Infinite Jets

NY Jets #8 - Part 2

2012-02-23T10:12:00.012-08:00

Mark Brunell? (circa 1966)

Craig Morton? (circa 2011)

Apropos of absolutely nothing, has anyone ever seen Craig Morton and Mark Brunell #8 together? If so, are they ever embarrassed? Although Brunell is three inches shorter than Morton, I have an otherwise plausible theory that Mark Brunell is actually Craig Morton having traveled back in time and reestablished a younger clone of himself as a starting quarterback, as he was for Jacksonville in the 90's. The only trouble is that now Brunell (in his present form, as a Morton clone) is about a year younger than I am. So the time jumping Morton has to come up with a new plan.

Maybe it's the other way round. Maybe Craig Morton is actually Mark Brunell who traveled back in time and replaced Don Meredith for the Dallas Cowboys in the mid to late 1960's. In any event, Morton/Brunell played so well against the Bills at the end of the 2010 season in place of Mark Sanchez that I almost hoped he might be able to do something in relief of our starting quarterback toward the end of this past season. But then the statistics show he merely went 6 for 12 for 110 yards in that game. Maybe I'm just hoping that a man born the year after I was born (and the year that his earlier/later self brought the Cowboys to a loss in Super Bowl V) can still lead a team to victory in football. So, now that Brunell nears the age at which Elvis died, where will he go? Mark Sanchez needs more than just fraternal advice; he needs an intervention, which a time traveler may not have time for, figuratively or literally. So whither will the time traveler go?

****

There is a famous photograph taken along the sidelines of a 1974 game against the Buffalo Bills at Shea, where Joe Namath is speaking with his coaches, or maybe his agent. He is caked with mud, and he is about to lead the Jets to a 20-10 win with a touchdown pass to Jerome Barkum. It is one of the most commonly signed of Namath shots, and it depicts one of the last moments of Namath glory (such as it was) complete with the gladiator's parka. It's merely a moment caught, but I've always been alert to the fact that walking behind Joe is #8, the rookie punter, Greg Gantt.

Greg Gantt

I remember going through the PRO magazine at my first Jets game, the 1975 home game against the Colts, and looking through the faces of all the players who listed as starters that day. And there, between Eddie Bell #7 and JJ Jones #11, was the photo you see to the right - of a gap-toothed, mop-topped guy with a mustache, looking more like a Lynard Skynard roadie or a sheriff's deputy than a football player. I don't remember him, but he punted relatively well, five times averaging 42 yards. By comparison, the Colts' David Lee punted six times, though the Colts won 45-28.

But Greg Gantt was a well-known punter in the world of the Iron Bowl, the world of Alabama football. In the early 1970's, Gantt was the Crimson Tide's punter. With under a minute to play against Notre Dame in the 1973 Sugar Bowl, his last game with Alabama, and trailing 24-23, Gantt launched an excellent punt that went over the head of the returner, and Alabama downed it at the Irish 2. In all, Gantt's punt went 69 yards. At 6:19 you see him launch it, but he's also roughed up by Ross Browner, and rather than take a fourth and five for the penalty, Bear Bryant gave the ball to Notre Dame, hoping for his defense to come through. Yet no one would have remembered Gantt's great punt, whether the Bear accepted the penalty or not, for Notre Dame's Tom Clements then made a brilliant pass to Robin Weber along the sideline at the 36, giving the Irish the first down and enough room to run out the clock.

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;The&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

The piece of Alabama lore for which Greg Gantt was actually better known is referred to "Punt, Bama, Punt," a 1972 Iron Bowl game where Bill Newton of Auburn blocked two of Gantt's punts and the Tigers' David Langer scored touchdowns off the blocks each time, helping Auburn to a 17-16 win over the Tide. Afterwards, Bear Bryant apparently said that he would never again have a "3 step punter," which I suppose is what Gantt was. It's difficult to think about Gantt playing another full year under Bryant knowing that he was the last of a kind of punter that the Bear didn't want anymore.

Or was it that he lived the rest of his life in the shadow of the moment from the state's most important game? Let me say first that Gantt actually passed away last October 2011 from heart disease after battling diabetes for many years. (A fine online dedication to him is available at the Southern Heritage Funeral Home web site.) He seems to have lead a good life, a full life. According to the Times obituary, Gantt's sister says that her brother worried for many years that the blocked punts would be what people would know him for most of all. Almost as if to guarantee it, the obituary actually begins with the following:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Greg Gantt, a former punter for the University of Alabama and the Jets, who might be best known for having two punts blocked in a 17-16 loss to Auburn in 1972, died on Wednesday. He was 59.

Well, there you have it, New York Times. You made Greg Gantt's worry come true. The obituary fails to mention that Gantt also led the Southeastern Conference in punting three seasons in a row and held records for punting at Alabama for many years. Gantt returned back to Birmingham after his last season with the Jets in 1975, to his home, to a world where the past is the most important time frame. Past resentments, past slights and memories held in place determine the present in Alabama, and the past repeats again and again with a melancholy redolence. I've often said that I haven't got much appreciation for college football, even if it is the feeding line for the pros. Everything I've seen here in Pennsylvania in reaction to the decline and death of Joe Paterno suggests that, in general, the game fosters sentimentalities in people that defy common sense. And in Alabama, where the state flag features the bars of the St. George's Cross in blood red, the Iron War are very likely deeper than just the sides of a football game. It's awful to feel as though you are the reason why your team lost, but remember that Gantt's blocked punts were also a failure of the offensive line. Right? Doesn't that make sense? Yet Bear Bryant said he didn't need a three-step punter anymore.

The moment in memory has also come down to three men - Gantt, Newton and Langer - the punter, the blocker, and the recoverer. As late as 2004, the moment was being discussed. Newton says at the link that people still approach him with pictures of one of the blocked punts for him to autograph, with the players carefully labeled on the picture. They tell him of how "they'd passed down the story of the game to their kids." Mike DuBose, former head coach and Bryant player is quoted as saying of the Iron Bowl in A War in Dixie: "It's the kind of game I didn't enjoy playing in. The game is never over. You kept repeating it and repeating it and repeating it. ... It's never over until you play it again next year."

We imagine that by being a fan we are encouraging our heroes to mark their time on the field as the time of their lives, as if we are doing them a favor. You get the sense that Newton is "humbled," as he says at the link above, when fans approach him with a picture to sign from a game played in 1972, but he also seems beguiled. DuBose speaks of the game as not at all enjoyable, and why would you enjoy something that actually has the potential to mark itself not just in your memory forever but also in the consciousness of the entire people who occupy the only place you can ever be able to return to and call home. Was it a relief for Greg Gantt to live in New York, where probably no one mentioned "Punt, Bama, Punt?" He came home to Alabama when all was done, regardless, had two daughters, and worked in the recycling business. He was beset by illness, and apparently had his left leg amputated (though not his kicking leg) within a few years of his death as a result of his struggles with diabetes. He came home to a place where people don't appear to forget anything.

At the end of the obituary, there is a piece of Modernist poetry. Of the '72 game, Gantt's sister is quoted as saying, "He got over it; that’s what most people remembered most." That Faulknerian semi-colon sits in the middle of two truths, one about the efforts of the individual and the other about the insatiable collective memory of home.

NY Jets #7 - Part 2

2012-02-18T15:09:00.000-08:00

We are in the process of updating all previously discussed numbers up to 61, wherever necessary. We are also revising some of the previous entries themselves, making them, we hope, more palatable. More readable. Less unreadable.

Kevin O'Connell #7 was Mark Sanchez's backup in 2011 after doing such services behind Tom Brady in New England and then playing for the Jets (and suiting up for the Lions and Dolphins) after that. Altogether, the Jets cut him in 2010, brought him back at the beginning of the 2011 camp, then cut him again, then brought him back after Greg McElroy (of the now famous "culture of corruption" quote) dislocated his thumb. O'Connell was this year's third stringer, and he threw three fewer passes than Jeremy Kurley #11 and one less than Ladanian Tomlinson, who threw one.

Which reminds me of another tall guy with an Irish name...

****

When I first started the then-unnamed Infinite Jets project in 2007, I went through the numbers pretty quickly, thinking that this would be something to do briefly in my spare time. It has developed into a largely unread obsession which takes up big chunks of my free life. It is mostly a hobby, but it is also an outlet for a frustrated fan of a football team and therefore, by definition, a labor of love.

So many players got a short shrift here early on, especially Ken O'Brien #7. I remember writing about number 7, for example, while sitting in a student desk, monitoring the hallways during a final exam period. Instead of grading my own student exams, I wrote about O'Brien:

This man is a New York Jets legend, mostly because he was not Dan Marino. The Jets could have picked Dan Marino in the draft - many teams could have - but they chose Ken O'Brien instead. Do I need to discuss the ramifications of this? Do I need to talk any further about it?... O'Brien was good when he was good and terrible when he was bad; basically, he was just like you and me. Average. He was not Dan Marino, but then neither are you - literally or metaphorically. After a while, he started to look small in his uniform. He was a good quarterback in the best days of 1986 - the first half of the season - when we went 10-1. But then we also lost the last five games of the season. When Pat Ryan pulled his groin (his own) in the playoffs against Cleveland, Kenny came off the benching he received and attempted an ill-fated QB sneak. He threw a winning touchdown to Al Toon to keep the Giants out of the playoffs in 1988. Then he starts to fade away. The more Dan Marino won, the more we knew Ken O'Brien himself would never live up to being Ken O'Brien. It's just Jets logic, and it works every time.

Blunt to the point of being glib, I said all I could about Ken O'Brien, knowing there was a lot more to say. "Do I need to talk any further about this?" I realize that this is the same question I ask near the end of every entry on every player on this site. And the answer is yes, always yes. There is always more to say. And if any player epitomizes the Jets fan's brief joys and relative misery, then it's Ken O'Brien, this devotion's patron saint. So let's try again.

First of all, as of a year and a half ago, Ken O'Brien seems to have been doing quite well. He was a quarterbacks coach for Carson Palmer and Matt Cassel at USC. He says the best parts of being in the game were the relationships he forged with fellow Jets teammates. He speaks at the link above with malice toward none, even if he's aware that the central question he'll be invariably asked will involve Dan Marino. Recall that both Todd Blackledge (Chiefs' pick) and Tony Eason (Patriots) were picked before him and that Marino was available to both those teams as well.

You have to admire the absolutely enormous gamble the Jets made in picking a Division II star quarterback whose arm would soon give out instead of the man who would become the greatest quarterback of his time (of all time?). It was not entirely clear what the outcomes would be, but maybe it was a little clear. A little. And hindsight, though useless, tells us that picking O'Brien was not so much an informed decision (remember that the Jets - and several other teams - were worried about Marino's IQ) as it was a collective death wish. With O'Brien's gradual decline, the Jets' organization - ever the second banana of New York - would become a non-entity for years.

It was not his fault. Ken O'Brien wasn't a bad quarterback. In fact, statistically, for almost two seasons, he was every bit as good as Marino. He had an extraordinary passer rating in 1985, going to the Pro Bowl that season, as well as to the playoffs. For most of 1986, he was excellent, but then after week 12 the Jets played like the worst team in the NFL, and O'Brien went into a mysterious funk. That season, one of the most vividly horrifying of my entire fandom, took a briefly better turn in the Wild Card Game, when the Jets beat Kansas City 35-15. Joe Walton started Pat Ryan (the patron saint of Jets' backups; remember that, Kevin O'Connell) in place of O'Brien. Paul Zimmerman's article on the game in SI spends a curious amount of time on the arm fatigue of Ken O'Brien, who stood on the sidelines:

O'Brien had come into camp during the summer and thrown five days a week. When he wasn't practicing on the field during the season, he was throwing on the sideline, always throwing. When the weather turned cold, the equipment man would give him a thermal shirt to wear under his jersey, but he turned it down. He was young and strong, and his arm had lightning in it. Then his arm got tired.

He was young and strong. The Jets lived and died on the long arm of O'Brien. Injuries ensued in 1986, and the defense couldn't keep the others side from scoring less than the Jets did. The object was to outscore the opponent, and with receivers like Wesley Walker and Al Toon, the Jets could do it, just so long as O'Brien could throw as far as they could run. When I think about the team's seeming inability or unwillingness to let Mark Sanchez unload the ball downfield this past season, I'm struck by the fact that, long ago, all the Jets did was throw deep.

O'Brien's Wikipedia page is a fascinating apologia, the profile of a man who was, for a brief period of time, untouchable. There is a conspicuous information suggesting that he really was as good as Marino, Montana, and Elway for that brief period time. There is a list of games on the page in which each opposing quarterback threw for 400 or more yards, and there you'll find O'Brien's greatest hour, the 51-45 victory over Marino and Miami, a game I remember well. O'Brien tied up the game on a last-second touchdown to Wesley Walker and then reached Walker on a bomb in overtime.

That game's highlights and a praising montage O'Brien, courtesy of AmazingQB is here:

(I love that one commenter says, "Can we lose the shitty music, please?" But that would mean we'd lose the whole ambiance that accompanies such videos. It's heavy-handed, crass, obvious - all the things that make up Jet fandom, and that's why it's appropriate. We can't lose that shitty music.)

O'Brien went to the Pro Bowl in 1991, but then no more, and he gradually faded. He ended up with the Eagles in 1994 and then his career ended. A more full and vivid appraisal of him is by Phil Rippa at Veteren Presence. Rippa is a genuine fan whose love for O'Brien's heroics speaks better than anything I can say here. His essay ends with the inevitable words that Jets fans have muttered under their breath each time they remember that every one of their division rivals has been to the Super Bowl several times since 1969, while we have not: "I suck."

Not we. "I." There is no "I" in team, but neither is there one in "fan," and while a player can always have his teammates to draw upon for solace, the fan usually has only himself and maybe his fellow fans. Players can at least acknowledge to one another that they tried their best and that no one else would be able to try as they did. No fan can really do anything to help his team win or lose. Fandom is the ultimate passive experience. There is literally nothing you can do to keep your team from losing, and even then, they don't usually win. They suck; I suck. It's an equation you learn early on in school while your classmates are talking about how they love what seem to be only the winning teams in sports and you are unable to feel disloyal to a team that never wins. It seems to suggest something horrifying - that you care about this more than anyone else does.

No wonder then that Rippa became so upset in his above piece when he discovered that Wikipedia identifies Dan Marino as the winner of NBC 's 1991 EA Quarterback Challenge when Rippa thought O'Brien had won it (O'Brien won it the year before). And here endeth the lesson in personalizing fandom. The worse your team is, the more you will yearn for validation, even in the most absurd of places, like the EA Quarterback Challenge, an event that hasn't been on TV for a long time simply because it was obviously so silly. Did Dolphin fans need to know that Dan Marino won the challenge two years in a row? Did it matter at all to them? I would think not. For Rippa, every little thing counts to someone who cares about the Jets. It mattered the whole world to me that Wesley Walker made the 1978 Pro Bowl. It mattered to me that the Sack Exchange was a nationally recognized nickname. It meant something to hear Al Michaels' incredulous voice say that the Jets would move on to the second round of the playoffs against New England a little over a year ago. It meant we meant something. And I felt validated.

So enjoy this little moment below, again from AmazingQB, just as you must, as a Jets fan, enjoy all the little things in life as they come. Enjoy the shitty music. Just aim for the bullseye. But remember that, as always, it moves:

NY Jets #6 - Part 2 (cont'd)

2012-02-11T12:51:00.000-08:00

We are in the process of updating all previously discussed numbers up to 61. We are also revising some of the previous entries themselves, making them, we hope, more palatable. More readable. Less unreadable.

How things change. Only last year, I was bemoaning the moral lapses in Mark Sanchez #6 when he was associating with a 17 year-old, either romantically or socially. Now I see that my rather heavy-handed lecture from a year ago was not even worth the time reading. Now I seem to have found more important considerations - that he is not a great quarterback and, quite possibly, not even a good one.

Jets fans have been debating internally and externally about the possibility of picking up yet another over-the-hill quarterback like Peyton Manning ever since the season ended, and it's absurd. Nothing good comes from bringing old veterans to our team, and I'm certain that Manning is not considering the possibility himself. Sanchez is, according to some reports, not a serious leader of the offense, and he apparently lacks a work ethic. I don't know. This culture of "corruption" of which Sanchez's backup spoke at season's end is such a cauldron of poor planning and bombast, and the problem is neither Sanchez nor his unhappy former co-captain Santonio Holmes. The problem is that Rex Ryan is a very good defensive coordinator but not a great Head Coach and is almost completely devoid of offensive vision.

But you know, outside of that, the Jets are actually still not that bad a team, and Mark Sanchez, if he can improve even vaguely, might yet lead the offense to the playoffs again. That might seem like a bold statement considering how deeply felt everyone's funeral songs were for the Jets' future at season's end.

But Mark Sanchez is close to being a good quarterback, if not a great one. His statistics show a QB whose rating has incrementally improved in three years. He threw 26 touchdowns in 2011, which was an improvement, though against 18 interceptions, which was at least two less than he threw his first year. His passing yardage has increased each year. One of the most telling pieces of information is that he was fifth in the NFL this year in being sacked (39 times). That was a steady growth from the season before, and we all knew how bad the Jets front line was this season as early as the Ravens' game. Take with this that Sanchez was saddled with the underperforming Brian Shottenheimer offense, and you can actually argue that the problem is not his alone.

But he isn't on any lists of top statistical performances from last year. In overall stats, Ryan Fitzpatrick had a better season than he, and so did Carson Palmer, technically. I admit I actually believed he'd throw for 4,000 yards this season, so I'm as ridiculous as anyone else who, conversely, thinks that the only answer is Peyton Manning. I don't see how things can get markedly better for the Jets' offense, even with Tony Sporano as offensive coordinator, and the team has made personnel decisions that are just terrible. So what real good will a modest improvement in Sanchez's performance really bring, anyway?

Maybe he still might be a good quarterback, or even a very good one, but it will be if only the gods will be kinder to our club next year. Of course, I don't recall many instances where the gods have been so generous with us over the years since Super Bowl III, and perhaps they are only now reminding us that the confident, almost oblivious young Californian who took the field to lead the Jets over the Patriots in the playoffs more than a year ago should have counted his blessings while he still had them going his way.

NY Jets #4 - Part 2

2012-02-05T20:01:00.000-08:00

TJ Conley: a busy man

On the last day of August last year, TJ Conley #4 was named the starting punter for the Jets, replacing Steve Weatherford, which made him a busy man in 2011. He ranked in the top three for punts attempted, which is not a particularly inspiring statistic for a team, though it shows that Conley had plenty of experience. His punts were mostly on average with other punters in the league, so it will be interesting to see whether or not the Jets will start him again in 2012. Punters tend to stay. Or someone picks them up pretty soon after they're cut.

Take Steve Weatherford, for example. After we foolishly chose not to re-sign him, Weatherford, the man Conley replaced, signed with the Giants, and in the Super Bowl proved how valuable a great punter can be. Weatherford pinned the Patriots a few yards in front of their own end zone twice and nearly did it a third time. He was the closest I've ever seen in my feeble memory of a punter who deserved the Super Bowl MVP.

Quarterbacks don't stay quarterbacks for long unless there's something special about them. Witness Kellen Clemens. What's interesting about Conley is that he was a starting quarterback in high school and transitioned to punter at the University of Idaho after he broke his leg. Unlike the starting quarterback, the punter or kicker appears befriended by no one on the sideline because he participates in another sport entirely, one made for smaller, skinnier men; it must have been a strange transition for TJ Conley.

In a way, as it was suggested at camp, Conley is still learning on the job. In the link, Mike Westhoff suggests that a good punt is about the drop, just as the serve in tennis is about the toss. In football as in life there are plenty of chances to do a better job to make up for the last mistake you made. But punters and kickers rely on the best decisions of a single moment. That moment embodies the precarious nature of their work. The only men to use their feet in football are only as good as their last attempt. Other players will always have another shot on the next play, but so many factors - the wind, the oncoming rush - can unsettle the precision of the drop or the snap. Perhaps kicking is like heart surgery, as Nick Folk suggested.

Kickers and punters aren't drafted high up (Mike Nugent excepted) and they usually come to the club by word of mouth or as vagabonds just strolling onto camp, looking for someone to snap the ball to them or offer to hold. At Florham Park, you can see the placekicker and punter stand to the side, mostly keeping each other company, mostly snapping to one another and sharing in the peculiar solitude of their professions, whether they like it or not. They look like the kids whom no one wants to play with.

So where do these men go when there's no other place to turn, when they need someone to teach them to become better at their job? One person he can turn to is Louie Aguiar #4, who punted for the Jets from 1990-93. If you want to be a better kicker, you can attend his Aguiar Kicking Academy in Missouri. Aguiar played well for the Shottenheimer Chiefs after playing reasonably well as a Jet in the early 90's. Like a lot of punters, Aguiar looks less like a football player than a public school principal.

***

Glenn Foley, QB

In the dark days of the mid-1990's Glenn Foley #4 was a very distant hope for the future. A New Jersey native, Foley was the Jets fan's ideal underdog. During the miserable 1995 season, the Jets got their second of three wins when they played the Dolphins at home. Bubby Brister threw two short touchdown passes to Johnny Mitchell and Wayne Chrebet. The final was 17-16, and it might have felt good since the Jets had lost to Miami at home the year before in the Faked Spike game. I don't remember. Through the crackling AM broadcast of the game that I was barely able to pick up in my little apartment in Philadelphia, I do recall that the crowd was chanting the last name of their recently drafted quarterback from Boston College: Fo-ley, Fo-ley.

A drafted quarterback is always a piece of mythical promise, and Jets fans can sometimes be the most gullible people on Earth. We are, by definition, believers in ridiculous promises: Lam Jones, Blair Thomas, Browning Nagle; Leon Hess believed he could win the Super Bowl with Richie Kotite. The most important bet in sports history cost $427,000 in the person of Joe Namath, and it might not have paid off anywhere other than the gate had he not beaten the Colts in Super Bowl III. This gamble is the Jets' legacy to organized sports, but it has cursed Jets fans into believing that it will magically happen again, and for a little while, we believed Glenn Foley could make it happen. The good day came for Glenn Foley when the Jets played the Patriots at home in 1997. Neil O'Donnell was taken out of the game by an unhappy Bill Parcells, and Foley was put in.

An old friend of mine, Johnny, had come back into Philly for a visit that day. He and I had been in grad school together, and he had gotten his PhD and moved with his newlywed wife to the Midwest where they had both gotten jobs teaching at a cloistered liberal arts college.

My wife has always asserted that I had a "man crush" on Johnny, and I realize she is essentially correct. Tall, striking, resembling a cowboy version of a 1985 Michael Stipe, Johnny was a constant source of attention from passersby whenever we went out for a night of bar hopping. By comparison, I looked like his food taster, his manservant, the guy who carried his saddle around from rodeo to rodeo. I realize now that we bore an uncanny resemblance to Joe and Ratso walking down the street in Midnight Cowboy. When we were at the bar together, strange women would come up to him and ask if they had ever met before. I basked in the glow of his company; I never knew what it felt like to make people feel this way.

If he was a cowboy, then he was an intellectual cowboy. He could sing a few Hank Williams songs with a warble and then talk about Jacques Derrida, whom no one understands. Not even Derrida. Probably not even Johnny. Now a full-time professor, he nevertheless decided to come back to Philly for a visit. I gleaned that things weren't going well for him at the college, and I was worried. Maybe he was looking for some consolation, some kind of reminder of a more innocent time, when we were both graduate students, when he didn't have a mortgage, a marriage and, likely soon, a baby on the way.

My concerns were a little less material. The Jets were playing Parcells' old team, the defending AFC Champion Patriots, and although we're talking about 1997, we might as well imagine ourselves speaking about a earlier age of communication. Today I can check the score on my computer, on an iPhone, or I'll tune in to the score of the game through online radio. Back then, the Jets had rarely been considered good enough to be shown on the local NBC affiliate, and the only way of following them was to try, like some Soviet listener of Radio Free Europe, and carefully tune in the New York WFAN AM station, turning the dial ever so carefully until I heard Dave Jennings' voice, or maybe I would find some sports bar that showed the game on one of dozens of TV's. The Jets were that bad. I might as well have been a guy with a broken radio in 1947 looking for news about the World Series.

Johnny refused to go to a sports bar. I asked him if he would, but he gave me a look as if I had asked if he wanted a punch in the face. He and I hadn't sat down together in months; the Jets were on every week. I got it. But they were also 4-3. They hadn't been over .500 since the Faked Spike game. We went to a wine bar.

Glenn Foley, 10/19/97

It was not a game to miss. This was one of Glenn Foley's two great performances as a Jets quarterback. He threw 17 for 23, 200 yards and two touchdowns. The Jets won, 24-19. The Jets were 5-3, decisively over .500. To me, this game represents the beginning of the new, contemporary era of the Jets franchise - a time when we were allowed to have higher expectations for the team, year after year. Though we have frequently seen the Jets disappoint, I have seen them on the local NBC often enough without having to resort to buying into the NFL Network. They have been in more playoff games in the past 14 years than they were in all their 37 years of history previous to that day in October 1997. So there's some consolation.

It was also the last day of my friendship with Johnny. Maybe, now that I think of it, Johnny wanted me to act like a grownup and forgo the juvenile compulsion to be a fan because he wanted me to to be more adult. But it didn't even work for him. With a few glasses of merlot in him, he suddenly insisted we drive to his old neighborhood and take a look at the loft where he first met his wife. We drove to Northern Liberties, a part of the city going through regentrification, which he tsk-tsked. He liked it better when it was poor, more dangerous, a real neighborhood to him. When we got there, he stared up at an old biscuit factory that had been turned into cold water apartments when he lived there. He stared at its red brick exterior, maybe wondering how it all happened, or rather what had happened him. I asked him if everything was OK. Sure, he said, with a twang. Everything's fahn.

We sat in the car as the overcast day ended. We tuned in the news radio sports report, and I caught the score of the game after it was over. He must have seen a little of my disappointment about missing the game. Maybe I should have hidden it; this was an old friend, and I should have been paying more attention to him. That's true. But that's not what bothered him.

"You need to give up on this damn team," he said.

Not even thinking him serious, I said, "Oh?"

"It's Parcells," he said.

I shrugged.

"He's a fascist, a bully," Johnny said. "How could you be so careless as to root for a team he coaches? Honestly."

"You're joking," I said. "Careless."

He shook his head. He was sincere. "He'll just swing his purse somewhere else when he's done with the Jets. Come on, Marty. Be smart for second."

The scales fell from my eyes. What had I been doing in a wine bar? Johnny had been friends with me through Coslet and Carroll and, most of all, Kotite. He had always admired me as a loyalist to a losing cause. But Glenn Foley had pushed the Jets two games over the winning mark that day.

Johnny was right about Parcells, of course. This year Parcells is being inducted into Canton, and he deserves it. He was and is an aggressive, corporate winner, but he also resembles an abusive father who tells his son on the way back to the car how disappointed he is in him, and he would indeed dump us after three seasons, just as Johnny predicted. Part of me knew that, but it didn't matter, for there were no conditions in my loyalty to the team, ever. There weren't any at 1-15; how could there be at 5-3?

"You need to root for a publicly-owned franchise like Green Bay," he said. "Try being a more progressive fan."

Need to? I could see he was serious. He was suggesting that I abandon my team out of principle.

"Well," I laughed awkwardly, "I don't think that's going to happen."

He shook his head. "That's disappointing, Marty."

I have a good memory of Glenn Foley, even if that was also the last time I saw Johnny. Afterwards there were a few e-mails back and forth to him, and then there were none. I think of this conversation now, and I wonder what Johnny really wanted. He must have been torn about what he wanted for himself; did he want to be the loyalist to a losing cause, left to make his own hot water in his own home, or did he want to accept the new realities, to forget the past and move on? I suppose it doesn't matter now, and that I'll never know. It had nothing to do with my team.

A year later, when the Niners played the Jets in the opener, Foley threw for 415 yards in an overtime loss. Steve Young made sure to give Foley extra words of encouragement when the two men met at midfield at the end of the game. But by week three of the 1998 season, Glenn was replaced by Vinny Testeverde for good. He went to Seattle before retiring. But his victory over the Patriots in 1997 made me realize how hungry I had been as a Jets fan, having endured three seasons previous over which the Jets had won a total of ten games. Now I was no longer a fan of a perennial loser, nor a victim of the circumstances of the times. I was the fan of a team that went to the playoffs half the time, more often than not being lead by a cartoonish coach. I was a Jets fan. Some things were just too important for friendship to spoil.

NY Jets #4 - Part 1

2012-01-27T09:35:00.000-08:00

At the end of the 2008 football season, I taught with a young colleague who had relocated from a little town in Wisconsin to Philadelphia. Her newlywed husband had recently been transferred because of his job. Here she was, a quiet, Scandinavian-looking girl from one of the most polite and rural states in the union now living in what, one might argue, is one of the angriest, most aggrieved metropolitan areas in the Western Hemisphere. She seemed horrified by the casual vulgarity of the school's hallways, by the ghetto mannerisms that all her students assumed. It was angry and urban. She was at a loss.

