NY Jets #8 - Part 2

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.

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.



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

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)

 

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 1

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

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?

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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

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.

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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.

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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.