NY Jets #70 - Part 5

The Jets won today. That's not a phrase I use lightly or, for that matter, often. They won in Jetsy fashion. Todd Bowles benched Ryan Fitzpatrick against the Ravens, started Geno Smith, who managed to get a touchdown pass to Quincy Enunwa before getting injured in the first half, perhaps badly. I don't know why the gods have such a thing about Geno. He is probably not a bad person, and he is, statistically speaking, not a talented enough quarterback for the gods to treat him with such feckless jealousy.

I have a former student who's now in the tenth grade, originally from Lithuania, who's a Jets fan. I don't know how it happened. I don't know what the basis was for his choice. Did he happen to catch one football game in his new country, a Jets game, sort of like the one the Jets played today - one where they benefited mostly from the opponents' miscues? Did he suddenly and misguidedly tell himself, That's my team? It's too late now, and he knows it. His loyalty is branded on his brain. Win or lose, he wears his Jets swag each Monday, but he's lately taken to walking into my classroom when I'm not teaching, and look at me with incredulity. Five times this year he's come to see me after five losses.

"Mr. Roche...," he says. Nothing else. He shakes his head.

"I know, kid," I say. "I know."

He says nothing.

"We're in for the long haul," I say encouragingly.

But he speaks frankly. "That doesn't help me."

"No. They'll probably win a Super Bowl in your lifetime, not in mine."

"That's even more depressing."

"Not for you, though," I try to salvage as we walks away. "Not for you!"

****
The blog is back. I don't know why. Why was this Sunday different from any other? Maybe I'm just avoiding the 90 freshman papers I need to grade. For a long time, I forgot my password to the blog, and I just let it slide. When I recently figured it out and returned, I found a handful of kind email messages from people wondering if I was okay, wondering when I would write again. I appreciate that. It's been almost two years since I last wrote, and some things in my life have really stabilized since then, while other things just keep me up at night. I'm probably just like you. It's been so long since I've written that I would visit the blog just to see if it was still there (why wouldn't be?) but after a fashion, the Google search for "Infinite Jets" would return with Did you mean Infinite Jest? No I did not, but never mind.

I did get a number of comments on past entries from family members and friends of players, some of whom had recently died. One guy wanted me to know that his mother was one of the original Jets cheerleaders from the late 1960's, and I managed to find some film I had somewhere of some of those gals cheering on the sideline and asked him if maybe one of them might have been his mom, who had passed away sometime earlier. He opened the link I sent him, on Easter, with all his family gathered, and indeed, one of the images was his mom. It was emotional moment, he told me. That was pretty cool.

I hope you're still out there. Hope you're doing better than our football team. I need to write more and at the very least finish number 70. There have been a lot of new players who've gone in and out of numbers that we already covered; I can't say I'll be able to backtrack and revise those entries. Maybe I'll try. Otherwise, I'll just keep moving forward by looking backward and hope that I'll serve you well. If you're reading this, thanks.

****

Between 1978 and 1984 there wasn't much to be concerned about. I was nine on the front end of those years, and 15 at the end. If he's lucky, a boy's life between those ages can be simply summed up as playing late outside with his friends until, to turn a Joycean phrase, his body glows, until it's too dark out to see the ball. When he goes home, there's a reliable meal on the table. When he needs to be somewhere, he rides his bike with abandon. When my dad came home from work at night, I hugged him, and his trench coat smelled of the city and of the train car's cigarette smoke. I was not always a happy kid, but most of the time there was nothing really outside of my own mind to make it unhappy. During the years I taught at a high school right outside West Philadelphia, I had already seen more than enough children who did not have the slightest glimpse of such a simple, contented life as the one I had known.

And then there was the Jets. In those years, they offered lots of promise, chances at what appeared to be greatness, but always, always in the end, an early exit. There are few things in life that I have loved with such unrepentant emotion as I did my football team between the ages of nine and 15. What else is there?

And so say the name Stan Waldemore #70, and I can immediately picture his face, his uniform. I can hear Marty Glickman or Spencer Ross naming him on the play. He didn't always start, though he started pretty regularly late in his career. He is a regular at retired player meet-ups. When I mentioned that I was writing about him, my wife noted that his last name is similar to the notorious villain of the Harry Potter novels. I think he replaced Randy Rasmussen, who was a Jet forever, a player who was invariably blocking in front of Matt Snell in all of the childhood stories I read about Super Bowl III. That must have been a bit of a challenge to follow after Randy Rasmussen.

He had a good career. This is about all I can say about him, though in his book The View from the Bench, former offensive lineman George Mills talks about losing his job on the Nebraska Cornhusker line to Waldemore when the latter was just a freshman in 1974. He makes sure we know that Stan Waldemore was a good guy. Mills had to constantly petition line coach Monte Kiffin that he was better than Waldemore, all the while acknowledging that injuries were prohibiting him from really competing with Waldemore. It was nothing personal, though. It was a career at stake, masking as a boy's game.

