NY Jets #44 - John Riggins (Part 2)

About four minutes into the NFL Films interview with John Riggins, the real reasons why my favorite footballer of all time left the New York Jets are explained. He had come to hate the losing team the Jets had become. Most of all, though, he knew he was never going to be granted pay parity with Joe Namath, and with a passing attack (or whatever was left of it) at the core of Namath's game, John Riggins felt entitled to more. I was crestfallen. I didn't get it. I wrote him a letter, begging him to come back. He had been my football hero for such a short time, and now he belonged to some other six year old.

It's absurd to think of Namath getting more money than Riggins when the latter's Hall of Fame career was ahead of him and former's long behind. But times were what they were. Our quarterback would hobble through a final season with the Jets. Even with Riggins, the Jets would still have finished the 1976 season 3-11. They were a terrible team, and I cannot imagine how he would have endured Lou Holtz as Head Coach. Becoming a free agent in an era when the concept was still novel in sports meant that Riggins was merely fulfilling the expectations of his own self-defined unconventionality. Still, for years and years afterward, I kept the poster of him that Mom once got for me while he was still a Jet. In that picture, he is forever playing against the Dolphins at the Orange Bowl in 1972. When I would come back from college or from a visit wherever I was living afterwards, he was still there on my wall, looking for a hole, grasping the ball on either of its sides as if it were a brick. On my wall, he was forever a Jet.

****

The story is fairly well known. A man recently hired to coach the football team located in our nation's capital had a piece of unfinished business left over from his predecessors. Specifically, he needed to locate a player of some exceptional talent who was once rumored to have been transported by aliens to another dimension or something like that and had recently vanished back home into the anonymity of Kansas. He had refused to play in 1980 for a contract that he felt beneath him. The coach was a racing enthusiast and a Southerner, but hardly the sort of man to believe in such wild stories. Instead, the coach believed in the power of God's salvation. A man was with God or against Him. This strange man existed for some reason, so maybe the coach could make some good of it and trade the player for somebody who fit his model.

When Joe Gibbs found John Riggins outfitted in a camouflage hunting outfit, hitting the sauce, he was appalled:

He had been hunting, him and a buddy. He had a beer can in his hand. It was 10 o'clock in the morning and he's meeting his coach for the first time and I'm thinking [sarcastically], 'This guy really impresses me.' But I went in there, and halfway through the conversation he says, 'You need to get me back there. I'll make you famous.<sup>[13] 

I thought to myself, 'Oh, my God, he's an egomaniac.' I thought, 'I'll get him back and then I'll trade him. I'm not putting up with a fruitcake.' So I fly back to Washington, and two days later he calls me. He says, 'Joe, I made up my mind, and I'm going to play next season.' I thought it was great. I've got him back, and I'll trade that sucker. But then he says, 'There's only one thing I want in my contract.' I ask what it was. He says, 'A no-trade clause.'[13]</sup>

Egomaniac, fruitcake. At first, to Joe Gibbs, John Riggins could be understood no other way. But he would obviously come to know just how famous John Riggins would make him. In Gibbs' offense, the pass and the run balanced beautifully, but John Riggins was special - simply a force of nature. Riggins simply did not fit into the world view of anyone who believes that he exists either in God's mercy or without it. He carried the whole thing himself.

From 1981 on, John Riggins's statistics become the work of an epic storyteller. As I turned into a teenager, my mind's picture of him as a Jet began to blur and fade. The world was now parceling out its realities to where nothing could ever make me completely happy the way a Jets Super Bowl victory once promised. I was forced to take my joys where I could, and following John Riggins throughout his career became one of those diluted pleasures in a confusing world. I knew what Joe Gibbs only half-suspected when he took the fruitcake on his team. John Riggins had the capacity to carry the whole thing across the line. I had seen it with my own eyes, and John would do it with panache in Super Bowl XVI.

