NY Jets #67 - Part 5

An an analyst on ESPN this week, former Jets tackle Damien Woody #67 said that the Giants would be green with envy to have the Jets' defensive line. If this comment ends up being the highlight of the season (and it probably will be) then I'm fine with that. Neither the Giants nor the Jets distinguished themselves on either side of the ball this weekend. And I'm not a Giants hater; much of my extended family are Giants fans. But since December 25, 2011, my life as a fan has essentially been the long nightmare that immediately followed the pass from Eli Manning that Victor Cruz took for a 99-yard touchdown.

That year, after being manhandled by Philadelphia, we held out a bizarre sense of hope that we would beat the Giants in Week 15. Big Blue looked a little lame at that point, but of course they would go on to win the Super Bowl. Rex Ryan's public notes of confidence going into the game were his usual misjudgment, the kind of braggadocio made by a drunken uncle at a backyard barbecue. Blue had the last laugh. They always seem to. But there we go. No sooner am I talking about Damien Woody than I'm talking about the past, the past, the miserable past, and the sweet, burdensome pain that it brings to any Jets fan. What would be without our sense of torment? I guess we wouldn't feel like fans.

Rex and Damien Woody in happier times

Damien Woody's career was a fine one, moving through New England, Detroit, and the Jets, from 1999-2010, managing to miss Detroit's winless 2008 season and then enjoying two winning seasons with us. His last game was the Jets' 17-14 Wild Card Playoff win over the Colts, which sent us off to their playoff win against New England. He tore his Achilles' tendon in the Colts game, and I seem to remember him being led from the field, though I know that we didn't know he had blown it out until the following midweek. I remember feeling a sense of unease that should have bit deeper than it did, if only because Wayne Hunter replaced him.

After the Patriots game - the happiest moment in my fandom - came the AFC Title Game loss to Pittsburgh. But here I go again, trying to mine through the recent past to make sense of where it all went wrong. Maybe it didn't all start with Cruz's touchdown, but with Woody going down for good against the Colts. No wonder his praise for the Jets' defense resonated with me this week. I'm still wading through the bad signs from the past to find the sign that things are going to get better again.

***

Kimo Von Oelhoffen in 2006

It seemed as if everything was going to change. Years and years of losing were on the verge of being forgotten by a single, elusive playoff win. I speak not of the 1981 Jets, but the 2005 Cincinnati Bengals, hosting the Pittsburgh Steelers in the second round. On the second play of the game, Carson Palmer was hit below the knee by Kimo Von Oelhoffen #67, and the Bengals were on their way to losing in the playoffs once again. Even after apologizing to Palmer through the media, though not to the quarterback himself, Von Oelhoffen was released by Pittsburgh at the end of the season and picked up by the Jets. His single hit changed Palmer's fortunes; he's obviously never been the same.

Von Oelhoffen lasted a season with us, another year with Philadelphia, and is today retired and settled in Washington state. More importantly, his name was given to a special addendum to the rules guarding quarterback safety during the offseason in 2006. It's the "Kimo Clause," which penalizes defenders who do not take as many measures as they can before hitting quarterbacks low. If his name had been "Bill" I don't know if there would be a "Bill Clause," but such is the way with names.

The clause came up for discussion again when Tom Brady was injured in 2008 after being hit by Kansas City's Bernard Pollard, who had been taken down, got up again and then hit Brady below the waist, injuring his knee and taking him out for the season - an event about which I don't remember having any feelings. Various observers, partisan or not, considered that Pollard had broken the Kimo Clause, leading immediately to the institution of the "Brady Rule," which says that if a defender is brought down in pursuit of the quarterback, then he must stay down, otherwise he will be penalized, unless he is blocked into the quarterback. This seems a bit more easily enforceable, whereas the Kimo Clause suggested rather absurdly that defensive players somehow go through a mental checklist of items mid-flight the way a pilot of a plane actually does before flying.

Established in much the same way that violations are written and rewritten by kids playing among the amorphous boundaries of a suburban backyard, these hastily written rules and clauses are absurd after a while. Basketball and baseball don't have to worry about these kinds of things. Basketball is a game that's made organically complex by the infinite strategies that can be applied to its rather simple structure. Baseball is inherently complex and is allowed to remain as such because its loyalists are such rabid traditionalists that the game is impervious to fundamental change.

Regardless, the constant changes in pro football, which are almost all dictated to defenders, favor the offense and the passing game, which makes football as great as it is. The problem is that it's not really what football originally was meant to be. In training and drafting we are constantly trying to mold and shape defenders into superhuman giants who would have obviously towered over players in 1927, yet we somehow expect these defenders to still play the basic 1927 game, with smash and grind, even while we are also hoping that we can keep the ball flying in the air. We want everything out of football. So we nip and tuck at it, searching for the right formula.

