NY Jets #70 - Part 1

The other day I was listening to "This American Life" about the twisted identities of Asa and Forrest Carter, two men who were in fact the same person, the latter resurrecting himself from the vanishing act of the former. Asa Carter was a violent, viciously racist would-be demagogue from Alabama who wrote George Wallace's inauguration speech of 1963. A radio personality with hatred for anything other than what he called "Anglo-Saxon" culture, Carter was so racist that when Wallace cooled on segregation and race-baiting, Carter decried him publicly, ran against him and then disappeared.

In 1976, Forrest Carter - a self-proclaimed storyteller of the Cherokee people - published his second book, The Education of Little Tree, a memoir of the care and teachings he received from his Cherokee grandparents and the lessons he learned about the "Way" of his people. It quickly became a staple of high school English classes. The novel preaches the importance looking toward nature to learn life lessons, and it teaches about the kindnesses that ordinary people of different backgrounds can show one another. It took at least two decades for the country to finally accept the fact that Forrest "Little Tree" Carter never actually existed. He was in fact Asa Carter - thinner, tanned, with a mustache, a cowboy hat and a softer, gentler demeanor. Forrest Carter was in fact no more full-blooded Cherokee than my dog. Asa/Forrest Carter died in 1979 as news was just starting to get round that he was, in fact, a fraud. After Oprah picked the book as one of her favorites in the 1990's, it went back on the nonfiction bestseller list, but the Times moved it over to "fiction." It continues to sell to this day.

I recognize that using Asa/Forrest Carter as a prelude here is not really appropriate at all, but that's never stopped me from making convoluted associations. In doing crack research on Gene Cockrell #70, I discovered two men with that name, roughly of the same age, living in Texas, and I wondered while studying their very separate existences if they were in fact the same guy. Both Gene Cockrells seem like fine, accomplished, good human beings, and unlike Asa Carter, the Gene Cockrells have nothing to hide. But one of the things about Asa/Forrest was his extraordinary talent at personal invention, and in this, the two Gene Cockrells seem well suited. Might they be one Gene Cockrell?

What is Gene Cockrell doing?

First, the player, the Gene Cockrell in whom we have the greatest interest. He was drafted out of Hardin-Simmons by the Browns but ended up playing all three of his NFL years with the New York Titans, which means that he also played at both tackle and defensive end for all three years of the Terribles' existence. In the football card to the left, he's approaching us with what looks like a tackle dummy. Was this a common routine at Titans' practices? Is this something from his college days? He looks almost as if he isn't taking no for an answer, and he's going to knock down the door himself. I want to believe that this was somehow Gene Cockrell's idea, this pose, though knowing how card manufacturers insisted through the ages on specific and ridiculous poses from their subjects, I doubt it.

It's a tea party. Get it?

Then there's this gem, taken from Tales from the American Football League, which shows five Titans planted next to the goal post of the Polo Grounds, overseeing the seeping of a giant cup of tea. One of them is Gene Cockrell #70. Can you guess the historical allusion at work here? According to Todd Tobias above, it's a tea party, and, if you follow the thinking of the guy who staged this amusing and slightly awkward photograph, there's a team coming to town to play the Titans that might be associated with an historical tea party:

The caption on back reads, “October 10, 1960 – The Boston Patriots will have no tea party these New York Titans players say as they gather in the “tea formation” to brew special plays for their Saturday night game, Sept. 17th, with the Patriots at the Polo Grounds.  

Tea formation! Tobias suggests that what we see here is the "simplicity" of the old league, but to be honest, I find the strangeness of the image to be the best part of it. It's not simple at all. Football players are sitting around having tea like something out of Lewis Carroll. Do each one of them get a sip? It's surreal. I understand it would be difficult to post something like this today without it being derided on Deadspin, but who thought this up? My money's on Harry Wismer, but some part of me wishes it had been Gene Cockrell.

Deeper questions remain, though. Where did they get the props? For a team like the Titans, whose expenses rarely ever met the basic needs of running a football team, the extravagance of a giant tea set seems shocking. The fellas up there appear to be good sports, and it's nice to know that despite worrying about whether or not their paychecks will clear, the Titans' players are still upbeat. It's still 1960 - very early in the Titans' existence - so the cash for big tea place settings and historical metaphors may not last much longer.