To her, a lifelong Packers fan, Brett Favre #4 was a representation of everything that was sacred about the life she left behind. In the mess of all the anger and rage of Eagles fans around her, she cherished the times that she could talk to someone about the Packers - in one case, a 200 pound kid she taught from West Philly who wore a giant puffy Packers sideline parka. And this was going to be her first season without Brett Favre, and she couldn't quite remember the Packers without him - the Packers of Don Majkowski, Lindy Infante and Randy Wright.

When she found out I was a Jets fan, with Favre starting for us that year, she looked at me as if I were her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend. It had been a complicated breakup. She didn't want him back; after all, he had called it off in the first place and had left Green Bay earlier in the year, and then suddenly he had wanted back in when it was convenient for him. Since then, Green Bay had matured, settled down and married her younger boyfriend named Aaron who didn't seem all that much fuss over, but then who can say what's in the eye of the beholder, but love? Green Bay told Brett that she still cared for him, but things had changed, and it was time to let go. As for me (once again, in this analogy playing the new girlfriend of the old boyfriend) she expressed a hope that I'd be happy with Brett, though I could tell there was still some reluctance in her eyes about not having him around anymore. Women - even proverbial women in an uncomfortably extended metaphor - know these kinds of things about one another. She was still a little jealous.

I didn't have as much time with Brett Favre as she did, certainly not enough time to think of him as a personal icon the way Joe Namath is to me. At first, he was just Brett Favre, football legend, like other legends who made their name with another team before coming to the Jets, but I certainly knew how good he could be. And then, after the October win against the then-unbeaten Titans, with the Jets at 8-3, I forgot all the other bleak Decembers of seasons past. It was all new and alive with possibility. Only Brett Favre could have accomplished that, and like all late converts, I fell hard for the magic he so effortlessly wielded, only to be betrayed in the end. By December of that fateful season, though, my Wisconsin friend gave me a commiserating expression. The romance, such as it was, practically ended before it had begun. She could have told me I told you so. But she didn't. Oh gosh, my friend from Wisconsin seemed to say, with all of that kindhearted rural pity in her eyes. Yeah, that's Brett. Kind of lets you down in the end, doesn't he? I remember when he did the same to me. Hurts like heck, I know. But you'll get over him. I promise.

I did, of course. Now I see the whole thing as an unbelievable story. And what's never stopped bothering me is the stone cold truth that, at the end of that season, New England Patriots fans must have been laughing themselves to sleep every night. Maybe they're still laughing about it, if they ever give it so much as a second thought - especially now, as their team prepares for yet another Super Bowl.

****

It's the number worn by punters, line judges, and Lou Gehrig. Until Brett Favre came along, who knew or cared about #4? At one time, Favre himself ranked in the catalogue of What If's in our world of the Jets. Onetime Jets executive Ron Wolf had been interested in the rookie quarterback from Southern Mississippi, though as Favre himself attested, considering how wild he was in Atlanta, he would probably have been killed by the experience of living and playing in New York. The Jets would probably have dealt him away just as Atlanta did.

Brett Favre, Jet (2008)

But then he did come to us, many years later, after rewriting the history books and making himself the quintessential romantic hero of America's Game. With a single Super Bowl ring that probably should have been followed by a dynastic line of them, Favre's constant story of familial ups and downs made him a beloved figure to all. For a period of time, outside of Ronald Reagan, he was the lone American icon who could draw the devotion of peoples on both sides of the Mason-Dixon.

Did he belong with the Jets, or even the Vikings? The real question was, after the years, the records, the playoff games and various dramatics on MNF, did Brett Favre really belong anywhere other than in the mythic imagination where all of us are still young and beautiful, charismatic and new? The answer was obviously no. But like all mythical figures, Favre stoked our desire and capacity for wonder. With a seemingly confident offense, he led the team (and here I repeat) to a rare 8-3 record by Week 12. So complete was the general consensus that the Jets would win big in January (and February) that even I began to believe it. And I had been a Favre doubter from the start. Then, when the team went 1-4 the rest of the way, pulling out of the playoffs, it felt like I had awakened from a fever dream where Brett Favre was my quarterback, and he was leading us to the Super Bowl.

My single favorite Favre moment from that season came after the Jets defeated the Titans - a moment that seemed to prove the brilliance of their decision to sign him in the first place - when Eric Mangini was being interviewed afterwards on the field, and someone approached him from behind and smacked his ass with such excessive congratulatory force that the coach yelped out, angrily at first, until he realized that his assailant was his quarterback. No matter, then. Let the boy be the boy.

The team never did take to him, though. Hurt or healthy, Chad Pennington was respected by his offense. To players like Laverneus Coles and Thomas Jones, Favre was a snake-oil salesman, pretending, without much effort, to care about something as big as what our team means to us. The criticism among Jets players was that he was not a team player, but while we've thought about him as a kid out there, what we were really saying was that he was only one type of kid. He played for himself, first and foremost. Commentators, with their lilting platitudes about how lovable Favre always was, ignored his inherent selfishness. And why not? Everybody needs to believe in a ridiculously talented, self-reliant, self-assured, though flawed protagonist. Such is the character description of the American hero. But in reality, Favre was simply the kind of popular high school jock whose shenanigans, disobedience and blase attitude are often ignored by the classroom teacher because, secretly, he knows that to deny that kind of kid is to deny the potency of an archetype, of a dream.

So we released Chad Pennington and took Brett Favre. Who wouldn't have done the same? And when the magic flared brightly at 8-3, we believed in the myth. When it burned out, we remembered what we had always been told about him: that he's just a kid out there. A really, really talented kid who plays brilliantly throughout a game, but throws against everyone's better judgment across the field for an interception to lose the game.

****

My friend moved back to Wisconsin a year later because neither she nor her husband liked it in Philadelphia. It's an acquired taste. After years of being verbally abused by bartenders and waiters in New York, by cab drivers and cops, I was ready for Philly and its angry people when I first moved here. Not everybody can or should be groomed for it. But I often wondered what she thought about Brett Favre's texting scandal. My God, I could just see her thinking, and to think I used to be in love with that guy. What a loser. Did Brett Favre send pictures of his penis to women when he lived in Mississippi or played in Wisconsin? Was it just that he was happy to be finally living in Joe Namath's old playland, eager to be drawn out by a latent desire to be bad in the big, bad city? It's mildly tragic, I suppose. He could have just finished in Green Bay as he was going to, but then he would have had to have been satisfied with being merely a name, like Tennyson's Ulysses. "As thought to breathe were life," Ulysses says. "I will drink/Life to the lees..."

Still, yet another characteristic of the popular high school jock who gets away with everything is that he always goes too far, and he ends up texting an obscene image of himself to the wrong cheerleader. Then suddenly the teachers and administrators start to remember all the things he's been getting away with all this time. And with that, he goes from being the archetypal hero to being Biff Loman, an outcast, with his days of embodying a mostly phony dream gone for good.

NY Jets #2

2012-01-24T07:02:00.000-08:00

Is it Mata Hari? Is it a safety?

Two is a strange number in football. You don't see it all alone on a football uniform that often. Who's the greatest #2 in football history? It certainly looks weird on the scoreboard, the way halftime at Super Bowl IX was locked at a 2-0 yawn after Fran Tarkenton landed on his own fumble on the Vikings' end of the field. A safety is signified by the ref with that odd joining of hands over the head. The defense gathers round the grounded, embarrassed offensive player, and they all put their own hands up like so, as if to influence the call. The official agrees or disagrees; if he goes along with it and makes the safety signal, he seems to be hearkening back to some vague, ancient motion, one made by men throughout the ages who've been placed in extraordinary circumstances and haven't an idea of what to do. An extraordinary moment requires an exotic symbol. (Plus, there's really is no limit to the confusion football imposes on us when a Safety can score a safety.)

But we're really here to talk about Nick Folk #2, the Jets' kicker for two seasons at our writing. After this season, he averaged 76% field goals made, which more or less matched last year's rate, though the Jets themselves attempted 14 fewer field goals this year. It was a busier year for punters.

Nick Folk, 1/8/11

Folk is often invoked as the "former Cowboy" who hit 90% of his kicks until a injury reduced his production for Dallas such that he became available to the Jets. His return from injury required a recuperation that revealed to him some of the great medical achievements of his own ancestors. As it's mentioned in the link above, in the tough old days of rudimentary heart surgery, where surgeons needed "nerves of steel," his grandparents (both surgeons) apparently performed pioneering heart procedures that were at the time quite risky and had a high mortality rate.

It made Folk wonder about the nerves needed to be a placekicker. Failure cannot be an option, but it happens all the time. There are no substitutes for the man who can kick the ball 56 yards when we need him to, as Folk did in Denver in 2009. His picture above is taken at the moment he realized that his last second field goal against Indianapolis in the January 2011 playoffs would send the Jets into the second round of the playoffs against New England.

Watch the video below. As Folk lines up for the kick, the arena is filled with the plain white noise of the crowd's anxiety. When Folk sees his kick go through the uprights, you can actually hear him make what Whitman would call his "barbaric yawp." It's a spontaneous, instinctive, guttural cry of satisfaction more than relief. It's one of my favorite Jet moments of all time, and it's a sad reminder of what a disappointment the 2011 season has been.

Just before the Christmas Eve 2012 game with the Giants, the Post predicted that Folk was looking to have a "key role" in the game, one that, according to his coach, would be a true 50-50 matchup. "It's going to be a fun game on Saturday," Folk is quoted as saying. All indications were by then that the Jets had a decent chance at a Wild Card spot if only they could just play reasonably well. I actually thought that the vaguely flagging Giants would win the game, but of course, like the old fool that I am, a Jets fan, I had no idea how outmatched they really would be. None of us knew the deep decline the Jets were in nor how much worse things would get. There would be no playoffs, no barbaric yawp. And Nick Folk would play no major role.

Yet the kicker endures; he goes on elsewhere if need be. The Jets will hold onto him for next year, or they won't. He will have to win a spot in the summer, or he won't. But in my mind, and on a pirated video, he will always be there in memory, providing the aural punctuation to a favorite moment at a much happier time in our beloved team's long, troubled history.

If you need more on the trials of the placekicker, on how all his need for precision, repetition, and consistency can still go for naught, consider the Times' graphic that suggests that Folk is "terrible." He's not even nearly terrible, though every season is a long season. Things can always get worse.

****

The 1991 season was the first in my life where I literally unplugged from football. I attribute this mostly to my own desire at the end of college to seek out something that would make me useful to someone other than myself. I thought I would make my life interesting. Of course, the waywardness and vanities of youth were probably to blame as well, but back then I was adventurous enough to believe that I would live in a different city every year of my life. At this time, I lived in a commune in St. Louis, Missouri. It was what was called a "social justice community;" I was living with three other men and four women, and each one of us worked in a social work job in a city that had been gutted by white flight, vanished industry, and crack. I traded my Fridays at college house parties where floors were sticky with stale beer for Friday nights in a candlelight circle with my roommates, talking about socialist revolution taking hold in the United States.

I went to meetings of the Socialist Workers Party and believed that even in the year of the failed coup in Moscow the United States was still ripe for economic revolution. We were told the fall of the Soviets happened because it had been corrupted by Stalinism, whereas Castro's Cuba was still the hope for the future. There were pictures of Che Guevera and Oscar Romero in our house, without the slightest concern for their various ideological contradictions. I suppose there is no razor idealism quite like the kind you find in a person between the ages of 17 and 25. At that age, you're old enough to digest complex ideas but still not in possession of a fully grown frontal lobe. I put away childish things like working for money, owning things, and, most importantly, monogamy - all of which I cherish today - in order to be a revolutionary.

Most especially, I didn't care about football anymore. I'm not even sure what happened, but it turned September, and I just wasn't watching games on Sundays. "Football's so chauvinistically exploitative and imperialist," I would say to the pretty roommate on my floor while I mixed beans over the stove. I may even have said such things at our Friday group meetings. I couldn't have really believed it, any more than I could have actually believed that a radical redistribution of wealth would appeal to the mostly conservative people of my own country. It wasn't even a gradual change, which may explain why I went back to it when things became interesting for the Jets at the end of another dim season under Bruce Coslet.

There were cracks developing in my newfound worldview. The Miami-Jets game at the very end of the season was being shown on the local NBC, and, as if awakening from a fever dream, I suddenly knew I had to watch. While my housemates were out clearing an empty lot somewhere in North St. Louis, I found a way to stay home and watch the Jets' last game of the season. Both teams were hoping to finish with a dinky Wild Card spot; the Dolphins' season had been a disappointment, while the Jets managed through their Coslet-era blandness and injury to get to 7-8. I told my unsuspecting roommates that I would work on the compost in the back yard while they went to the north side to pull out weeds, glass and brush from yet another spot of urban blight.

I don't remember much of the game; a Jets game can make you feel the same whether they win or lose, conjuring in the Jets fan all a childhood's feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, fear. And of course, the Jets blew a lead late when Dan Marino led the Dolphins to the end zone with a fourth and goal touchdown. What could possibly be more familiar? At that very instant, Marty Glickman's swan song as Jets' radio announcer was, "Folks, in all my years of broadcasting, I've never said this, but there is no way the New York Jets can come back and win this game. There is just no way it can happen." (I didn't hear him all the way in the Midwest; you can hear them on the Jets' history DVD.) And given all the things that Marty had seen in all his years with the Jets, can you really blame him? It made sense for him to say it. And yet, come back the Jets did. They tied the game with a no-huddle at under a minute to play. Placekicker Raul Allegre #2 hit a 44 yarder to send the game into overtime, and then he won it with a 30-yard field goal.

Today Raul Allegre is a Spanish language broadcaster of the NFL. Until Nick Folk, he was the most famous #2 the Jets ever had, which is galling. Like many of the Jets of the late 80's early 90's, Raul Allegre made himself originally famous with someone else, in this case with the 1986 New York Football Giants. He ended his career with the flagging Jets that season.

And what did his heroics get them? A whimpering 17-10 Wild Card Game loss to the Houston Oilers the following week. Raul Allegre's field goals against the Dolphins were the singular highlight of the Bruce Coslet era. I left the commune the following year, I gave up socialism, and the Jets gave up their briefly winning ways.

2012-01-14T05:45:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, there was this kid who came from one of the more upstanding families in town. His parents looked like a couple smiling at their kids in the Sears catalogue. The kids did great in school; I think there were four of them in all, and they never got in a scrap of trouble. This kid was especially courteous even to the most outlandishly unfair teachers, and he was an attendance aide, which meant that he was in charge of collecting all the attendance notices teachers left in the little hanging baskets by the classroom door.

It was a small town. Everybody knew everyone's business, or so we thought. We all returned to school one autumn, and everything had changed for him. He was different. His face was suddenly pocked with acne, pale, with piercings long before it became fashionable to have them; several of them looked like DIY jobs with safety pins. His eyes shamelessly betrayed an emptiness born of something that had shattered him. Evidently his father had been carrying on with someone else's wife, and perhaps in the spirit of everything being out in the open, the kid also discovered that his mother had been shacking up with someone else, too. What I think troubled him the most was learning at the age of 16 that his parents had actually known about one another's infidelities for a while, and they not only tolerated them but had also known of others reaching further back into the cloudy, rounded-framed, earth-toned photographs of his earlier childhood. Within a year, he was expelled for pushing over the high school library stacks like a bunch of dominoes. A year after that he was in jail for dealing angel dust.

It only takes a few hard truths to undo a daydream. Whether you're old or young, you can buy into anything that looks secure. Try to imagine what it must be like for young Jets fans unaccustomed to being the laughingstock of the NFL. Imagine how hard it is for them to be wearing their jerseys, even at home. I thought they were good. They were. But sometimes things don't work out, and things change. Actually, most of the time they don't. You'll get used to it.

It's been a long time since the Jets have looked as bad - organizationally and spiritually - as they have over the last month. It is, for lack of a better term, a disgrace. I mean, no one expects a professional football team to exude integrity; Belichick's football machine in Foxboro vibrates with a cold, analytical precision that leaves anyone who loves football feeling empty and glum. Last Sunday a delusional Fundamentalist Christian beat a probable repeat rapist at Mile High Stadium; I don't turn to football for integrity. If that's what integrity looks like, I'll take ineptitude.

But Greg McElroy's puritanical tirade about the Jets' locker room possessing a "corrupt mindset" filled with "selfishness" made me think back to my old friend from high school. I wonder where he is now. You never quite forget your first truly authentic disillusionment, your first shattered dream. Mine was January 1987, when a stupid late hit by Mark Gastineau plunged the Jets into one of the worst playoff collapses in football history (at least until the day the Oilers franchise died, after Houston gave up a 35-3 lead to Buffalo five years later). I would say to any young Jet fan left feeling lost and empty after this season that you grow a callus over it. You get used to it. Consider Didi and Gogo from Waiting for Godot:

ESTRAGON:
Fancy that. (He raises what remains of the carrot by the stub of leaf, twirls it before his eyes) Funny, the more you eat, the worse it gets.

VLADIMIR:
With me it's just the opposite.

ESTRAGON:
In other words?

VLADIMIR:
I get used to the muck as I go along.

NY Jets #60 - Part 2

2011-12-31T20:43:00.000-08:00

Dennis O'Sullivan #60 played at center for the Jets in 2002, though he was technically in the NFL for about five years, including years on the Jets' bench and with the 49ers. In 2003, he was compelled to testify about an assault on a limo driver that may have also included him, Jason Fabini, Todd Husak, and Jumbo Elliott. Of all the players, Elliott seemed the one most implicated, with the suggestion that "one of the players was drunk and rowdy." Elliott himself was previously involved in a legal case after he apparently injured people in a bar brawl in 2000. Perhaps these and other things O'Sullivan witnessed influenced his retirement decision to become a speaker on the subject of alcohol and drug abuse among athletes.

Apparently he is a vice president for development for the American Athletic Institute, which sounds like a pretty broad name for a group focused primarily on "proactive" issues addressing behavior, sportsmanship, and health among student-athletes. O'Sullivan has spoken at schools and community centers on the subject of drug and alcohol abuse. As a high school teacher, it's almost commonplace for me to have to tell the football players in my class not to talk aloud about the details of their weekends where, no doubt, they were probably hammered. We write referrals to the substance abuse program at the school, but there's no proactive initiative to deal with drinking among athletes, specifically. In this community, it seems that every other year a young person dies from an overdose, though it's rarely an athlete. But our athletes are drunk or high often, sometimes even at school.

That wasn't exactly weird at my high school growing up, either. Every weekend, football players held hibachi parties where everyone knew they were drinking. When I was a junior, I inherited a copy of the Best American Short Stories in my English class from the kid who had it before me, a huge, belching defensive lineman who had scrawled the word "ALCOHOL" on the side of the book. It was no big deal.

My upbringing was sufficiently strict to keep me from drinking in high school. I was also a band kid, a theater kid, a geek about music, old movies and statistics in sports. I was a blogger before there were blogs - someone with only a few friends, all of whom drank cola and ate Doritos while listening to the Big Chill soundtrack at Friday night parties. That's how crazy it got. I didn't start drinking until college. Once there, I was surrounded by Irish-American kids and kegs of beer, and so I joined in. But I will never forget the first high I got from beer. "Where have you been all my life?" it made me wonder. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

****

There are plenty of things I remember faintly and unhappily from my drinking life - things like trashing a room, putting my fist through a wall, visiting bars I didn't want to go to just for a drink, dancing with women I didn't want to talk to, laughing at jokes that weren't funny, saying unfunny things just to say anything. I remember blackouts, though obviously not well. I remember lashing out at people for no reason. I remember not doing well at my job and trying to disappear behind my cubicle. I remember only feeling comfortable talking with people socially if I were liquored up enough to chat, and I remember running out of things to say. I remember saying I didn't want to drink anymore and then drinking more. I remember folding myself up in the shower, trying to imagine the hot water washing away the hard wall of misery that came with the morning. I remember wishing I were dead. I remember the planning, the endless planning that came with a night's drinking, and planning it out so that it could be just the right kind of high without going too far, and being despondent the next morning because I always drank myself to sleep, often on a floor.

Drinking was great, though. I've always known it was from the very first drunk. It would be pointless of me to say otherwise. I can't drink anymore, I won't tonight, but after I got sober it always felt false to testify that I hated drinking. I always loved it. It made me happy in the moment when so few things do. The very idea of it made me happy; it still does. Knowing that there's alcohol in the house was a kind of security that comes from believing implicitly there is only one thing that can make you content. Tonight is New Year's Eve. If I were drinking, I wouldn't want champagne, or the champagne of beers. I would want whiskey, and if it were in the house, I would normally want to drink the better part of a quart before bed, before sleep, or whatever it would be called. Then I'd go out the next day and buy another quart.

****

Larry Grantham #60 shares a distinction with only three other men we've discussed; along with Curley Johnson, Don Maynard, and Bill Mathis, he is a Super Bowl III starter who also played for the New York Titans. When he retired in 1973, he had been a five-time All Star in the AFL at linebacker and a longtime leader of the Jets' defenses. His deep, dour face, lined with the expression of a herd driver in John Wayne's crew in Red River, reveals a pathos that I always found impressive. He seemed the diametric opposite of the people in Namath's buoyant jock world. Grantham came from Mississippi, which made sense in a way. When I read Best American Short Stories, I imagined that Faulkner's Wash of Yoknapatawpha County looked a lot like Larry Grantham. Or maybe he looked like one of the endless numbers of knuckle-cracking bad guy henchmen that Jim Rockford had to fight off in slacks. He looked quiet and hard.

He re-emerged in the news over the past few years because an ongoing battle with cancer had drained his finances, and in 2009, he was thinking about pawning his Super Bowl ring to pay some of his bills. Bassett writes eloquently about Grantham's importance in Jets history, but he also mentions how a Star-Ledger article about Grantham's financial plight brought thousands donations in so that he could keep the ring. Bassett suggests that this was karma. Dave Anderson wrote a year before that Grantham is known for his generosity, in being the regular coordinator of '68 alumni events, but most of all because he has been the key fundraiser for a New Jersey drug and alcohol recovery center called Freedom House.

According to Anderson in 2008, Grantham had been sober for decades, and Freedom House has become the main focus of his interest. One of his good friends from the defensive front line in 1968 was Paul Rochester, who hadn't had a drink in 37 years at the time of the article. Rochester describes the struggles in retirement of his other teammates from that famous squad, like Verlon Biggs #86 and Sam Walton #72, and the role Grantham had in trying to help:

“Larry and I spoke at Verlon’s funeral in Mississippi,” Rochester said. “Sam was a sad situation. Larry heard that Sam was living on the streets in Memphis and tried to find him to help him. One time, Larry even spotted him, but Sam took off; I guess he was too embarrassed. When Larry heard that Sam died in an abandoned house, he arranged for a proper burial for him. That’s Larry.”

Grantham is the player who grabbed the ball at the very end of Super Bowl III and ran off the field with it. He runs off like a fan who has invaded the pitch, stolen the ball, and needs to be chased down by security. Grantham looks not at all like the stoic leatherface I once imagined him to be. He leaps into the air with the joy of a kid; he is carrying the ball that Johnny Unitas has just thrown on the very last play. He is ecstatic in a way that a football player is not supposed to be, or maybe he looks like a young high schooler whose team has just beaten the state champ. Braylon Edwards' end-over-end leap at the end of the playoff game against the Pats last year was like that too, and as I've said before, that was one of those moments where, for a fan, anything seemed possible.

When I watch the Super Bowl III game tape - which I do more often than I'd like to admit - I see Larry Grantham standing alongside his other defensive players and looking considerably smaller. He was light and short for a defensive player at any position, even back then. He is as tall as I am. As a recovered alcoholic, he knows what it is to be his own enemy. Dave Anderson says that in truth, Grantham's "greatest asset really was and is himself."

Obviously, it was beautiful that others were there for Grantham when he needed them and that he was able to hold onto his ring. The ring has meant more to other people than perhaps it even meant to him. It signified that an unlikely win against an indomitable foe was not out of the question. It suggested that an effervescent childhood innocence could be conjured out of a grown man such that he would leapfrog jump across a football field. It meant that a hopeless drunk or junkie could experience freedom from the sole obsession that occupies the addicted mind. In more than one article about Grantham's quandary, a Freedom House resident is quoted as saying that Grantham would regularly take the ring off his finger and place it into the resident's hand, suggesting that if Larry Grantham could get clean, then the resident could too, and that anything is possible.

NY Jets #60 - Part 1

2011-12-29T06:43:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve, my wife and I drove to another commonwealth, where my parents live. Somehow, though moving away from the New York-New Jersey area, we were able to pick up the Jets-Giants game on the radio all the way down. Needless to say, what began as a promising matchup turned out to be no matchup at all. It was an awful experience, listening helplessly. You sensed the momentum shift after Victor Cruz's 99-yard touchdown. Antonio Cromartie forced two returns when he should have taken the touchback. Penalties abounded. The Jets were a team forced by a mediocre Giants club to see themselves for what they really are, fueled by symbolism, fortune, hubris, energy, hot air, but little else. Even the announcers craved a Sanchez pass way downfield to Burress, Holmes, or Keller - to somebody, anybody - but it didn't come. Or maybe if they just ran the ball more.

Christmas came. My nephew got an Ahmad Bradshaw jersey and a kid's sized Giants helmet that reminded me of the Jets one I had when lived on Long Island. He and I played catch out back, and he talked about all the players from Big Blue that he loved. He talked about playing the game himself against all sorts of NFL players, and I realized that he was talking about Madden 11. He's light on his feet, tall for his age, curious and thoughtful, most of all. Perhaps I had moaned once too often about how remote the chance of even backing into the playoffs seemed to be for the Jets, and he said, looking through his Giants' face mask, "Don't worry, Uncle Marty. The Jets are still a good team." It was nice of him to say. He pitied me.

Is this the end of the current era of winning for the Jets? The 49ers are back to being dominant, which is a condition that cosmologically necessitates that the Jets do poorly. Was it worth it? Did we learn anything during this time? Is that all there is? Over the years 1997-present, which represented the 49ers descent into mediocrity, we've gone to the playoffs seven times, which is as many times as the Jets managed in their entire history before then.

D'Brickashaw Ferguson #60 is a character representation of the best of these years. At tackle, he was drafted #1 in 2006, has made the Pro Bowl three out of the six years in the NFL and is regularly considered to be among the better offensive linemen in the game. True to an offensive lineman's nature, he does not appear to be boastful or particularly nasty to anyone, and he heads charitable work outside the game. He is, in other words, not really an ideal character in a Rex Ryan drama. His tweets are quite innocuous, polite, thoughtful, and not at all the confessional work of today's players. Aside from appearing to have arms as long as his legs, he is the sort of fellow that I would hope my nephew would grow up to be.

****

Casey Wiegmann #60 should win an award for surviving. He is 38 years old, has played for six clubs (one twice over, and that one being Kansas City), actually married a contestant on Survivor, his house in his childhood town was destroyed by a tornado, he played for the 1996 New York Jets, got to go to the Pro Bowl for first time in 2008, and currently has the longest starting streak at his position of any player in the NFL. If you are wondering, he plays center, the most unrewarded and unrewarding of positions in the game, and he is from Iowa - a stoic, virtuous Midwestern state that may, for all I know, produce many a remarkable number of centers. It is a position that must demand a self-sustaining sense of humility and humor, for the center must have his fanny touched on every play. He endures. He survives.

NY Jets #59

2011-12-10T06:21:00.000-08:00

For Jets fans, this season has been a little disappointing. For old fans like me, this has been a trip down a memory lane that's about as enjoyable as a hangover to a drunk. For young fans, it's like showing up at the popular hamburger joint you've enjoyed every weekend that's suddenly run out of beef and shutting down for good in a few weeks. I'm not sure if that makes sense. When you know that this season won't be as well off as the last, nothing feels as good, and the words come slowly, meaninglessly. The Jets lost a month ago on a Sunday night when our biggest rival suddenly found their passing game. Then they lost the following Thursday night to a team that literally doesn't have a passing game. This seems like old times.

But I also live in Philadelphia, and for once the Eagles are failing even more impossibly than the Jets, despite all their apparent talent. Here it is a time for self-recrimination, regret, the placing of blame, cynicism, and general bitterness - the business of the soul's dark night, the hour best suited to the people of this fair city. Unreasonably euphoric when the Birds when four in a row, Philadelphians find a groove of misery when the Iggs disappoint, and they will stay there with a masochistic relish for as a long as possible. Losing, I find, brings out metaphors and similies in this town.

"Disappointment is a dish best served with Cheese Whiz on a soft roll," one of my co-workers said to me when I told him I was sorry to see the Eagles lose to the Pats the way they did. "Slather it," he said.

"It was like watching a chicken getting eaten by a snake," another fan, my next door neighbor said after the Eagles lost so entirely to an inferior Seahawks team, "you keep watching, thinking that the chicken's got to be able to get away. But he doesn't."

Sometimes failure, so common to people in hard times, so omnipresent to most football fans is familiar and warm. "As familiar as your father's plaid Christmas pants," another Eagles fan said to me when I extended my condolences toward after their bizarre. "You wish it weren't there, but you remember it, you got through the sight of it before, so you know you can survive it." Perhaps that's why I feel so comfortable here. Losing brings out the wordsmith in the denizens of this place, and it's consoling to me too. It may even last through the game the Jets and Eagles will play in a few weeks.