As for Dakota Dozier #70, our current wearer of the number, I do not see any record that he has started a game on the offensive line this season, but he might take comfort from Mills' book about being an unused football player, or perhaps he might be reminded that he is earning good money without having to worry as much about permanent brain damage as Sunday's starters will. As a former consensus All-American, that probably doesn't mean much to him.

****

Woods (at left) and teammates from Tennessee State University, before he was drafted by the Lions. I did not know I could want anything as much as I want the jacket worn by Alvin Coleman in the middle. At the right is Robert Woods, another future Jet, and Larry's brother.

Larry Woods #70 played for the 1973 Super Bowl champion Miami Dolphins and then signed with the Jets, playing for us from 1974-75. I do not remember seeing him play, but I remember his face among the player pictures in the game program. He has the distinction too of being a member of the original 1976 Seattle Seahawks. He started only three games for the Dolphins and was able to play considerably more for the Jets. In a Times article during the 1974 preseason, Woods admitted that the prospect of playing more often was more meaningful than being guaranteed a chance to go to the playoffs on the bench. By the end of the 1975 season, the year I first saw his face in the program, I was happy rooting for the Jets, so the experience was branded on me, even as they lost, over and over. By the time I was 16, like my Lithuanian immigrant student, out of the glow of an ordinary little boy's life, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. But it was too late.

NY Jets #47 - Part 2

Last night, the Jets lost their second straight AFC Championship. They played the first half against Pittsburgh horribly, right down there with the worst of their play this season. They didn't tackle properly; at least three interceptions that could have been. I can't even really articulate all of the frustrations. The second half was less horrible, and had the game gone on for another minute and a half, they would have won, the way they did several times over admittedly lesser teams when the game seemed out of reach. But they didn't do it. Time ran out, the Steelers got their first downs, the game ended.

I have been here before, and not because they were in last year's AFC Title game. My first Jets playoff game was an exact primer for watching how quickly a playoff game can spin out of your team's control. Such was the case with the 12/27/81 Wild Card Game loss to the Buffalo Bills, where the Jets were down 24-10 at halftime, fought back and then lost within the last minute.

Unlike last night, it actually looked worse for the Jets in the second half of the 1981 playoff. In the image below, courtesy of Corbis, Jerry Holmes #47, defensive back, is trying in vain to chase down Bills' running back Joe Cribbs, who is about to score on a 45-yard touchdown run, making the score 31-13 in the third quarter. I remember this. I remember the sense of frustration that only a 12 year-old can feel when he believes that the gods are serving up his hopes to the dogs. The Jets would respond with two touchdowns after Cribbs' score but then would mythically fail on an a Bill Simpson interception Richard Todd pass intended for Derrick Gaffney. I was filled with awe at how terrible it felt. I felt a little of that last night, but my wife and I had friends over, and that was a good distraction from the kinds of things a lonely boy once felt almost thirty years ago when Joe Cribbs added insult to injury.

If you looked closely and see into the eyes of the fans there in the background at Shea Stadium, then maybe you'd see the same expression of horror and haplessness among them. But is that what Jerry Holmes himself is feeling at this precise moment?

This is happening. It is. It's vanishing out of sight. We waited all season, and now this.

I was listening to NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me two weeks ago, and their guest was former Ravens lineman Tony Siragusa, the large guy who stands at the end zone and provides whatever insight that a big guy in the end zone can provide, which, to be honest, is something I don't think I really understand, but Fox does; and that's not a statement I make very often. Anyway, he was asked whether he rooted for the Ravens in the playoffs, and he replied that if they still paid him, he would root for them, but no.

Can Jerry Holmes really feel what the fans are feeling right now, in their knit green hats? Who knows. Maybe not there, not then. Still, we all feel it somewhere. That sense of loss. There it goes. It's vanishing. It's gone. Gone for good.

After the 1983 season, Holmes went to play for Walt Michaels and the New Jersey Generals and then for the Pittsburgh (wait for it) Maulers, both of the USFL. (I believe Mike Rozier played for the Maulers.) Holmes left a good thing with the Jets at a time when better things outside the NFL seemed possible. On the verge of next season's lockout, we now know that the NFL really is the only game making a wholesale profit in America, but Jerry Holmes didn't see any of that way back then. How could he? So he had to try.

