NY Jets #62 - Part 1

Roger Duffy, C

Roger Duffy #62 was born 45 years ago today in Canton, Ohio, the place where, in a couple of weeks, Curtis Martin will celebrate a high point in his storied career - his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Duffy played at center for the Jets from 1990-97, which means that he missed the Curtis Martin years at the Meadowlands. 

By the mid-1990's, Duffy was a starting center. This means that (with the exception of the 1974-5 season, when it was primarily Wayne Mulligan, and of 1986-87, when it was mostly Guy Bingham) the starting centers for the Jets were primarily Mike Hudock (1963-66), John Schmitt (1967-73), Joe Fields (1975-85), Jim Sweeney (1988-1994), and then Roger Duffy. After Duffy left for Pittsburgh in 1998, the incomparable Kevin Mawae became center.

Duffy's Wikipedia page is one of those unnoticed Internet gems that are allowed to persist without correction. It's like watching a scratchy public access TV advertisement. It reads as follows: 

Roger Duffy (born July 16, 1967 in Canton, Ohio) was a center and guard who played twelve seasons in the National Football League.Duffy just got back from an aninversary (sic) party where he re-met his cousins David Phillips, Chritopher Romano, Caroline Phillips, Olivia Romano and Regina Phillips. David and Christopher were very excited to see their football star cousin 

That's it. 

Duffy probably came back from this party - which seems like a family reunion - and either added the information above (which was last updated February 14, 2012), or maybe someone else in the family did. Had the Phillips and Romanos not seen Duffy in a long while? Why were David and Christopher only excited? Why is this all we know of Roger Duffy?

As always, it doesn't matter. What piques my interest, though, is that Duffy was drafted in 1990 by the Jets out of Penn State, which means as a sophomore he suited up for the 1986 National Champion Penn State Nittany Lions. I remember Penn State winning the Fiesta Bowl that season, just a day before the Jets would lose the AFC Divisional Playoff game in double overtime to the Browns. What a truly insane weekend of football that was. Look at the names at the bottom of the page and consider the legacy of that one Penn State team alone; look at the other future NFL players: Andre Collins, Shane Conlon, DJ Dozier, Tim Johnson, Steve Smith, Dave Szott (who finished his career with the Jets) and Steve Wisniewski. Of course Blair Thomas was drafted by the Jets the same year as Duffy. A backup quarterback on that team was Joseph Paterno, Jr., also known as Jay. The most infamous name is the last, and he's listed rather innocuously under "Assistant Coaches."

I've mentioned before that here in Philadelphia, among people from that place with that fabricated name of Happy Valley, there is an almost impossibly persistent denial - not of Jerry Sandusky's guilt, but of the culpability of administrators and faculty in enabling hero worship at a publicly-funded university. One former Penn State graduate I know recently wrote me an emotional e-mail characterizing the media's handling of Sandusky's conviction and the subsequent investigation by Louis Freeh as a "vilification" of PSU and a "witch hunt," which of course it's not. Still, if I can bring myself to have sympathetic feelings for Tim Tebow, I suppose my team's importance to me is as much a sign of my own broken compass as is my friend's insistence that Paterno's halo be restored to the Penn State mural. I grasp this. Still, the New York Jets are not an institution that purports to educate and enrich good values in people. If it were, my college degree would probably be worth about as much as Blair Thomas' rookie card on Ebay.

As it happens, I've just come back from driving across the long, long state of Pennsylvania to attend a Steelers fan's wedding just outside Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania is a quiet, rural, Evangelical Christian commonwealth, and it is welcoming. The first truly unfriendly person I experienced all weekend was after I returned from my road trip - that twerpy blonde haired creep who waited on me at Han Dynasty last night on Manayunk's Main Street in Philadelphia. By contrast, the rural people of the rest of the state are awfully nice. They're happy, even when a closer glance you see that many of its people are living in a broken-down poverty. 

