native Montana, but Cummings chose to go to Stanford over the University of Montana when he was 18 because of a quick judgment made by his high school coach:

"He called me into his office and said, 'If you go play football at Stanford, you will sit on the bench for the next four years,''' Cummings recalled. "That made me so damn mad, I decided, right there, I was going to Stanford."

Cummings became a valued player at Stanford, playing both sides of the ball, most notably at running back, where he was an All-American, and at linebacker, leading the team in tackles from 1961-62. That doesn't even seem possible, yet it is. The article hints that his AFL career was cut short by the "penury" of ownership. He says, "cattle get more respect than we did." It seems a strange American paradox that the more you work, the less you are paid, and vice versa. Perhaps that is not true in sports anymore, but maybe that's just another example of how sports are not all like life.

Cummings mentions about his education at Stanford, a place that was a far cry from the quieter, rural world of Montana:

"I went from reading Outdoor Life and Ring Life in Anaconda, to reading the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi and the Egyptian Book of the Dead."

He returned to Montana; there he resided in 2005, and perhaps he resides there today. The contrast of the two worlds, the worlds of both the ranch and the ancient Book of Dead, seems even clear when he says that his Montana friends threaten to "stuff him into a snow tire" if he brags too much about his Stanford induction. He is that rare person who has lived in distinct, polarized worlds - the Great Plains and the Redwoods, the offense and defense, Ring Life and the mythic afterlife. After his coach made that passing, smug assessment of his chances at Stanford, Cummings responded by successfully straddling all of those worlds. In that sense, he is more than just existing in the distant past as cattle; he comes across as a rare renaissance man. Whether he really is or not matters little to me. It's what we see on his lawn.

Plus I can't stop thinking about Cummings' indignation. It's the kind Jets fans understand. The Jets are a listing organization on the field, burdened by their own poor choices, lead by a coach who is increasingly a cartoon version of himself, owned by a billionaire who supports an equally rich Presidential candidate who refers to corporations as "people, too." There's no reason to feel sympathy for their plight, but it's we, their fans, the consumers, the ones who are actually the people, who are treated like cattle. And Jets fans come from beneath the underdog. I'm finding myself unpleasantly in two minds of my own - one of nagging self-doubt about this corporation and the other my own bloated pride in being their loyal fan. Our team, this corporation, has wronged us by fielding a squad (a "product," as Woody calls it) that pretends to be great; it plays to the press, taunting opponents without even improving the offensive line. Yet I would love them to stuff this season's smug and cheesy prognosticators into the proverbial snow tire.

NY Jets #62 - Part 2

Sports fans are often torn as to how to answer the question, "Does everything happen for a reason?" On the one hand, everything in sports happens for a reason. Every play, every action on the field has a consequence that directly or indirectly determines the outcome of a game, the "everything" of the question. Last night's Mets game was largely determined by the successful pitching of Chris Young over seven innings and also by the five RBI's by Ronnie Cedeno. But even three of those five runs came as  a result of a shabby play in left field by the Giants' Melky Cabrera. Performance determines a measurable outcome, reflected in either a win or a loss.

But sports are once again not at all like life. Unlike the outcome of a game, the "everything" of life is an ongoing struggle that is never quite complete. We go through each day having completed a generally routine experience and so therefore seem at an end, but that distinction is an illusion. An end is not the end; it's the conclusion of what appears to be a "day," a mere completion of the Earth's rotation while hurtling through space on its measurable, endless revolutionary orbit around our Sun. Sleep is only the imaginary measure of an end, and that's only because we go into an unconscious, nurturing dream state available to most Earthbound, sentient creatures when the Sun appears to vanish over the horizon. There are no winners and losers. We create narratives to help us understand, but these are mostly comforting, or discomforting, illusions.

My co-worker, fellow sports fan and friend Patrick ends his days at work by asking me, "Did you win or lose today?"

I begin by equivocating on the issue, much as I do above: what does it mean to win or lose at anything, other than in a game? I ask.

"I'm asking you," he says, insistent, standing at least three inches above me, "did you win or lose?"

I answer again by offering some indicators. I thought my lesson on paragraphing went well, but the ensuing peer review writing workshop exercise seemed to fall pretty flat, with the students feeling mostly confused. "I have to do better next time," I say. "I see where I went wrong. I'll win next time, but I have to say that at the end of today, I feel like I didn't do as well as I could have for the kids. So, I don't know, I feel like today, yeah, I lost."

Almost like Olivier's insistent dentist in Marathon Man, he approaches me more closely and merely repeats the question, "Did you win or lose today?"

"I lost."

He shakes his head, unhappily. "That's not what I want to hear. You got through your day. You won."

"I won?"

He nods. "You got through your day."

"I won."

"You won."