But football is also characterized by the two impulses in American life - violence and litigiousness. Football has always been an unmanageably violent game because we like it that way. We're talking about a culture that took boxers, put them in a cage and let them beat one another into senselessness and called it UFC. But our conscience also compels us to use rules and clauses to manage our violent obsessions and turn football into the perfect game we all imagine it to be. A rule here, a clause there, and maybe, just maybe football will find itself working just the way we idealize it, with players hurt and challenged on the field, but nobody permanently damaged. I cannot tell if a vanishing pipeline of players from high school will kill the game or the game itself will become obsolete through its contradictions. Probably neither.

***

Opening Day at Shea, 1964

Back in 1963, when the dominance of professional football was a mere gleam in the eye of a disoriented postwar superpower, back when players took water refreshment on the sidelines out of soup ladles, Jim Price #67 played linebacker for the New York Jets. He had been drafted by the Dallas Cowboys, only to be washed out and picked up by the AFL Jets the same year, playing in the franchise's last season at the Polo Grounds.

On New Year's Day 1964, he became part of what was apparently the biggest AFL trade ever; he, Dick Guesman, Ed Cooke, Chris Janerette, and Sid Fournet went to the Denver Broncos for Gene Prebola, Gordy Holtz, Bob Zeman, and, most importantly, Wahoo McDaniel. By securing McDaniel, the Jets had what would be for a year a marquee player, or rather for what passed as one for the newly revamped Gotham Football Club. But say what you will, tens of thousands more fans attended the first football game at Shea, the season opener of 1964 against Denver (as luck would have it) than ever attended the Polo Grounds to watch a pass thrown from Dick Wood or Al Dorow. The Jets won 30-6.

Now, as a linebacker for the Broncos, Jim Price got to see what he was missing. When his replacement made a tackle against Denver, the Shea announcer would playfully say, "Tackle by....you know who...."

And the Shea crowd learned to dutifully answer: WA-HOOOO.

And so was born the football-as-entertainment model that the Jets have more or less followed over four decades. A jet car patrolling the sidelines, a professional wrestler and Choctaw warrior at middle linebacker, a bonus baby quarterback, the Sack Exchange and Gastineau's Dance, Keyshawn Johnson, and Rex Ryan's clown car - these are all pieces of a larger puzzle that is the Jet way. It all began with Wahoo McDaniel, and, by default, with Jim Price's departure to Denver, although Price might not have thought of it that way.

***

As Wikipedia points out, Dwayne White #67 "was nicknamed "The Road Grader", for his run blocking prowess and as such is also considered the first to receive that name." 

The first? You read that right. Personally, I didn't know the name was up for controversial discussion. It's a great nickname, though, and it fits White's size and position. What running back, especially the elder Freeman McNeil, Blair Thomas, and the assorted other unknowns who ran in the Jets backfield from 1990-94, would not have appreciated the road being paved before them with the bodies of opposing defenders?

I say "pave" here, but that's a misnomer. Dwayne White was a road grader. A grader prepares the road that will eventually be paved. A grader creates the road as it can first be imagined into being. The road paver then lays the asphalt. Dwayne White - laying blocks where he was supposed to, perhaps even traveling with runners on a sweep - would by definition therefore be grading roads unimagined and unheralded. In this way, the grader is really a misnomer. Guards and tackles always travel on the paths that all offensive lineman throughout all of the game's history have traveled. They don't create any new roads. They retread the old ones. They're really just pavers, or re-pavers.

But I love the name "Road Grader," and I'm glad that Dwayne White, who went on to play two more seasons for the Rams after leaving the Jets in 2004, was given that nickname. After all, none of us are really grading absolutely new ground in this life, but we like to believe we are, and given the pitiless nature of human life in the scope of historic time, maybe we deserve to believe it. What option do we have?

NY Jets #67 - Part 4

The other day I was reading a profile of Bryan Cranston, who referred to the character he plays on Breaking Bad as "the role that undoubtably will be the first line of my obituary." After years of solidly working in small and larger projects, he has now become one of the most vital actors in an age when people like Walter White are a fascination. As a superpower who slowly destroys everything valuable around him, Walter reminds us of something. But no matter what he does from here, it's likely that Cranston's future work will always be measured against Heisenberg, Walter's alter ego, the one who knocks.

All of us will have a first line to our obituary. Considering what that means for most of us, Cranston is obviously lucky. For some of us, the first line will be bad, wincingly bad. Martin Roche, who attempted to write rather subjectively and disjointedly about an underachieving football franchise, died today after a short battle with liver cancer. No, I'm not sick. Not that I know of. But whatever I imagined my life would be has constantly adjusted to the simple tolls of time. I was going to write my first novel by the time I was 30, my first published novel when I was 40. Now I try to take solace from knowing that Louis Kahn still didn't have a sense of his artistic vision until he was well past 50. But what will I do when I get to that point, and my grand work of supposed genius is still not done?