Cloistered in majestic, misty mountains, Happy Valley is the real capital of this mostly rural state, but it harbors a myth. To me, the real world is represented by that creepy kid at Han Dynasty, with his little black earring, his possibly Russian accent, his mean little affectation, his absurd nastiness and indifference to conventional politeness. In the real world, there are no halos; the guy behind the counter doesn't even want to take the bagel you bought out of the toaster yet because "I don't wanna burn my fingers" (actually, that was from a South Philadelphia diner.) Yes, the world is peppered with profound iniquity, like Assad's regime in Syria, but mostly we human beings are mostly just short-sighted, small-minded, unambitious, petty, vulgar, and ignorant in a pathetic sort of way. There really aren't many real halos around. A desperate population demands them, though, and no one is more desperate for the belief in saints than the 18-22 year olds, the ones who make such good cult recruits. 

The legacy of those college years, those years of manufactured innocence, never quite leaves the people of Happy Valley, even as they go out into the world as alumni and get waited on by some guy who doesn't like you because you ordered take-out and you're not going to tip. They think they can contrast the nasty world in which we all live to the perfect one that they believe they once knew. They want to believe that a university that holds classes in ice cream manufacturing is the best place on Earth, and unfortunately, because they believe it, a predator was then allowed to fall between the cracks, and the university's own janitors were too afraid to report his acts of repulsive sexual abuse for fear of being fired by Saint Joe. I'm glad Roger Duffy had good things to report from a reunion with a family outside his Penn State one. I don't envy people who feel dedicated to a Penn State ideal that had already died  the first time Jerry Sandusky was allowed to walk away from his crimes without such much as threat of prison.

****

Sid Fournet with the LA Rams (1955)

Sid Fournet #62's last season of pro football was the first season for the renamed New York AFL franchise in 1963. The fabulously detailed 1995 Coffin's Corner history of the "First New York Jets Training Camp" by John Hogrogian mentions him several times. Fournet played a career in the NFL from 1955-59, then went to the Dallas Texans in 1960 and arrived in time for the Titans' last season in 1962. He passed away in 2011.

His LSU obituary reminds us that Fournet belonged to an entirely different age where you played both offense and defense in a game of football: 

The versatile Fournet played both guard and tackle in his All-American season and was credited with seeing action in 83 percent of LSU's total plays.

The only advantage to playing 83% of the time is that you avoid tightening up on the sideline; you stay loose. For workers in the contemporary office culture, or maybe for those of you working at home, laboring away for 83% of your day means less time reading Deadspin, checking out major league baseball statistics, downloading poorly written podcasts, Skyping (which is a word), or writing blog entries about people who worked harder than you and for much less money. Whom then should we pity most?

Statement and Query

1. I haven't written regularly of late, and there are personal reasons. None of them grave or terrible; quite the opposite. However, I'm also working on trying to turn Infinite Jets into a book. If anyone has any ideas on how to make that happen (other than writing it), I'd be extremely grateful. You can e-mail me if you like with ideas, encouragement, discouragements. All are welcome. Meanwhile I will be updating here, but slowly. Please be patient with me. I also plan on making a trip to both Florham Park and Canton for Curtis Martin's induction into the Hall of Fame.

2. I've asked this before, but I think it was when even fewer people were reading the blog back in the day (2007, probably): Does anyone recall an advertisement (circa 1998) depicting a father sitting in a Jets shirt with his infant son, watching Joe Namath in Super Bowl III, looking at his son and saying something about "team loyalty?" The gist of it is that as the son grows up, he notices that his father switches his allegiance to whichever team is a winner - the Steelers, Cowboys, Raiders, 49ers, et al., while the son remains a Jets fan. Then as we see them watching Vinny Testaverde on TV, the father has obviously switched back to the Jets, saying, "Loyalty, son." The Interwebs are not helping me with this one. What was the ad for? Where can I find it? Is this just my imagination?

NY Jets #61 - Part 5

When I was about eight, I was walking out of the Toys R Us in Hempstead with Mom and my little brother Charlie, and I found exactly what I wanted. I don't know why we were there. We might have been shopping for someone's birthday.

Do people do that? Do they bring their children to a toy store with the idea of buying a gift for someone else's kid? Is that even possible? It sounds like an alcoholic's trip to a crowded cocktail party. It starts out with a well-coached discipline and a commitment to control that has to finally give way. The sheer volume of surrounding happiness makes you think that you can ask for something just this one time, just this once. Please.