****

Todd Burger #62, clearing the lane for Leon Johnson

Todd Burger #62 shows up in a bit of research and from memory. He had originally been brought in by Parcells in 1998 because he was a "rough and tumble" guard who brought "toughness" to the Jets' front line. I remember that front line, with Elliott and Mawae, and sometimes I think I'm still rooting for Parcells' team to go to the Super Bowl in 1999, just as I'm still waiting for the 1983 Jets to do it; just I'll always be waiting for last year's group to go there, too. Burger was cut at the end of 1998, his last season in the NFL.

He was arrested in 2007 as part of an illegal gambling ring in New Jersey. It was only when I came across a 2008 article by Matt Taibbi in the Phoenix that I discovered that Burger wasn't the mastermind of the organization, but rather, one of its "enforcers," one of its bruisers, the shakedown guy. He's the guy who's hired to beat up the guy who owes another guy money. He's the guy who rings your front door bell and convinces you he's there to repair a visible problem with your satellite dish, and the next minute, he's in your kitchen, eating some cold leftover pizza from your refrigerator in one hand and pressing your face into your kitchen counter with the other.

As Taibbi points out, "Give Burger a few added points for sentimentality... At least he wasn’t coking up and braining strippers like some ex-football players do." And that's true. Questions remain with me, though. Why was he was cut in the first place, and before the 1999 NFL Draft? Is the fine line between "rough and tumble" and being an enforcer for the mob discernible at the very start? I'm having a hard time believing that Parcells ever objected to Burger's propensity for that kind of guy whose paw, having now finished with the cold pizza in his left, has now commenced to take you by the scruff of your neck with and swat your helpless, regretful face with his right.

****

Does everything happen in life for a reason? We ask ourselves this question most often when coincidences occur. It's a coincidence that I was just thinking about that vacation I took with you, about how fun and regretful it was at the same time, and all of the sudden you just happened to be visiting town, walking into the very same deli that I'm in right now, waiting for my cold cuts. What were the odds? The odds were pretty steep. But it happened, anyway. Either that, or you're following me. What does it mean?

Joe Pellegrini #62

Between 1978 and 1979, Joe Pellegrini #62 played for the New York Jets. He played defensive tackle for the University of Idaho and then for the New York Jets for two seasons. There was nothing strange at all about it.

Joe Pellegrini #62

Then Joe Pellegrini #62 graduated from Harvard in 1982 and played two seasons on the offensive line for the Jets, from 1982-83.

In other words, two men with the same name played in the same number for the same team at different times over a period of seven seasons. You can see this for yourself on the All-Time Jets roster page. You can read about the elder Pellegrini's (above, left) celebrated play while playing for Idaho in the late 70's; you can find his NFL statistics, limited though they are, on his seasons with the Jets, here. You can find out about the other Pellegrini (right) from his recent success as an investment banker and you can see that he spent several seasons with both the Jets and the Atlanta Falcons.

How did this happen? How could this be? What does it mean? There are a considerable number of people throughout the United States with this name, but the odds remain somewhat stacked against this occurring anywhere in the NFL since or again, unless they have the names of Robert Smith and Michael Davis. As a kid, I used to babysit for a family named Pelligrini down the road from my house. They were nice people. There used to be a bakery in Hawthorne called Pelligrino's where we'd go after Mass every Sunday. But that's it. I've known a lot of Josephs in my life, but I've never met anyone named Joe Pelligrini, and the odds of doing so in my life remain bleak.

There is one possible explanation for this - that the organization may have been too cheap to use anything other than a stored #62 jersey for a guy named Pelligrini for another guy named Pelligrini. If that's not it, then we are left in the realm of mystery, wondering, as one does when a coincidence is in evidence, whether or not it all happened for a cosmic reason that none of us are evolved enough to understand.

****

But then, like a firm believer who always thought was an artificially created "face" on Mars, I am forced to accept a simpler, less exotic, less enjoyable explanation of what I see with my own eyes. The simple truth is that I have been tricked into an illusion. From 1978-79, defensive tackle Joe Pelligrini, born in Aberdeen, Washington, graduate of the University of Idaho - the man you see in the blurred picture above - actually wore #77 on the Jets; the team's All-Time Roster has made a simple mistake, certainly not the first one we've ever located. What do you expect from a web page that no longer offers specific data on its former and active players, other than an error message that depicts a referee who looks almost exactly like Steve Carrell?

We create narratives to help us understand the outrageous and confounding mysteries of our lives. It was comforting to believe that two men had the same number and name, because such serendipity hints at a world of greater magic, and who knows what other wonders this magic could yield? But there really isn't much magic in the world. If there were, our teams would win against the odds more often than they do and leave us to bask in the presence of their unexpected glory. Instead, we are left with the logical explanations of why our teams do not do as well as we hope, mostly because they could never be as good as we imagine they might be.