****

What makes a man a "good guy?" Is he a mensch, someone who's there when you need him? Is he someone who is actively good, going above and beyond what people expect of him? Or is he just a guy that doesn't give you trouble? He does his homework, he doesn't give the teacher problems in class, he nods at his jokes. In high school, I recall that girls didn't date good guys. They dated bad guys. When you ask a woman about the man her friend is marrying and she says, "He's a good guy," you somehow know that there's something disappointing in what she's saying, though you don't know what it is.

The Jets' yearly "Good Guy Award" is named for linebacker Kyle Clifton #59, who might recall some familiar losing seasons with the Jets. To anyone who has followed the Jets for the past 30 years, you might recognize his name as longtime veteran of an absurd era (1984-96). Thirteen seasons, four coaches, two winning campaigns. Through most of it, Clifton was a good player on some poorly performing teams. His best year was 1990, when he caught three interceptions and made 199 tackles, an extraordinary statistic in and of itself. He led the NFL that year, but that number of tackles would correspond with the top number in several of the past seasons in the current NFL. Whether or not this meant that no one else was making tackles on the Jets in 1990 is irrelevant; someone had to do it, and in almost 200 instances, Kyle Clifton did.

The Kyle Clifton Good Guy Award is explained in German here. Brad Smith received it in 2007, and on his Wikipedia page, it's described as recognizing a player with "consistent willingness, cooperation and professionalism in everyday dealings with various departments in organization." And I wonder about this. Was this Eric Mangini's description of the award that year? He cooperated, he didn't give us problems, he didn't ask us for anything big. Sounds like the kind of thing Mangini valued in his players. And indeed this year Brad Smith went out the door like a good guy when the Jets picked up Plaxico Burress and made a contract with Santonio Holmes.

"Good guy." It sounds corporate. When Kyle Clifton made 199 tackles in 1990, he was not so much valuable in his everyday dealings with the organization but valuable where it counts, as a player in the field doing his job above and beyond expectations (and he should have gone to the Pro Bowl). The award was first given out in 1996, and to him, and it may have been a way for the organization, as it were, to say goodbye, especially after he had been slotted to be replaced by Marvin Jones for so long. But still, it feels clinical, flat, a kind gesture toward the door, with nice parting gifts. He may not have taken it that way; I certainly hope he didn't. But sometimes "good guy" doesn't feel like a compliment.

***

In 1974, Howard Kindig #59 was brought in to play his last year with the Jets after being a longtime AFL guy with the Chargers and Bills. He played in 1972 for the perfect Dolphins. His career ended with the Jets, which may have been exactly as it should have been. Had he played with the Jets the following year, he might well have given up on the integrity of the game altogether. The Bills have a more thorough background on its "alumni," and here is Kindig's story, including his sense that the AFL had two distinct times - the early era, when teams were playing for financial survival, and the period after the merger, when bonus babies like Joe Namath and OJ Simpson redefined the AFL player. Kindig, on the other hand, seems a relic of the older version. As the link makes clear, Kindig even forsook balmy San Diego to play with his buddies in Buffalo, which to me is an almost unthinkable transition. I don't have anything interesting on his year with the Jets, but here are the details of the case the United States made against him in 1988. I presume he weathered it.

Linebacker Bob Martin #59 replaced Kindig in number for the Jets. He played from 1976-78 before playing briefly with the 49ers. He started all of 1978, netting two interceptions that season and today he works for a Nebraska-based corporation that sells industrial-based equipment. The company's name is, curiously enough, Valmont. I'm certain that they didn't intend to name their company after one of literature's greatest rogues, but who knows? Aren't there Lotharios in Lincoln and Omaha? Aren't there aimless young aristocrats hanging around the halls of prairie mammon, hoping to corrupt a guileless young debutante? Perhaps there is a correlation between the sale of industrial equipment and sexual seduction. What do I know?

****

Rob Spicer #59, linebacker for the Jets in 1973, may have been a junior in high school the year the Indiana Hoosiers went to the 1968 Rose Bowl. He may have thought that they would return again when he enrolled there as a freshman in 1969, but they haven't been back since. I don't need to tell you that's a little bit longer than we've been waiting for a conference championship. I remember how my college's basketball team went to the Final Four the year before I enrolled there, and they haven't been there since, either. We're all waiting for something, though most of us don't really know what it is half the time. But at least, as fans, we have discernible needs, wishes and wants. We know what we want. We're just waiting for it to happen.

NY Jets #58 - Part 3

2011-11-09T09:50:00.000-08:00

The other day I found my second grade class class photo, taken sometime in January 1977. It's been a very, very long time since I've seen this. I vaguely recall seeing occasionally unearthed among other photos as I grew up. I remember almost all of the kids in the picture. There's Mrs. Saperstein, with her cat's eye glasses. There's my best friend John who works in Hollywood now. There's JT, whose Dad was a fireman; Jose, the class clown; Sean, a psychotic who spat in my face; Colin, whose Dad was my Aunt's boss; Vinny, who ended up on Riker's Island; Annie, Miss Perfect; Jennifer, who could beat up Sean. And then there's me. It took a few seconds to find me. Everybody else jumped right out.

What do you expect to find when you look back to find yourself? I don't know what I expected. What I found was a little boy in the front row sitting next to two girls, his arms wedged in slightly. He has his hands folded almost prayerfully in his lap, his striped shirt buttoned to the top contrasting against the bright patterns of the girls' blouses and skirts. He looks a little tired and a little frightened; or is that the way I feel lately? His smile seems forced. In a strange way, I want to go back and tell him a joke, tell him to lighten up a little when he's on his own. Or maybe I want to tell him not to try so hard to make other people laugh, and that it will get him into some bad habits. Don't try so hard. Watch out for bullies.

The older one gets, the less one looks back to find assurances or understanding. At a certain age, one tends to look forward, to stare at people older than yourself; you stop looking backward to see what you have become and to start to wonder what you will become someday if you play your cards right or, conversely, what you will turn into if you don't take better care of yourself.

Which brings us to Wilber Marshall #58, the longtime fearsome middle linebacker who played for the Jets for one season - 1995, a cruel punishment (3-13) in and of itself. If you look back and regret, what kind of life can you lead? If you look back in anger, where can you find comfort? As with many retired NFL players, Marshall is looking forward by looking back. He refuses to be sentimental or attached to his pro career because he knows that his career is at the root of his current problems. A recent article coming out of a Redskins blog talks about the physical and mental toll the game took on him, the worst thing being that he believes the Chicago Bears swindling him out of his pay. He says they re-negged on a promise of a long term payout after he agreed to not take a salary up front, all in order to help the team financially. He was also denied disability by the NFL for a long time. Marshall has been angry enough to say that he won't even watch NFL football games.

Are these the circumstances that Drew Brees blithely talks about when he says that current players shouldn't be forced to help pay for former players' financial mistakes? As the blogger above writes, Marshall believes the only decent lesson he should have learned was that you shouldn't do the organization any favors, that you should always take the lump sum. Is that the moral? I just hope Brees has some sense of what's waiting for him when it's all over. Perhaps he will be lucky enough to still have medical insurance.

The only other regret Marshall can have is that he made the mistake of playing football to begin with. This is one of the ironies of modern football. The player is a gladiator, a star in the arena, and as with all stars his worth is only as significant as his duration of play. He thinks of nothing else but what he is. We've seen many players whose life after football has been significantly positive. I can at least amuse myself with the notion that many of the players I've written about have become teachers. But when I was in second grade, I wanted to be like the big men who played the game. I wanted to be like Randy Rasmussen, Carl Barzilauskus and Winston Hill. When I look at my frail little self in my school picture, taken at the end of a football season, it seems humorous, but little children do dream of becoming big men, not knowing that their own lives will be just beginning with hopes and dreams just as the lives of the big men are already, prematurely coming to an end.

****

What are the odds? Three guys in #58 at linebacker with alliterative names beginning with "M?" There's Mark Merrill #58, and no, he's NOT the guy who opposes gay marriage with his organization Family First. And Mike Merriweather #58 who finished his career with the Jets after accumulating as many as 18 interceptions. Matt Monger #58 is now a financial advisor with Merrill Lynch after playing a few seasons and a handful of games for the Jets and Bills. Apparently in 2002 he was in partnership with ex-Dolphin Howard Twilley. He advocated - when the market still somewhat stronger - the age-old philosophy of chance: "...be patient. Time will determine the risk and the return." It sounds hopeful. Or does it? Time will determine it all. Be patient. It will come for you.

****

Marty Wetzel #58 suited up for five games at linebacker in 1981. There is nothing available that I can see other than a discussion of his exploits at the Wikipedia site for East Jefferson High School. Adding this one note: "An interesting fun note: The current principal of East Jefferson High School James Kytle was Marty's position coach!" Perhaps as we look back without anger we can find any number of different things - however remote they are from our persons - that give our lives their permanent definition.

NY Jets #58 - Part 2

2011-10-30T10:46:00.000-07:00


End of last year's Title Game. This feels like a "leftwich."

James Farrior #58 was once seen as just another draft bust in Jet history, at least until he spent the first decade of the next century earning two spots in the Pro Bowl and 2004 Team MVP for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Then he didn't seem like much of a bust. Nope. Not really. The Jets may have made some progress as an organization, but in the last ten years, they let go of linebackers John Abrahams, Jonathan Vilma and James Farrior, actions that constitute impressively bad judgment. Yes, we are in a different time and a different place, where defense has become the focus of the team, but the latter of those two have been in four Super Bowls total. Living in Philadelphia, you can be guaranteed that the local CBS affiliate will show a Ravens game, a Steelers game, or a Jets game. Farrior has had a good career with the Steelers, at times offering people opportunities to recall days of the Steel Curtain, though that's still a stretch, and everybody knows it. But the number of times I've had to see his name flash before the screen in Steeler yellow on the back of his jersey, or the number of times I've had to hear Greg Gumbel say, "James Farrior in on the stop" are directly proportional to the number of times I've left my lunch sitting on the counter and only to realize it when I open the refrigerator in the teacher's lounge and see nothing there with my name on it (my wife calls this a "leftwich"). That is, equal and often.

****

Jason Glenn #58

Bill Ferguson #58 played linebacker two seasons for the Jets, 1973-74, though very few statistics are available on him. Jason Glenn #58 played longer, from 2001-04, when the team went through its swoons under Herman Edwards. He played special teams for the first two seasons and then went on to play more full time linebacking in 2003 and might have continued to do so had he not broken his arm the following year. The rest of his career he spent on special teams with the Dolphins and then the Vikings. Today he is a high school football coach in Texas, which is a lot like being a Sherpa in the Himalayas or a soothsayer on the streets of Mumbai. Outside of his region his skills bring him little of the honor he gets at home. His Wikipedia page is acutely itemized, year by year, almost like a resume. If most of us are not important enough to receive the kind of entry one used to find in a volume of the now defunct encyclopedia or the Who's Who, then we can write our own story, with the idea of being in control of our own past, if not our own destinies.

The page for Joe Kelly #58 features very little, except a link to his NFL statistics. He played for the Jets from 1990-92 - when I knew and kept track of very little of what the team did. I was too busy studying Jacobean Drama or something like that. He must have made some impact on Bruce Coslet, who probably brought Kelly over from the Bengals, for whom he played previously. Otherwise all that's there is a dead link to an article from the Cincinnati Enquirer entitled "NFL Was Easy By Comparison," which made me wonder if he had suffered medical issues post-career. But when I found the link republished on a blog, I saw that the opposite was true. Instead, as of the writing of the article, Kelly was operating several homes for juveniles whose "families are entangled in abuse, drugs, mental illness or behavioral problems." This is no small feat, and had I not just looked a little further, I might have just written off Joe Kelly as another retiree whose life was marred by football. Instead, he is, it would seem, a hero. There are no pictures available for Joe Kelly, except a hint in the article of a man with a shaved head and a ring in his ear.

The link is worth looking at because "by comparison" the NFL did not require the emotional work that Kelly's efforts include. It's one thing to create foundations to help at-risk youth, as James Farrior has, but it is another to be the person to care for them, day by day. As a teacher, I enjoy having six hours with kids from the lower income community where I teach, but I don't go home with them, and home for many of them is the most turbulent place imaginable. And the angry, wounded adolescent is about the most unappealing human on Earth. Of the kids he helps, Kelly gets "walls patched that they've kicked in, and wait(s) with them at hospitals for treatments and emergency evaluations." Here's hoping that amid all of the deterioration of services for the neediest persons in this country, that Joe Kelly's work in Cincinnati still survives. What little I've read of him makes him one of the noblest ex-Jets I've encountered.

NY Jets #58 - Part 1

2011-10-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

There are names that scream out for a caricature, especially names that sound like the stuffy rich guys in a Marx Brothers film - a millionaire of self-important privilege whose wife Groucho is going to insult or whose drawing room will be used by Harpo as a stable. Names like Lynwood Alford and Aubrey Beavers.

But then these guys are also actual human beings, with lives, feelings, thoughts, and most importantly histories. Aubrey Beavers #58 ended his career with the Jets in 1996, after playing two seasons with the Dolphins. He had two interceptions in his first season, but then he started only one game in 1995. Promise, then silence. In the epics of antiquity, only men who have been cursed by the gods or who have to be punished for a wrongdoing against nature are sentenced to places where no man can happily survive. Napoleon was eventually banished to a place as inhospitable as St. Helena. And with stomach cancer. But nothing Aubrey Beavers did in his life could have earned him a fate just worse of not playing at all - that is, playing linebacker for the 1996 New York Jets. Real life is much less fair than history or in myth would lead us to believe.

But then consider Lynwood Alford #58, who played linebacker for one game in 1987. That's right. Alford was a replacement player for the 1987 replacement New York Jets. In a poignant article in the Times on October 5, 1987, Alford talks about what it meant to be in uniform and living out a dream he thought had long ago passed him by after graduating from Syracuse in 1985:

''It was a dream come true,'' Alford said about playing in an N.F.L. game. ''It was something that I'll never forget, something that I'll tell my grandchildren. I don't care if I was just on the kickoff return unit. I was in the game.''

Alford played in only one game in 1987, and it was the only game in his whole pro career. He was not even a starter in a loss to the replacement Cowboys.

I was in the game...something that I'll tell my grandchildren.

A paycheck is a paycheck, but I confess I felt slightly humbled by Alford's words, if only because being "in the game" is where so few of us end up. I once had a literary agent for four months, but like a girlfriend who is trying to let you down, she stopped returning my calls. The dream was over. The game was over.

But they will never be able to take that away, any more than they can take the replacement game away from Lynwood Alford. His experience of covering a kickoff, technically, took place in an NFL game. You can look him up on the NFL's website. He's there. No one is taking that away. Replacement or not, he played in what the League construes as an actual game. His one distinction is simply putting on #58, going onto the field, and making a brief contribution. That would be enough for any of us who've never been anywhere that we always wished we were.

The article above about the 1987 strike talks about "Integrity and Dreams" being the replacement players' inspiration during the strike. But there were two particular regular players on the Jets who were scabs that year: Marty Lyons and Mark Gastineau.

"Dreams" belonged to guys like Lynwood Alford. But when he was asked why he was playing during the strike, Marty Lyons invoked the "integrity of the game." That will never sit particularly well with me. Lyons is and always will be a legendary Jet, but I'm a union man, too, and if there was one thing my mother told me when I left home and went off into the world in 1987, when I was 18, it was "to never cross a picket line."

Alford talks about his otherwise impossible dream as something he will be able to talk about to his grandchildren. In the Times article, Lyons invoked something of the same when he said that crossing the picket line was about creating a future for his "little boy." He said that his decision was one that "he will live with for the rest of my life." At least he understood there was a legacy for every decision and action. Both men left a legacy that season, and it's best to say nothing more.

But then remember that Lyons and Gastineau were both drafted for the 1979 season, and they were members of the Sack Exchange. They represented a period of hope of the the team after years of terrible play in the 70's, and that finally came to an end in '87, a year when the Jets played in a division so bad that they might very well have won it had they just one a few more games. But they didn't. Gastineau was a clown, a rube. He says in the article above that playing during the strike made him "uncomfortable," as if that would explain away his decision while Bridgitte Nielsen blew kisses at him from the stands. Lyons was still an anchor (just as he is the Jets' commentating voice on the radio each Sunday) and when he crossed the line that year, he made all my unambiguous devotion to the team change into something else, to be defined later. Being a fan would never really be the same after he did that, and it's probably just as well.

Recently, Lyons talked about his 1987 decision in light of the most recent lockout, contextualizing it as a matter of how Gene Upshaw and the NFLPA did not take into account the money needed for players down the road, past retirement. After this year's lockout, we have still a long way to go before players start thinking about the money they won't have later, as opposed to the money they get now, so it's at least good to see Lyons speaking up for retired players and the pension fund. Lyons is also the head of the Marty Lyons Foundation and has a long track record of philanthropy.

Bobby Bell #58 was a replacement player in 1987, too, although for the Chicago Bears. Prior to that, he started a handful of games for the Jets in 1984 at linebacker. He came from the University of Missouri and was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, which makes sense because his father was also Bobby Bell, the Hall of Famer who played for the Kansas City Chiefs and went to the University of Minnesota. Bell the younger must have played with heavy expectations, though if you're going to have a father who leaves a legacy, let it be Bobby Bell, the elder.

NY Jets #57 - Part 4

2011-10-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

This was originally written as we approached the Jets' week five trip in 2011 to Foxboro. They lost 27-21 - not a bad showing for a team that got flatly outplayed two weeks beforehand. The circumstances of this game are starkly different from the last time the Jets were there, back in January 2011, when they took the field as underdogs in the Divisional Playoffs and upended a Patriots team that everyone took for granted would win the Super Bowl.

For a brief moment, when it was all over, everything in the world seemed possible. I was grateful, joyous. My wife took this picture of me and my dog Harry when the game was over. Harry even has eyes to match his dear friend's beloved team. He's not happy about the scarf; he does not appreciate human clothing at all. He does not value its aesthetics, and frankly, he doesn't know why we can't go without, particularly in the morning, when he needs his walk and his human friends are picking out their outfits for the day.

Our enthusiasm after the playoff win could not stave off the inevitable title game loss the following week. Still, he looks ebullient in the photo, throwing his muzzle in their air with total pride, as if he knew all along it would work out. This was taken not long after Bart Scott #57 expressed his own pride at the playoff win over the Patriots. He did it to Sal Paolantonio, who must have known Scott was going to give him something good, and he did. Bart Scott was neither grateful, nor joyous. He was indignant. Why did so many people doubt us? What were they thinking? Or as he says, "Anyone can be beat."

The fact that it begins with his rendition of the flying jet is terrific. Bart Scott dances around the background, and Paolantonio waits patiently for him to pull into the terminal, and as he lands, Scott pauses to signify that the flight is over and that passengers may disembark when the seat belt sign is turned off. Thank you for flying. It is a complete performance piece. How did it feel to win? It felt great. Tom Jackson and Keyshawn were wrong. Are you looking forward to the title game? "Can't wait." Jets fans are a struggling people who don't look to championship seasons or MVP awards to find validation. They go to YouTube to find brief videos like the one above, where the necessary gave way to the possible.

We know the rest of the story, but things change so quickly. Two weeks ago, the Phillies were the best team in baseball and about to embark on a championship run. Last night, they were a team that couldn't score more than two runs a game against a St. Louis Cardinals team that seemed another makeshift creation of an allegedly "genius" manager with Gene Simmons hair treatment and a penchant for guest appearances with Albert Pujols at Tea Party rallies. To make matters worse, the gods chose the Phillies' last out for Ryan Howard to tear his Achilles tendon. Wanting so badly to make up for watching the last strike go by him in his last World Series, Howard ran with all his hefty might down the first base line and blew out his ankle. As the stunned Cardinals celebrated the end of the game, Ryan Howard lay a crumpled heap in front of his dugout. How did it happen? To all the unbelievers, anyone can be beat.

And now the Raiders and the Ravens have outplayed us this season, and I find myself thinking about how quickly things change. Will Jets fans have to wait years and years for another moment like the one above? Will we ever know what it will be like to permanently outdo the doubters, the haters? Although I never felt this way, many of the NFL's TV people were willing to eat crow, and they admitted that the Jets' 28-21 victory over the Patriots in the playoffs was a sign of the changing of the guard, the beginning of a different team's preeminence over their most detested rival, at long last. Admit it, they said, Bart Scott is right.

And now it all seems like a sad replay of the near and distant past. Anyone can be beat, but mostly the Jets. "There is no present or future," Eugene O'Neill wrote, "only the past, happening over and over again, now." At least for one night, Bart Scott stood up to all the prognosticating unbelievers who put their trust exclusively in the power of the past. And it felt very good at the time.

***

This is a tale of Mac Stephens and Blake Whitlatch both #57. Between them, they suited up for 11 games in the pros. From LSU, Whitlatch was in a Jets uniform for four games in 1978 and then no more. Stephens appeared in four games for the Jets in 1990 and then three games for the Vikings the following season. As professionals this is all I have to report. Whitlatch might be the same guy who today is a business owner in Baton Rouge. Stephens might be a recreation program and activities manager in Euclid, Ohio. We know that there is life after football.

John Woodring, LB

Or consider John Woodring #57. He played five seasons on and off as a linebacker for the Jets, from 1981-85. You see him at right in one of the two last seasons, obviously at the Meadowlands. Perhaps he might not have been the focus of an article had he not played for the Jets. Apparently he worked on Wall Street until he chose to become a teacher for 15 years. A year ago this article in the Norwalk Times appeared about his work as a football coach for third graders, which was the one year I played football. My football coach was an alcoholic, abusive, and plainly crazy man who forfeited our final game when the referee finally penalized him for forcing his players to fake injuries to stop the clock. It seems like John Woodring is a better guy than that, and he mentions loving to teach players who are too young to know that they are doing anything other than playing for love. As for his playing days, Woodring says, "My wife knows that easiest way to embarrass me is to talk about that...It happened a long time ago. It was 25 years ago, and that's where I'd like to keep it."

So be it. Another coach is John Yohn #57, also known as "David Yohn," which might be preferable to a name that rhymes. Life after football enabled him to become a legend as a high school football coach. In rural places like Ohio and Texas, high school football has an enormous cultural importance. So too in Pennsylvania, a state that some people think of in terms of the Amish, the Continental Congress, cheese steaks, empty steel mills, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but it is also, as James Carville once wrote, "Alabama in between." Most of Pennsylvania is a cloistered world, two spots of urban progressivism on either side of a rigid, traditional plurality. Barack Obama described Pennsylvania and other rural areas running for President in 2008 as places where people "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Harsh, maybe, but Rick Santorum didn't come from Texas or Alabama. He came from Pennsylvania. It is a largely conservative state, and in such places people gather at high school football games as a means for being in community, and there the high school coach is a lightening rod personality (note: I have never watched a single episode of Friday Night Lights, much to the chagrin of many of my friends).

John "David" Yohn was drafted by the Baltimore Colts in the late 50's, and he then played for the Jets in 1963 until he had to retire due to his back troubles. He briefly replaced Hubert Bobo in number and position in that first Jets training camp. He was born in 1937, the same year as my mother, in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, a quiet town within an olfactory-pleasing distance from Hershey. Yohn became a high school football coach of the Middletown Area High School football team in 1968. If you are a resident of the Commonwealth, as I have been for the past 19 years, you know how typically Pennsylvanian a name like "Middletown" really is. Tucked into the anonymity of a very long state from east to west, a place like Middletown never needs to be thought of as the extreme of anything, and so it builds its own mythology out of the world between worlds, between the Yohn and the John.

Yohn died of cancer in 2002, yet even in 2008 he was remembered fondly as an "iconic" coach. He accumulated an impressive win-loss record such that one wonders why he retired after only nine seasons of coaching (1968-75) when a high school coach can often stay in his job when he's losing. One description of his prolific 1971 offense in the above link suggests that his team scored "a point every minute," which seems like something mythological, or true, or both. When he was dying, apparently a former player traveled all the way from Idaho to say goodbye to him. Long journies, victories on the gigantic scale - these describe the kind of myth still allowed in the middle places of the Earth, the places where the legends of men like John Yohn live on forever without being dashed by the cynical, professional world, where life is cheap.

***

After the Jets defeated the Patriots in the January 2011 playoffs, Shaun Ellis #92 was given a chance in Greg Bishop's article to reflect on how much had changed in his tenure with the team (2000-11). He was at that point the active player with the most experience on the Jets. Originally he was a part of the complicated transaction that allowed Bill Belichick to leave the Jets for the Patriots. Ellis was one of two linebackers drafted in 2000 as a result, and he will always be among my favorite Jets.

But first we're here to talk about Ryan Riddle #57, linebacker for the Jets for 12 games in 2006. Riddle was released amid that confusion at the end of Mangini's first season as coach. His story is an object example of Mangini's communication skills, for a team spokesman simply insists that the move was "Coach's decision." Such was Mangini's way, a kind of patronizing restatement of the action in order to explain it. I don't miss that.

But we also mention Shaun Ellis because last January, in Bishop's article above, Ellis used the Jets' #57's over the years to show how much (or how little) changed. In his years with the Jets - among Al Groh, Herman Edwards, Eric Mangini and Rex Ryan - #57 on the Jets was worn by Mo Lewis, Darrell McClover, Ryan Riddle and now Bart Scott. Ellis had seen it all. Bishop suggests in his article that in January 2011 things to come would be better, that the long climb was reaching somewhere, and where there had been turnover in the past, stability in the future was bound to come.

And now I miss Shaun Ellis. He is a New England Patriot now, playing across the field from the Jets as they go off to Foxboro. Bill Belichick picked him up late in the summer, perhaps as a symbolic trophy of his complete victory over the team that dared claimed Belichick as their own. Number 92 on the Jets, long worn by one guy, will now be offered the same revolving door that's been used by men in #57 as they entered and left.

NY Jets #57 - Part 3

2011-10-06T18:34:00.000-07:00

When I walked out to do some errands last Sunday morning, I saw my next door neighbor sitting on his front porch, smoking, and in his Ravens jersey, about nine hours early for kickoff. I smiled. He smiled back, somewhat wanly.

"We're not neighbors today," he said.

I sensed that he was only partly kidding. But there are plenty of things in this world that he probably wouldn't half-kid about in the same way. Some things in life are just not that important, and some are just that important. He was kind enough to say he thought the Jets would win, and I said the opposite. The only difference was he was just trying to be polite, whereas I believed I was right. And, of course, I was. Last Sunday night the Jets played the kind of game that's too painful to watch. Their defense is not the immovable force that we, with smoke and mirrors, have imagined that they are. Their running game is officially in need of magic. Their offensive line, missing only one crucial part, is now a catastrophe. Nothing is working properly, except for Joe McKnight.

The Jets were completely over-matched by the Ravens, and one sensed from the beginning that while the Jets are a team pretending to be as good as the Ravens, the Ravens themselves might be as good as they pretend, even with all of the stupid mistakes they made throughout the Jets game. They may still develop into the team that plays the Patriots in the title game. The Jets are not.

The following morning I greeted my class, knowing that they would be upset about the Phillies' loss in game two of their series against the Cardinals, but they were even more furious that the Eagles blew a 20-point lead against the 49ers, a team that, on paper, is simply not as good. Their defense failed miserably in the second half, and their offensive line has become the subject of speculation about Michael Vick's meeting with karma. The Eagles' running game still resides squarely behind the passing game in importance. My students are at the edge of despair. One of them said he had been rooting since he was little, but he now asserted that he was "done."

One thing all throughout my fandom to which I have become accustomed is seeing the Jets play beneath the lowliest of expectations, and I feel sad for the newer, smaller fans who haven't gotten the chance yet to adjust their expectations. They never saw Bill Simpson or AJ Duhe intercept Richard Todd in the postseason, nor did they see the New York Jets suddenly fall to 7-9 in 1983. Nor have they known what it was like to deal with an entire decade (1990's) spent watching their team vainly compete with infinitely better teams week after week. Abandon hope all ye who enter. If you don't like it, leave now. You might be grateful you did.

But many don't. Particularly if they decide to become a fan on the basis of even the most innocuous thing. Sometimes the tinier the inspiration, the greater fire that burns. Take johnjet on a Jets forum who describes the following about John Matlock #57, former center of the Jets in 1967:

When I was about 9 years old I was given a couple dollars to spend at a book fair at school. I didnt know what book to buy, but for some reason I decided to buy a Joe Namath book. My father introduced me to his friends son in law. His name was John Matlock, he played for the Jets and he was a center. He came to my house knowing I liked the Jets.
I am the only Jets fan In my family. Everyone else are Eagles fans.
I just never looked back. I seem to become more obsessed with the Jets every year.

More obsessed every year. Why is that? Do you Patriots fans feel that way? Maybe the little ones do when they first learn that they root for a team that has Tom Brady on it, but the older you Pats fans get, the more you probably take for granted that your team will win. The Patriots' situation stands in grand incongruity to yours after a while. Your life is filled with painful ups and downs. Not so your Patriots on most days. You begin to realize the simple truth that, of all the things they need to keep winning, the Patriots certainly don't need you.