But what if your moment has already come and gone, leaving you no choice as to what you'd like that first line to be? What if your claim to obituary fame will be "Buttfumble?" What if that thing is really beyond your control? What if you are Everett McIver #67? Only Everett McIver can answer that question, and my guess is that he'd answer it favorably - I am well, I have a life, and I don't have to answer to anyone, and I applaud that. But popular culture doesn't care about people as actual human beings, so it's likely that McIver will be known for "Scissorgate."

It may be that he doesn't mind that. As many people who were witnesses to what happened at the Dallas Cowboys' training facility on July 29, 1998 say, McIver did nothing to provoke what eventually happened to him. The entire story is vividly retold in a 2008 article in The Guardian about the Dallas Cowboys of the 90's. To whit: Cowboy players were receiving complimentary haircuts, McIver sat down into the chair when his turn came up, and even as the job was being done, teammate and clinically insane wide receiver Michael Irvin entered and demanded, on the basis of seniority, that McIver immediately give up his seat and let Irvin get his cut instead. The two argued, eventually coming to blows, and Irvin stabbed Everett McIver in the neck with a pair of scissors, a laceration that required seventeen stitches. Rather than allow Irvin to face the legal consequences of the assault, the Cowboys apparently offered six-figure hush money to McIver, which he took. 

Everett McIver vs. Bruce Smith -
Let's see you try this.

If you do an image search of Everett McIver, you will often find Michael Irvin. Some of us are simply destined to play no role of distinction in this life, and yet some others must play a supporting character in another man's Hall of Fame story. Yet McIver has a success story of his own in that he was an entirely undrafted free agent when he first signed with the Jets, his first professional team, and managed to keep a starting role through much of his career. At 6'5" and well over 300 lbs., I remember McIver as this enormous oak tree standing at the guard position, a vast abutment making his jersey number seem smaller than everyone else's. He began his career in #74, but then moved to #67 in 1995, his final year with the Jets. He found greater success with Miami, and spent two seasons with Dallas, playing one year quite regularly beyond Scissorgate.

But dig a little deeper still, and McIver comes across as a guy who continued to bounce back from challenges both big and small. The simple truth is that the very worst thing that could happen to a person happened to him in 1991, when his infant daughter died during surgery on her heart. Deadspin put McIver in their top 100 Worst only for being unable to block Bruce Smith in 1994 as a rookie, which is ridiculous. But then what the hell would he care? I would suggest that McIver is probably the kind of person to look at life - and maybe even the promise of whatever his first line will be - with a fair measure of clarity and perspective that we might all envy.

***

As we discovered a few weeks ago, Howard Glenn was playing in place of Bob Mischak #67 on the Titans in 1960 during the weeks that Glenn was gravely injured and then died. Mischak went on to have an AFL All-Star career that ended in 1965, after playing for both the Titans and the Raiders. But Mischak earned his earliest fame while playing for Army in one of those moments that become immortalized.

Against heavily favored Duke in 1953, Army was about to seal a 14-13 upset, when suddenly Duke appeared poised for a score. Red Smith waxed rhapsodically about what happened next because a Duke player also named Red Smith took a reverse downfield, with seemingly no one to stop him. In his biography of Vince Lombardi, David Maraniss also talks about this moment too, since Lombardi was at the time on the Army coaching staff. Smith was moving toward the goal line, when Bob Mischak came from behind with incredible speed, caught up with him, and stopped Smith from scoring. He saved the game.

Maraniss says that what Mischak did was pretty extraordinary; he managed to help the team redeem the season: "When Bob Mischak made that unlikely play, what (Head Coach) Blaik called 'a marvelous display of heart and pursuit,' Army's football team regained its soul. Not just Lombardi, but all the coaches, and even the stoic colonel (Red Blaik), cried in the locker room after the game..." The play itself entered into Army lore, apparently even becoming part of West Point's lessons in leadership.

It's difficult to comprehend what Mischak's play meant to people at the time. In the years beforehand, the West Point team had seen players go on to multiple wars, and the endeavor of football itself had taken on the quality of historical events as large as the deeds of Patton, Eisenhower and Macarthur. These were moments of great skill, lionized to mythology. It was just football, but it wasn't.