After his football career was over, Cockrell returned to Texas. He went into rodeo and then became a rancher, and a successful one at that, owning ranches in the US, Australia, Brazil and a gold mine in Costa Rica. In an article in the Amarillo Globe-News covering his induction into the Pampa (Texas) High School Hall of Fame, Cockrell speaks kindly of Titans coach Sammy Baugh, and adds, "I've thoroughly enjoyed my life."

I've thoroughly enjoyed my life. I'm still amazed that anyone can say that, and I'm slightly horrified by the notion that I've never heard anyone say it before either. I don't imagine being able to do so myself. I've thoroughly enjoyed my life. The other day I was chatting with a colleague about trying to quit smoking, and she said that what kept her from doing so was "the psychic pain of living in this world." I don't know what precisely she means, but in spirit, I know exactly what she means.

"Audrey"

But then there's another incarnation of Gene Cockrell. There's a man bearing a resemblance in age and appearance to the rancher and rodeo man. This is Gene Cockrell who lives in the town of Canadian, Texas, known for his remarkable roadside art. His most notable work is a one-ton sculpture that sits atop a hill overlooking the road that leads in and out of town - a yellow-spotted brontosaurus dinosaur named "Audrey," named for Cockrell's wife, a love token as grand as the Taj Mahal, as one writer put it. As the Roadside America site notes in the above link, he has also created renderings of all sorts of animals, space aliens, statues of Jesus and Cowboy cheerleaders, most of which adorn his Canadian (Texas) home.

Looking at the images of the two Gene Cockrells in the different stories above, I see similarly wrinkled, sunlit faces, square chins, smiling eyes, and the long gangly ears of old Texas men. A little closer, though, and I see that the sculptor is probably ten years older than the rancher, and so the rancher alone is our man. There are two Gene Cockrells after all.

The questions that survive Asa/Forrest Carter are about the contradictions in his own words - how could one man preach such a different messages about tolerance and intolerance? That he made himself into an entirely different person suggests (as Allen Barra says in the link above) that Fitzgerald was right and that there are no second acts in a single American life. It's why, like Don Draper, he needed to create an entirely new persona. The most optimistic (and probably most simplistic) interpretation of Asa Carter is that he saw the error of his ways, and he found a platform that allowed him to be a gentler human being.

Is this why I want so much for the two Cockrells to be one person? I want to believe that Gene Cockrell, a self-taught artist of large and small proportions, is also the rancher who has traveled the rodeo circuit and dug for gold. I suppose I want to believe that there are no limits to the possibilities of our lives, no boundaries to the human experience, regardless of how much time is left to us. I want to know what it means to thoroughly enjoy one's life.

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Whenever I dwell on these kinds of things, I know it's also time to bring up yet another member of the NFL Strike "replacement" squad for the Jets in 1987. In this case, it's Tony Garbarczyk #70. Drafted out of Wake Forest but then cut by the Buffalo Bills in 1986, Garbarczyk answered the call the following season for interested persons to replace the starters as scabs in the middle of one of the worst seasons the NFL has ever known. He is on record as playing two games at defensive end and that's all, though considering that Mark Gastineau and Marty Lyons both crossed the picket line, it's hard to say how much starting time he got. Originally from Hauppague, NY, dead center of Long Island, he was a Jets fan, and it was only a ride along the Long Island Expressway, through the tunnels, onto the Garden State Parkway, and then to the Meadowlands to get to his dream.

In one article I found on Garbarczyk's college days there's one snippet suggesting that he was so enamored of Mark Gastineau while at Wake Forest that he wore a black glove over his hand after he broke his thumb, just like Gastineau. How surreal it was for him - if only for two weeks of the strike - to suddenly be in the locker room with Gastineau himself, and potentially playing at the same position. One wonders if the Long Island boy took one look at Gastineau, who at the time was a fashion casualty, and saw everything he could dream of being. Or, instead, did the scales fall from his eyes, and suddenly all he could see was everything that's wrong with pro football?

NY Jets #56 - Part 4

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.