I spied something wholly unexpected in the book section of the store. It was John Devaney's Super Bowl!, a Punt, Pass and Kick narrative of the first five Super Bowls. I was dumbstruck. I had lots of the Random House books, and poured through each one of them as often as I could, reading and re-reading any chapters about Joe Namath and the 1968 Jets. But I couldn't believe it. I hadn't known about this one. I must have broken down and begun pleading with Mom, but I didn't get it until the following Christmas, which was probably derived from a promise made to me in the store and a part of the continuing lessons in the value of patience and waiting.

I was a pretty well disciplined child. Mom rightly helped us to understand that life was not all about us, about our needs and wants. I've seen parents in stores who haven't taught their children about patience. It's an ugly sight. Mom might read what I'm writing here and say that she shouldn't have been that way, that she should have been nicer and given us whatever we asked for at Toys R Us. I find that lots of parents look at their happy grown-up children and wonder why they were so tough on them when they were young. Toward the end of the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, about the 12 men who landed on the lunar surface, one of the things Charles Duke (who landed in 1972) looks back upon are his children, whose images he left on the moon. The voyage to the moon, he said, gradually changed him into a better, less unreasonably angry man. His sons were good boys, he says. "I didn't need to be so hard on them all the time." I suppose Mom might imagine something like that. Still, I've taught students who think they should have everything in the proverbial toy store, and they're not really nice people. I don't know.

In the section of the book about Super Bowl III, the narrative thread is Namath's guarantee, but on the last page of the chapter is an image of Bob Talamini #61, kissing his little son in the the celebratory locker room, after the game is over. Talamini, a key offensive lineman throughout that season, is covered in sweat and dirt and the grime of a long day. His son gives a smiling grimace as the old man holds his little face in the thumb and index finger of his left hand, the way I'd squirm gleefully when I was little and Dad would kiss me on the cheek with a heavy beard, just to make me laugh.

Bob Talamini #61, leading the way in Super Bowl III

Whenever I think of Bob Talamini, I think about that image, about a giant man and a little boy too young to truly understand the significance of what his father has been a part of. To the left is a New York Times image of Talamini, probably late in the game, leading the way for Bill Mathis #31, while Joe Namath is doing what he did for a surprising amount of the game - that is, handing off the ball. This image is also in my Great Moments in Football History Punt, Pass and Kick book, the one I got for my birthday when I turned seven.

As a kid, I imagined that, with that Italian name and face, which could easily have belonged to one of my neighbors on Little Whaleneck in North Merrick, Bob Talamini was probably returning home when he came to the Jets in 1968. But that's not true. He was recently inducted into the Kentucky Football Hall of Fame because he went to the University of Kentucky, and he actually grew up in Louisville. So there you are.

Houston's All-Pro Bob Talamini...

...redone in 1968 as a NY Jet

Talamini played only the 1968 season with the Jets; beforehand, he played eight good seasons at left guard for the Houston Oilers - 1960-67, which probably amount to the franchise's best run in Houston. It seemed he still had good seasons ahead of him beyond Super Bowl III, but according to Gerald Eskanazi in Gang Green, Weeb Ewbank did not have an interest in offering anyone a raise after the Super Bowl. The second issue, though, was that Talamini's wife and kids still resided where Charles Duke and his family lived, in Houston, and apparently the constant trip back and forth between the two cities was taking its toll on all the Talaminis. Talamini's yearly salary in 1968 amounted to (deep breath here) $17,000, which was actually better than what he earned from the Oilers' owner Bud Adams, who also refused to offer him a raise after the successful 1967 season. So after the Super Bowl, Bob Talamini retired. 


If he had been playing in today's age of inflated salaries, instant messaging and Skype, would it have made a difference? I want the time traveling Craig Morton/Mark Brunell to bring all four - Randy Rasmussen, Dave Herman, Winston Hill and Bob Talamini - through the black hole portals of the past to Florham Park this summer. I want them to start on the front line this season. They were big men for their time, all four well over 250 lbs, which I grant you would be considered well undersized today. Still, they were probably smarter, as aggressive, and quicker than most of the present-day lineman. In the Super Bowl they effectively handled what was back then considered one of the best defensive front lines of the time - Baltimore's Billy Ray Smith, Bubba Smith, Fred Miller and Ordell Braase. 