The title of Maraniss' biography of Lombardi is When Pride Still Mattered, one of the very best sports books I've ever read. The title itself is a test of the modern aesthetic. Can you actually say it without laughing? But that's the point. Players played for pride and were rewarded for playing only for that. Lombardi is often seen as the representative of that tradition, its last lion, dying just before he had a chance to see it wither into nothing. Now, pride as a motivation for courage is often honored like the memory of Lombardi himself, yet so far from the reality of contemporary American endeavors that it seems like a Saturday morning cartoon version of a way of life. As a pro, Mischak played for a team that couldn't even afford to pay its players on time, but he would always have the memory of playing for Army, stopping Duke's Red Smith, and inspiring Red Smith of the Herald-Tribune. He was the essence of pride for its own sake.

If you consider the modern quandary of paying college players to play - which is truly fair in a market sense - and imagine the ripple of consequences that it will then have on college tuition, enrollment, housing and program funding, then suddenly pride - harmless, virtuous pride - seems like the ideal reason to play. But that's not who we are now, and pride may have once mattered, but it ceased to be sufficient a long, long time ago.

Given the lingering legacy of Bob Mischak, and what he represented to a world long gone, I found this odd online tribute to Mischak himself on YouTube to be affecting, even appropriate. I can't quite put the pieces together. It's a kaleidoscope of images, mostly of Mischak looking proud on pro football cards from his days with the Titans and Raiders. In the background, you hear what sounds like the strains of a lone guitarist playing something sentimental and melancholy. But occasionally, a few other images pop up - a corporate photo of a man, whose face is concealed from us, certainly too young to be Mischak. Another is the torso of a large, heavy, anonymous man wearing spandex, holding what looks like a foam legs of a dummy.

What do these have to do with Bob Mischak? Who are these people? Are they all metaphorically Bob Mischaks? Are they other people named Bob Mischak? Do they have the spirit of Bob Mischak? The images then cut back to Mischak himself again, but they study his number, then maybe his chin, never quite getting the full man into focus, almost as if this is some video art piece that, if nothing else, reminds us that whatever mythological power Bob Mischak represented to all the Reds - Blaik, Smith and Smith - today it's nothing more than an unfiltered mess, a random set of images, destined to remain ambiguous forever.

NY Jets #67 - Part 3

I have no idea where the human soul is located, or of what it is made. Is it of non-corporeal, spiritual substance, of the weight of an angel's wings? Is it the content of our breath in a sneeze? Is it our mind, constantly wrangling over issues of wrong and right? Dr. Duncan Macdougall in 1907 attempted to weigh the body immediately before and after death to discover the weight of the soul that had departed the moribund unfortunates he weighed. The loss he found was 21 grams.

Though Ed McGlasson #67 and Kareem McKenzie #67 might not pursue it in quite the same way, I feel like they are after the same goal - to save people's souls. One of them believes that the soul is an eternal substance, moving on in the afterlife to whichever place fits a person's choices and beliefs. Another believes that what we call the soul is the mind, the experiences of our life in cerebral form, whether damaged, misled, or controlled by violence and pain, and healed by the simple acts of talking and listening.

Ed Tandy McGlasson played one season apiece for the Jets, the Rams and the Giants before initially retiring in 1981. Today he is a minister with a congregation he founded called the "Stadium Vineyard" in California. His biography is at the church's website. The key to his story seems to be the death of his own father in 1956 and the kindness shown to him afterwards by his stepfather.

In his ministry McGlasson talks about a struggling person's relationship with God as similar to finding a missing father. Another moment that he brings up seems to be the knee injury he suffered in college at Youngstown State, which healed in such a way that he became converted to evangelical Christianity. Then, at CBN's 700 Club, one finds a feature on him where he discusses playing the Eagles' training camp in 1983 and then hearing God call to him to become a minister, which he was reluctant to do, at least until he blew out his knee the next day.

For me, the struggle is to see into the life of things without always having to identify an absolute explanation for why anything happens outside of my control. I've been told once or twice by people with good intentions that my reasoning is flawed and that I should understand that everything happens for a specific reason in life. But it's no use. I am not a convert to anything, sadly. Just as I have given no real allegiance to anything other than to a failing football team, I find myself unpersuaded to become a member of any club that would have me. I don't think I'm better than anyone else - just a little wary to be led to falsely interpret a signal that is nothing more than a light, a sound, or a gesture randomly made in passing.

But people are brought to where they're brought, and I've always wondered if people like Ed McGlasson resent or pity people like me. Does he think he can coexist in the same world as I? Does he just look at me as an unfortunate person destined for the flames? Perhaps he sees God's role in his life as similar to the one his stepfather played when he was a boy:

“He came to me one day and asked me what I wanted to do,” Ed says. “I said, ‘Well, I want to be a pro football player.’ He smiled at me and didn’t say anything. The next day I remember being woken up at 5 a.m. with a Sears air horn. Woke me out of bed. He takes me and drops me four miles from my house. He looks at me and says, ‘Son, if you’re going to make this dream, you’ve got to build a ladder to your dream one rung at a time. If you’ll run every day, five days a week throughout high school, you’ll hit your dream.’”