You. The guy living in Swansea or Pawtucket or Chelmsford or Natick. Is it really the same as it used to be? Admit it. The thrill and flavor of your fandom are gone. How many times can you feel anxious for the Patriots and believe it's an authentic feeling? Your will to live is no less horrible after that loss to Buffalo. You don't need to know the score of this week's game at this precise moment, do you? Check it later. You don't check it in on your iPhone.

You don't live Sunday on the edge anymore. Somehow you know the ship will be righted if they fall behind, so why not do some yard work, or work your errands instead? Go to your kid's soccer game, all the while wondering about Monday at work. You don't have to worry about how the Pats are doing. They've got it under control. And if they don't, you feel even less satisfied because you know they're the best team in football. What excuses could they possibly have for losing? You're going to be resentful and maybe even dismissive if they do. And when they win, you feel unmoved because that's what's supposed to happen. In fact, you follow the Patriots less and less each Sunday.

Don't you?

It's the very fact that the Jets are always perilously close to disappointing even my small, fragile expectations that I too am as obsessed as ever. Life on the margin is more interesting, more compelling than a life with a perennial winner. It's a gambler's life, and no gambler would ever honestly deny that the house doesn't always win in the end, any more than a drunk honestly believes that this next bender is going to different this time. But they keep coming back.

***

Sometimes a football player's life is just like yours. Like Richard Lewis #57, you were on a journey that lead you to a place where you are today, and no one might have guessed - certainly not you - that this is where you would lay down roots, find a home, a family, a life. Lewis did this after he played linebacker for the New York Jets. He then played four seasons with the Toronto Argonauts and then never left. He became a rather active member of organizations linked to parks, recreation and churches in Toronto. According to his write-up with Twisted Sports International, which is a "hybrid organization" that seems to want to encourage children to be more active, he has been a part of Toronto life since he retired. A moment from his pro career that he recollects with greatest pride at the link above came in 1974 while playing for the Buffalo Bills, when he intercepted a Joe Namath pass (this also happened to Namath 21 other times throughout that season, but Lewis is entitled to feel it was special to him). He also recollects the day in 1973 when OJ Simpson ran over the Jets to gain the mark beyond 2,000 yards for the season and says, as carefully as a member of Toronto's Board of Trade possibly can, that Simpson's infamous life over the past 20 years is, simply, "sad."

***

Darrell McClover #57 was drafted by the Jets out of the University of Miami in 2004, and in 2009 he finished his career after four seasons with the Bears. He was injured in his rookie year, and might well have felt strange playing in the metaphorical shadow of his good friend, the other player drafted out of Miami that year, Jonathan Vilma. As is often the case with linebackers that teams don't know quite what do with, McClover played with the Bears mostly on special teams.

Kevin Macarthur, LB

Such are the journeymen's lives. They are the rule more than the exception. Kevin Macarthur #57 has a story that gives some insight into how to engage in the struggle of your life. It helps to believe in God. Macarthur was cut three times by the Jets before he was brought back to play in the 1986 playoffs, where he intercepted a pass for a touchdown in the Wild Card victory over the Chiefs, giving the Jets a 28-6 lead in the third quarter. That's a good memory.

His story, written in 1987 by Gerald Eskanazi for the Times, reveals a portrait of a man whose belief that he would be back on the team the following season appears to be part of a cosmic struggle. There is a quote he gives Eskanazi about his mother that comes across as an eerie prophecy:

''I knew I'd be back with the Jets, and I was very proud of that,'' he said. ''I went to see my mother back home in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I told her about the coming season. She said something strange to me. She said, 'I won't take a train, and I won't take a boat, and I won't take a plane, but I'm going to be watching you play next season.' ''

Her words come across as a riddle, but apparently she died of a stroke soon afterward. Macarthur says she lead a hard life, an unforgiving one that saw her become a mother for the first time when she was only 16. Such stories sound cliche-ish, though it's not surprising that the most resilient players who at cutting time endure the constant rejection and acceptance and rejection again are the ones with the toughest mothers, and most especially religious mothers. He says that therefore each time the Jets cut him (and not when they brought him back) he fell on his knees and prayed.

And this is what stays with me as we enter into the weekend where the Jets will travel to Foxboro, to once again play the role of underdog, the less and less likely team to vanquish the perennial division champion. I was also raised by a religious mother, and though I haven't fallen on my knees the last two weeks after consecutive losses, maybe it's time to try. I've always felt that unconditionally loyal fandom is a creature born under the same sign as unconditional faith. A Patriots fan may make his trip to Home Depot this weekend while the Jets are being pounded into paste. Whether he realizes it or not, he has become disaffected with the existential experience of being a fan. And if he wants to watch it later in the week he's got it on Tivo. But then who has the time to follow football these days? He won't be on his knees when it's over. He's already lost his faith.

NY Jets #57 - Part 2

2011-09-29T17:28:00.000-07:00

Mo Lewis #57 (ranked #142)

To give Mo Lewis #57 a tribute higher than simply being the man who inadvertently changed the modern game of football with a single devastating hit on Drew Bledsoe, I think it's important to mention something which should both elevate Lewis to a place of genuine respect and also shed light on a sad truth about the way the franchise has played defense over the past 51 years.

Pro-football-reference.com offers a comprehensive list of the 1000 best players on offense and on defense using the Elo system, "a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games" based on the calculation system for chess ratings made by Arpad Elo. I don't claim to understand it, except that the list is a set of matches, one player against another statistically, in order to determine who is better than whom. The overall list puts Jerry Rice as the best overall offensive player who won the most statistical matchups out of 720 possible players, and Reggie White as the overall best defensive player out of a possible 815. Mo Lewis is at a rather high ranking - #142. Whether any of this has any validity at all is questionable. But putting Lewis there is no fluke, especially when you take into account his high rate of tackles early in his career, forced fumbles and interceptions.

The comparably rated offensive player is Grady Alderman, the longtime Vikings lineman. Above Alderman there are eight offensive players who spent a considerable time with the Jets, notably Curtis Martin (80), Vinny Testaverde (90), Joe Namath (102), Kevin Mawae (114), John Riggins (126), Don Maynard (137), with present-day Jet LaDainian Tomlinson #21 at number 18. Not many, but what can you do? Those ratings are themselves a little absurd. I would put Martin above Riggins, but I would put Riggins above Namath. But the really striking point is that above Mo Lewis there are no Jets defensive players. No one. This point cannot be emphasized enough, and to be honest, I think this is reasonable. It is only very recently that the Jets have been considered a strong defense, though after Sunday's game against Oakland, there is reason to believe that they may be rated lower this year. The Sack Exchange ranks lower (Gastineau at 188, Klecko at 247, Lyons sadly not at all) while Larry Grantham #60 ranks just below Lewis. So there is at least one argument here that Mo Lewis is statistically the best defensive player in New York Jets history. True? False? Perhaps it was appropriate that in 2001 the "best defensive player" in our history helped create a seismic shift in the AFC, for who else could be capable of such a thing? James Farrior #51, whose best statistics have come with the Steelers? Maybe. He is ranked overall at 140.

***

Jim Jerome #57 played special teams for the Jets during the latter part of the 1977 season, when the sky was darkening on an increasingly poor season. After starting the year 2-2, the Jets dropped seven in a row before they managed to barely squeeze past the equally poor New Orleans Saints. When Jerome joined the ride, the season had long lost its momentum, and the young team had probably fallen into the ennui that infects a late failed football season. When a new player enters the locker room he must feel like the new teacher in our disgruntled faculty who tries to save her inspiration for new ideas from the veteran colleague's compulsion to stay attached to old ways, whether tried and true or not. But regardless, when you play a few hours or weeks in the NFL, you are always known as someone who played in the pros. The Watertown Daily Times of Connecticut mentions Jim Jerome as a standout for Syracuse football when their program was at a low and then as a a special teams man for an NFL team on the slide.

Whether the Jets of 1977 (3-11) were really pros in the sense that, say, the 1977 Oakland Raiders (11-3) were is hard to say. The Jets might even have done as well as 7-7 in '77 if you take into account how close the games were that season. Four losses alone were within four or fewer points. But on the last day of what appears to Jim Jerome's career, the Jets fell 27-0 to the Philadelphia Eagles, a team that managed only a 5-9 record.

***

On July 12, 1997, the Seattle Times published the following about John Little #57:

Former NFL lineman John Little died of a heart attack in Hot Coffee, Miss., earlier this week. The two-time All-Big Eight selection at Oklahoma State spent seven years in the NFL, with the New York Jets, Houston Oilers and Buffalo Bills.

Apparently he was born in Tallulah, Louisiana, but he died in Hot Coffee, as rural a community as one could possibly imagine - even rural by the definition of a rural state; according to Wikipedia: "about halfway between Jackson and Hattiesburg ... Hot Coffee isn't a quaint little town; it's not even a town. Instead it's a tiny community of farms, homes, and businesses scattered along two-lane Highway 532...According to local lore, a resident [J.J. Davis] opened an inn in 1870 and sold coffee to passersby. Apparently the drink was the only memorable thing about the place."

The "only thing." Is that all there is? Hot Coffee, Mississippi is a non-census municipality without a zip code. This is where John Little's life came to an end, far from the northern cities where he once played, distanced from suburbs, freeways or malls.

I suppose one of his last games in a uniform was playing for the Buffalo Bills, and probably against the Jets in that middling season of 1977. This was a cold, gray, poorly played December game at Shea that I listened to on the radio with my Dad as we drove around Roosevelt Field, doing Christmas errands. I remember feeling what I felt last week as the Jets fell to Oakland. They can still win. They will, won't they? Is that all there is? Dad suggested that it was. "This is why I gave the season tickets away," he said. They trailed in the fourth quarter 7-3 before Wesley Walker caught a touchdown pass from Richard Todd, raising our expectations for two wins in a row, a feat they hadn't achieved since October. And then the Bills scored, and I slumped across the back of the bench seat, staring at Dad's shoulder and then beyond it, out into the vast, flat cold slate color landscape of the Long Island Expressway. That's all there was.

***

Hubert Bobo #57 has the best name for any season. In a new magazine called Sports Illustrated in 1954, he is included in their preview of the upcoming Rose Bowl between Ohio State and USC. SI noted the formidable backfield of the Buckeyes, which included Bobo, Bobby Watkins and "Hopalong" Cassaday. Bobo had been a Ohio high school football star, and at Ohio State, he helped win a National Championship for a team that also included future Hall of Famer Jim Parker. He would then go on to play as a pro in Canada and then eventually begin a professional career in the States with the Los Angeles Chargers, and then at linebacker with the New York Titans for two seasons. His Wikipedia page thoughtfully outlines his statistics as a pro.

But at one time in our history, during Christmas season in 1954, a marvelous moment of synchronicity occurred. In that 1954 issue of SI, Hubert Bobo is mentioned as one of the keys to the Buckeyes' offense, but on page 24, a story can be found on middleweight champion Carl "Bobo" Olsen. In the midst of the holidays, readers were given a Christmas gift of two Bobos. Would that we were so lucky.

NY Jets #52 (Redux) - John Schmitt

2011-09-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

During the spring and summer of 1972, my Mom and Dad were expecting my little brother, so they began looking for a house. We lived in a rented apartment in Flushing, a mere long walk from Shea Stadium in the autumn, a subway stop in winter. Up until this time, they had never owned anything except their clothing, their cutlery, their furniture, their books, a TV and a 1967 Volvo. Now we were moving to suburbia, to Long Island, a logical step along the narrow strip of land to Nassau County from Queens. Now they were diving for more. Dad had known a little of the town and country growing up as a small child in middle class Braintree, Massachusetts, but his family soon hit hard times, and he became a city child. Mom had never known anything but the city, in a railroad apartment where she and her siblings slept in the same bed. She wanted my little brother and me to have our own rooms.

I have vague memories of being driven around in the backseat of a Saab by a realtor, looking at houses. I was three and a half, and I recall very few details of the trip around the South Shore neighborhoods. I remember seeing more trees than ever before, and tall ones at that. I saw a car that advertised a product with a plastic German shepherd dog attached to the roof. I wish I could remember what that company sold. It's killing me. What I don't remember is what my parents told me many years later after I became a Jets fan. Among the many houses we saw, we also looked at #52 John Schmitt's house in Hempstead.

Apparently he was moving out. He was Joe Namath's starting center from about 1966-73. Like my Mom, Schmitt was born in Brooklyn. He had already made the move out of New York City to the Island, settling near where he went to college at Hofstra. I always assumed that we were looking at his house back then because he wasn't playing for the Jets anymore, but I see now that he still had another year to play for the Jets when we were there. So where was John Schmitt moving?

I just know that as a boy each time I read about the Jets in Super Bowl III and saw a passing imagine of John Schmitt - his white towel attached to his back belt so Namath could wipe his hands before the snap, the peculiar cleats the offensive line wore with the circle on the heel - I always felt like he had been rendered a little less magical by virtue of knowing him to be a regular person, with a home, cutlery and china, a TV, books, and a car in his garage. Suddenly he was like a member of my extended family, or at least a family friend, for why else would a person allow me into his home? No matter how distant these people were from my devotion, I had to realize too that they had lives, sometimes decorating them with vestiges of the lives of the city they left behind. There was no mass-produced, fixed accounting of personal taste in the 1970's; things were pretty loose, and there was no IKEA. All the accoutrements of real life only served to make the paradox that much more incomprehensible to a little boy: the Jets of the mythical time of 1968 were immortal, but all the same merely human. John Schmitt was the first to be filed in my understanding of the world in just this way.

***

John Schmitt #52, playing with pneumonia

Back in the day when I used to go to work with crippling hangovers, I found a completely distorted inspiration in When Pride Still Mattered, David Marraniss' excellent book on Vince Lombardi. One of the coach's primary lessons was that to be a successful in the game, a player had to live with and accept constant pain. Running back Jim Taylor specifically said that Lombardi taught him the lessons of how to recognize his own limits for pain and to then push through that limit to a new place where the player gave that much more than his opponent. It made the Packers of the 60's fearful from more than a strategic point of view; it made them psychologically impenetrable.

Yet Marraniss also points out that Lombardi's own ability to face pain was constantly at odds with what he demanded from his players. In his own private experience, Lombardi was apparently greatly afraid of physical pain, perhaps as any normal person is. But football is not normal, not the real world, and while Lombardi became the first professional coach to embody lessons that could be apparently applied to the real world, his insistence on his players being intolerant of pain is not part of the normal world. It belongs in the fantasies of football heroism, where it erodes the mind and spirit of many of its players.

In North Dallas Forty, a violent mid-day practice before a key divisional game against a fictional Chicago team ends with a receiver going down with a pulled hamstring. From high above the field in a tower overlooking the whole practice, Coach Strouther speaks evenly through a megaphone to the trainer below. Is the player ready? he asks. The trainer admits he can't tell but he doesn't think so. Wide receiver Phil Elliott, a sometimes sour veteran, a free spirit, not at all to Strouther's taste, is the next man up. Strouther doesn't like Elliott's independence, his immaturity, and Elliott doesn't like how the coach stokes the racial tensions on the team to create a greater hunger on the squad for violence. But they need one another. He calls out from the megaphone for Elliott, and he takes a walk with the receiver. Can you be ready for a whole game? he asks, knowing that Elliott will have to be shot with pain killers to play.

Of course, says Elliott. "Hell, I ain't afraid of needles," he says, walking away, but not before adding to Strouther, "I guess that's what's called maturity."

Where's the fine between a distorted maturity and pride? When I consider John Schmitt on the day of Super Bowl III, I admit find something admirable in his masochistic determination to compete. Apparently in the New York Daily News back in 2008, John Schmitt admitted that he had played the Super Bowl while seriously ill. Rich Cimini of the Daily News writes:

"Schmitt...said he played Super Bowl III with pneumonia. By the fourth quarter, he was on the verge of exhaustion. He was so ill that, during the postgame prayer in the locker room, he vomited. Namath, kneeling beside Schmitt, scooted away in a hurry."

There is Schmitt, hulking over in pain and puking during a solemn moment, and there is Namath, kneeling at his greatest moment of professional pride and very nearly hit with something that would have been difficult to explain to the reporters amassed around his locker without first trying to use the towel tucked into the posterior end of his center's pants.

***

Someone mentioned to me today that he was taking comfort at work from remembering to see things as they are, not as he hopes they will be. It's strange because I've been doing the same lately, and finding myself mostly reassured by the results. Keeping your expectations low can wedge you through lean days when it seems as though that what you planned to accomplish in the most rudimentary way will simply not get done. Some people complain endlessly at my job, and it might be because their high expectations are always dashed. It's human for us to hope, to aspire. But should we see things as they are? As a Jets fan, I have been given the unique privilege of practicing a life of low expectations but found myself still bitterly humbled in 1983, in 1999 by things as they truly were.

But consider Rich Cimini's recent article on the miraculous reappearance of John Schmitt's Super Bowl ring. According to the story, in 1971, not long before my parents began following their hopes for a new house, John Schmitt was surfing in Hawaii when the ring that signified his heroic part in one of the most important games in professional football history vanished into the Pacific Ocean. It slipped off his finger and disappeared into the blue. The entire story is circuitous. A lifeguard found it some time later and gave it to his wife, but it became part of a niece's estate. The niece then had it appraised and contacted Schmitt recently to let him know that it still survives, saved from the waters of Waikiki.

What do you believe you have lost that you still wonder about after all these years? Are you diving beneath the surface, despite your own exhaustion, hoping to find what disappeared into the abyss? Is it recoverable? A perfect love lost to your years of selfishness and dissolution? A friend whom you suspect might wonder about you too? Is it a book you loaned? Words of consolation that you know might have made someone smile, helped remind someone that she was loved, that he was important? As the song goes, you must come to the surface and come to your senses, though it's a very deep sea around your own devices.

But there are times when it seems as though that what we have lost, what we have missed all these years, is retrievable, after all. The remnant of our beautiful, innocent hopes are suddenly glimmering through waves and sand, and someone discerns them, recognizing instantly something of value. Suddenly it seems that nothing is lost, everything is recoverable. Perhaps that's why Cimini felt it worthwhile to add that Schmitt's ring is the stuff of larger legend, a sign for others to begin to imagine hopes just as impossible and miraculous:

When Jets fans read about Schmitt's ring discovery Friday night on the Internet, some began tweeting it's a sign of luck and that the current team is destined for the Super Bowl. They haven't been back since 1969.

When the words "luck" and "destined" are found in the same sentence, you realize that you should come to the surface, you should come to your senses. But it's a very deep sea. It could be down there anywhere.

NY Jets #57 - 9/23/01

2011-09-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

The weekend came and went. When we were not in praise and remembrance for the fallen, we were thinking about how much the country has tilted toward oblivion in the past ten years. We are a more divided country, a poorer one, an angrier one, a less important one in the eyes of the world, and yet the terrorists did not win, nor will they ever. Generations to come will wonder what we were thinking during this time, and I suppose we'll wear the same look of bemused frustration that my parents had when I asked them about living through the 60's. It was a strange time, we'll say. Stranger than usual, and it became difficult to see the difference between what was real and what was just our imagination.

I had an argument with a colleague of mine this week about whether or not it would have been better to make the memorials for the fallen in ~~Schwenksville~~ Shanksville and New York more of an affirmation. Why do we need to build holes in the ground to show where the towers were? he asked. Why can't we have something that reaches for the sky? I think sometimes he just enjoys a good argument. My brother narrowly escaped the World Trade Center that day and ran for his life uptown until he reached my cousin's office at Park Avenue. A colleague of mine once dated a fireman from Queens who was lost in the towers' destruction. The stepsister of a friend of mine was a flight attendant on one of the planes that hit the towers. Everyone on the east coast seemed no more than three degrees separated from someone who was witness or victim that day. Ten years later, given what little comfort we can take from our country's present state, it's appropriate that a void be the main symbol of our remembrance.

***

Two days after JFK was assassinated in 1963, my mother went out on a date with a guy to watch the football Giants play the football Cardinals at Yankee Stadium. She met him at his apartment, arriving just in time to see Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live TV. She remembers being unable to take herself away from the networks showing it over and over, like instant replay. Her boyfriend wanted to get to the game, but she couldn't stop watching it. All the while in her mind she kept wondering, What's going on? What's happening?

Still, the game was played, and she went. So did approximately 63,000 other fans. Richard Rothschild wrote in the Chicago Tribune that he attended the game and remembers no music, no extra sound effects, no halftime bands, nothing extraneous being done and that the crowd in attendance was solemnly focused on the game, with cigarette and cigar smoke wafting everywhere in the late autumn sun. There are legendary (and possibly inaccurate stories) of the tomb-like silence of the big stadium that day, so much so that people claim they could hear the whistles clearly from the upper seats. Bob ~~Shepperd~~ Sheppard called for a moment of silence at the game's start.

The news of Oswald's death buzzed around the stadium. Most people who were at the game got there too early to see it happen on TV as Mom did. They missed an event that would shape their country to come - a man's murder, caught live, witnessed by millions of people who had already been stitched to their TVs in a effort to comprehend the incomprehensible. As for the Giants, they were upset by the Cardinals 24-17, playing poorly throughout. Pete Rozelle later said the Sunday games should never have been allowed to go on, though apparently he had been given permission from the Kennedy family to let them play.

In his article above, Rothschild gives the sense that for the Giants' fans the game was entirely separate from the events of the weekend. They all comprehended that something terrible had happened, but the game itself was an honest distraction in the meantime. Football was a game. Kennedy and Oswald were real life. What separated those two worlds of reality was a void of knowledge, an absence of the intrusive media that we have today, though it could be said that the events of that weekend in 1963 ensured that such a void would not remain for long.

But even today, the world may change, but the games stay the same. You might have voted for one candidate three years ago and are now already following a fashionable wave of indifference toward him today, but three bad seasons for your football team mean nothing to you. If they do, then you're not really a loyal fan, you're an enthusiast. And that's fine; you might be healthier that way. Once the commemorative ceremonies ended, there was still the Jets-Cowboys season opener to play, a game very like one played ten years ago or even forty-nine years ago, and Tony Romo still gave the game away with turnovers, just as Tony Romo often does.

***

Rothschild's article was written exactly ten years ago today, perhaps to give some perspective on why the NFL was reluctant to repeat Rozelle's mistake; they skipped a week after 9/11 and returned to action on September 23, 2001. The Jets played the Patriots at Foxboro in a game intended to unite the two teams, their fanbases, and the entire football community in one knitted brow of sorrow and determination. One sign in the Foxboro stands read, "GO PATS. GO JETS." Both the Jets and Patriots played listlessly, just the Giants did back in the day, just as one imagines two teams would at a time of massive grief.

But this Jets-Patriots game represents a different ten-year milestone - a pivotal moment that signaled a radical change in the history of the two clubs. This was the night that Mo Lewis #57 knocked out Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. There were little more than five minutes left, and the Jets were ahead 10-3. Bledsoe scrambled for the sidelines and was nearly there when he was blindsided by Lewis and hurled to the ground. You may be able to hear the hit in the video below; many people on the field claimed it was the hardest hit anyone had ever heard. A blood vessel burst in Bledsoe's chest, and he was unable to get up. Backup quarterback Tom Brady went in for him, and the rest is, as they say....

In order for a truly great rivalry to develop, one team has to be preeminent and the other the spoiler, the underdog. Since that night, the Patriots and the Jets have been repeating a pattern built by the consequences of that hit. They were already trading coaches and players, but as soon as one of them became a Super Bowl champion later that year, the war of words and gestures that followed developed into one of the great spitting rivalries in the game. Until September 23, 2001, the Jets and the Patriots shared similar spaces near the bottom floors of the five-team AFC East, occasionally seeing one another take a trip to the penthouse, only then to end up in the same space again. After 2001, the format changed, and both teams have been consistently more competitive than Buffalo and Miami, but in the end we all know who's really better, and we all know why.

So the question begs: what if Lewis had pulled up? It's hardly right to blame him for not doing so. Though an excessive hit, it was a legitimate one, and the quarterback is fair game. In a quiet, defensive struggle, Lewis was simply doing his job; he had a fine career with several poor to underachieving Jet clubs, and it is unfair to spend this entire entry talking about him solely in the context of this one moment. But it did make a difference. It's a moment that haunts Jets fans because they're always inclined to believe that Fate works directly against them and in favor of the Patriots, and in this case Fate made a visit on the night football was supposed to return to normalcy.

Let's say Bledsoe stays as starter, and Brady goes somewhere else in the NFL. It's difficult to imagine a Belichick team excelling without Tom Brady, though you could say that 2008 was as close as an example of that as we will find. Where would Brady have played, if not for the Patriots? Would he have ended up a good quarterback on struggling teams, as Matt Cassel, Kevin Kolb or Matt Shaub have? Was he special all along, with or without Belichick?

Drew Bledsoe can be forgiven for not anticipating any of this. As he lay in pain on the Patriots' sideline, he certainly knew his night was done, but he probably never entertained the possibility that his career with the Patriots was over, too. Nor could he have known he would be replaced by the greatest quarterback in football history. We can all be forgiven for being unable to see the Hand of Fate in the form of Mo Lewis.

NY Jets #50 - (Redux II)

2011-09-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

This is my exciting night life: I return home from work, walk the dog, wait for my wife to come from work, I make dinner, we trade work stories, then we eat in front of the television, which I think every marriage counselor would advise a couple not to do. TV can always be detrimental human interaction, but I am brain dead anyway after a day where I've had to assign and reassign a place for a 17 year-old to sit in my class (which is insane) and it doesn't really matter what we watch. TV is merely a conversation piece, enabling us to talk with one another when we're dead tired. In Hard Day's Night, George disparages a "trend-setter" to her creator by saying that "the lads frequently sit round the television and watch her for a giggle. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things." Though the real Beatles did not end well, at least Richard Lester's Beatles bonded over watching TV and mocking it.

Anyway, the other night, we came upon North Dallas Forty, the film adaptation of Peter Gent's novel based on his time playing for the 1960's Dallas Cowboys. A really generous critic would suggest that the 1973 novel did for football what Catch-22 did for war, by demythologizing it and painting it as an expression of human avarice. I've yet to read the novel, but the 1979 movie is about the best football film ever made, which may not sound like much considering how many really bad football movies there are. Nick Nolte plays hard-living wide receiver Phil Elliott, the Peter Gent character, while Mac Davis effectively plays the bleakly humorous quarterback Seth Maxwell, a thinly veiled version of Don Meredith. I'll watch anything with Nick Nolte in it because although he's played a wide variety of characters - an oily lawyer, an American Nazi, an obsessed painter, Thomas Jefferson - he's still always Nolte, and like Humphrey Bogart he's a flawed malcontent, a powder keg, which is OK, and you buy into him every time.

A comparable film today would study steroids and head injuries in the NFL. North Dallas Forty is about pain killers. BA Strother (GD Spradlin), the head coach who spouts scripture and consults computers for insight into his players' capacity for output, is the slightly veiled version of Tom Landry. Strother manipulates his players like chess pieces, sometimes turning them against one another in order to get better results. Nolte's Elliott is out of shape, he smokes grass and Tiparillos, he drinks Budweiser while lackadaisically lifting weights, and he has fallen out of Strother's favor. The key to his performance are pain killers that he takes ritually, culminating in massive injections he gets just before a game. In one scene, he stretches his body in agony before going to bed, and we hear all his joints crack, one by one. When Strother needs him for a full game, it means that he needs Elliott numbed up enough to take the pain, and Elliott is only happy to oblige.

The real issue of both the novel and film appears to be about whether or not there is life for a professional football player other than football. When Elliott falls in love with a woman who doesn't understand the game at all (and is portrayed as having no sense of humor, either) it means that he's really struggling to find a way out. What else is there? That's a question that fans wonder about when their devotions leave them numb, but it's also what I've been curious to discover about the infinite Jets. Is that all there is? If the football player in my senior high school English is smart enough to work hard but still wants to waste my time by arguing that he should be able to sit next to the pretty girl that he's just going to distract from classwork, I think it's because he's gotten the message that there is nothing in life more rewarding than the game. If only that were true.

***

It took a minute longer than usual to find John Sullivan #50. He's not the John Sullivan who plays for the Minnesota Vikings at center. He is not Vincent John Sullivan who's been robbing banks in Montana wearing a Mark Sanchez jersey. He is John Patrick Sullivan, former linebacker who attended University of Illinois (apparently recruited by alumnus Dick Butkus) was drafted by the Chicago Bears, and then played for the Jets for two seasons. With the Bears he never made it out of preseason. Apparently he got absolutely crushed in a 1979 preseason game against the Jets in which he otherwise played very well. I remember this game, most especially because I got violently ill after a spaghetti meal at the house of a family we were visiting, and I lay down on a couch, watching the game. (Normally I don't have an encyclopedic memory of all my childhood adventures with vomiting, but there are some vivid moments I can still use for effect. I recently had to tell a longtime family friend to stop putting my mother on a Tea Party e-mailing list, and when she refused, I told her that understood why she was doing it. I hurled on her baby blue living room rug when I was about four years old, and I told her that she was probably taking revenge against us for it by vomiting her right-wing propaganda on my Mom. She stopped.)