The Super Bowl that year was personal for me, and not just because of him. Miami's Dade County had destroyed my 13 year-old's faint hopes for a Super Bowl appearance by not putting down the tarp the night before the 1983 AFC Championship between the Dolphins and the Jets. They played in puddles of water, and the Jets were shut out and kept out of the Super Bowl against Washington. I don't think I hated a team any more than I did the Miami Dolphins, with their nickel and dime quarterbacks Strock and Woodley, their little running backs, their Killer B's. I wanted to see them destroyed, which I really didn't believe could happen.

They weren't, but what happened was even more beautiful than that. Midway through the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, the Redskins were down 17-13 at 4th and 1. The Dolphins called a timeout, knowing that the ball would likely be given to John Riggins. When play resumed, the plan didn't change, but Riggins ran off-tackle, carefully extricating himself from the grasp of Don McNeal, whose efforts to get to the outside fell short with a slip on the turf. Once he was free, Riggins ran for daylight along the sidelines, charging and pumping his body, almost running through the grandstands at the end zone's edge. He had put the Redskins ahead in the game for good and created an image that still stands as one of the singularly important moments in Redskins history, when their team was suddenly no longer an also-ran and runner-up to the likes of Dallas. They were the champions.

John Riggins' breakaway, which I remember watching on TV with as much excitement as if he were still in green and white, is a moment that all fans wait for - the transformative moment when you realize the team you love is now about to enter into immortality. I see it in Flyers' fans right now around Philly; I mean real ones, not fair-weather hockey fans like me, but ones who've been following every game this season and every one before it. As they await Game 1 of the Stanley Cup, they wonder, Is this the year? Riggins' mad scramble on fourth and 1 answered the question. For all the Redskin fans who survived the 35-34 Thanksgiving loss to the Cowboys in 1979, the answer was clear: Yes. This is your year.

Beating Miami that day was like getting the plastic action figure version of that feeling. Though he broke my heart, John Riggins showed me what it might feel like. Now I'm also grateful that the Jets didn't win the Mud Bowl in Miami because my heart wouldn't have been able to bear the sight of John Riggins running off-tackle over Bobby Humphrey on fourth and one. No, thank you.

****

The story is very well known. My memory tells me it happened right after the Super Bowl, but I may simply be mixing up events where I read that John Riggins showed up somewhere in top hat and tails, which he did often. At a black tie affair attended by the nation's political elite at the Washington Press Club in January 1985, John Riggins drunkenly collapsed during (what he says was) Sam Donaldson's speech (other reports suggest it was then Vice President Bush's). But it was what he said just before entering the land of nod that was true to his nature, even if that nature happened to have been absolutely snackered at the time. Seated next to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, John Riggins offered a bleary-eyed piece of advice to America's first female appointee to the high court, one that may or may not have changed the course of legal history:

"Loosen up, Sandy baby. You're too tight."

He's been asked about it many times. He was asked about his drinking around the same time, the twilight of his career. Did he have a drinking problem? "Only when I'm hanging from the rafters by my knees." That's a drunk's reply. But since finishing his career, after being inducted into the Hall of Fame, Riggins became an actor, however briefly, on soap operas and on stage. He is an eloquent critic of the circus program that is Dan Snyder's Washington Redskins, and he seems rather well put together as a human being right now. We cannot ever really know the extent of what the acid aliens did to his brain, but I am grateful for their work. John Riggins defies the expectations of the No Fun League, with its squads predictably filled with nothing but bland religious zealots and illiterate, borderline sociopaths. John Riggins would have had no fun there.

But I argue his influence is lasting. The question remains: Did Sandy baby actually loosen up? Is it merely a coincidence that Sandra Day O'Connor, nominated by Ronald Reagan, became one of the more reliable moderates on an increasingly strident, conservative court? Could John Riggins have had something to do with it? Are we to credit the influence of peyote-eating extraterrestrials and their Sioux captives? I think it's very, very possible.