Both Hill and Talamini belong to that purgatorial world of AFL heroes whose work in a reputedly inferior league has probably kept them from being inducted into the Hall of Fame. They should be in Canton, especially Hill, who is championed by Namath nearly every time Joe opens his mouth, which is still quite often. Thus I cannot help but feel that the '68 offensive line would have fared better than last year's wounded and baffled front line. Put them in, Rex.

But what are the rules in the No Fun League about recruiting past pros through time portals? You'd have to consider that if Bob Talamini hated traveling back and forth to Houston as often as he did, how would he endure being separated from his family by an impossible stretch of elastic time? Would he end up meeting his grown up son, whom I believe is, in the present day, a fairly successful physical trainer at the Houstonian Club in Houston? Would Bob the son be who he is today if Bob the father took that trip forward to our time? I can't help but wonder if the personal trainer named Bob Talamini in present day Houston is the little boy who happily received his father's celebratory, grizzled kiss at the end of one of professional football's most important championships.

****

Since I know Slimbo is a Syracuse grad of roughly the right era, I wonder if he can shed light on anything inspirational about Terrence Wisdom #61, who graduated around the same time. He had the dubious distinction of playing about half a season for Kotite's Jets in 1995 (3-13). I hope life has been kinder to Terrence Wisdom since then. I don't know how it could have been any meaner.

NY Jets #61 - Part 4

I was dwelling on the significance of John Roman #61, who played at tackle for the Jets from 1976-82,  when I received a phone call from my mother. I didn't get to the phone in time; I should say that I usually don't answer my land line because it's usually a telemarketer, or rather I should say that it's usually a recording of a telemarketer because, apparently, selling something to someone these days doesn't even require an actual beating heart. My mother's message was:

What's wrong with you? Don't tell me you're not home watching this. How can you not watch the Mets' first no-hitter in their entire history!? Are you insane? Don't you know what's happening right now? Aren't you watching this?

Johann Santana's no-hitter came at the right time for the New York Mets, who are still above .500, a few games out of first place, and still using people's doubts and disparagement as fuel for the fire. It crashed and effectively ended the existence of a beloved blog devoted to the drought. For a franchise in need of good news, Santana delivered the news that no one ever thought would come, like a Buccaneer kickoff return, or a Saints Super Bowl victory.

The next day, I called Mom and spoke to Dad first, who told me that he had never seen Mom act the way she did. "She lost control," he said. "She became this other person. I think I've seen her like that when she's mad, sure, but this was when she was happy. I just couldn't get her to calm down. She was a maniac."


I remember her like that. I remember when the US beat the Soviets during the 1980 Winter Olympics - an event whose significance has been lost on generations of Americans who never had to grow up wondering if an international misunderstanding would someday result in the complete annihilation of the human species, or what it felt like to be outwitted by a bush league Iranian government that was groping its way toward an oppressive theocracy. Our nation was having one of its neurotic crises of identity. I don't remember the hockey game even being televised, but I do remember Frank Reynolds on ABC telling us that the US team had done it, and Mom went into an hysterical joy that scared me. I can only compare it only to a Gastineau sack dance for its fury and abandon. I explained to Dad that I had inherited this same kind of irrational, deeply emotional attachment to team and loyalty that sometimes culminated in such scenes.

My wife can attest to that. There was the brief time, between Eric Barton's late hit on Drew Brees and Nate Kaeding's 40-yard miss in the first round of the 2005 NFL Playoffs, when I quit the Jets, a period of approximately 20 actual minutes. After Barton laid the hit, I hurled the remote control at the exposed brick of our apartment's living room. I'm not proud of that game. The remote was replaced, but I had forgotten the solemn truth that Lena Younger teaches her children - that the time to love someone is when their at their lowest, which, normally, with the Jets, I always do. Like a little boy, I locked myself in my bedroom and refused to come out, at least until my wife told me that the Chargers missed their overtime field goal. It was my first playoff game without beer, but that's not an excuse.