Sullivan was so badly injured in that Jets-Bears preseason game that he never got to live out the dream of being a new Bears middle linebacker. Instead the Jets, who had seen him play, picked him up and used him in special teams and suicide squads, which the new kickoff rules have recently made somewhat obsolete. Accustomed to being a middle linebacker, the Jets put him on the outside where he could not perform as well. His story is here. You can find out how he was screamed at by Buddy Ryan, how he intercepted Richard Todd and was fired by Walt Michaels.

When football was done with him, he eventually moved to California and turned to yoga. The link above shows a barely aged man with the sinewy build of a yoga master. I'm inclined to an easy cynicism when I see yoga instructors posing on a mountain rock in bare feet, or when they call themselves ministers of something called the "Diamond Approach Community," but John Sullivan seems to have discovered a world for himself after football by making a long journey through the connections between the mind and body. Reading his story made me wonder about Phil Elliott making the break from the game at the end of his season and about his future beyond the world of the game. It took some time, Sullivan says, before he reached a sense of peace of mind. He first had to abandon what he calls the "football mask." Once the Jets let him go, he said:

The phone just stops ringing. I wore the “football mask” for many years after though; I lived with the players, I stayed friends with many of my former teammates, I was part of the fraternity. I felt I was still was part of the team even though I wasn't collecting a check. I was renting a room from one of the guys on the team; I worked at one of his bars for a while as a bartender. I was still running in that circle, so it was very hard to let go.

He also discusses football's compulsion to build only the muscles and strength in players that it needs, leaving other muscles vulnerable to injury, which he feels is ultimately what happened to him. There is a remarkable moment in North Dallas Forty when we see players in the weight room; their repetitions make their bodies seem cruelly melded to the weight machines themselves. They are conditioned and shaped by the industrial power of the team's owner, and they are a part of his chemical company empire. They are not machines; they are only small cogs in a vast machinery, and they are all disposable and replaceable. Sullivan's tale made me envious of what he was able to accomplish by reclaiming his body from the machine.

***

Born in Teaneck, NJ, Dan Murray #50 might, for all we know, have grown up rooting for the New York Jets. After graduating from little East Stroudsburg University in rural Pennsylvania - a college that has seen only five players drafted all-time in the NFL (and all in the 1980's) he began his professional career at linebacker with the Indianapolis Colts and then came to the New York Jets in 1990, where his career ended. There is so much more to be said but so else little to add, and that is the nature of life.

***


Final bid at auction: $1,220. Number of bids: 0

Michael Taylor #50 was an All-American out of Michigan, an exceptional college linebacker drafted in the first round by the Jets in 1972. He played two years for the Jets and then jumped to the WFL and the Detroit Wheels, who didn't even finish their only season in 1974. Taylor was one of several Jets who left for the new league, including Gerry Philbin, Bob Parrish, Steve Thompson, and John Elliott. A truly comprehensive WFL site offers a surprisingly detailed discussion of the Wheels, a team described as "the most forgettable of W.F.L. teams," which is sort of like being last in England's Fourth Division in 1974 (Stockport County). It's rough stuff. The above link on the Wheels includes a couple of good pictures of Taylor. He might have briefly entertained the notion of returning to Michigan as a hometown hero, albeit near Ann Arbor, in Ypsilanti, where the Wheels shared a stadium with Eastern Michigan University.

The team was bankrupt even before the midway point of the year. After their loss to the New York Stars at Downing Stadium, the Stars themselves were immediately sold to Charlotte, NC and the Wheels were sold to no one. They landed back home to no one waiting for them at the airport and no one to watch them any longer. According to Jim Cusano's fine write-up, the Wheels were the first of the WFL teams to die. Their final record was 1-13. Michael Taylor went in the subsequent dispersal draft to the Shreveport Steamer. The league itself did not last through the 1975 season. If I'm not mistaken, this was also the end of Mike Taylor's professional career. The game-worn helmet at auction above is a relic of a time when style reigned over substance, a time when, arguably, the very best designed logos and uniforms in football history were wasted on teams with little or nothing else left over in the bank to spend. In our own contemporary society today, where 1% of our people own a quarter of American wealth, we must all sometimes feel like WFL franchises. So let's hear it for the the Stars, the Hawaiians, the Sun, and the Wheels. Let us all carry on the doomed tradition.

NY Jets #50 - (Redux)

2011-09-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

This is an entry on #50 that should have been completed months ago. I inadvertently omitted mention of seven whole human beings in this discussion of #50. I am forced to locate my own error - a labor with which better read contemporaries don't have to worry themselves - and am now correcting it. My apologies, phantom reader. Let me continue.

S, M, L, XL (XXL not yet available)

Carl McAdams #50 was an All-American linebacker coming out of the University of Oklahoma in 1967. He was drafted by the Jets and played for two more seasons after that, which included Super Bowl III. He is the big guy at extreme right in this Daily News photograph just after the team had gotten its Super Bowl rings on July 14, 1969, two days before the launch of Apollo 11. You see from left to right Emerson Boozer, Curley Johnson, John Elliott, and Carl McAdams - a big guy, even by today's XXL standards. He technically played for the Jets at both linebacker and defensive tackle, which seems funny to think of now. He would definitely fit in with today's linebackers because of his documented speed, but on defensive lines that are too big to fail, McAdams would have been a little out of place.

Just after the Super Bowl between the Saints and Colts, McAdams was interviewed by a local Oklahoma station about his role in the game of games. He shows off the ring that he received in the photograph above. I think it's interesting that he also confesses to what Mike Curtis and Bill Curry say about Super Bowl III in the NFL Network's story on the 1970 Colts - that on any other day, the 1968 Colts would almost certainly have beaten the 1968 Jets. Today, McAdams sells real estate, and if you're interested in obtaining life, home or auto insurance from someone in the general vicinity of Antlers, OK, you might be able to speak with a veteran of the most important Super Bowl of them all.

***

Mike Mock #50 has a tough name. It sounds tough to carry around too. On an alphabetical list, it appears as "Mock, Michael," which must have been a little trying, after countless first days of classes at school, being asked by teachers "Do people mock, Michael?" or saying, "I don't think you should be mocked, Michael." Maybe I'm investing too much humor in the lives and work of teachers in the places where where Mock grew up. But the truth is that Mock was born in Trondheim, Norway, a harbor town located on the Nidelva River, so I guess his teachers didn't do that. The Internet tells me that "spotte" is Norwegian for "mock," but how long did he live there? He was drafted by the Jets out of Texas Tech, so maybe his parents were just passing through. "Mock" is not, that I know of, a Norwegian name, though being a linebacker means you can be named anything - Lipshitz, Sukoff. It's all in the attitude you carry with it, and if anything, a player can live up to the name of "mock" by being irreverent and droll. In any event, Mike Mock wore #50 on the sidelines for the 1978 season and doesn't seem to have an NFL record beyond that, which is why I bothered to fret about his name.

***

Kelvin Moses, LB

Drafted out of Wake Forest, Kelvin Moses #50 is as tall as I am (six feet even) and, when he played for the Jets, he weighed about 50 pounds more than I do (185) now. Fifty pounds of muscle, no doubt. I would have liked to have said the same about myself, but I had the distinct displeasure of looking at myself in the mirror this morning, and I saw a sagging, prematurely aged middle aged man with what looks like a layer flab at his midsection that his skin is holding back with less and less enthusiasm. I imagine anyone performing my autopsy would say this was a layer of fat sadly reminiscent of most grown, sedentary men - men who spend most of their time hunched over, writing, all the while remaining staunchly attached to the notion that they are physically about as healthy as a person half their age. If you are out there, Kelvin Moses, beware. Like Phlebus, whose dead body decayed in the water while turning in the gyre of the whirlpool, I can only act as a warning now to you, who are still young, but older, and who may be holding onto that weight you carried back in 2001-02 when you played predominantly special teams for the Jets. We see him in the attached photograph above in one of his last regular season games, a happy occasion, when the Jets beat the Patriots 30-17 and put themselves in a position to win the division, which they did. It's the last division title they've won.

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.*

***

Wayne Mulligan #50 was another former Cardinal that Charley Winner brought over from St. Louis when he replaced his father-in-law Weeb Ewbank as Head Coach of the Jets in 1974. Mulligan was the center who handed off to Joe Namath in the two games I saw with my Dad in 1975, games that resonate in my mind like personal myths. Where did we sit? How many off-duty cops were there sitting in front if us? What did Dad get me to eat? I still hold that the greatest piece of mystery is how my mind was able to not see the Mets' infield and home plate that remained left over in the Jets' season at Shea. I don't recall it at all, though I do recall the disappointment I felt when I noticed it in 1978, when Dad took me to the Jets-Dolphins' season opener at Shea. Did my brain not actually see the infield in 1975 because I wasn't expecting to see it? Was it like the apocryphal story of the natives who could not see Columbus' ships on the horizon because they had no prior basis for understanding something like that could exist?

Mulligan appears to have retired after the 1975 season. He was replaced by rookie Joe Fields, who would snap the ball to Joe Namath, Richard Todd, Pat Ryan, Matt Robinson, and Ken O'Brien. And Phil Simms in 1988, when he became a Giant for one season. Centers act as the keystone to the line, the transitional arc from one side of the line to the other, with their posteriors pointed toward the most important man on the field. It's such an odd place for anyone to find himself, and I suppose centers, whom you rarely hear about, have to have as good a sense of humor about themselves as Mike Mock does about his name. Do we never hear about the center because we are too embarrassed to admit that the game we love requires a man to have the ball fed to him between another man's legs? Anyone not already acclimated to the absurdities of this great game would likely be suspicious. "You construct intricate rituals," Barbara Kruger once said in one of her works, "which allow you to touch the skin of other men."

Regardless, Wayne Mulligan was the transitional point in the arc between John Schmitt #52 (1966-73) and Joe Fields #65 (1976-87). That's a total of 22 seasons among three men at one position. Only at the quietly devout position of center (and placekicker) is something like that even remotely possible.

NY Jets #56 - Part 4

2011-09-03T10:54:00.000-07:00


John Abraham in 2005

Am I wrong, or does John Abraham have really long arms? I keep staring at this picture, amazed at what I'm seeing. When I stand up straight, my full palm goes past my waist. His elbow almost meets his waist. When I was a little boy I drew pictures of football players with one physical aspect usually out of proportion with the whole - a giant head, giant feet, or arms as inordinately long as John Abraham's. So we can think of this not as a deformity but as an abstraction of the human form, an aesthetic improvement over the norm, certainly for a linebacker.

This Life photo is, as Jets fans know, taken from 2005, the one season Abraham wore #56, a gesture that always seemed derivative of another famous player with that number from another New York-based team. Normally, Abraham wore #94 for the Jets, and he now wears #55 with Atlanta. That he could not be kept on the Jets is one of the greatest frustrations of my recent fandom, alongside the departure of James Farrior and Jonathan Vilma. The Jets never really made good draft choices before the first decade of the 21st century, so I guess it would have been too much to expect them to keep all the great ones they made afterwards.

His #56 in 2005 was a tribute to Lawrence Taylor, I think. I guess for a Jets fan that's a bit like seeing the Mets wear black hats, which still smacks too much of trying to be like the Yankees. You have colors already, I keep saying every time I see David Knight in those black shirts that make them look like they're Auto Zone attendants. Be who you are, not who they are. But even more, by wearing #56, John Abraham seemed like he was expressing a need to appear like something that he couldn't be, that no one could be. To offer a tribute to LT is as understandable as it was for the Greeks to make alms to the gods of Olympus, but it's kind of obvious, too, isn't it? Don't all men want to be gods? All linebackers in some sense want to be like the man who redefined their position, so wearing his number is just being redundant. Of course you want to be LT, I wanted to say. Just be grateful you're not a criminal offender the way he is. Be yourself. You have a number. Be that number. You don't have to be anyone but yourself. So John Abraham became a Falcon and then gave up #56. I should have been more specific.

Linebacker Godwin Turk #56 does not have arms as long as John Abraham's, but I'm certain most people don't, not even Lawrence Taylor. Turk was drafted by the Jets in 1974, and I probably saw him play the following season when he started every game. He then went on to play mostly special teams for the Denver Broncos for three seasons (1976-78) and like John Abraham, he traded #56 for #55. He played for the AFC Champion Broncos of 1977, the Orange Crush. Turk is also apparently "infamous" for separating his shoulder after spiking the football in celebration of a fumble recovery. I don't know for whom he played at the time it happened. According to his database record, he suited for almost every game in each of his seasons of play, save for one or two. He recovered fumbles in 1975 and 1978, so did he do it at the end of one of those seasons? It would be horrible to think of him doing it at the end of his career. Maybe it happened in the 1974 preseason? The card below lists him as "injured" that year.

Your mystery Jet? Jerome Barkum or Winston Hill

As has been pointed out before, it's unfair to identify a player's career with a single foible in the field, and considering how popular it was to spike the ball in the 1970's, you could hardly blame him. It was a sign of the new, exuberant football of Billy "White Shoes" Johnson. It seems innocuous compared with hiding a cell phone in the padding of a goal post. Godwin Turk was celebrating what a defensive man always wants for himself - to be in on the play that will turn the game around. A Denver Post laundry list of worse "freak injuries" is here, and Turk's spike is on it. Some of these are acts of God, others are acts of ignorance, and others are just a matter of someone being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I can't attribute any of that to Godwin Turk. All he hurt was himself, and his sin was one of exuberance. The back of his card is all we really have to go on. It calls him a "lusty hitter," which also sounds exuberant, though I don't think anyone would call a player that today, probably because it sounds like something Don Meredith would have made fun of Howard Cosell for saying.

****

Craig Powell #56 played linebacker at Ohio State and then in a pro career that originally saw him as one of the players who moved with the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore. He returned from knee injury briefly to play in 1998 with the Jets, but he wrecked his knee again and was finished in the NFL. He returned in 2001 to play for the San Francisco Demons of the XFL. His write-up on the Demons' page says that at Ohio State, he was "touted as one of the fastest linebackers in college football, always arrived at the ball in a hurry and in a nasty frame of mind."

It seemed that one of the failures of the XFL was its insistence that what Americans wanted was not a better game, but a nastier game, a game played with a manufactured sense of violence. I suppose you could say that all of this began with the spike, which suggested that the game was also a spectacle of a player's attitude, his sense of himself. The spike was a threat to the game's traditionalists; as late as the 1980's Tom Landry didn't want his players to spike the football. The NFL is named the No Fun League for a reason, but part of its conservatism is legitimate - too much exuberance in a violent game can sometimes lead to uncontrollable violence. Consider the brawl in 1983 that started with Jackie Slater attacking Mark Gastineau for his sack dance and that eventually lead to the NFL banning the dance.

The XFL struggled because it wanted to cast real people in a narrative that had the nature of fiction but was also an actual game. Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo would never have made it in the XFL, probably because they were friends in real life as well as teammates in an unscripted drama. They were also real people played by Billy Dee Williams and James Caan in a motion picture film based on a real story, the polar opposite of the kind of drama Vince McMahon wanted. Brian's Song would have been deemed "pantywaist" entertainment by McMahon (one of his favorite words), probably because it transcended notions of what football was all about and attributed a sensitive nature to men.

Excessive celebration is also an element of professional wrestling, but you can feign the bluster of a professional wrestler because the professional wrestling is not real. Most importantly, wrestling's violence is controlled and scripted. I remember feeling true unease when the XFL was first planned because Vince McMahon seemed to want to compound the level of violence in a game with enough unscripted violence as it was. Perhaps because it was such uncharted territory for him, he failed. I just kept seeing the excesses of a growing fascistic state being stirred by the nearly mortal violence of its favorite sport. What I was really seeing in my mind was Rollerball, another good James Caan film that, like Brian's Song, was made into a terrible remake.

Anthony Schlegel #56 came from Ohio State a decade later and was drafted by the Jets in 2006. He is out of the NFL today and is apparently a strength coach for Ohio State. His web site is an advertisement of sorts for his services in building strength in the weight room. On the other hand, it is also laced with references to Biblical scripture, offering what seems to be his philosophy behind "strength building." It's also a window into a part of the United States that I don't really think I understand, offering a conflation of things like football, guns, God, and hunting that could only come out of Texas. My sausages for tonight's grilling came from the market. Schlegel started hog hunting when he was 16.

He says that today when he hunts he comes back with meat that he will then clean and offer to homeless shelters, an altruistic gesture that most hunters probably don't even think of. So there's that. But sometimes when I look at the Red States I see another country, one that is also the core inspiration for the game I love, so it's disorienting. I feel like I'm unable to communicate with that part of the world. A queasiness comes over me, I shake it off, I move on. The games must be played and watched. The German poet Friedrich von Schlegel (no relation to Anthony that anyone knows of) once said that it was "peculiar of mankind to transcend mankind," which I think is especially true in reference to football. Whatever Brian's Song might have suggested.

***

Chris Wing #56 came out of Boise State and suited up for two wholly non-statistical games at linebacker for the Jets in 2007 and that was that. Vernon Gholston came out of Ohio State, was drafted #1 in 2008, he briefly wore #56, suited up for three seasons with the Jets, producing virtually the same results. Who could have seen it coming? "The historian, says von Schlegel, "is a prophet looking backwards." So, no one.

NY Jets #56 - Part 3

2011-08-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine came into the copier room this morning with a radiant expression, which is not the manner of anyone entering the copier room of a public high school. At least one or two copiers are always out of order, and the line for the one still working is usually populated with teachers who've now been given some unsolicited time to consider their own blundering careers. As for my colleague, he's just recently been hired for a full-time college coaching job at a nearby university and will be leaving us in January.

He slapped me on the shoulder, as if my wife had just had a baby. "This is it, Roche," he said. "This is our year."

I knew what he was talking about. He's one of the few people in the Philadelphia-area school where I work who, like me, was born on Long Island. He's a Jets fan, and although he once insisted that The Great Gatsby was the dullest book he was ever forced to read in high school (he's in the Social Studies Department) at least he knows who Lance Mehl #56 is, and why he's important. He too can recall the moment that Lance Mehl made the Impossible seem briefly possible.

"I can't believe you'd say that," I said. "I'm impressed."

"It's true," he said, shaking his head at his own disbelief. "I feel it. I really do."

Like any good Jets fan, he's usually skeptical, almost to the point of gallows humor, for why would anyone call any Jets season "our year," a phrase that can mean only one thing? Normally Jets fans look at life much the way teachers on the copier line do - with low expectations, with a manner of being already defeated. I know I've been harping on it of late, but the average public educator in a down-and-out school feels a bit like a fan who knows that his team is not going to have a winning season. It's a "rebuilding year" among many to come, at least until public education becomes a less popular target in the age of recession. It doesn't mean that you're giving up the ghost; you're just waiting for things to get better. You're waiting and waiting.

But my colleague is no longer waiting. It doesn't mean that he's impatient. He just believes that it's here. He believes the time we have been waiting for all of our lives has finally come. He's entitled to believe in the Impossible, in a championship season, even if I think he's been affected by his own recent good fortune. For the rabid fan, the spectator's life is intertwined with his own personal hopes and ambitions. For some reason, the fate of people who don't even know or care about you means as much to you as a new job, a love affair or a bigger house. For some bizarre reason that makes sense.

*

I was 13 the first time I ever thought that the time I had been waiting for all of my life had come. It's not an age I would ever want to return to, personally. I was repellent to girls back then and not likely to attract them any time soon. School was filled with moments of personal mediocrity. The one thing that could make everything OK was the Jets winning the Super Bowl. And in January 1983, it became possible because of Lance Mehl. In the fourth quarter of the 1983 AFC Divisional Playoffs, as the Jets edged past the heavily favored Raiders at the LA Coliseum, Lance Mehl intercepted two passes and kept the Jets from blowing the game, as they had in the previous year's Wild Card Game.

The Jets and the Raiders were two teams that had followed different paths since the year I was born. For the Jets, the once visible path to greatness had been made invisible, and whatever good things fate had granted me by the time I was 13, it had also made me a Jets fan, and that was only thing I cared about.

Lance Mehl, making the Impossible possible.

The Jets led at halftime 10-0. They barely held onto a 17-14 fourth quarter lead, and I can still see Freeman McNeil fumble in Raiders territory with just under a minute left, and Jim Plunkett being given one last chance to come back and move the Raiders downfield. Plunkett hit Cliff Branch, then Todd Christensen, and my feelings of desperation crept in. I gripped my aching stomach. Don't blow the lead. Please. Please, not again.

I remember Lyle Alzado from that Divisional Game. He would suffer years later from a cancer that he claimed, before he died, was related to his steroid use. He reacted to being held by the Jets' Chris Ward by tearing off Ward's helmet and throwing it at him. These were Al Davis' Raiders of a different time, back when Davis didn't look like his own skeletal remains. The Raiders were relentless, opportunistic sociopaths, the kind of men who didn't so much join drug-dealing, chain-wielding gangs in prison as organize them. In order to feel comfortable about being anywhere near the game on TV, I fantasized that I was a traveler from a future age who already knew the end result and that the Jets had lost. I was visiting the residents of this sad, powerless time who had pinned their hopes on the Jets. Poor fools, I thought. It was best to accept only the existence of the possible, and nothing more. All else was impossible.

In truth, I was learning the manly art of repression. Just as I saw that crying was something that real men didn't do, so too was I learning how to resist even the slightest hint of emotion or the expectation of happiness. (My wife often comments on how even now I watch Jets games in a state of tense silence, perched on my chair, like an owl.) Nauseous, filled with quiet stress, I was becoming a man. Don’t kid yourself. The Raiders are going to win, I thought. Don’t get hopeful. Just accept whatever happens.

You can watch the fourth quarter of the 1983 Divisional Playoff here. Ex-Jet Burgess Owens intercepts at 9:20, and the Jets seem doomed, as they usually do. But at 16:44, with the game clock at 4:52, Todd throws through double coverage to Wesley Walker for a great catch down to the Raider 1. Scott Dierking scores to put the Jets ahead, 17-14. Dick Enberg mentions Walker's partial blindness, something that still makes him the ultimate Jet, and one of my favorite players in all of football.

I will watch this game on my computer from time to time, whenever a bad day forces me to seek out the kind of consolation that others might find in a kind word from a friend or in a glass of scotch. You can see that the Coliseum's air that day is colored the grayish yellow of Los Angeles' persistent smog, and the turf is a scrabbled green and brown from all the dry months of the autumn and winter. If it rained during the playoffs in the Coliseum, the ground would turn into an sodden pit of mud. When Mehl comes down with his first interception at 21:16, he lands on desert grass.

Then Burgess Owens dislodges a fumble from Freeman McNeil, but yet again, on what appears to be an identical play, Lance Mehl intercepts Plunkett on the ensuing drive. The game is done. The Jets will move on.

But it's only now that I notice that the images of the two interceptions are identical in the video. Whoever edited the footage actually looped Lance Mehl's first interception twice. Why hadn't I noticed it before? His two interceptions, coming over the middle, seemed identical in my memory anyway, so I suppose it's appropriate that the second catch is exactly the same as the first. It's as if to prove the point that what we see on film is actually a trick of the eye, as unreliable as our own memory. We replay these moments on film and in our memory because they mean so much to us, but aren't they also altered somewhat by the emotions that accompanied them then and that accompany them now? Why shouldn't they be simply one frame looped over another? What difference does it make?

The following week, the Jets would lose in the Mud Bowl, a misnomer for a game actually played in a vast, clear puddle in the Orange Bowl. Miami's AJ Duhe sealed the win with an interception, and my brief hopes splashed away. For years since, the possible has been mostly impossible, reappearing only of late, and teasing us all into believing once more in bigger things to come some other day.

****

At some point my wife became enamored of Arena Football. I confess I look at Arena Football as a sideshow act, suitable for viewing alongside the bearded woman and the Turtle Man. For her, it may have been the irresistible lure that Jon Bon Jovi has for all white women between the ages of 35-50; he was the primary owner of the local Philadelphia team that won the Arena Bowl in 2008 (I had to look that up). It's like watching lacrosse, played with an enthusiasm that seems manufactured. She picked up on the hyperbole of NBC's coverage of the Arena Football League a few years ago when a commentator intoned, "This is Arena Football, Bob. There's nowhere to hide."

Nowhere to hide. Arena Football has lived out its life, and though it has been reincarnated somewhat, it had nowhere to hide in the geography created by America's Game. The American Football League endured from 1960-69 because it offered a more colorful - though only slightly modified - version of the game that already existed, not a re-imagined alternative. Arena Football will endure for the same reason that the circus has; because men and women need things to do on a date; because divorced men need to do something with their children when they have them for the weekend.

Which brings us to Rick Hamilton #56. To end your career with the New York Jets in 1996 (1-15) was when you were ready for Arena Football. And yet, to read the Orlando Predators' tribute page for Rick Hamilton (the more desperate a league, the more violent its mascot) is to discover something you'd never find for a contemporary NFL player. In a league so overladen with an emphasis on measurable performance, where a player's worth is gauged in his fantasy statistics and not in the incalculable drive of his desire, the NFL has lost the mythologies that once made the game what it is in our memories. No wonder NFL Films is nowhere near as important as it once was - it can no longer help us in the fantasy draft. Its narratives were themselves fantasies full of hyperbole, the original language of sports.

Was Odysseus not as great as Homer would have us believe? Does it matter? Perhaps he was like Rick Hamilton - a player who survived his destinations and returned home. Who knows? If the past can be as unreliable as our memories of Lance Mehl's interceptions in 1983, then why can't Arena Football someday be compared with The Odyssey? When the fall of NFL comes along with the fall of our civilization (or which ever comes first) people will have forgotten the short-sighted ambitions of Fantasy Football and will want to bring back the language of the mythical, back to the story of Rick Hamilton's struggle for survival.

Meantime, we must come back to reality; sports is a crass and cold business. The smaller the league, the greater the language that's used to describe its players. The smaller the life, the greater the hyperbole. That's the secret of myth. But before we draw the veil away, look at Rick Hamilton's tribute link above, and you'll find something Jon Facenda would have said about Unitas. Would that we might inspire such descriptions for ourselves in the smallest of our endeavors, as teachers, business people, artists, servants, laborers, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters:

"From today on, any player who straps up in the red and black and plays FB/LB will be compared to Rick Hamilton, the best ever!"

NY Jets #56 - Part 2

2011-08-24T13:03:00.000-07:00

his 1978 card

I'm getting started with a new school year at work, and as we were sitting in our introductory meeting, the ground began to shake. Literally. We had a tremor that derived from a 5.8 earthquake centered in Northern Virginia. It's appropriate to our time. I feel like everything that we have taken for granted as a culture has to started to shift dramatically because of our economic ills. Especially in education. No teacher is safe anymore in a universe where a standardized test grade can determine your future. I feel like Larry Keller looks.

I'm probably reading into it, but linebacker Larry Keller #56 doesn't look too excited in this 1978 card. The best that I can tell, he's doing warmups before a Jets' exhibition game at the old Meadowlands, probably summer 1977. I think the Jets won 10-0, which will tell you what kind of game it was.

Living in Orange, Texas, a town close to the border of Louisiana and near the Gulf of Mexico, Keller is probably wondering about how luck put him in America's biggest city at its worst time. Crime is a scourge, there's been a mass killer on the loose, and the city recently had a blackout that brought out anarchic looting. The Jets and Giants elicited about as much excitement back then as a pair of Peewee teams on an autumn afternoon. Maybe less than that. It would be a long season for both teams, and another long one in New York for Larry Keller. He seems to know it.

his 1979 card

Or maybe he looks determined. Maybe he's looking squarely into the camera and thinking to himself, "I'm giving it what I got. I'm getting a paycheck. I know what I have to do. People will know that I've been here." Who knows? Larry Keller had been a veteran of three leagues by the beginning of 1977. He played well for the University of Houston in the early 70's, was drafted by the Chargers but spent his first pro year in 1974 in Canada with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Then he played with Csonka, Kiick and Warfield in the WFL's Memphis club in 1975. Then he went to the Jets in 1976, a tough place to start in the NFL. You'll see it all laid out on the back of his 1979 card, one which I also have in my collection. His last season in any league was 1978. The information on the back of the card tells us all we need to know: he played "specialty teams" and was "good against the run." Most of all, back home in Orange, he was a volunteer fireman, and for all we know, he may still be one. A Texas boy, he had traveled around quite a bit by the end of a decade when everything seemed to have been shifting under the feet of ordinary people. Leagues came and went. Fads arose and vanished. Kids smoked weed. Perhaps we're just like Larry Keller in odd times of our own, the ground shifting under us.

****

For some, you can find #56 Jeff Lageman's bronze likeness in a wing of our Hall of Infamy devoted to Jets draft busts (no pun intended). Listing him as a least disastrous draft bust can hardly be flattering, or even fair. He played well early in his career. The Jets were simply guilty for many years of a crime that all teams perpetrate at one time or another - they failed to pick up the real gem from the pile. As the Bleacher Report mentions in the above link, Carnell Lake, Daryl Johnston and Steve Atwater were all available when the Jets picked Lageman.