NY Jets #44 - John Riggins

There are rules for being a fan, but they are mostly held and maintained by people who are loyal to one team and can't fathom changing sides. Contrary to what some people might tell you, it's perfectly acceptable for a fan to love two teams, even three, at once, though he or she will probably lack the sense of tribal kinship intrinsic to the entire experience. I think your likelihood to play the field in sports is directly related to the love of the sport in question. I follow more than one baseball team but only one football team. I'm on a hockey team's bandwagon right now, but that will not last through the playoffs. I don't even recognize basketball as the game that used to be played by Bird and Magic. In football, I wish Andy Reid's grim-faced soap opera in Philadelphia well because I've lived here for eighteen years. But the only football team I could possibly have followed outside of my one and only were the Washington Redskins from 1976 to 1984, and for only one reason: John Riggins.

Perm, handlebar

In a fan's life, a person can become attached to one player for whatever reason; he follows the player's career regardless of where the player plays. Sometimes this attachment arises from some personal sense of belonging stirred in you. For some peculiar reason, you can feel it. The player belongs to you. You aren't about to camp out in front of his home or write letters to his children, but he becomes the embodiment of everything you need to believe about the sport. If he is traded or departs of his own volition, he sticks to your heart such that you can live, spiritually, in two places at once. This is what happened when John Riggins #44 became a free agent.

From 1971 to 1975, he played for the Jets, and if you don't mind, aside from the handlebar snapshot above, John Riggins will here remain a Jet. Drafted out of Kansas, having broken all of Gale Sayers' records, John Riggins was seen as the kind of player who might be able to replace Matt Snell. He did that and more. If anything, he possessed an eccentric streak that was decidedly less cosmopolitan than Namath's. It was a bravado born of the prairie, an odd, middle American anarchism that represented nothing in particular - no politics to speak of (other than posing with a gun in a 1980's magazine ad for the NRA or needling Sandra Day O'Connor), no commercial products - nothing other than a zest for shocking and appalling ordinary people.

Mohawk, beads

In fact, we could write exclusively about the subject of John Riggins' hair. For a long time, it was his primary mode of self-expression. Consider his early 1970's mohawk. This came with a leather vest and Indian beads so as to express Riggins' unhappiness with his contract. In Kay Iselin Gilman's Life Inside the Pressure Cooker: A Year in the Life of the New York Jets about the 1973 season, there is a photograph inside of Weeb Ewbank sitting down for a chat with Riggins and his mohawk, and they so obviously represent two generations separated not so much by time but by the contortions of outer space. Riggins looks like a man abducted from Lawrence, Kansas by hallucinogenic-ingesting aliens just before his college graduation and brought to a radiation farm on a planet located in an anterior galaxy where he was apparently adopted by a contingent of the Sioux nation who themselves were abducted a hundred years before and stayed ageless due to constant light speed travel. Centuries passed, but within a twilight of our own time, Riggins was returned to his home planet in order to shift his shape, play football and practice whatever he managed to glean from his Sioux teachers. He didn't speak their language, which made his whole interstellar experience a little frustrating, but he returned to Earth a new man. In the picture, Weeb Ewbank looks like the chubby, FBI man, obviously near retirement, who has been brought in to debrief the time-space traveler.

Sandy afro, mustache

I've written before on the subject of John Riggins' departure from the Jets. I remember how often Dad spoke about him during the seasons he was on the Jets, as if there was something transformative about him, and when I looked through my next door neighbor's discarded books about modern heroes of the NFL, I noticed that Riggins' appearance changed from year to year. Short crop, mohawk, sandy afro, dark brown bouffant. It was similar to how John Lennon transformed with every Beatles' album cover, from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road. In that era of weird freedom, the greatest artists were shape shifters, constantly displaying on the outside an impetuosity that accompanies the creative mind. So too John Riggins.

But I have to clarify something that I realize now. I mistook my first epiphany of hero worship to be his performance in the 1975 home game against New England. It wasn't. It was the late season away game at Foxboro. I had already watched him run off-tackle, but until late in the season, there was still only one Jet hero worth all the attention, and he wore #12. Everyone else remained a supporting cast member. I see myself clearly sitting on the sofa with Mom and Dad watching the cold game at Foxboro on NBC. I see John Riggins scoring not just once, but twice. The first was a 37 yard run for a touchdown, while the second was a 6 yard touchdown I see being scored in my mind's eye by Riggins, carrying two or three defenders across the line all by himself. That last one was the clincher, not just for the Jets, who would hold onto a 30-28 win, but for me, for my absolute devotion.