Being awakened with a horn is an image you find throughout the Bible. It's one that ministers always love. His stepfather made a dramatic gesture that lots of seemingly indolent adolescents actually crave - the extremity of a clear, unambiguous signal. When I was a boy, I looked for these all the time, hoping to be awakened and persuaded to live in one way - If you do this, this will happen, and you will become this and never doubt yourself again.

McGlasson's smile is welcoming. His church seems like a standard Southern California evangelical one. He addresses his congregation in casual attire. He has a smiling family. I hope that he genuinely helps people. He offers a denunciation of gay life that's a little less depraved than many of the other ones I've read, but it's still homophobic.

His recent tweet to Tim Tebow is great:

@timtebowtim I was also cut from the NY Jets and played for Coach B at the giants. We had the same problem with John 3:16 Proud of you!

American football - with its ferocity, violence and unease - has always been a place for converts to total transformations, like the one Ed McGlasson claims he experienced at the Eagles training camp. In all the fulminations these past few months over the Jets and their disarray, his shout-out to Tebow is my favorite. Being cut by the Jets and playing for Bill Belichick is, apparently, a sign of God's will for those who love Him. By virtue of this brief exchange - gone without a reply from Tebow himself - the Jets appear to represent the world of the wicked and lost, those to whom love and charity are nothing more than a sounding gong. And, sadly, I'm still at home in this world, rooting for the Jets to win against all odds, maybe even those divinely ordained.

***

Kareem McKenzie's best days of play were with the New York Giants. Go ahead and do an image search for him, and he will appear wearing #67 in nothing but Blue. He initially played four seasons for us and then as a Giant, helping to win two Super Bowl victories over New England, and for that he always will have my deepest gratitude, much the way the 1983 Seattle Seahawks will always have my thanks for eliminating the Miami Dolphins from the playoffs, even if for many years Seattle had the best record against the Jets.

When the Giants cut him in March 2012, McKenzie wondered about his future. According to the Fifth Down, he decided to not watch much football because it felt "like watching your ex-wife dance with her new husband." By the time the new season began, he was already beginning to prepare for the GRE's so that he could begin his study for an advance degree in psychology.

At the above Fifth Down link, McKenzie says that his goal is to provide counseling help to former NFL players who were having difficulty acclimating to life after football. He admits that many players use alcohol to manage anxiety and depression from living a world without absolute rules or procedures. But I like that MacKenzie addresses the larger disorientation a player experiences when his career is often done, well before the age of 30:

“Let’s be honest...Players in the N.F.L. are being graded and judged every single day. Their careers can end on any given day. There are people asking things of them, demanding things of them, coming to them for money. If you can’t explain how you’re being affected by things, they just pile up. And I want to be able to help players avoid that.”

If nothing else, the bizarre and troubled lives of many players are, in MacKenzie's view, the result of  having so many people constantly judge them over and over on the basis of something other than the character, or the substance of their souls. He suggests that players have to learn how to talk about what "pile(s) up" in what they experience of the game. The relentlessness of never being good enough, of not being strong enough, of being threatened by the possibility of being replaced by someone else who is probably better than you - none of this is really similar to the actual moment-by-moment experience of everyday human life. At best, half of ordinary life is merely showing up, while at worst we are sometimes expendable no matter how good we are. Life is not football - it's actually more ambiguous and complicated. I hope Kareem McKenzie is successful in helping former players negotiate it all the way through.

NY Jets #67 - Part 2

The conversation, somewhere in Queens in 1975 or '76, must have gone something like this:

ME:     "Dad, what's wrong with his voice?"

DAD:  "Well, I think he has an accent, Marty."

The voice on the radio about which I was speaking belonged to Dave Herman #67, former tackle and guard for the Jets from 1964-73, who was now the color commentator for WOR-AM's coverage of the Jets. Our conversation reveals something about the way I viewed the world at a very early age. First, without knowing any better, I think I came to assume that most things in the world were essentially flawed. It may have been that rooting for the Jets had already enabled this sense in me or maybe this way of being was merely the perfect breeding ground for a Jets' fandom. Regardless, when I heard Dave Herman's voice on the radio, I assumed that something was wrong.

To further complicate my understanding of the world, this is how I actually understood the conversation:

ME:     "Dad, what's wrong with his voice?"

DAD:  "Well, I think he had an accident, Marty."