But when John Roman started, or when he stared from the sidelines when he wasn't starting, he did so during the first rush of hope and desire I felt for the team. It was a time that wove the team into the fabric of my life. The first stage of my fandom encompasses two of Roman's seasons - 1975-77, a time where the team went 9-33. The Jets' overall record for the remainder of his career was 38-38-1. As a number, the record during 1978-82 is representative of breaking even. The tie, of course, was a result of Pat Leahy's missed field goal in overtime against the Miami Dolphins in 1981. Had he made it, the Jets would have won the division.

Yet a mere .500 record over five seasons cannot quite capture the constant presence of hope a boy feels in the leaping growth between ages nine to 13, as he experiences every conceivable emotion in the team's Icarus flight, which finally culminates in the Mud Bowl in 1983. But I felt a measure of each win and loss, I remember following each game, and I can recall where I watched or listened to every game during those seasons. Girls were a vague rumor. I didn't consider my education important yet. I couldn't drive. A wider world had not yet been opened. Football was the most important thing in the world, and as a consequence, my memories of life got woven into the games.

****

circa 1982

According to the Database, John Roman appeared to have started about 12 of 93 games, which is not that unusual, but he had the unique statistic of receiving a pass in 1978. I wish I could say I remember it happening or that I know in what game it happened. So when I discovered that he works only about ten miles from me, I managed to contact him and ask him. As a marketing director for an investment company, he was kind enough to answer my question about where it happened and when:

Mr. Roche-
The play you referenced occurred up at Schaefer Stadium versus the Patriots in October of 1978. We were unsettled at QB heading into that game and ending up playing 2 QB's that game (Pat Ryan and my roommate Matt Robinson). Pat started the game ( think he was picked off a couple of times) but gave way to Matt later in the game. By the time Matt took over, we were trailing the Pats something like 40 to 7 (3rd Q) and were in catch up mode. Matt called a passing play...and it was batted in the air by one of the Pats d-lineman (fortunately for me it was not my assigned d-lineman that batted the ball in the air). I was in the right position at the time and caught the ball (a O-Lineman's dream!) but as soon as I caught the ball, I was mass tackled by the Pats' lineman and linebackers. I took some ribbing from my teammates who said I could have at least fallen forward to avoid the 2 yard loss! I was just happy to have caught the ball to show that O-lineman can catch. 


My thanks to John Roman for that. He also added that he came into the league with a bum left knee but was regardless considered a reliable player throughout, which I can certainly believe. I liked his memory of feeling relief when he realized that the man he guarded wasn't the one who batted down the ball.

The game, of course, was the 55-21 thrashing the Jets took at the hands of the Patriots at Foxboro, a game I remember vividly because my parents drove north of the city, ostensibly to look at the leaves that had turned golden, red and orange; in reality they were looking for a new house. The entire 1978 season is seen through the transition of house hunting, the memory of each game woven with those of my parents' first wondering and worrying about moving, then actually planning the move, and finally building a house on a hill that looked back at the city from about 30 miles. It was a psychological growth spurt, the beginning of a precise time I knew I had to record in my memory as succinctly as I had once before all the play-by-play of Jets football games:

During the second game of the season against the Bills, I am sitting with my parents, as they look through the real estate pages. For the away loss to Washington, I am at a pizzeria with my cousins Gene and Eamon, and Gene is playing Aerosmith's version of "Come Together" on the juke box, and Dad has a distracted expression. The game is on a black and white TV on the counter, and I see Richard Todd led away to the locker room after injuring his shoulder. The away win over Baltimore, I am sitting in the backseat as my parents are on a stakeout to confront the carpenter who appears to have run off with our new kitchen cabinets. By the time I am listening on the radio to the Jets lose to Dallas on the last day of the regular season, I am helping my father to tie the Christmas tree to the roof of the car in a bone-chillingly cold, gray afternoon. The season and the future have resolved themselves, and each game is not just a piece of a collective memory but now an integral part of the memory of my life. I am growing up.