The Jets had lost eight games in a row up until that point, two of which I had seen at Shea with Dad. I was no less a fan than when I started out at the beginning of the year, but I had also become aware of the fact that being a Jets fan would demand a great deal of my young, developing soul. This was not a passing thing. This was a life's demanding and spiritless work. Today I think I am able to greet my unreasonabe, irrationally reluctant 16 year-old students each morning because I have been rooting for a losing cause for so long. I'm not sure what it's doing for my circulatory system, but being a Jets fan from a very early age has taught me a patience at the molecular level, albeit with teeth and fists clenched. Alright, the spirit says, here we go again. You know the drill.

So when I watched John Riggins help the Jets to win over the Patriots late in the 1975 season, I felt like I was watching a man single-handedly pull the Jets into the end zone. For at least one more game, and for the last time that season, the Jets would win. By virtue of his sheer will, Riggins would see to it. He was the man. And in my very immature sense of personal mythology that he was also now The Man. I had found my own football hero, perhaps in much the same way that Dad had once found Namath. John Riggins had done it all himself.

The only trouble is that he had also made himself that much more appealing to the free agent market. And having been instructed in the importance of sharing and pitching in at public school, how could a child possibly be expected to understand the real principles of Ayn Rand's self-interest on which his society rested? Well, he would find out.

To be continued...

Dear John - 1975

Dad took Mom to the last home game of the 1975 season, a loss to eventual NFC Champion Dallas Cowboys. They left us with my grandmother in Brooklyn and then shivered in the frigid chill of Shea Stadium in December, probably wondering why they had wasted a perfectly good evening on a lost cause in Queens when they could have gone to their favorite restaurant in Greenwich Village.

“What a disgrace,” my father said upon his return. All Mom and Dad talked about was the cold wind off Flushing Bay. Apparently, on their way to the game, Dad had told Mom that she was going to see a great quarterback, by which he meant Roger Staubach, not Joe Namath. However, they saw Clint Longley; Staubach didn’t even start the game for the Cowboys so that he might rest for the playoffs.

Mom looked beautiful, wearing a mink hat that was already behind the fashion. She had always looked great in her hats, but the 70’s were evolving into a time where such things were less preferable to plainer, more functional styles.

“Even with gloves on, Marty, look,” Dad said, taking them off. “Look. You see?” He revealed how raw his hands had gotten during the game, like the color of ground chuck. He felt I needed evidence of something miserable.

Things were changing for Dad. His world of possibilities had already begun to lose its mythical dimensions. He had kept on faithfully climbing up the ladder, but ever since he moved to the suburbs, his beloved team had failed to follow him along. I see now that the Cowboys game was the one that started him reconsidering his season tickets. He didn’t want another humiliating night like that again. He must have known that the Jets were going to get worse before they got better. He would give them one last chance, one final season, but if they showed no clear improvement, they would be let go like a doomed employee.

I didn’t know that he felt this way. He didn’t mention anything about it at the time. I just assumed that the Jets would always be a part of all our lives. But Dad had used the word disgrace.

Of course, in the world of the Gang Green, as the Jets are commonly called, the word disgrace is simply part of the vernacular. It is a verb fit for self-pity: This fucking team has disgraced me long enough, or an adjective used for self-loathing: It's a disgrace that I root for this fucking team. One of the off-duty cops in the Loge had said this very thing within earshot at the Colts game earlier in the season, and now Dad invoked it, albeit less profanely.

While researching Jets history from the 1970’s, I discovered that immediately after that loss to the Cowboys, the Jets’ owners stood around the locker room asking for complementary autographs rather than discussing the loss with their players. The Jets finished the season at their worst record to date, 3-11. The team was in disarray. Free agent John Riggins, with 1,005 season yards, was now likely to sign a better contract with a more competitive franchise. I thought John Riggins would always be with the Jets, so you can imagine my absolute shock and dismay when, before the 1976 season, he signed with the Washington Redskins.