To a sheltered South Shore Long Island boy, Dave Herman's voice sounded different from anything I had heard before, and while I didn't know what an accent was, I knew what an "accident" was. It was a blanket term for a variety of things that had happened or could happen to me. An accident was what you claimed when you spilled orange juice across the kitchen table, but it was also something that you heard had caused the death of a neighbor down the road who drove into traffic coming home from work one evening. Without knowing any better, it seemed to me that if something was wrong with Dave Herman's voice - and to me there was - then it made sense that something happened to him - an accident - something that had disabled his voice.

Dave Herman was actually born and raised in northwestern Ohio, in the town of Bryan, and he attended Michigan State. So what was I hearing? Well, according to Rick Aschmann's mind-blowing map of American dialects, Herman's hometown is an area of the Midwest located at the crossroads of a variety of intersecting dialects - the basic "Inland North" dialect that is also heard in upstate New York, the "General American" accent found throughout the US, the "Midland" accent and the unique "Indiana North" accent. Where Dave Herman fits in any of that, I don't know, so I will leave it to you to figure it out. I'm just glad I could hear him speak again.

Other than the linguistic confusion that Herman's accent offered, it was his "accident" that somehow made me believe that if even of the world were flawed, it was still could be a good place, offering compassion, opportunity, and a chance at recovery. It seemed as unrealistic back then as it does today that a man injured in some kind of accident such that his speech was affected would land a place on the radio, and yet apparently, in my impressionable mind, WOR did just that, and that was nice to know, albeit erroneously.

***

Super Bowl III is seen as Joe Namath's moment, an apotheosis of one man's will. Jets fans are unique in seeing the game of football this way. We have this basic belief that a quarterback will save us, just as he did that seemingly hopeless day in 1969. But their victory that night relied on a monumental team effort that seems sadly missing from our ranks in 2013, and that's the essential problem. We buy into this false myth that the charismatic quarterback we either bring in or draft - Richard Todd, Ken O'Brien (not you-know-who), Browning Nagle, Neil O'Donnell, Chad Pennington, Kellen Clemens, Brett Favre, Mark Sanchez, Geno Smith - will save us from ourselves.

In 2009, Jeff Miller did a fair service to the legend of Super Bowl III by suggesting a new wrinkle - that its MVP should have been Dave Herman, not Joe Namath. Herman was put on the right side for the latter part of the '68 season, which meant that he was in charge of guarding Ike Lassiter in the AFL Title Game and, most importantly, the taller and faster Bubba Smith in the Super Bowl. That Smith only got to Namath once for a sack in the third quarter was a testimony to the game plan itself.

Dave Herman #67 in front of Bubba Smith #78

The Colts were a machine that ran rather unimaginatively on a series of assumptions that the Jets were able to exploit. One of these was that Bubba Smith could get past anyone to Namath, while the other was that Smith would neutralize the running game. The Jets took care of the latter by running Snell left. Dave Herman took care of Smith because he was an excellent, experienced lineman who knew how to stop a second-year player from his own alma mater.

In his memories from the buildup to the Super Bowl, Joe Namath remembers that it was Dave Herman who spoke up (in what he describes as a country drawl) during the hours of preparatory film and said something to the effect that they should stop watching so much of it because it was making everyone over-confident. While in Countdown to Super Bowl, Dave Anderson writes that Herman was in and out of a state of agitation throughout the time leading up to the game. On the morning of the game itself, Herman apparently sat at team breakfast, staring into space, repeating to himself over and over that he was going to kill Bubba Smith. During the weeks waiting, Herman seems alternately buoyant and anxious, reading only the Wall Street Journal for reports on the stock market. Now that the game itself is on the horizon, he seems uncertain, more afraid, or simply trying to visualize what he needs to do in order to stop one of the most feared players of his day.

When I took my six-hour Master's comprehensive exams years ago, I got our of my car, approached the department building on campus and thought about Dave Herman barely touching his breakfast, psyching himself up to kill Bubba Smith. Perhaps we love sports so much because our life is filled with little contests whose magnitude we can represent to ourselves as resembling the ones our teams play - contests over which, ironically, we have no control and which have no actual meaning to our lives, except in terms of the strange feelings they evoke in us. A job interview, a certification test, a meeting with someone to resolve a dispute, or a first date - we suddenly realize we are just an hour away, and we must now come to grips with the fact that this thing that we had thought about only abstractly is now very close at hand. It must be because it has to be. It has to be because it must be. It's an elliptical syntax that doesn't allow any doubt to enter.

In 2009, when Jeff Miller told Herman that he made him the MVP that should have been, Herman "didn't seem surprised or overwhelmed." Instead, he seems to know what the Jets' front office has lost sight of - that a true championship is not the miraculous work of one charismatic individual. Such things are only the property of myth. A quarterback solution is not a team solution, and while many of us await the second coming of a Namath, returning on a fiery chariot to vanquish our enemies, the truth is we could use more Dave Hermans, Randy Rasmussens, Winston Hills, Jon Schmitts, and Bob Talaminis. They kept Namath safe and kept the holes open for Snell to run. And we had Snell, too. And Maynard, Lammons and Sauer. And a relentless defense that forced turnovers. So many puzzle pieces that seem to be missing today.