NY Jets #61 - Part 3

The Jets appeared to have drafted Greg Gunter #61 as a center-guard in 1985 from CW Post, and yet there are few mentions about him as a professional football player, except in little notes added to articles about Mark Gastineau. The web site FamousWhy, which offers the kind of spectrum analysis of worldwide human fame that I think an unknowing alien species would perform if it wanted to understand Earth culture, lists him as a "Taurus." FamousWhy lists most people as "personalities," which according to them means politicians' wives, models or porn actors. Greg Gunter is an "athlete." We are, all of us, possibly one of those things, or all of them, whether we know it or not. (I have no idea what that means.)

George Lilja #61 appears to be none of those things. In fact, the center from Michigan, who played for the Jets from 1983-84, is much more than that. He was lucky enough to play for the Cleveland Browns during the last great years of the franchise - Marty Shottenheimer's mid-to-late playoff teams, and yes, he started the January 4, 1987 double-overtime playoff victory over the Jets, which means he blocked against the very same defensive front line composed of former teammates from two years before.

Much of what I've found out about Lilja indicates that he is defined most by his religion. According to his Wikipedia page, his parents "brought him up in a Christian manner" - a manner that remains with him today. What being a good Christian means can vary, depending upon whom you ask. Whatever the definition, being a "Christian" now has manifold political implications in our present environment. If you are Christian in the United States, then apparently you are more likely to vote one way, while an agnostic is likely to vote another. I don't remember that always being the case when I was growing up, but this is what the current political dialogue seems to suggest.

I grew up a Roman Catholic, which meant that I was, technically, a religious minority within a religious majority, which was a little confusing if you went to college in New England while your family had relocated to Memphis, Tennessee. During summers between college years, I worked in an auto parts warehouses around Memphis. I worked in the packing division, loading things onto trucks with a forklift; it was the only time in my life when I was allowed to operate a piece of cool, heavy machinery. I was at the shrink-wrap machine when an older worker came over to me with an affectionate hand on my shoulder, telling me he'd be very happy if I attended service at his church. It was an invitation you got in the South, as common as someone asking if you'd like a ride home in the rain. People were always trying to get you to go to their church because I think they were told that it was the way you got to heaven; you invited people who weren't destined for salvation to see the path made available to salvation. It was only polite.

I told this man that I was Catholic and went to church with my family at parish down by the river. At this, he became troubled.

"That's terrible," he said.

"Really?" I asked.

"Son," he said, as if I had strayed onto the path where there were lots of hungry bears, "you're marked by the devil."

"The what?"

He shook his head. "I don't think I can do anything for your kind. You're a member of the Beast's tribe. Read Revelation, son. It's all there." He walked away, dismayed. The Beast's tribe sounded like a fantastic biker gang, but I knew that it was I who was being demonized.

***

We are two tribes, aren't we? Separated into the red and blue colors of the electoral maps in our old American history textbooks, we are now encouraged to demonize one another, often at the bidding of a media that relishes and is nourished by conflict of any kind. We are, in fact, re-enacting our oldest conflicts as a country, yet we don't always seem to know why. Government is not completely evil, as people are made to believe; corporations are not all inhuman, as others would have you expect. Yet there we are - Tea Party zanies vs. 99 Percenters, never wondering what we might have in common.

Reading a 2003 online Christian publication on George Lilja's life after football, I see this:

Understanding his imperfection, George has made the Bible and prayer to be his guides when speaking to people of ages ranging from high school to adult. George has thoroughly enjoyed using his gift to edify the church and speak to the lost. For him, it has been very rewarding and fulfilling. The journey that has since been traveled by George has been truly radical and exciting.

"It's a journey that the world just doesn't understand," he said.

I know that I am a part of "the world" he mentions above, and not apart from it. I live in it, and I try to do good within it, and I don't consult the Bible to address my own imperfections, of which there are many. I search for something he and I have in common. The article points out that he struggles with things just as I do:

Throughout his life, George has struggled with worrying. It has been one of the biggest struggles that he has had to face. In his heart, he has realized how worrying is a sin of distrusting God, and in thinking that his circumstances were bigger than God.