According to the vast black hole of information, after his playing career, he went on to become the Head Coach at Hampton University in 2008, turned the team around and then was fired for shopping himself around informally for a better coaching job in the NFL. By publicly shopping around, he apparently hurt the school's recruitment for the following year. Still, he had to try. Now he's a secondary coach for the Hartford Colonials of the UFL, which still exists, I believe. Remember when we talked about the Colonials, earlier? Remember? The former New York Sentinels, whose home was in Hofstra? Ah, the UFL.

Makes me kind of feel bad for Jerry Holmes, although right now I'm liable to recognize loss and misfortune in any given situation. We're all searching for that moment when opportunity will shift our way. We chase after it - it's a job, a love, a piece of serenity. But all things are elusive in their own way, and some objectives are in fact the very ironic source of our undoing. We either watch it evaporate from the stands or on the field, and I don't know which is preferable, for the sense of loss is palpable either way. There it goes. Gone for good.

Whereas sometimes the objective seems impossible to begin with, even as it rips right past you. Tommy Marvaso, #47 played defensive back in 1976, statistically one of the Jets' worst seasons, particularly on defense. After that, he falls off the statistical map, gone for good from the professional world of football. He has one lone, dubious moment in a quick wrap-up of the NFL Films' week 13, below. At about the :20 mark, veteran tight end Jean Fugett is running alongside Marvaso and then suddenly gets behind him and open for a touchdown from Billy Kilmer.



In this case, two people watching helplessly in the stands were Mom and Dad, while the Jets lost 37-16. It was their last game. They didn't get divorced; Dad divorced the Jets after that, giving up his seasons tickets. Like a lot of people, he didn't even go to the last home game against the Bengals. It was a sensible thing to do after a second consecutive 3-11 finish. He had been watching the Jets' fortunes vanish out of sight since 1969, losing season after losing season, and he decided there wasn't really a point to watching it happen anymore.

But in Tommy Marvaso's case, he may not even have had enough time to watch it vanish completely out of his view. There may have been only a quick moment of recognition to see Jean Fugett there, and then not there. Where the hell did he go? he wonders as he looks to see Fugett with the ball. How the hell did that happen so fast? Gone for good, Tommy.

****

Try to grasp this one. Roscoe Word #47 played at cornerback for four different teams over nine games in the 14-game season of 1976. This means that Marvaso replaced him in the secondary in number, if not at position. I'm not sure where Word finished the season, but he had the most traveled single season I have ever seen in the NFL. He began his career with the Jets in 1974. It's difficult to tell where and when he ended up first in the '76 season; it may be that it started with Buffalo, but then he either went to the Giants or back to the Jets, getting his old #47 back, I guess. Then he traveled to that legendary island of misfit toys, the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Here his journey came to an end. Which games and where and when, I cannot say.

If you cannot show a respect for a man who was witness to such an allotment of losing over one season, then I do not think you have a heart beating inside you. Consider that the 1976 Jets (again one of our worst squads on record; a team whose own coach quit on them before the season ended) were not even the last place team in the AFC East. That distinction belonged to the Buffalo Bills who, after finishing 10-4 in 1975, finished 2-12 the year later. The Giants finished 3-11 while the Bucs established the industry standard for ineptitude and went winless. It is statistically possible that on his journey, Roscoe Word may not even have encountered a single victory.

Did it matter? Perhaps no more to Roscoe Word than it did to Jerry Holmes. We assume he collected a paycheck wherever he went. His only complaint may have been having to collect all the W-2's. But it's the idea that maybe he finished his career with those legendary 0-14 Bucs that intrigues me. To be a benchwarmer, a replacement, a cog in as mightily broken a piece of machinery as the Buccaneers were that year must have been a humbling experience or, possibly, surreal. Perhaps he saw himself as a fly on the wall, a witness to history. If the great affair is to move, then the trip ought to be interesting.

All I know is that he made a late-game interception in 1974 that made my Dad exhale with a violence of joy that only a man in the throes of passion can truly express, as the Jets held onto a 21-16 victory over the Patriots at Foxboro, keeping the Jets' winning streak on track that year. I have written of this before; it's my ur-Jets moment. The Jets were out of the playoffs by the time Word ended the game, but Dad went to the following week's game against Miami at Shea, which Word helped end yet again with a late-game interception of Bob Griese. Dad came home buoyant, willing to renew his season tickets another year, willing to believe all over again. In two weeks, I saw him become a boy again right before my eyes, and because of this, I think Word is the man most responsible for making me what I am today - a convert, a Jets fan, a neurotic, a wreck, a shell of a human being who fights against high expectation each week after a win and who finds reassurance of humanity's innate ridiculousness with each Jet loss, the naively felt possibility that comes with each Jet win.

Thank you, Roscoe Word. For better or for worse, you have made me who I am. And because the human soul's limitless capacity for faith cannot be measured in a statistical value that I yet know of, I am left only with the option of referring to you as an infinite Jet.