***

Mike Gisler #67 was one of two other vital pieces of the New England Patriots' offense that came to the Jets, courtesy of Bill Parcells' influence in 1998. The other two were Keith Byars and Curtis Martin. Byars retired at the end of the season, and Martin is in the Hall of Fame. Mike Gisler played two seasons with the Jets, and then retired. I have no way of knowing if he continued his playing career somewhere else.

Where else could he play? Well, professional football began in the United States on Thursday with Denver's dismantling of Baltimore, but it's also important to remember that some degree of professional and amateur football is played everywhere, by teams like the Silver State Assassins, the Wenatchee Valley Rams, the Braintree Cowboys, and the Middle Tennessee Honey Badgers. My favorite is the Midwest Nightmare.

These are all teams in the American Football Association (AFA), a league promoting semi-pro and minor league football. For players whose dreams of NFL play are dashed, there is always a game somewhere in pads and helmets. One of their mottos is Ernie Banks' own - "It's a great day. Let's play two." As their site points out, players must play for the love of the game. What other reason would there be? Money seems scarce in the AFA.

Anthony Corvino #67, replacement player-scab for the Jets during the 1987 strike, went on in years to come as a second team All-American with the Marlboro Shamrocks, a good team to play for in the Eastern Football League, especially from about 1983 to 2004, when the Shamrocks won 15 Eastern League titles. However, the team doesn't appear to be on the league's current list. All periods of dominance must ultimately come to an end, and with them even the team itself, whether out of mediocrity, which I trust it will soon for the Patriots, or financially, as it did for Rangers FC. More than one fan of the Middleboro Cobras is today enjoying the absence of the Shamrocks from the standings, especially since the Cobras dropped six title games to the Marlboro club over a period of 14 seasons, acting as Wilt Chamberlin to the Shamrocks' Bill Russell. But last year, the Cobras beat the Worcester Mass Fury (my new favorite name; sorry, Nightmare) 39-6 for the EFL title. Perhaps Jets fans of many types can take comfort from that news, though not fans of the Broome County Jets, whose team doesn't seem to exist anymore, either.

NY Jets #67 - Part 1

According to Bucpower, which navigates the 37 year-old history of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Darrell Austin played mostly on special teams in #69 for the Bucs from 1979-80, which means that he enjoyed the glorious 1979 season, when the team made it to the NFC Championship, only then to somehow lose at home 9-0 to the Los Angeles Rams. In the matchup that got them there, the 24-17 win over the Eagles in the Divisional Playoffs, Austin played almost the entire game at guard. Before he ended up in Tampa, Darrell Austin played at guard in #67 for the Jets from 1975-78. 

According to the site, Austin was nicknamed the "Colonel" because that was the military rank of the Six Million Dollar Man, the bionic Steve Austin. Apparently, Darrell had "an artificial small finger," which might mean he had small part of a finger, or maybe an artificial pinky finger, hence the name. Regardless, the idea that somebody's artificial finger could be used to compare to a man barely alive, entirely rebuilt by science is as humorous now as it must have been in the locker room the day someone first discovered Darrell Austin's artificial digit and put it all together. 

You can get a nickname in a millisecond, and it will stick with you. One of my college roommates, named Dave, instantly became "Phil Simms" for almost his four years after someone at a party noticed their resemblance. Eventually Dave had to make an all-out public relations assault on the name each time he heard it. I was watching a game of craps in the back of my school bus in middle school when one of its players satirically referred to me as "Bruno, the enforcer," which was my name for several years of my childhood. The speed with which it happens can be amazing. Since the Six Million Dollar Man ran from 1974-78, it's conceivable that someone in the Jets' locker room gave Darrell Austin his nickname, and if that's true, I'd really like to know who it was. 

This is the 1977 Topps Darrell Austin, which I have somewhere. This is the Jets' guard on the sideline looking lonely during 1976, easily one of the worst seasons in Jets' history. If you've been keeping score of late, that suggests some truly bad football.

I've been thinking about bad Jets seasons lately because, apparently, 2013 is supposed to be one of them. It will be, I suppose. People are predicting it with the same tone they use to forecast another terrible hurricane season, or a forest fire, or a stretch of impending tornadoes, or Lindsay Lohan's latest foray into rehab. Since we are, as a nation, addicted to bad news, the Jets' 2013 season - which will not be the only losing season for a football team this year - is predicted by the sports world with an anticipation and relish that defies all considerations of reason. It makes me realize how many people love storms, fires, crashes, mass destruction, or at best, displays of abject failure, hubris, and bloopers. But nothing sells like self-destruction, and everybody sees the Jets as a self-destructive team.