This is another what-if obsession of mine, and I would like to someday assemble the teams that might have been had the Jets made what might be deemed the "right" choices, beginning, obviously, with Dan Marino in 1983. Since I'm middle aged and in a reflective mood these days, I find myself doing the same for my own life, yet finding I probably am fine with everything I've already done, relatively speaking. But "relatively speaking" doesn't exist for a football fan; his team either makes the right decision or the wrong one. Such judgments are ultimately subjective, though. Who's the biggest bust? Vernon Gholsten? Lam Jones? Blair Thomas? Certainly not Jeff Lageman; that's clear. But who you think is the biggest will probably vary according to the era in which you rooted. Lee White was a bust in 1969. Carl Barzilauskas in 1974.

Considering that Lageman played fairly well in his seasons with us (1989-94), and suffered injuries, you can't really call him the "wrong" choice. Every team makes a "wrong" choice in the draft, but the volume of mistakes that one organization makes consecutively or over time can convince a fan that everyone the team picks is a bust. This has been historically true for the Jets and for other teams like the Bengals. Suddenly Lageman goes from a less appropriate choice to a "bust." Because we Jets fans are prone to sensational collapses, the odd draft choice here or there can be thrown into a bridge abutment of poured concrete ineptitude (that metaphor might be a bust). It's all part of the insurmountable network of failure that we wear like a hairshirt (that's better).

The issue ultimately is whether or not the team can change the pattern. You have to agree that their choices of late have been getting better (excepting Gholsten), so the pattern has changed, and it's what we've done with them that made the difference one way or another.

Lageman got to play later on for the Jacksonville club that went to the AFC Title Game, while his old teammates were losing by four or five touchdowns during the Kotite era ('95-'96). His Wikipedia page mentions that he and other players questioned the disciplinary approach of Tom Couglin. Today he is a Jacksonville area sports guy and an avid hunter and fishermen who will sometimes offer guest appearances to experts in turkey calls on his program, starting with Dave Holloran and the "Crystal Mistress."

Another wing in the Hall of Infamy goes to players lost during the Belichick era to the New England Patriots, and you will find the bronze likeness of Roman Phifer #56 there. When he went to the Jets in 1999, the Rams took Patriot Todd Collins to fill his space, but then the Patriots took Phifer when the Jets let him go. Was it a good idea? The only thing I can gauge it by are the 100-plus tackles he made in two of the four seasons he was there, and he earned three Super Bowl rings. At the end of his first year with the Pats, teammate and future Jet Terrell Buckley called Phifer the silent MVP of the team. The Pats' first Super Bowl win was something to admire, a victory of David over Goliath, and I had no sense of its being the beginning of a new Goliath, which in a way is what David became anyway. I remember that letting Phifer go bothered me, as has letting Shaun Ellis get away. You begin to see the patterns that bind one team to mediocrity and another to success. It was good for Roman Phifer to leave us, and his bronze bust in the Belichick Wing is well earned. Will Ellis have one too? We are already heating up the bronze.

But I didn't know until I began looking into his background that Phifer was a producer of Blood Equity, the HBO show that two years ago dealt directly with the issue of the inadequate pension for retired players. The target of the film isn't management but the Players Association and its inability to deal with long-term issues of retired player disability, both mental and physical. The show is poignant because a recent suit fronted by players like Jim McMahon alleges that the NFL has hidden the effects of player concussions for decades. The Players Association has yet to deal with what its present membership will have to face in the many years to come. At the end of the above clip, Bob Costas says that, "If a handful of active superstar players stepped up and said, 'Hey, we understand. We're concerned. We're behind this,' that'd help a lot too."

Of course, if you listened to Drew Brees, that doesn't seem very likely. Brees has always taken advantage of the opportunity to generalize wildly where he has zero expertise. And the matter of whether or not the recent agreement is any good for NFL's Legacy Club remains a mystery, certainly to someone as ill-equipped to understand it as I. The only thing I'd like to know right now is exactly how many older NFL retirees Drew Brees has actually met in his lifetime.

Training Camp 2011

2011-08-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

At his destination

Finding the Jets' training camp at Florham Park, NJ is a lot like trying to find the prize in a massive box of Cracker Jacks. It's there, you know it's there, it says it's there, you have no idea why it's taking so long to get there, and you start to think it's all a vast trick they're playing on you. In a way, that makes sense. No football team wants everybody to stop in and say hi during the summer, and since the Jets are still one of the franchises that doesn't charge tickets for admission, it's still worth it. If you want it bad enough, you'll figure it all out.

There are no signs anywhere in town letting you know this way or that is the right direction, but there are Jets flags everywhere to let you know that geographically you are in the right village. Finally, we clearly went in the back way, following the compass on my wife's iPhone, or maybe it was the front way, I don't know which, passing through an AT&T business park. Suddenly a cop directs you past the main entrance, and you head out to a vast parking lot that looks as old as the franchise itself, all covered with weeds and broken asphalt. You are then guided by silent, dehydrated parking attendants to the exact spot where they want you to park, and you walk the length of ten football fields to the shiny silver mother ship of the Jets' new summer facilities. It is the last public day of training camp 2011. You are home.

LT, Jim Leonhard - behind them a place
where you can register for your wedding.

This was my first time here, so I couldn't help but compare past and present. For the players, it's obviously better than Hofstra; for the fans, not so much. With fewer fields on which to play at Hofstra, all the players used to have to practice on the same field, which they still sort of do now, though the punters and placekickers had a larger space of their own for practice. There are fewer seats for fans to sit and watch things up close, but the ones available are much closer than in the past; if you got there early, you got a good spot. But by the time the first, second, and third strings were practicing against one another, I noticed that the players standing on the sidelines were actually blocking the fans' view. So where we ended up standing, at the end zone of the main practice field, leaning up against the artificial fencing like refugees, ended up being a pretty good place to stand and observe. Hofstra offered better seating, but the players must love the new building, which they no longer need to share with a college. Local suburban residents might even mistake it for a Crate and Barrel.

Of course, Shonn Greene was not playing due to a skin infection, so Joe McKnight played a great deal, as did Chris Jennings who was sharing #32 with another guy. From our vantage, Sanchez looked sharp enough, but threw a few worrisome errant passes. Plaxico Burress caught a few nice passes; one that elicited the biggest cheers from the crowd was a long one from Sanchez, and I found myself going right along with the crowd. Many people mumbled around me about how happy they were to see Jim Leonhard play, and he was pushing Dustin Keller and Tomlinson around, letting them know he was there. Mark Brunell still seemed to hobble a little (as did Plaxico) so Greg McEvoy (wearing fellow Alabaman Richard Todd's old #14) took a lot of snaps. From our end it was easier to see how the offense did.

My wife took the photos, and she caught some good candids:

Plaxico Burress, lining up

Derrick Mason, Mark Sanchez

Plaxico, in thought

Mark Brunell, still injured

Nick Mangold and Rex Ryan

We play the Bengals tonight in exhibition without Brunell and Mason, and there still plenty of injuries to be concerned about on the defense, especially to Bart Scott. It is hard to remember who was and was not playing on defense that afternoon, and since I'm more of a historian than a reporter, I admit that I wasn't looking hard enough. The crowd was a little more interesting in a way. A woman from North Jersey was excited to be there with her husband and son, and they let us have a closer view after standing at the fence for a while. She was a math teacher, about as eager to go back to work next week as I am, which is not very much. It was hot out, very humid, and a young woman behind me collapsed, and we all went scurrying to find water and shade for her.

Another guy with his two little kids was there, and we chatted about our worries for the season. His little son kept bugging him about getting water, and the Dad kept telling him that he couldn't pull it up out of the ground. I was with the Dad on this one. "You said you wanted to see Revis," he told his son. "He's right there," he said to the boy, pointing at the field. When my wife and I started for home, she laughed and said, "Leave it to a Dad to not think to bring bottles of water to the practice field," and I laughed because I wouldn't have thought of that either.

We had Tom Moore's view of the offense the entire time

After about and hour and a half, we got our fill. We stopped by the Jets Shop, and I bought nothing, which is on the same par as a struggling diabetic abstaining in a candy store. The inflatable bouncing things were there for kids; a bunch of high school girls were enduring the tropical sun while guiding little ones through its obstacle courses. I'm glad I'm not young anymore.

It's his real spot.

And we found Woody Johnson's parking spot inside the facility area. There's no way you can park there. My wife and I had the following exchange:

"Is that supposed to be a joke?"

"No, that's his real name," I said.

"I know that's his real name. Are they just kidding about that being his spot?"

"Oh," I said. "I don't know. I don't think so."

We bought a $4 bottle of water and left. This time we were able to take what seemed like the front way; to tell you the truth, it was only more obvious because a electric construction sign was temporarily placed at the entrance flashing, "JETS FANS ---->" on and off.

It was a good visit. I felt like it made me that much ready to gird my loins for another tough season with its high and low expectations. It was especially good to be around nothing but Jets fans in a place specifically designed for our team - not somewhere we share with someone else, or a place with another entity's name on it. In this sense, Woody Johnson deserves his own parking spot. I will park miles away for that.

NY Jets #56 - Part 1

2011-08-21T08:01:00.000-07:00

Roger Ellis: linebacker,
Secret Service Agent

This is what a linebacker looked like in 1960.

Well, Ray Nitschke didn't look like this, though one could argue that Larry Grantham did. We are talking about the New York Titans, and we are talking about Roger Ellis #56, the overachiever who always impressed coaches and kept his place in a uniform in the AFL. After him, there was Ted Bates #56, who had played at linebacker for the Chicago Cardinals and then for the Jets in 1963. This was a time when players were smaller, and football Cardinals played in Comiskey Park, but that time was changing rapidly right before everyone's eyes. It was a strange epoch by any measurement. It was the early 60's. There were Soviet satellites orbiting the Earth. There were Catholics in the White House. Things were shifting. Suddenly there were two different Cardinals in the St. Louis. Suddenly a man could run a football team out of a hotel room. Anything was possible. Ted Bates and Roger Ellis were just passengers in time.

After showing up to the Jets training camp in 1963 for one last tryout, Roger Ellis managed to gain a spot as an "understudy" to Sherman Plunkett who, by God, was what football players were going to look like more and more in the wide open future of what would become a national game better suited to an increasingly corpulent people. Perhaps it was not that players weren't large enough; it was that our appetites had grown to Sherman Plunkett's supersize. Still, you can't help but look at Roger Ellis and see someone who has an honest appraisal of his chances and yet believes in himself all the same - a combination that any sane person would envy if he felt it lacking.

After leaving the Jets that year, Roger Ellis pops up again later on in the annals of time as a Secret Service Agent following the detail of then-Vice President Spiro Agnew, which I have to tell you, makes me jealous. I don't know why. Traveling with Agnew (codename: Pathfinder) must have been a hoot for anyone having to transcribe the English language, as rendered by Messrs. Safire and Buchanan. Here's a great deal more from William Ryczek's fine book Crash of the Titans. In his credits, Ryczek says Ellis was of enormous help to him but also a little defensive when first approached with questions about Titans history. He didn't just want to be made fun of the way he felt that former Titans always were. No one wants to be made fun of, and Ryczek does them all a service. Sadly, Ellis passed away in 2008. Bates is probably still alive and somewhere in Texas. As always, folks, remember your Titans.

****

Sam Cowart #56 joined the Jets in 2002 after playing with Buffalo for five seasons and then played regularly at linebacker for us until he became injured in 2004. He played the equivalent of half that season. His injury was Jonathan Vilma's opportunity, and Vilma then became the starter. Cowart asked for a trade, and what happened next is triangulated confusion to me. Randy Moss went from the Vikings to Oakland for the Raiders' seventh pick in the first round and the Raiders' overall seventh round pick. Cowart went to Minnesota, and in n exchange for him, the Jets wanted that seventh round pick from Oakland via Minnesota. This seems like a plan thematically assembled from Norse mythology, with language from the Old Testament. I saw Odin bring unto the Viking nation the seventh from the first and the first from the seventh, yet the Raiding men clothed in darkness were handed only the gift of moss in exchange, and in time they came to curse themselves for it, with a wailing and gnashing of teeth, for the moss yielded nothing unto them.

Phantom reader, do you know who that seventh round Raiders pick was?

****

Paul Crane, C/LB

The man who passed the ball between his legs to Joe Namath and Steve Sloan at the University of Alabama in the mid-1960's was Paul Crane #56, an All-American center whom the Jets converted into a linebacker from 1966-72, earning him a Super Bowl ring. He netted three interceptions in 1969. In 1994, he was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, an entity whose existence appears to rely on a careful balance between the Alabama Crimson Tide and Auburn. For every Tide player inducted, there is a Tiger inducted. In 1978, Alabama's Joe Namath was inducted the same year as Auburn's Heisman Trophy winner Pat Sullivan. But nothing will ever really keep the peace in the Middle East or the Deep South when both regions are peopled by fanatics. The recent poisoning of Toomer's trees in Auburn is an indication of how perverse this rivalry is.

The alleged tree assailant Harvey Updyke, Jr. is described as having mental health issues, manifesting themselves here in his attachment to a school he did not attend. But how many of us really are this close to the boundary between earnest fanaticism and full-blown mental illness masking itself as fandom? In such cases, it isn't the face-painter that people should worry about but the middle-aged man who sits alone in his room and thinks more about the football games he's watched than all the things in the world he could be doing with his life, aside from thinking about football. I got into a shouting match last night with some young suburban guy and his date over a parking spot in the city; is it really "just a coincidence" that I'm also worried about the Jets' offensive line? I mean, my God. It was just a parking spot.

I've done plenty of dumb things in my time, including stealing a large sign from a Shell station in Rhode Island, but I don't think I would kill anyone's trees. I suppose the dumbest thing I do as a fan is that I hold it against my old Massachusetts friends from college that the Patriots have been so successful. It isn't their fault that a team that was in fourth place in the hearts of most New Englanders not so long ago is now one of the most successful franchises in professional sports.

But I do hold it against them, and they hold it against me that the Jets are even in the same division as the Patriots. Now we exist on disparate shores of an abyss, filled with resentment. We've tried to exchange occasional pleasantries while secretly plotting each other's demise. For a brief period of time, Facebook gave us an opportunity to chat about the good old days of stealing signs from gas stations, and we laughed about how none of us are in the physical shape we apparently believed we were in at college. But the football season renders everything silent, and like two groups forced to exist on either side of a concrete wall, we find it more convenient to refrain from speaking to one another. Since the Jets' defeat of the Patriots in the playoffs last year, I have heard nothing from New England, nor do I expect to any time soon.

Paul Crane still lives in Mobile, Alabama. He was also an assistant coach for the Crimson Tide and for the University of Tennessee for a time. Alabama (the school) gives out awards in the springtime for "A-Day," which are for players who performed best in spring practices. According to the Alabama HOF site above, the "I Like to Practice Award" given on A-Day was initially named for Paul Crane. It's an award that sounds like a nice parting gift for a game show contestant. Having recently visited the Jets training camp at Florham Park, I can tell you that the man who likes to practice most is the man who is desperately trying to find a place on the roster. But according to the A-Day story above, the award named for Paul Crane is now now the "Offensive Lineman Award," which this year was given to William Vlachos.

The "I Like to Practice Award" is currently named for Jerry Duncan, a small tackle sometimes used by Bear Bryant as a receiver in the 60's. According to an equipment manager at the time, Duncan liked to practice so much that he once wept when he was too injured to do so. I don't know if Paul Crane could possibly have competed with that, or that he'd have wanted to.

NY Titans #55 - Part 5

2011-08-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

Robert "Bob" Marques #55 joined the newly created New York Titans and apparently played linebacker. There isn't much to go on in terms of the stories of his career. He is mentioned, however, in The Coffin Corner, an ongoing history of professional football. This issue from 1999 includes "Fantastic Finishes: Three Weeks with the New York Titans." Here Bob Marques shows up in a mention of the Boston Patriots game against the Titans of New York at the Polo Grounds, 1960. Early in the game, the Titans lead, 17-7. William Ryczek writes:

Titan middle linebacker Bob Marques was enjoying himself tremendously at this point. A graduate of Boston University, Marques was well-acquainted with Boston assistant coach Mike Holovak, the former Boston College star and coach, and Alan Miller, the Patriot fullback who had also played at BC. Marques shouted a number of uncharitable remarks across the field to Holovak as the Titans built their sizable lead and was quite vocal about the poor performance of the Patriots. During one Boston drive, on fourth down and one, Marques blitzed and tackled Miller in the backfield. He laid on top of him after the whistle, holding Miller down and forcing the cursing fullback to wrestle himself free.

Marques had gone to Boston College while Holovak had coached at BU. Why not razz him? We can imagine history repeating itself, can't we? Shaun Ellis getting a hold of Shonn Greene and having a few words for Rex Ryan? I remember going to the old Spectrum in Philadelphia during an ill-fated bachelor party many years ago when the Celtics were in town. Eric Williams was playing for the Celtics at the time and was going up and down the court against the hapless Sixers. We had courtside seats, and when one of the guys in the party found out that Williams went to my alma mater, he insisted that I come up with something with which could heckle him. I told him which dorm Williams lived in at my school, so he started yelling, "Hey Williams, go back to Stephens' Hall!" It worked, sort of. Williams stopped in the middle of a fast break and bent over, laughing. The Sixers still lost.

If we had only known how Eric Williams would someday aspire to a career as a porn film director and recruit his wife's friends for nude scenes - and would throw a drink in his wife's face on Basketball Wives - well, just imagine what we could have said to him at courtside. By the way, Bob Marques' heckling went for naught. The Patriots ended up beating the Titans 28-24 at the Polo Grounds in 1960. It was the first meeting between the two franchises.

Pasquale Lamberti #55 played for the Titans in 1961, but he was known as "Pat." Though no real bits of information seem available, Lamberti has the following write up on yet another site where they also care about who played in what number and where - "Denver Broncos Greats By the Numbers" at Mile High Report. According to them, Pat...

Was drafted 146th overall in the 1959 draft by the Chicago Cardinals. Pat never played for them, instead choosing to wait two years so he could jump into the fledgling AFL in 1961, where he played twelve games for two teams without starting a game. In his seven games with Denver he intercepted one pass and ran five yards with it.

His seven games with the Broncos were preceded by five games with the Titans. After that, Pat Lamberti is nowhere to be found. He clearly played alongside Larry Grantham at linebacker. He was from Woodbridge, NJ, and he played football for the Richmond Spiders in college. And he died on December 19, 2007.

With or without football, I'm usually in an autumn Sunday malaise that doesn't start wearing off until later in the week, roughly Thursday night. But last autumn I was at least guaranteed a TV lineup that distracted my Sunday ennui even before it had a chance to settle in. The 1:00 pm game was very likely the Jets game, or at least an Eagles game in Philadelphia, which was typically operatic. (No team has bigger expectations this year than the Eagles, so no team will disappoint in quite the Wagnerian way that the Eagles will in 2011, and you will be able to thank Andy Reid for it.) Then comes the hysterical buildup to Hockey Night in Canada on NBC, with a very, very awkward pregame program, followed by the Sunday night game itself.

Then, I would switch over to AMC later in the evening, and there was the brilliant but canceled Rubicon, which I agree was convoluted, but then so are most good things. And then I would be able to end the night with Mad Men, which has become so popular now that its mere reference in a blog is as obnoxious as mentioning Stephens Hall to Eric Williams. But I did back then, so I will now right now. So far, Mad Men has covered the years 1960-65. My mother worked in Manhattan at the time the show takes place, and like Peggy Olsen, she was an impressionable, smart, well-meaning, astute, conscientious, hard-working Irish-Catholic young woman surrounded by barely functioning alcoholic executives who believed most of the time that they were geniuses. Granted, Peggy's no angel, but my mother worked as a secretary for the same firm for 13 years, and she knew how to handle people.

But if you're really interested in the history of the advertising agencies of the 60's, apart from the Lucky Strikes and the Rob Roys, then consider the New York Titans center and linebacker Alex Kroll #55.

Alex Kroll's 1963 card (he did not
play for the Jets)

According to Jimmy Wales' free site, Kroll was accepted to Yale in 1955 but was thrown out in his first year. "He played on Yale’s varsity football team," it says "but a physical argument with a young associate professor got Kroll expelled during his sophomore year."

He punched a young professor? Now I was intrigued by Alex Kroll. He then went into the Military Police. My Uncle Mike was an MP in the early 50's, and I have never quite understood how he made it in there considering that the average height for an MP was roughly Kroll's, at six foot-plus; in order to put soldiers in the clink you needed a height and weight advantage. My Uncle Mike is only about 5'7", and he believes he was made one because Michael Patrick Colahan signed his name "M.P. Colahan," which I'm not going to argue over one way or the other. After the army stint, Alex Kroll went to Rutgers and became an All-American at center.

He played in 1962 for the New York Titans, and rather than work at Sears in the off-season, he became a trainee at Young and Rubicam, the famed advertising agency in New York. The company was responsible for developing a variety of campaigns that helped shift the industry into a contemporary aesthetic. Today, their clients are Land Rover, Gap, VH1, the Red Cross. In the 60's, they were the first to do TV advertisements in color.

A BBC program from 1967 shows Young and Rubicam creative director Steve Frankfurt as the focus of a documentary about the typical United States ad man, about how he balances work, creativity, change, family and so on. It's a vanity project, very much like the one the good people at Sterling (Cooper?) Draper Pryce try to get Don Draper to do, though he refuses at first because he's not actually Don Draper. He's Dick Whitman. While Steve Frankfurt would be out of Y&R by 1970, he would also create posters for some of the most memorable films of the next decades. His poster for Rosemary's Baby proclaimed, "Pray for Rosemary's Baby" when really people should have prayed for Rosemary, but then that was the point. And yes, Frankfurt later came up with "In Space, No Can One Hear You Scream," which haunts people who market movies to this day.

But when Frankfurt was let go of Young and Rubicam he was replaced as creative director by Alex Kroll, former Titan, former trainee turned advertising superstar, and apparently Kroll lead the company in new and profitable directions, eventually becoming CEO in 1985 and then stepping down in 1994. Here's his somewhat cloudy Horatio Alger tribute, complete with a cheesy medal around his neck. To his credit, he apparently tried to lead an exploratory committee to help Bill Bradley run for President in 2000.

If you are as intrigued as I am by the tough rooms filled with smoke and spirits that execs encountered at ad agencies in the 1960's, take a look at the last part of the BBC segment on Steve Frankfurt below and you'll see Frankfurt leading a discussion in Creative about the agency's plan to get Spalding to sell golf clubs to women. As one of the two women in the room point out (there's only one at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, mind you) most middle class women had the luxury of playing golf all day, whereas men could only play on weekends (in 1967, at least). Women needed golf clubs, too.

But the most vocal proponent in the tough room for the idea is Alex Kroll, the then up and coming man at Y&R. Compare the football card above with the assertive man with glasses who is sitting down in the video below, and tell me if they don't match.

"Women," he says in the video, "comprise 20% of the market, and the market's growing as fast as you want it to." Then the camera focuses on Kroll, so much so that you wonder if it's been staged. "Nobody's ever done any advertising to this particular segment of market; as a matter of fact, it's the fastest growing part of the whole market. And there's like seven million golfers. A million two hundred thousand of them...," he hesitates for a moment, almost catching himself, and reverts back to locker room talk, "...are broads."

Still, he insists a few minutes later, again to both Frankfurt and the camera: "There are a million two hundred thousand women in this market," he says, "and nobody's paying any attention to them."

I certainly know even less about advertising than I do about the New York Titans, but I do know that the great success of advertising in the United States after 1967 grew out of a recognition that women were consumers of something more than just household goods during the week. To draw broad conclusions based on one or two moments in a carefully staged film would be silly, but Alex Kroll would eventually become a CEO at a time when more and more women would be in higher places on the corporate ladder, which meant that more women would definitely be playing golf.

NY Jets #55 - Part 4

2011-08-14T08:36:00.000-07:00

What is the measure of a good linebacker? Is it sacks? Is it tackles? If it's the former, then Marvin Jones #55 had nine, which is as many as Ray Lewis got in his first three seasons. If it's the latter, then consider that Jones played his entire career with the Jets - 11 seasons total - and finished with 1200 tackles. Lewis, in 15 seasons, has 1452. I understand that this is a slightly unfair comparison, but it also illustrates Jones' strong contribution to our team. On squads consistently inferior to those for whom Ray Lewis has played, Marvin Jones made a significant mark at his position.

I say this because Jones had to deal with the tag of his being a high draft choice when the Jets desperately needed an improvement in their defense. In their transition from Bruce Coslet to Pete Carroll, the Jets were poised to begin a new defensive era, one that was trying more and more to effectively stop the run. Picked from Florida State in the first round, Jones was highly touted, and rightly so. (He wore #54 until 1997, after Bobby Houston left) It did not work that way. He had the burden of people whispering Lawrence Taylor's name when he first walked into the room. He had the burden of replacing the popular leader Kyle Clifton in the longstanding tandem with Mo Lewis and Bobby Houston. He also had the burden of early injuries that make fans particularly impatient with first rounders. His hip injury, so early in his career in 1994, made him vulnerable to being called a waste of money, a lazy player, a player who cannot handle pain, and I recently encountered a Jets fan who still felt that way, and that fan was wrong.

Aside from his respectable statistics, Jones had a good career in terms of duration, and the fact that he managed the stats he did in the midst of the most absurd 11 years that a pro team can imagine makes it all the more impressive. What effect do years of consistent, almost insurmountable losing have on the mind of someone who was, at least in premise, as talented as Jones? He certainly found more comfort in his friendship with Mo Lewis #57 than he did in the hopes and aspirations of the many head coaches he played for - Coslet, Carroll, Kotite, Parcells, Groh, and Edwards. This article from the Times late in his career illustrates exactly what happened: both he and Mo Lewis, the defensive leaders, had been so conditioned to the yearly false promises that they had both lost their own veteran leaders' voices - the hectoring, driving, motivating voices so available to team leaders (and manslaughter accomplices) like Ray Lewis, to whom both men are unfairly compared in the article.

Imagine playing under six coaches in your career, each time having to shift gears, listening to the same opening speeches from training camp to training camp. The money helps add salve to the wounds, but aside from the amount they made in their time, Jones and Mo Lewis (for they go together in my mind) played late afternoons on cold days at the dawning of winter some time in 1995 or '96, in a cavernously empty Meadowlands stadium named for another team, at a time when the Jets were the laughingstock of professional sports. The two might as well have been sea-faring characters from a Joseph Conrad novel, sitting on the bow of a docked merchant ship, recounting tales of battling their enemies with nothing more than their own existential grief.

Interlude:

Actually, how did any of us who love our team survive those miserable years, when the Jets went from laughable doormat to playing in the 1999 AFC Championship Game to being the team for whom Bill Belichick wouldn't work to ending up as Al Groh's sloppy seconds? How did we get through it, other than with _____________ ? (alcohol/grass/religion/junk food/xanax) At least Marvin Jones had his money. What did I have? Old Smuggler. Back then, "if things don't work out this year" meant another losing season. Now it means something different. And I forget this sometimes. If we end up there again, and stakes is high, then I need to file those experiences away for future use.

And, back:

Finally, I always loved Marvin Jones for maybe the single most evocative nickname I have found in all of sports - "Shade Tree." Ed Jones was "Too Tall." Nate Newton was "The Kitchen" to William Perry's "Refrigerator." But "Shade Tree" is Southern Gothic. It's almost Native American, or maybe like a wise character in a Toni Morrison novel. It's great. And because I like it, I added it to Wikipedia's page for Sportspeople By Nickname. I hope it turns up soon, and I hope Marvin doesn't mind.

****

Brad Kassell #55 arrived with the Jets in 2006 after a good career in special teams with the Tennessee Titans. At North Texas University, Denton, TX, home of Midlake, he was a star running back. He was a special teams leader with the Jets in 2007. A year later JetsBlog documented the manner in which Kassell's re-signing was meant to be a patching up at linebacker after Jonathan Vilma left the Jets for the Saints. In reality, the team probably had no long term interest in Kassell, and that's no way to run an organization. No offense to Brad Kassell. If you look at the comments, several people point out how Eric Mangini's hard lines in negotiations, and his reluctance to deal with players, were harmful to the team. This is something that Ryan and Tannenbaum have clearly learned to manage differently, and at the very least, I'm glad that Rex Ryan is not, if you'll excuse me, a dick in this particular way. As a result, his players want to play for him, even taking pay cuts to do so. See what happens when you let the green flow? And this is why Eric Mangini is today employed by ESPN, and not by a professional football team in any capacity whatsoever.

Jamaal Westerman

And yet, I worry that Ryan's high opinion of Jamaal Westerman #55 is a false optimism inspired by the loss of Shaun Ellis to the Patriots. Like a Dad who is trying to convince the kids that a round of miniature golf makes the vacation just as good as it would have been had Wally World been open, Ryan says, without provocation, that Westerman has exceeded his expectations. He said the same of Vernon Gholsten. Westerman is an interesting guy, having played in Ontario and then at Rutgers, where he excelled. Is he the kind of player who can fill the gap left behind by Ellis, who is now with New England? The real question we all should ask is whether or not Ellis is merely just a psychological ploy to get at Ryan and his impressionable crew. Maybe Shaun Ellis is just another toy Jet that Belichick has added to his collection, just as Charles Foster Kane bought all the Chronicle's men. Isn't it possible that all of this will lead someday down the road to Bill Belichick aimlessly pacing the corridors of his Kubla Khan, counting the days until his death, foundering from room to room, confronted by limitless reflections of himself, all while his trophy wife is chewing gum and assembling a vast puzzle in his mansion's great hall? One can only hope. That or Jamaal Westerman is every bit as good or Ellis, or better as Ryan hopefully suggests. I would take that too.