His departure from the Jets taught me the valuable lesson that the market dictates everything. As a boy, I never entertained the notion that playing for the Jets was anything other than hugely fun, but then it probably was not, especially when they lost so often and when so few good players (except the aging Namath) were paid competitive salaries.

This was a new concept to me, but I wasn’t exactly alone. We take for granted today that a player could leave a franchise as quickly as he arrives, but during the 70’s, when free agency was only beginning to change all of American sports, no one could adequately explain to me why Riggins was leaving. I suppose that even the most observant of fans had yet to fully grasp the breadth of free agency’s power. You played for a team, you stayed with a team - right? Free agency’s impact was certainly beyond Dad’s experience. When my father had been a boy, DiMaggio had played his whole career as a Yankee; both Ted Williams and Bill Russell had played all their years in Boston, a city that both athletes disliked. John Unitas roamed a little when he was a rookie until he made a very long career in Baltimore, spending one short season in San Diego only when the Colts themselves finally let him go.

But Riggins was still at the beginning of his great career when he left the Jets. How could this arrangement with New York have failed? Whose fault was this?

At first, neither my corporate father nor my religious mother could adequately pin blame on one culprit. They simply chalked it up to life’s unfairness. But that wasn’t good enough for me. Danny Hennessey from down the street could pull down my pants in front of the neighborhood girls – our older neighbor Billy Vitale might have tried to run me down with his Corvette while I rode my bike. Sure. Life was already unfair. I got that. But John Riggins going to Washington? I needed something better than “Life’s not fair.”

So my parents ruminated, and each of them identified separate guilty parties:

"They didn’t pay him enough money," Mom said when I came home from school. She had dwelled on it all day for me. "If Dad were offered a job with more money," she said, he would probably take it."

"He asked for too much money," Dad said, as he took off his trench coat and removed his pork pie Stetson. "He thinks he’s more important than God."

Say what you will, but these people were preparing me for the debate that rages among fans to this day – who’s responsible for fucking up American sports the way it is – the owners or the players? I have insisted that all throughout my life, the Jets have been an integral part of my understanding of the world, and this is an example of what I’m saying: John Riggins taught me that where there are no easy answers, the clearest, most acceptable motive in American life seems to be self-interest. As I learned more about his release from the Jets, I realized that Riggins’ pay raise with the Redskins was not substantially greater; it seemed he didn’t want to play for the Jets anymore, too. He was going to be happier working somewhere else, and apparently my own happiness had absolutely nothing to do with his.

He felt the Jets didn’t deserve him, and what’s worse, he felt that my devotion to him was not worth staying for. This was a quality of life issue for him - a matter of self-interest.

Still, I continued to resent John Riggins as the years went on (despite looking up his statistics with the Redskins week after week) because I knew more than ever that my own happiness lay in rooting for a really bad football team. And I needed to somehow express this. Mom had written monthly letters to President Richard Nixon in the early 70's, demanding that he resign, so I decided to take her cue and write to John Riggins. I felt that if Mom could bring down the Nixon Administration, I might have some effect on Riggins’ mind.

I remember telling John that even though he was leaving, I was still staying with the Jets, and so should he. I never heard back. I consoled myself with the idea that my feelings must have had some impact on him, and though I never really believed in Santa Claus as a child, I did believe for many years that John Riggins kept my heartbreaking, crayon missive with him throughout the remainder of his Hall of Fame career.

I was a lot older than I’d like to admit when I finally realized the naïveté of such an idea. When Keyshawn Johnson left the Jets in 2000 for Tampa Bay, I blamed him for being selfish. I had to pull myself together and recall the lesson I first learned with John Riggins: I should really know better than to hold any player in the modern era responsible for feeling something as irrational as my own passionate love for my team.

But it's all I have. As a child presently operating the bodysuit of a man, I suppose that mine will always be, at its core, a child’s love for the Jets - one that constantly holds the basic laws of supply and demand in vague suspicion. True, the fanatic can offer his team nothing more than his own unconditional love and devotion (and his money) but it still feels good to say that I have stayed true to what I believe in, even if the only thing I consistently believe in happens to be a football team.