But back in 1976, when the photograph for Darrell Austin's card was taken, I used to thrill at any level of coverage directed toward my pathetic little football team from Shea Stadium. And while I have lots of bile about where the team is headed right now, I'm more disgusted by the entertainment quality surrounding the struggles of our club. It's as if in some way the Jets promised the cure for esophageal cancer this summer, and the media of Bristol and the metropolitan tri-state area are now expressing their subsequently righteous outrage at their failure to deliver. I understand that Rex Ryan has promised much over the years and delivered only just a slice of it, but methinks everyone just doth freaking protest too much.

Where in hell is Gerald Eskanazi when you need him? It's absurd. The Jets are our team. The fact is we have been through these kinds of seasons before, and while Jets fans are routinely cast as knuckle draggers, we remain, for whatever reason, loyal. Sean Newell of Deadspin scornfully suggests that Jets fans will turn on Geno Smith after a few games, and sadly I guess that's true. Jets fans can't be blamed for feeling manipulated about the quarterback position over the past six seasons. But - and it pains me to say it - it's just another bad Jets season. We have been here before, even if no one else in football reportage has, and we'll continue to be here (most of us decent human beings who don't feel deep hatred or bitterness in our hearts) when no one in the media cares about us anymore. We know what we're about.

As several people have pointed out, the fallout from Ryan's starting Sanchez late in the Giants exhibition game was also insane. Actually, it was more enjoyable than any circus I've attended, comparable with the wild outrage accompanying Miley Cyrus' VMA performance the very same weekend. As Miley danced horribly in a diaper, waving a foam finger as a substitute phallus, baring her tongue to the audience like a goat from behind the fence at a petting zoo, Mark Sanchez was hit late and left rolling around, holding his shoulder. The next morning, with synchronized precision, I was able to jump back and forth between replays of this young woman, barely out of her teens, slapping the asses of giant, oddly depressed-looking teddy bears and then images of Mark Sanchez getting hit in the Giants game, again and again. Each one was narrated in equal tones of hysteria. Miley, Mark. Mark, Miley. I got to feel as Lewis Black did about the TV coverage the day after Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction:

"I awoke...and watched...as my beloved country....lost its goddamned mind."

This unhappy obsession the sports world currently has with our team is making everybody angry, especially non-Jets fans. At work, near Philadelphia, friends of mine hold me responsible for the volume of coverage my doomed team gets on ESPN. Who cares about your team? they ask. Why do I have to see another story about Mark Sanchez? 

I want to tell them that when Darrell Austin played guard for the Jets in 1976, the team merited little more than a small column at the bottom of the Times sports page, which I would ask my mother for as she sat hovered over the paper in the morning, cigarette in hand. She would deftly tear the little scrap of paper about the Jets off the sports section without even so much as breaking her concentration. Back then, the Giants of Doug Kotar, Joe Pisarcik, John McVay, and Larry Csonka, who were nearly just as bad, got so much more print than we did. Now, much to Giants fans' dismay (though not Eli Manning's) the Jets get so much more. Back then, in sports at least, our Fourth Estate still believed that you should give more coverage to teams with the greatest potential for winning because success actually sold more papers than stories that rooted against losers did. How times have changed.

"Times being what they," the Player repeats again and again about the decay of theater to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as he trots out a hapless, homeless teenage boy named Alfred from his acting troupe to perform as a promiscuous woman in a sex show:

GUILDENSTERN: (regards ALFRED sadly.) Was it for this?
PLAYER: It's the best we've got.
GUILDENSTERN: (looking up and around): Then the times are bad indeed.

Indeed. Sure enough, at lunchtime this week, a couple of my co-workers and I went to a local pub, where a big screen TV with the sound down was showing ESPN's interview with Curtis Martin, discussing the Jets' "catastrophic" preseason.

"What the hell?" one of my companions said, pointing to the TV, his voice filled with indignation. "This what I'm talking about, Marty."

So I looked up and saw, to my delight, that while that was going on, another onetime winner that ESPN was now rooting to lose  - Johnny Manziel - was featured in the crawl below. I pointed it out.

"It's all in the game," I said. "All in the game."

"Thanks, Omar," he said, sitting down, looking over at the specials. "But I want my football season back."

"Well," I said. "You can have mine."

"No, thank you," he said. "No way."

I nodded solemnly, needing to eat my feelings. I ordered the corn beef special, and, despite our better judgment, the two of us waited for our food by staring back up at the TV, trying to decipher what Curtis Martin was saying.