NY Jets #55 - Part 3

2011-08-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

Lately the weather on the east coast has been boiling hot. It's rarely below 90 this summer, and when it is, you know it's not really a reprieve. Neighbors say, "Better than yesterday, right?" And I nod. I don't say anything. I just agree. But it's still too hot. Most days are overcast, and the heat just seems to hold itself still under the dull clouds. I should have gotten used to this kind of thing in between years at college when I spent my summer breaks in Memphis, Tennessee. Dad moved us there just after I graduated from high school, and I would return to Memphis each May. I worked in an auto parts warehouse where we'd unload trucks, going from near 100 degrees in the vast building to something approximating the surface of Venus inside the trailer. You endured, staying perfectly still, like a lizard camouflaged on a desert rock.

Memphis is a sleepwalking town. There is a Civil Rights Museum on the site where Dr. King was killed, but when I first lived in Memphis, the Lorraine was still a seedy motel, the sort of place where a hooker brought her john. Things change slowly there. When there was talk about the city getting an NFL team, the locals responded in a typically Southern way, with the kind of smile that politely masks a deep reluctance. You get the same thing when you sit down at a Southern restaurant and are met by a waiter who wants to be your friend yet never remembers your order. The South loves college football, which is played for honor. The North loves the professional game, whose fans believe they have made a contributory investment in the club. That they are both wrong may help to explain who we are as a nation.

Every time the NFL played an exhibition game in Memphis, just enough people would show up to make the league curious. The Phoenix Cardinals played Doug Flutie's Patriots at the Liberty Bowl in 1990, and I went with my brother and his friends, who were only interested so that I could buy them beer. Still, local impresarios like Pepper Rodgers and corporate giants like Fred Smith tried to make pro football happen in Memphs. But it never happened. When Jacksonville got the Jaguars, it seemed a folly to keep trying.

But then Rodgers and Smith turned to the CFL, which tried expanding into American markets that couldn't get an NFL team. Smith pledged to be owner of the CFL's Memphis Mad Dogs, and Rodgers assumed the Presidency. The cynical venture collapsed after just a year, and the whole story is starkly painted here; Rodgers wanted to turn the CFL into a rival of the NFL, while Smith invested nothing more than his initial $100,000. The team's uniforms were a bizarre forest green not unlike the Jets of the late 70's, but with the number placed in the right hand corner of the jersey front.

Not the Most Valuable
Canadian

Alex Gordon #55, who played linebacker for the Jets from 1987-89, with a longer career elsewhere in the NFL until the mid-90's, was picked up by the Mad Dogs in 1995. When you look at his stats, you get some idea as to the difference in quality between the two leagues. According to his information on Jimmy Wales' dying website, Gordon led the Mad Dogs with 61 tackles, and he registered seven sacks, which was almost his career total in the NFL. After the team fell apart, he was picked up in the "dispersal draft" (as if he were some kind of molecule) by the Toronto Argonauts who, as luck would have it, won the 1996 Grey Cup. Alex Gordon's career ended on that high note. By the way, the Most Valuable Player for that Cup was Toronto's Doug Flutie. It says something about the expectations of our brothers and sisters to the north that there is also a Most Valuable Canadian award in the Grey Cup. It reminds me of an old friend of mine from Montreal who, for example, will hear William Shatner's name in conversation and suddenly blurt, "And you know what? Canadian!"

****

Bobby Houston, LB

Bobby Houston #55 played his best years at left linebacker with the Jets, from 1991-96, the formative years of my twenties, the time when a young man is supposed to be on the path to discovering the grown man he will someday become. His thirties are the time when he accepts the man he has already become. I don't know where I heard that, and it sounds like nonsense, but there you are. Perhaps his forties are a time to reflect on what he could have been. As a teacher, I'm sure that my students' standardized test scores will soon be used to see what kind of professional I am. I may have one or two Pro Bowl years, or I may end up looking like Bobby Houston did: no Pro Bowls, no All-Pro years, but a career filled with solid, dependable play.

For his best years he shared linebacking position with Mo Lewis and Kyle Clifton on Jets teams that consistently ranked at or below average on defense. For better or worse, Houston, Clifton and Lewis must truly know one another. He retired with the 1998 Minnesota Vikings, the greatest team that never was. At the very end of his career, he could at least say he was this close. Had fate been kinder to all of us that season, he might also have met the Jets in the Super Bowl, but then I'm being too much like a man in his forties again, thinking about what could have been.

The Spring 2009 article from Lifestyle Magazine profiles a retired Bobby Houston. One thing he mentions is being robbed as a boy selling peanuts in RFK Stadium at Redskin games. "A man crept up behind the little league star," it says, "and said 'don’t turn around' and proceeded to rob him. From that moment forward, Houston’s childhood was primarily spent enrolled in self defense classes." Personally, I would have stopped selling peanuts at RFK. He says that if he had known the odds he would eventually face in his football career, he probably would never have tried as hard as he did. How's that for what could have been? But then none of us can go back and change anything, and we made the decisions that we made back then because we were the people we were back then and not the ones we are today.

But with all the regret we see in the lives of players who retire, Houston makes middle age seem approachable and decent. It might be that he is just being profiled in a magazine and putting on a face, following the athlete's stoic credo to remain instinctively positive whenever someone from the press asks him a question. Maybe I've been feeling rather old and lost lately myself, and I need to hear someone talk about simplicity and humility, traits that Bobby Houston says he willingly embraces: “There are a lot of empty millionaires out there,” he says.

One burdensome realization for the former athlete is knowing he will never be as rich as he was in the years when he was just discovering the grown man he would someday become. It's the inverse of what we are taught to believe is the American Dream. I'm just optimistic enough to believe that Bobby Houston really believes he was never an "empty millionaire" at heart. I want to believe he always knew who he was. I'm not sure any of that will be of comfort to someone like Randy Moss - the bright young rookie teammate of Bobby Houston's on that '98 Vikings team - but by now, at 35, Moss probably knows who he is and is probably content with it. I suppose he has no other choice.

****

If I had been forced as a boy to pick any team other than the Jets to root for, I might have picked the Kansas City Chiefs. There is absolutely no basis in geography or logic to support this, but I think about what my father told me about Vince Lombardi. My father loved the Jets, but he also felt loyal to the entire AFL enterprise. To make my childhood enthusiasm for football that much more amusing to him, he insisted to me that Lombardi was a "bad man" because he had said at the end of the Super Bowl I that the AFL was inferior to the NFL. With a Catholic boy's paradoxical mix of infallibility and inferiority, I reacted to what my father told me by being loyal to every original AFL team (except Oakland), but most especially to Kansas City because they were the league's first Super Bowl club and because, without question, they had the coolest helmet decal in the NFL and the coolest uniforms: bright red with yellow, a fire engine red you'd also find on the Flash or on Daredevil, the Man Without Fear.

Charles Jackson #55 played his last two seasons at linebacker for the Jets. Before then, he played for the Kansas City Chiefs from 1978-84. Out in the other universes, where they also care about who played in what number on what franchise, Arrowhead Pride asks who the greatest Kansas City Chiefs are, in this case for #51, which was Jackson's number when he played linebacker for them. Being a Chiefs fan was not always easy. Discounting any residual happiness around Super Bowl IV, I imagine that the 1971 Christmas Day double-overtime playoff loss to the Dolphins was a game from which no Chiefs fan could possibly have recovered. Consider how the team declined throughout the 70's and 80's, having to play in a division with some of the AFC's best teams: the Raiders (three Super Bowl wins), the Broncos (four Super Bowl appearances from 1977-89), and the Chargers of Air Coryell. During the years that Charles Jackson played for Chiefs in #51, the team played above .500 just once, in 1981.

About him, Pride adds:

Charles "Melvin" Jackson played seven of his nine NFL seasons in KC. He started 42 of 86 games; had five sacks; and get this - ten fumble recoveries for the Chiefs.

Why is Melvin in quotes? It's his middle name, but did his teammates actually call him "Melvin?" Why? Anyway, I like the format of Chris Thorman's countdown for the Chiefs because he asks who's best in each number, something which I have neither the inclination nor the readership to answer for the Jets. For #51 on the Chiefs, the winner is Jim Lynch, who wore it right before Jackson did, from 1967-77. Jackson places a distant fourth.

As for his being a Jet, at least he enjoyed two winning seasons with us at the end of the career (1985-86). Consider the supernatural possibility that he might have been a good luck charm because the Jets didn't get above .500 for 11 years after he retired. This seems unlikely all the same, for the infamous double overtime Divisional Playoff loss to Cleveland, a game from which this Jets fan has never recovered, was technically the last game of his career.

NY Jets #55 - Part 2

2011-08-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

Mark Brown #55 played linebacker for the New York Jets from 2003-05. Then his career statistics end. Those three seasons, Herman Edwards' last as coach, were difficult for Jets fans because it seemed as if we were always one or two injuries away from ruin, and sometimes ruin was inevitable anyway. Then in 2005, the fragile apparatus finally gave way, and no amount of duct tape could keep it standing any longer. Consecutive losing seasons are difficult, but a 4-12 season after being a game away from the Super Bowl the year before was just too rough on the system. By the Bye, we were done. Brooks Bollinger started nine games at quarterback. Vinny Testaverde, who was 42 in 2005, started four. These were desperate times.

The 2005 season ended at the Meadowlands between the Jets (3-12) and Buffalo Bills (5-10). It was the kind of game that comes up at the end of every season between two clubs whose chances at the playoffs ended at least a month before. They're not the worst of the worst teams that'll have everything to gain in the draft (though the Jets drafted well months later); they're just two teams that'll end with a whimper, hoping to salvage what is often referred to in the locker room as "pride." It's really just an opportunity to clean out your locker. It's an existential crisis - what is the purpose of this? one is compelled to ask. Is anyone really watching? Does anyone care enough to pay attention if I do well? Should I even try? Why?

Mark Brown ending on
a high note.

On New Year's Day, a smattering of cold, loyal, hungover, disenchanted, or maybe just bored faithful came to the game. They came because they had tickets, because they didn't want to mingle at home with relatives over pork chops and apple sauce, because their friends would be there, or unfortunately because they wanted to enjoy the last of the season's as yet unpublicized horrors at Gate D. Watching Fireman Ed do his schtick that day is like watching a kid's clown perform at a wake. The game was mostly decided by the two placekickers, Mike Nugent and Rian Lindell. The Jets limped to one touchdown on offense, yet they won 30-26.

But for one man, there was something eternally meaningful. While the game effectively ended with Justin Miller's kickoff return for a touchdown, Jets linebacker Mark Brown intercepted one of Kelly Holcomb's passes in the second quarter and returned it 33 yards for a touchdown. The image of him in the end zone is forever frozen on the card you see above, and it seems particularly important because it was Brown's last game in the NFL. It gave the Jets a 17-6 lead that they would squander in the third quarter, but Mark Brown can rightly claim that he hit one of his professional highs in one of his very last opportunities. If only life were like that all the time, allowing us these dramatic chances to find meaning in a purposeless existence, then maybe we would try harder. Or maybe we wouldn't try as hard; we would just always wait idly by for our chance to come round. I don't know.

****

Notre Dame used to make quarterbacks. USC used to make running backs. The University of Miami used to make receivers and defensive front lines. Penn State made linebackers. In the 60's the Jets had Ralph Baker #51, but then in the 70's and 80's, the team featured Nittany Lion linebackers like Dennis Onkontz #35, Greg Buttle #51, Lance Mehl #56, and Ron Crosby #55. I wonder if they all simply felt resigned to end up in Flushing. I've come to adopt Penn State a little bit as my local college football team, which means that I follow them when they're undefeated but don't when they're not. Alright, I'm a bandwagoneer. It's painful to watch Joe Paterno trying to coach lately, though, and it's too bad that young people in Happy Valley see him as a dithering old man propped up by coaches and players. At one time, he paced the sideline and gesticulated like a deranged math teacher, complete with pit stains, hard-frame glasses and a pocket protector (one of those is an exaggeration).

Rob Crosby

At the risk of generalizing, defensive lines are formed by men who, like Albert Haynesworth, simply move their mass against the offense. Secondaries are filled with roving, jittery, hectoring guys who must not allow anyone to get behind them, though receivers often manage to. But linebackers make the decision to go forward or back, entering entirely different zones of defense with disparate strategies of playing the game. Rob Crosby did this for the Jets from 1979-83.

In this image at left it looks as though Rob Crosby has suddenly thrust himself into the frame and is now eyeing your lunch. Near as I can tell, this photo was taken at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. This picture might be from the Jets' 17-14 loss to the Browns on December 7, 1980, a bad game in one of the most disappointing of Jets' seasons. It might be from the Jets' 14-13 win over the Browns on December 12th the following year. You can see Municipal's light towers reflected in his helmet. It's obviously cold out, Crosby's got his hand warmer stitched into his jersey, and there's an overcast, wintery afternoon light very like the kind cast at Cleveland Municipal in December. The light within the stadium in winter was always washed gray by persistently overcast skies, while the stands were made darker by Municipal's large overhang. The effect of watching a Browns telecast was such that you'd think the color had gone wonky on your TV. Colorblind players might have felt right at home in Cleveland, though I don't know if Rob Crosby is colorblind.

Like Rob Crosby, the wind-blown, tired-looking linebacker John Ebersole #55 (at right) also went to Penn State and ended up playing eight seasons at linebacker for the Jets, from 1970-77. In his 1977 card, he looks exactly like a man who's witnessed the deep decline of the Jets' franchise in the 70's. "O, woe is me,/To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!" A defensive rating of -7.1 in 1975!

Without many other statistics, it's still worth mentioning that Ebersole made three interceptions in 1974, one of which he apparently took for 41 yards. I've tried looking for it in the vast collection of 1974NFL's Channel without any luck. There is one moment of funny choreography from the Jets' final game of that season, a 45-38 win at Memorial Stadium. Go to 1:26 of the clip, and you see second-year Colts quarterback Bert Jones, who shredded the Jets earlier in the year, overthrowing his man and instead hitting Ralph Baker in the linebackers' no man's land. The ball then jettisons off Baker and high into the air, producing a Maculate Interception: under the ball are three men - Baker, Burgess Owens and John Ebersole. It looks like Ebersole's got it, but then Owens is faster; he gathers it and makes it into the end zone where he is upended by Jones. It's Baker's last game, and it's the last time the Jets will beat the Colts until 1978, when Bert Jones will be out of the picture with injuries.

Today, John Ebersole is listed as the Vice Chairman of the Celebrity Golf Board of Directors. I'm not sure what that means, but he looks like he plays the celebrity golf circuit. This spells hope for all of us, especially in the era where being a celebrity can be permanently defined by anything at all. Perhaps the Chinese are our economic overlords now because our most prescient prophet was Andy Warhol. At least Ebersole's LeeMo Marketing write-up grants him his celebrity status for toughness. "Once played almost an entire game with a separated shoulder and a broken hand," it says. (And a broken hand.) "Also had the dubious honor of leading the NFL in concussions in 1975 and 1976." I don't know why anyone would call that "dubious." I can see "unfortunate" maybe, but not "dubious." I'm just glad to see he's survived his injuries with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact. Not every player does, as we know.

****

In midseason 1965, linebacker Mike Dukes #55 was traded or released from the Boston Patriots to the New York Jets, perhaps to play alongside Wahoo McDaniel. The statistics show that he suited up for three games, and that is all. Sadly, he was killed in 2008 in a car accident in Beaumont, TX. On his memoriam page, you see him proudly displaying a championship ring from one of the first two AFL Championships in 1960 and '61 by the Houston Oilers, for whom Dukes also played at linebacker. A year before his death, his son Brandonn had written to the great site Remember the AFL and asked if anyone knew where he could acquire a game tape of the 1962 AFL Championship Game between the Dallas Texans and Houston Oilers. It's poignant that he was looking for something he thought would interest his Dad in retirement. I truly hope Brandonn Dukes found what he was looking for in time.

NY Jets #17 - The Curse?

2011-08-02T09:52:00.001-07:00

I used to live in a neighborhood where the resident across the street from me was labeled by everyone on the block as "Poor Choices." If there were a meth addict to impregnate her, she would find him. If there were a fistfight to be had with another woman over a parking space, she would mix it up in front of her kids. Often, with a determined smile, she would stare down the shady-looking baby daddies who came by to berate her for being disloyal or duplicitous. She endured, mothered several children, and maintained such a zen-like unselfconsciousness about how the neighborhood viewed her that I came to admire her. Though I wouldn't exactly gamble on her children growing up with the sense of a happy home, she had the power of Mother Courage, driving her children on to the next scheme for survival.

I'm not at all sure that this was a good choice for an introduction. I suppose the point I meant to make was that some people just make poor choices, yet they endure out of profit or pride, destined to live it out all over again at the risk of running infamous in the eyes of the world. As of writing this, two men who have such a reputation have come to confluence over the #17 - Braylon Edwards and Plaxico Burress. One is on his way out of the franchise, and one is seeking redemption on his way in.

I've maintained before that there is a curse to the #17 on the Jets, in that its wearer usually ends his career with the team for one reason or another. It is a black hole, absorbing the last, best hopes of any athlete. These two now add a new twist to the curse.

First, incoming. Before Plaxico Burress accidentally shot himself and began a prison sentence, he wore #17 for the Giants. I didn't know until today that it was because he signed with the Giants on a March 17th, making the number, in his eyes, lucky. Who wore it before him on the Giants?

Apparently, there is a tradition where players will hand over their numbers to other players who wish it so long as the player surrendering the number receives some remuneration. In the case of aged punter Jeff Feagles who wore #10 on the Giants until Eli Manning came to the team, Manning paid Feagles back for the number with an all-expense paid Florida vacation. Feagles then switched to #17. When Burress came calling for #17, the punter was only happy to hand it over in return for a new kitchen, which apparently Feagles never received. This stiffing of a longtime veteran was just further ammunition in the press about Plax's shadiness, his unreliability, selfishness and so on. He still owes Feagles a kitchen; perhaps part of his work to re-establish his reputation would be to make amends by allowing Mrs. Feagles (presuming there is one) a chance to look at swatches.

Burress is a Poor Choices, an enduringly flawed figure, now "prison strong," who finds a new home with the most colorful of coaches on a team that itself has become the kind of circus show that Sonny Werblin could only have dreamt of in his darkest moments at Toots Shor's. Burress chose the Jets over the Giants, the team whose fans still feel he owes them something symbolic ever since his self-wounding threw the team into a lengthy funk from which they have not yet recovered. Something more than a kitchen. My brother is a Giants fan, and I can only imagine his combined sense of grief and relief as Plaxico Burress replaces Braylon Edwards in #17. But will the curse endure?

In order to answer that question, one must take into account the future of Braylon Edwards. Plaxico will not have to buy Edwards so much as a sandwich for #17 since the Jets have said sayanora to him. He will likely show up on someone's roster, like Arizona's, or better yet, Oakland's; Poor Choices will endure as Poor Choices always does. But as of this writing, though he has not been implicated directly, members of Edwards' entourage actually attacked staff at a Birmingham, Michigan nightclub on July 31, 2011:

... Edwards' buddies got into an argument with employees that "eventually spilled into the kitchen" and that one worker was "sliced with a knife requiring 14 stitches...another was attacked with a fork."

Again, the fight continued into the kitchen, as if it were a farcical brawl in a Mack Sennett silent film.

Great Men have entourages because Great Men are always inherently insecure. Unless you were the queen bee of a group of catty girls in middle school, you (and I) have no idea what it's like to have one. Your entourage is your protection, your enablers, your familiars, the people who keep your secrets, your true friends who know you best and can be alternately blessed by your generosity or cursed by your contemptuous regard.

Edwards has had conflicts with the law and has avoided jail time, but if Plaxico Burress is truly settling upon a different way of living, he might advise Braylon Edwards to avoid nightclubs with his entourage altogether. But we know that's not going to happen. And Edwards? He apparently tweeted at the nighclub: "Damn. Get ya knuckles ready," followed by, "Don't fight if. You don't know how." The punctuation is his. I say "apparently" because these tweets were later erased, and Edwards claimed that his phone had been hijacked and that they were sent out by someone else, which is exactly what I would have done. It might have been the idea of one of his humbled entourage; it does takes a village.

****

Braylon Edwards always made me nervous. It seemed at first that his sense of timing was impeccable when it was time to make a poor choice. All players make mistakes with every game, but in the first two and a half weeks of the 2010 season, I made note that Edwards did the following:

1. Formation penalty that prevented the Jets from setting up in the red zone in the first half against the Ravens, week one.

2. Running into the kicker when placed in as special teams to block a punt against Baltimore, which then gave the Ravens the ball so that they could score.

3. Scored against New England in week two but taunted the man covering him, which earned him an unsportsmanlike penalty. Taunted his defender later on a two-point conversion but did not get penalized after he probably should have.

4. Received a DUI arrest after leaving a nightclub with D'Brickashaw Ferguson and Vernon Gholsten.

But then, I got soft on Edwards. Throughout the offseason, in order to deflect worry about the Lockout, or about whether or not Rex Ryan's traveling show will finally derail, I found it comforting to have Edwards' fine performances in the playoffs rewind in my head. First, there is this play against the Colts that essentially guaranteed that the Jets could move forward in the playoffs:

Great receivers can make poor choices, but they must make great catches when it is absolutely necessary. Steve Smith and Plaxico Burress did in the Super Bowl, as did Santonio Holmes. The fan tolerates the poor choices in exchange for such singular moments from your mentally ill wide receiver. It's all you can ask in the playoffs, and you are willing to forgive everything so long as he will save your beloved team from sudden death. Whether he tweeted about his entourage's violence outside Detroit or not, it seems impossible in the modern era to enjoy such moments without a dose or two of poor choices.

And then when the gun sounded last year against the Patriots, Braylon Edwards, eager to stand out as always, added his personal signature to the happy night, and we see it now as one of his last acts as a Jet. You can call it showboating or insanity. Such flamboyance and vibrancy exists outside the stoic realm of football; Braylon Edwards, filled with the unlikely joy all of us felt that night, transformed into a sylph out of Cirque du Soleil and backflipped in front of all of Foxboro.

Farewell #17, and again, sayonara.

NY Jets #55 - Part 1

2011-08-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

I foolishly assumed that the Jets would win the bidding war for Nnmadi Asomugha, and while I'm glad he didn't go to Dallas, it surprised me that the hometown Philadelphia Eagles got him instead. A loyal fan of any NFL team should know to assume nothing, though the safest of all assumptions was that, at the very least, Asomugha was leaving Oakland.

But this is also an assumption that illustrates a strange paradox about my football fan life. When I was a kid, there were nine planets, 12 apostles, seven continents, fifty states, and three counties to the self-descriptive piece of land known as Long Island. There was the Soviet Union. Cable TV was for rich people. There was no water on the moon. Today I'm more inclined to believe simple geographical truths over astronomical, geopolitical or theological assertions. But when I was a kid, one assumption remained true no matter what scientists said. The Oakland Raiders would go to the playoffs, and the New York Jets would stay home.

This 1969 picture goes to illustrate a moment when these two forces in American football were first sent into opposite orbits. More to the point, it helps highlight Jim Carroll #55, who played his last season in football in 1969 with the Jets, at linebacker. The 1969 season ended with the Jets' senseless playoff loss to the eventual AFL and Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs. In this picture, though, Carroll is shown defending in the Jets' 27-14 home loss to the Oakland Raiders. This game signals a cosmic shift between the Raiders and the Jets, equal AFL rivals in every sense up until that point. From here, only one of the two teams would go on to have winning seasons year after year. Only one would go on to cement an outlaw status that was itself simultaneously a violation and a vindication of the American way of life, further emphasizing this point by winning the Super Bowl in the year of the Bicentennial. The other team was the New York Jets.

To me it's poignant that the 1969 season was the last of Jim Carroll's football career, for it was an ending of a kind for the Jets, too; it represented their last postseason appearance until 1981. Conversely, in 1981 the Raiders posted their very first losing season in 17 years. Since 1969, the Jets and the Raiders, who will be meeting in Alameda once again this season, have existed in direct oppositional orbits circling around the same binary point. Take a look at the win-loss totals for the Raiders and Jets, and an eerily perfect inverse manifests itself. The Jets, one of the teams we assume will be a competitor for the playoffs this coming season (and may the gods not smite my team for this assumption) have a franchise record of 351-418-8. The Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders have an overall record of 418-343-11. When I was a kid, the tradition of excellence in Al Davis' Raiders was as predictable as the planetary list of the Solar System that ended with the name of Mickey Mouse's dog. Now, like Al Davis' Raiders, "Pluto's not a planet anymore, either." Like Charon, the Jets are locked into an eternal orbit with the Raiders' Pluto, their eyes fixed forever on each other in their respective fortunes, destined never again to meet in on equal ground.

And what of Jim Carroll? It's hard to hear his name and not think of the late author of The Basketball Diaries, who died nearly two years ago. I saw that Jim Carroll interviewed a few times over the last ten years of his life and was horrified by how he aged so profoundly in his last four. At 60, he looked like a spectral version of himself. I can't help but read him and think of another dead author and addict, Frederick Exley, who wrote about his obsessions in and around sports. Like Walter Kirn, I met people in literature classes who thought both men were like self-sacrificial literary saints. Frankly, Jim Carroll #55 who played linebacker for the Jets fared better. Though perhaps not an artist, he is at least still alive.

****

We were recently talking about football players-turned-artists, and offensive guard Ernie Barnes #55 is probably the most famous associated with the franchise, although he often took pains to mention how unhappy he was with playing in New York, specifically for the Titans in 1960. In his online biography, we learn that

Barnes loathed being on the Titans. He said, “(New York) was a circus of ineptitude. The equipment was poor, the coaches not as knowledgeable as the ones in Baltimore. We were like a group of guys in the neighborhood who said let’s pretend we’re pros.”

If the AFL was the Mickey Mouse League that NFLers claimed it was, then the Titans were its Goofy. We know that the real culprit was Harry Wismer, the sportscaster turned entrepreneur who ran the team out of a New York City hotel room. But Barnes maintains that the club's lack of character was represented in the death of his friend Howard Glenn #66, whom we will talk about later. Barnes believes that the organization - such as it was - never really told the truth about Glenn's death. He thought that Glenn didn't die of a broken neck sustained in a game against the Los Angeles Chargers, as the team maintained, but of heat exhaustion, a cause of death that would have cast Head Coach Sammy Baugh in an even poorer light.

In 1959, Ernie Barnes was drafted out of North Carolina College by the Washington Redskins, a team that didn't hire black players. His name was "Ernest Barnes" officially, and it would seem that a player named "Ernest" wasn't someone of color to George Preston Marshall's racist organization. Once they realized it, the Redskins disavowed him. After playing for the Colts that season, Barnes was labeled "Ernie" in the Baltimore press, and the name stuck. After the Titans, he would play in the AFL for San Diego and Denver before retiring from football entirely in 1965. But even when he quit the Titans after their game against the Chargers, Barnes was already an artist. According to his biography link above, he studied art at college and frequently painted scenes from football and elsewhere, honing a craft that would ultimately sustain him in a way that very few artists could ever hope to imagine.

His work ultimately enabled him to be picked as the official artist of the 1984 Olympics, but you also recognize Barnes' painting if you watched Norman Lear's 1970's sitcom Good Times. Early productions of the show featured Barnes' painting of the Evans family in the closing credits. Later episodes, though, featured one of Barnes' most famous works, "Sugar Shack," which was also used on the cover of Marvin Gaye's 1976 album, I Want You. The Evans family was one of the very few black families on American TV at the time, other than Lear's Jeffersons. I watched the famous episode where James Evans dies, suddenly struck with the same kind of horror I felt when Jake Walsh brought me into the laundry room in our basement to show me where my parents hid my Christmas presents. To a cloistered white boy from Long Island, Good Times provided a view of African-American life that wasn't exactly accurate, but it was vivid and alive, like Barnes' shack.

Ernie Barnes' "Sugar Shack" (1976)

Barnes' final revelation that he wanted to quit his day job for good and paint for a living apparently came to him late in his football career while playing for the Broncos, when he says, "The sun hitting the unmuddied parts of the uniforms created a yellowish white, it was just gorgeous. I knew then it was time for me to get out of the game." In his 2009 obituary, he is described by friends as believing that art could educate. In this sense, the game was merely a vehicle through which he could find new meanings in a world that defined him narrowly by his race and by his job.

As a fan, I can understand at least the bit about finding out something valuable about human life by accident in sports. At a certain point, even when we go number by number, the love of it has nothing to do with football. Even then I don't always expect to learn something as broad and profound as I did reading about Ernie Barnes. Football was a paycheck that enabled him to explore his designs on painting, but I still feel his unhappy time with the Titans is as revelatory about him as anything he painted. Whatever our assumptions about football players, the man who quits a team in disgust over the death of a friend is perhaps an artist at heart.

NY Jets #54 - Part 3

2011-07-29T07:03:00.000-07:00

When I was eight, my parents took us to Disney World, which was the biggest trip of my life to that point. It was the beginning of February, the gloomiest month for anyone who lives in the northeast. It was my first trip on a plane, and I remember being amazed by the idea of leaving behind an horrendous snowstorm at JFK Airport for the warmth of the sun only a few hours later.

Disney World's greatest attraction back then was Space Mountain, which had opened two years before. The ride simulated the build-up to a NASA space-launch, with authentic-sounding Mission Control banter in the background as you rode a moving platform to your destination, which was frankly paradoxical. "Space" and "Mountain" are two concepts that are a little disconnected. You can find a mountain in space, but usually on a planet moving through space. It was called "Space Port" or "Space Voyage" when the ride was first conceived in the 1960's, but I gather that "mountain" conveys more the sense of a human adventure, so there you are. It was and still is an indoor roller coaster ride in the dark (here with the lights on) simulating what in reality would be considered a really bad ride in space.

I remember the ads quite vividly (at the link, enjoy the animation, the futuristic font, the control panel lights, the yellow turtleneck on the guy riding it and the Dorothy Hamill haircut on his date). It was advertised as a dangerous ride. As Dad and I moved along the moving walkway toward space, there were warning signs letting people know that this was not for everyone. An attendant stopped a woman on the way toward the roller coaster and told her that expectant mothers were not permitted on the ride. The woman looked indignantly at the young man. "I'm not pregnant," she said. "I'm just fat." Dad, who was always encouraging me toward more adventurous, mannish pursuits, thought this might be just the thing. Never mind the fact that I hid through most of Haunted Mansion ride and that at eight, I still slept with a stuffed ocelot every night. His name was Ozzie.

I mention all of this reference to Steve Poole #54 for two reasons. One is simply because I have no real statistics on him, other that in 1976 he played nine games for the Jets, recovering two fumbles, one of them a touchdown recovery of a blocked punt against the Bills on Halloween. He is on the University of Tennessee's professionals list between between "Gordon Polofsky" and "Peerless Price." But I remembered his picture from a Jets' game program, and I always thought what an odd name it was - Poole. It registered with me because I was afraid of the pool as a kid. In his continuing efforts to have me experience a moment of bravery, Dad tried to coax me off the diving board, but I wouldn't do it. I refused to put my head underwater. What was it like to have a name that conjured something so fearful to me as water?

Somewhere in the transition from the hotel where we were first staying and the Magic Kingdom, Ozzie went lost. I do not recall the moment I realized he was lost; I just assumed that he would appear some time. He did not. By the time we reached Orlando we were a couple of hours from wherever Ozzie had been left behind, in a Florida motel. I tried to enjoy Disney World as best I could, but the simple truth was that my best friend, an non-animated figure made of artificial fabric, whose intestines had been filled and refilled again, whose cheap manufacture necessitated that my grandmother in Brooklyn redesign a neck for him made out of one of her opaque medicine bottles, was no longer with me.

I have always been troubled by an inability to let go of things - my football team, the past, the people I hurt and who've hurt me, the towns I left behind, my drinking, the jobs I've had, the women I kissed and so on, so much so that my life sounds like a Woody Guthrie song when it most obviously is not. If Dad at first thought this was a moment of serendipity, he was probably soon compelled by the gnawing look of gloom I wore in the Magic Kingdom to go on a mission to bring Ozzie back. And this, despite his own hopes for toughening me a little, is what he did. While I went on rides and posed for photographs with disarming-looking mascots, he traveled hours back and found Ozzie in the possession of a Mrs. Poole, a maid in the motel where we had stayed. She had found Ozzie in a laundry basket wrapped up in the sheets to be delivered down for the wash. I scarcely think he would have survived the ordeal.

Steve Poole then became associated by a highly associative child with something larger than the fear of the many, many things that seemed to threaten his childhood. He became associated with someone who saved one of its symbolic protectors, which Dad was only glad to redeliver, hoping I suppose, that my day of manly reckoning with fear would come some other time.

***

Jamie Rivers #54 LB

Jamie Rivers #54 played middle linebacker with the St. Louis football Cardinals before he came to Jets in 1974. This does not surprise me. The Jets of the late 70's (with all due respect to Jamie Rivers) were a hodgepodge of old players, traveled veterans from mediocre teams and blossoming players (very few talented young players were on the 1974 team, except for Jerome Barkum and, of course, John Riggins). The best explanation for Rivers' arrival on the Jets is that his coach in St. Louis was Charley Winner, who was later Head Coach of the Jets from 1973 to the middle of 1975, which was Jamie Rivers' last season in the NFL. He had a good run.

Still, I love to play a game to which I will someday devote a multi-part entry called "Infinite What If's" (just made the name up; we'll consider something else) that re-imagines outcomes for the Jets teams of the past. I have argued before that the 1974 team is one of the most compelling to study. (Commenter Michael said he was interviewing members of the squad, so I'm curious about that.) This is a team that won their last six games of a 14-game season, two of which were against division rivals who were going to the playoffs. Had they defeated Buffalo earlier in the season (they lost by 4) they would have won the Wild Card. If they had also won an additional game (against the middling Oilers, most likely) they would have won the division. Jamie Rivers played for the Jets that year and the year after, seasons which were quite different; for some reason the 1974 club had the breaks going their way. Teams like that get lucky, like the 2002 or 2004 Jets. I like to think we're beyond that point now, especially since those lucky Jets teams, like all such teams, didn't make it as far as the conference championship game.

Had they won the Wild Card in 1974, they would have played eventual champion Pittsburgh in the playoffs. Had they won the division, they would have played the Wild Card Miami Dolphins at Shea or the AFC West champ Oakland Raiders at Oakland, which means we would never have known the Sea of Hands, which would have been a loss to the history of the game itself. But such considerations have no merit in Infinite What-If's. At least the Jets would have been in the playoffs, even if they probably would not have gotten any further. In a little boy's mind, it would have made the possibility of a winning team seem less impossible.

Does this look like a
linebacker?

****
Actor Peter Gallagher went to my high school, as did the late Laura Branigan, whom no one would remember if you didn't hear this on the radio all the time. My best friend in grammar school has become reasonably famous over the years, but there comes a point where you stop mentioning aloud, to whomever is around, that "I went to school with that guy." In all of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' appearances on TV over the years, at what point did Jim Waskiewicz #54 stop telling people that he "went to school with Bob Gates?"

Jim Waskiewicz graduated from Wichita High School in Witchita, Kansas and then went to Witchita State, which inducted him into their Hall of Fame in 1981. Witchita State is known more for baseball than football, and their teams are the "Shockers," but did you know that the full name is "Wheatshockers?" I didn't. You husk corn in Nebraska but shock wheat in Kansas. Now I know. At any rate, he played linebacker for the Jets from 1966-67 but didn't get a Super Bowl ring the following year because he was on the 1968 expansion draft for the Cincinnati Bengals, though I do not see him on their roster. He played the year after that for the Atlanta Falcons, which was his last in the NFL. From the vault of a someone named Meteorite Guy (online, we are all becoming Brazilian soccer players) who apparently collects high school yearbooks of famous people, we see junior year Wichita High man Jim Waskiewicz (above right) in 1961 not looking much like a football player.

Go to the link, scroll down and find Waskiewicz sitting (at left) with his awkwardly bare chested high school wrestling squad. He resembles a geeky kid anxious to get the approval of everybody around him, which traditionally is not the attitude of the stoic high school jock who prefers to blend into a wall against which he hopes a pretty girl will lean.

But in the above link you will also see that one of of Waskiewicz's classmates at Witchita High from that year was senior "Bob Gates," who is, indeed the outgoing Defense Secretary of the United States. To be honest, young Gates really does look like someone who will become the leader of the Young Republicans at William and Mary and then join Washington's elite, working for the CIA. He was a flunky for William Casey, he probably knew a great deal about what happened during the Iran-Contra Scandal, and yet he has survived cannily enough to be Defense Secretary for two Presidents from different parties. Perhaps you really can see the future in high school yearbook photos. If he doesn't jump out as a linebacker, Jim Waskiewicz still doesn't look like he would lie to his mother to cover up his knowledge of a trade of arms-for-hostages in what he believed was inevitably going to protect national security. Am I wrong in thinking, on the other hand, that young Bob Gates already looks as though he would?

NY Jets #54 - Part 2

2011-07-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

When I go the gym, I find that I don't have the enthusiasm that people have when they work out. The people who grunt and wheeze when they lift more than their own weight. People who do handstands against the wall. People who do those crazy things with the heavy ropes. People who do pull-ups far beyond the point it seems possible. People who take up a lot of room doing exercises. People doing that spinning thing. I run on the treadmill and then work on the machines for a little while and sweat so much that people sometimes look at me as if to say, Are you OK? You look like you're going to die. And I don't like pain. I don't endure it well. If it hurts even vaguely, I stop doing it and go home.

Once I went a little too far with the running and began to have horrible weakness and nausea and felt myself disappearing. I don't know what was going on with me, but I decided that the best thing for me to do was to follow the example of a wounded dog and find a private place to die. In this case, a bench in the locker room was the best place. I lay down, hoping that someone would find me and bring me to the hospital. I tried to call out for help, but no one was there, and I didn't have the strength. Then in about five minutes, I found that I could get up again and walk out of the gym, acting like nothing had happened.

Maybe if I had a trainer like Dwayne Gordon #54, I would know what I was doing. But then male trainers at gyms tend to flirt with beautiful women while they're supposed to be counseling you about how to perform an exercise on the machine without ripping your muscles out of your shoulder. I don't blame them. What else are they supposed to do? They advise people about working out. It sounds a little dull, frankly. They try to communicate essential information about working out correctly with people who, for the most part, have unrealistic expectations about why they are there. And there you are, strapped to a Pec Dec machine that you're supposed to be using to turn your distressingly flabby pectoral muscles into something resembling a man's, and your trainer is pretending to talk shop with an inquiring blond who is pretending to be talking shop with him, and no one's noticing that you're letting your arms go way beyond your line of peripheral vision. Ah, what the hell, you say. This must be the right way to do it. Two months later, an equally disinterested orthopedist informs you of your partially torn supraspinitis. You hope the trainer got lucky.

Maybe Dwayne Gordon is different. He is described as the Fitness Trainer at 24 Hour Fitness in the Bronx, and that is where you'll find him. He played linebacker for the Jets in the late 1990's, ending his career in football and beginning his career in fitness in the vicinity of where his life began, in White Plains, NY. I'm sure he does a good job.

Olrick Johnson does a good job singing the National Anthem at professional football games. He too has found an avocation after football. In this video, he sings "The Star-Spangled Banner" quite briskly before a Vikings game in his old Vikings uniform. The announcer has to clarify at the end of his performance that "Olrick played for the Vikings in the 1999-2000 season" because you sense that the crowd at the Metrodome asked, in their various clanging Northwestern, Scandanavian-American tones, "Ol-what-who Johnson? Sure doesn't ring a bell with me." The speed with which he gets through the song is advisable for television, but it's also the secret of singing our National Anthem in public.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" has tonal changes that seem ridiculous. The lyrics are a series of run-on sentences and its overall structure is that of a wandering, searching, appositive-filled question. "Is it still there?" it basically asks. "With all the shit that's happening, do you still see it?" That's it. If you stop to think about what's being with each digression of thought, about when and how often we hailed the flag, amid rockets and bombs, how it inspires you in the midst of terror, you find yourself wandering with these parenthetical ideas, and this, I believe, is where people get off track, forgetting lyrics, repeating verses, going off-key. Don't think about it, move quickly before you realize what's happening, add embellishments to the ending notes of the late verses, and get the hell out of there. Like life.

Johnson was listed at the Jets All-Time Database as a #54 but on the Pro Football Reference Database, he wore #52 for the Jets. If we missed him earlier, then we're making up for it now. As a pro, he suited up for the Vikings, the Jets and the Patriots for what appear to be no more than 28 games over two seasons. He also has what appears to be a gospel/R&B album called Bless My Soul. There are categories we have in Infinite Jets for pros who went artistic after football, though it's rare. George Nock #37: sculptor; Al Woodall #18: artist and gallery owner of a sort (to my delight, I found that Nock advertises on his old teammate's website); John Riggins #44: actor, radio personality, alien abductee. Bless my soul, indeed.

****

After playing football in the AFL for the Oilers, the Jets, the Dolphins and Broncos, Edward "Wahoo" McDaniel #54 became one of the country's most popular professional wrestlers in the late 60's and early 70's. Professional wrestling today is filled with cartoonishly huge, steroid-addled monsters who bellow and preen the way wrestlers always have. Their stunts are less humorous than they were long, long ago, and certainly the WWE wrestlers today are more athletic than I remember them in the past. My brother recently took his son to a WWE bill at the Westchester County Center, where back in 1983, he, my cousin Will, Dad and I once saw Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka square off against his nemesis, the Magnificent Muraco.

Back then, wrestling was somewhere between worlds. Many wrestlers still looked like bar bouncers, with whatever they lacked in muscle matched by just their sheer size. Snuka, though, looked like the buff trainer who unselfconsciously who flirts with the blond at the gym. Muraco looked like the guy whom the gas station manager forces to come over to explain to you the work that's been done on your car. Snuka is considered by many to be a pioneer of the modern WWE look.

The Tomahawk Chop vs. the Figure Four Leg Lock

As a native Fijian, he might have taken inspiration from Wahoo McDaniel. It would seem that from the moment Ed McDaniel was born into the Choctaw-Chickasaw tribe in Oklahoma, the son of a man known as "the Big Wahoo" (making him the "Little Wahoo" for a while before finally settling on the simpler "Wahoo") he understood that success would come by way of the barely harnessed power of his large personality. In this way, professional football was at the right time in the right place, but professional wrestling was his true calling. In a genuinely good young adult biography on him by G. Neri, McDaniel is described as discovering, while playing games with his white classmates, that the Indian was always tied up and killed. To some degree, that lesson must have always resonated with him. In a changing world, where She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was eventually replaced by Little Big Man, McDaniel wore his nickname on the back of his pro football jersey (which they eventually did for most players in the XFL) and then wore his feathered headdress into the wrestling ring. He "played the Injun," as Neri says, but he wanted to be the Lone Ranger. He never lost the label of the former, but he insisted on taking the top billing of the latter.

In this way, he was also in the right place for Jets' owner Sonny Werblin in the early 1960's, a man who preferred his marquee players to be independent-minded attention-seekers. At the University of Oklahoma, McDaniel chafed under the disciplined style of Bud Wilkinson much as Joe Namath sometimes did under Bear Bryant. At OU, he was as large as a Native American legend. According to Neri, he ran 36 miles on a bet for $100. On a dare, he ate a pile of jalapeno peppers and washed it down with - and I am quoting directly here - "a can of motor oil." Phantom reader, like professional wrestling itself, the point here is not whether or not any of this is true. Werblin understood the power of myth in the circus show, and so he brought the large person of Wahoo McDaniel over to the Jets from Denver in 1964.

Wahoo McDaniel is the ur-Jet. Where the New York Titans had merely tried in vain to replicate the success of the Giants, the Jets were different from the corporate style of the Big Blue. They had pom-pom cheerleaders, a go-kart Jet car, fan giveaways, halftime spectacles and, for a time, a man named Wahoo. Because there was no Super Bowl, the goal was to put otherwise unsuspecting circus fans in the seats, and give them a show. Apparently Wahoo did. As a former Jets season tickets holder, my father has distinct memories of watching McDaniel play. It didn't matter if he played well or not; his name was "Wahoo," which is fun to say in unison with tens of thousands of other people.

Sept. 12 1964 - NY Jets 30 Denver 6

On the evening of September 12, 1964, the Jets played their very first football game at Shea Stadium. It was my Dad's first Jets game there, too, and the home team won 30-6. It was also Wahoo McDaniel's first game as a Jet, and it was against his former team. Several sources have corroborated this, including Dad: apparently McDaniel recorded 23 tackles in that one game. I haven't been able to find anything to show that this constitutes a record. People are right to say that tackles are hard to pinpoint and track because they involve so many assists, though we know how many tackles, overall, players amass each season. For perspective, since 2000, the NCAA record for tackles in one game is 26. I'm inclined to think that Werblin found his temporary marquee in the man who made 23 on opening day.

Dad remembers that at some point during the game, as McDaniel was in on one play after another, the Jets announcer began to join in on the carnival atmosphere of Shea. I wonder if Werblin gave the announcer $50 to do it. Neri writes:

When Wahoo became unstoppable, the announcer got the crowd going by shouting “Who made that last tackle?” The crowd would chant back, “Waaa-hooo!”

Dad remembers that this went on for a couple of games, and the announcer then went on to say, "Tackle by you-know-who...," and the crowd would respond in kind. To my knowledge, Wahoo McDaniel never had a game like that again, but you never have quite another game quite like the game of your life. They put his name on the back of his jersey, which was doubly profane by the standards of the corporate NFL Giants who never allowed anyone that distinction until long after it had become standard practice elsewhere.

This wasn't enough for Wahoo McDaniel, though. He became an early marquee player for the 1966 Miami Dolphins. Then in 1968, according to Neri, he punched out a San Diego cop even before he got to put on a Chargers uniform. The novelty of "Wahoo" on the back of a jersey had worn off. Joe Namath had re-written the rules of conventional sports. By beating the Colts, Namath made the AFL circus the industry standard and, unwittingly, had helped enable pro football to become even more corporate. But Wahoo McDaniel's secret passion for professional wrestling, that most unconventional of professions resembling sport, was his logical next step. In his time he straddled both worlds, the mythical and the real, like the land between the Chickasaw and the Choctaw.

He passed away in 2002. But Wahoo McDaniel lives in each and every one of us who love the Jets. Perhaps we forget the greasepaint and slapstick our forefathers embraced when they decided to stop waiting in line for Giants tickets and started going to Jets games at Shea. If you are sometimes fatigued by the absurd, outsized circus barker personality of Rex Ryan and his traveling show of troubled overachievers, just remember where we all first came from. We are not Titans pretending to be Giants. We are Jets fans, born to live and die lying on the bench near the precipice of insanity, torn between the world of sport and the world of entertainment. We are all Wahoo McDaniel.

Wa-hoo.

Let the Anxiety Commence

2011-07-26T06:52:00.000-07:00

Back from Paris, where my wife and I spent nine days. The trip was wonderful. Parisians are friendly people. With the exception of a snippy little man in an information booth in Gare de l’Ouest, every person I came in contact with was thoughtful and kind. If you try a little French, they appreciate it, and all I possess is the ability to create broken sentences with verbs in the present tense. Hello, thank you, I'm sorry, please, and good night were pretty much the only things I said. It was like being a robot programmed for only politeness, or maybe a simple child.

There are no fat people. It's extraordinary to visit a place where overweight people are the exception to the rule. And a walk down any busy street in Paris for an American is striking because very few people are on their cell phones. Very few are playing with their iPhones. In a city as large as Paris, there is excellent, efficient and predictable public transportation. Big book chains are the exception in Paris. Small bookstores are everywhere. In Philadelphia, we are down to barely a handful of really good, small bookstores while the colonizing force of Borders has retreated, leaving a desolate browser’s landscape in its wake.

***

Though the United States gropes even more blandly toward the precipice of total economic collapse, at least the National Football League and its players have come to an agreement. And although I was hoping that Brett Favre would start flirting with his final disaster by thinking about the Oakland Raiders, his story has gotten even better now that he appeared recently in a Phillies hat, signaling that he's interested, perhaps, in playing backup to Michael Vick here in town. Just when I thought Andy Reid had done all he could to court collective dysfunction, he does me even prouder. What can anyone say? He's like a woman who picks all the bad men and knows it. The ego of Favre and the personality disorders of the Eagles' fans would make for awesome combination. Alien versus Predator. I only hope it happens. And now we watch to see which receivers the Jets will hold and which will leave. How much disorientation has there been to the offense due to the impasse? Let the great anxiety commence.

Before getting back to work, I will first tell you of two stories from my trip. I saw a surprising number of Parisians walking around in Yankee hats. While dropping into a park along Boulevard Haussman, we came across two people being entertained by a guy who looked crazy wearing one. Seeing an obvious tourist, he came up to me and, much to the entertainment of others, began kidding me in French, knowing I wouldn't understand. I pointed to his hat and said, "Yankees?" He stopped and stared at me, blankly. "Monsieur," I said, tsking and shaking my head. "Mets." I don't think he knew what I meant, but then I don't either.

This man doesn't know that he's confused.

Then there's this. You might think this is a photo taken on an autumn day in any major American city, but the weather in Paris was wet and cool all week. This is a Parisian and not an American. Crossing Boulevard Sebastopol, he is wearing a bastardized Patriots jersey; you might not be able to make out that instead of Tom Brady's name on the back it reads, "New England." His hat reads, "New York;" you see the Yankees logo in the right hand corner. It's kind of like an American wearing a Real Madrid baseball hat and an FC Barcelona basketball jersey. That was worth stopping in the middle of the street to see. I live with a lot of contradictions; most of us do in some way or another. Are we any better off for knowing what they are or why they exist? Do we benefit from really knowing which were given to us by Fate and which we chose for ourselves to carry around? Does it really do any good for us to know that others see them as easily as I was able to see his from across the street? At least he lives in a culture where this particular paradox doesn't matter. He's lucky. Would that I could live with such contradictions, so blithely and untroubled, going about my day.

I'm Out of the Office

2011-07-15T09:50:00.000-07:00

Another work-stoppage, but this time I have a legitimate reason. I will be going on vacation for a little over a week starting tomorrow, and will have very little or no access to the Internet. And no, I am not going to prison. They have internet there.

We are in the midst of #54, and if you know anything about the history of professional wrestling, then you know that we still have to discuss the somewhat mistrustful looking man depicted at left, and we will. The numbers keep going up. There is no other way. I hope that when I return there will be an agreement to end the lockout because my inner clock is telling me that I need to begin thinking about how to parse out my emotional breakdowns so that they be gradually distributed through another football season. I also hope that the Oakland Raiders will begin wooing Brett Favre. I also hope the Jets manage to hold onto one good receiver. If, phantom gentle reader, you can do anything about any of these issues, I would be grateful. See you in about nine days.

NY Jets #54 - Part 1

2011-07-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

I started collecting football cards when I was six, just after I saw my first Jets game with Dad. My collection wasn't that large. I remember that the most important players I got from the 1975 Topps season were Coy Bacon, Mel Gray, and Randy Vataha. Not a Jet in the bunch, which was heartbreaking for a small child, but familiar in the order of things. I was a Jets fan, after all. I assumed football cards had the same significance in the world as baseball cards, and it took me all of four more years of collecting to see that this was not true. "Why do you get those?" Jake Walsh, a classic know-it-all friend, would ask in that way that was intended to remind me that I was stupid. In 1978, Jake followed the Red Sox until the end of the summer, when suddenly the Yankees hit their stride. Then he was with the Bronx all the way. Eddie O'Fallon kept the dream alive, though, and we constantly bought and traded football cards in front of the deli on Merrick Avenue, between Orchard Street and Old Mill Road during the summer before the start of the season.

Sometimes you'd see distracted men coming into the unwelcome sunshine from the Lucky 7's Cocktail Lounge on the corner of Old Mill Road. They seem like they were awakening from their sleep, tilting and reeling, listing like wounded ships. I remember how one of them tried to chat with us in a voice that registered as a growl as we stood there, straddling our bicycles, going over our loot. You guys got cards, huh? What you got? Who you got? When we wouldn't answer or would just stare, he quickly renounced his offer of friendship and told us we were ungrateful children for the world we had inherited. I couldn't help but notice the Lucky 7's windows, diamond shaped, colored and frosted, concealing the bleary light within. Today, my old football cards are somewhere in my house, in a narrow box, kept from the light and the world like those afternoon drinkers, and I wonder where Eddie's are today, or where he is, rather.

I gave up collecting football cards by 1979, though I had made my best collection that year. I had become weary of the poorer characteristics of Topps cards. They didn't show a great deal of action, and even when they did, the cards had no logos on the helmets. Here Jake Walsh may have had a point; at first I assumed that there were some games during the season when teams played without logos on their helmets; maybe they were out being cleaned, or maybe players were sometimes asked to pose with a blank helmet. I didn't realize the lost art of touching up the photos on cards, in the same way Stalin would have portraits touched up to remove people from reality. Topps had a less pernicious reasoning for editing out the logos - to avoid copyright infringement. That never happened on baseball cards, except when an entire mop-up revision needed to be done to convey a change of team for a player, as with Oscar Gamble in 1975.

This is still better than my college roommate's fake ID

This looks like #54 Troy Benson's driver's license, but it's his 1989 NFL ProSet card. It just happens to do something that I have never seen; it puts his face on the back of the card, alongside the statistics. As the write-up points out, Benson posted fairly good numbers in tackles, finishing "alone in second" in tackles on the team for 1988. Now that's a phrase, isn't it? "Alone in second." It really conjures a sense of being a Jets fan.

Anyway, this might as well be Troy Benson's driver's license photo for 1989. He has the look of a man who has been waiting on an unconscionably long line, being commanded by perpetually angry people to sit in one area, move to another, then go back to another waiting area because he has not completed his paperwork in full. Other than that, he looks like an average football player I knew in high school, with his nose wide and flat, his large chin taking up half his face, and his eyes far apart and dull. His hair sits flatly on his head with a fashionable part down the middle; he has the signature blond mustache of the era, with the look of a man you will run into when you both coincidentally need to pick up a case of Bud Light at the Circle K - that is, if you didn't live in Troy Benson's home state of Pennsylvania, with its Blue Laws.
****

Stan Blinka, LB

Stan Blinka #54 is looking up at us as if we are twelve feet tall. Perhaps he is looking up at the football gods, asking for some help. Blinka was a fairly accomplished linebacker for us from 1979 to 1983. He played one season alongside with the Denver Gold in the USFL. I found him on Facebook, and he looks healthy, happy and satisfied. I suppose that's how I look on Facebook. Does anyone ever offer up a Facebook page filled only with images that conjure the bleakness and fear inherent to the human condition? At the risk of sounding like George W. Bush talking about Vladimir Putin, I looked at Stan Blinka's picture on Facebook, and I thought I saw enough of him to say that this man has a good soul. On the NFL database, I found only statistics on interceptions (he had three in his career) but sadly nothing on his tackles or assists.

There are two things on the Interwebs I found about him. Though he was born in Columbus, Ohio (day-dreaming of playing for Woody Hayes, I presume?) Blinka went to Sam Houston State in Texas and was then drafted by the Jets. Here's a good article on his return to his alma mater in 2010, along with many other SHS alumni, to inspire last year's players as they took the field at Reliant Stadium to play rival Stephen F. Austin University (the Lumberjacks). The players left the tunnel with old SHS players standing in a line, rooting them on, which is nice. I wonder if any other players there would be labeled "NFL stars," as Blinka is in the article.

The next set of stories though are a little less flattering to Blinka, but I would argue that they represent a larger problem that defenders are dealing with even now. After the Jets' 15-13 victory over the Green Bay Packers in 1982, Packers Coach Bart Starr filed a complaint with the NFL over a hit Stan Blinka leveled at Packers' receiver John Jefferson. Here is the New York Times story on it. Here are more stories on its immediate after-effects. It seems to me that the hit, which I do not recall, was one of those that makes officials, coaches, players, reporters, and league executives mindfully stop and reflect (or more likely pretend to reflect) on the true nature of the game. What can be done to stop football's worst brutalities? they ask. So Blinka was fined and briefly suspended for the hit. If you scroll down and find Dave Anderson's article on the issue (which has two grainy photographs of the forearm hit to the head) Anderson notes that the league claimed that, up until that hit, it had been 63 years since anyone had been similarly fined and suspended as Blinka was that week in 1982.

Anderson is right to point out the hypocrisy of this decision. He gets Pete Rozelle to look at Stan Blinka's record of penalties to show that Blinka was, to that point, statistically a clean player - especially, Rozelle admits, "for a linebacker." Anderson also maintains that it is difficult to believe that the league would really require 63 years to find as egregious a hit as Blinka's apparently was. Without any real precedent, the punishment seemed fairly arbitrary, except that the Blinka hit occurred only three and a half years after Darryl Stingley had been paralyzed by Jack Tatum. The league felt that it could concretely deal with the inevitability of paralysis. They did not even realize that someday they would also have to devise a strategy for understanding the long-term psychological, physical, and emotional effects of even ordinary week-by-week contact; of course, they still don't know how to respond to such realities today, though they claim to try. The league tries again and again, often in vain, to reduce the number of horrors that the game, by its very nature, creates.

What stays with me most, though, is that in trying to find out specifics about Stan Blinka's career (other than those from my own memory, of hearing Spencer Ross say his name on WCBS) I discovered only information about this now largely forgotten moment. How little we really know of each other from the Internet, yet it is fast becoming our sole source of all knowledge. It behaves like our own memories, holding onto only the fragments of things we would otherwise soon forget or enhancing those things that we have sugarcoated into believing about ourselves. There is much more to Stan Blinka's career - the career of an otherwise clean player - than the one moment we find in cyberspace.