Worrying has always been a part of my life, too. I do not remember a time in my life when I was not in some way afraid of something, or anything. I remember being afraid of lightning, of school, of other kids, of being humiliated, of bullies, of making people angry, of monsters in my dreams, of drowning in water, and of armies in the middle of the night. It's human to worry, and it's not a sin against God, but I know that a little boy who worries about his football team losing all week is not a boy who is handling his fandom normally. The worry I felt leading up the the 1987 Divisional Playoff Game in which George Lilja played his small part was paralyzing. The feeling of dread that accompanies every game, every week of the football season is in some way part of a larger anxiety drawn from that event, and it also has its DNA in everyone in my extended family who has been beset by anxiety, depression and drinking.

Now that I'm a grown up, I can take medication to block my worries, to treat it like the diagnosable disease I feel it is, while George Lilja might see worry as a human imperfection in the first place. It's true that we don't have control over much of anything in life, but I feel that one of the things over which I have no control is my anxiety; though I can blunt it, I can never really make it go away permanently. I feel that the implication is that since I suffer from it, someone like George Lilja would say I have seen myself as greater than God. But I really don't.

Is he demonizing someone like me? No. And I don't want to demonize George Lilja, either. Maybe he feels I'm one of the lost, as someone who needs a ride in the rain. So be it. I can live with that. I've taught Fundamentalist Christian students whom I was convinced saw the flames of Hell lapping all around me, regardless of what they thought of my teaching. So be it. Perhaps someone like George Lilja and someone like me can indeed live in the same place and yet not tear our country apart. Now wouldn't that be nice?

NY Jets #61 - Part 2

Adrien Clarke

We're using a discussion of Adrien Clarke #61 to address something that's always fascinated me - the official player picture. Adrien Clarke played guard for the Jets in 2007 after recovering from serious back injury. He's mentioned here in a NYT article running for the weight room in anticipation for the second game of the season, an eventual loss to the Ravens, the second of what would be 12 losses during that dreadful year. Chad Pennington was badly injured early on and the team never recovered or simply could not protect any quarterback they fielded. Today, Adrien Clarke is mentioned on his Wikipedia page as the "incumbent right guard for the Virginia Destroyers," which sounds unusually official. They are a UFL team coached, at the time of this writing, by Marty Shottenheimer. (How is it possible that Shottenheimer is coaching in a vastly inferior league? Shouldn't he be relaxing on a beach somewhere? Doesn't anyone love him?)

But what I'd really like to do is talk about the football picture, the official snapshot that appears in programs, on web sites, anywhere you need to see your favorites without helmets. I'll never forget the extraordinary feeling of dread and fear that overcame me when in 1975 I saw the official Pittsburgh Steelers team portrait of Ernie Holmes, the most eccentric member of the original Steel Curtain. Pittsburgh was playing the Jets at Shea in 1975, and there he was, a man with what I recall as a handle-bar moustache, which might look whimsical on a bartender or a relief pitcher, but looks abjectly horrifying on a defensive lineman like Ben Davidson or Ernie Holmes. Baseball players don't look horrifying in the game programs. Basketball players may look brooding at worst. Hockey players always seem amused at themselves, particularly if they're thinking about killing someone when their picture is taken. But simply put, football players are somehow instructed to look like they're trying to scare small children, as Holmes' picture did me (and probably Joe Namath) that warm late autumn day, when I was six.

Adrien Clarke (Ohio State)

Take a look at Clarke's college football picture at left. This is how guys on my high school football team would try to look for the camera, or they way they'd look at you when they wanted you to step aside on the lunch line and let them go ahead of you. He's puffing his neck out, making himself resemble a mushroom. Often the football players I knew in high school were socially awkward. They got girls mostly by standing around, smiling and scowling while inflating their necks, with their chins in the air, their eyes looking imperiously around the backyard of whichever home had been commandeered for a keg party. It's a look that conceals uncertainty and self-doubt.

Adrien Clarke (Philadelphia)

But then there's Adrien Clarke at right, drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in 2004. This is his Eagles' team photo. It's the look of a bouncer who has identified you as definitely not fitting the criteria for visitation to the throbbing nightclub. Three women whom you saw with him eight years before in that same backyard are now all going past you, their wrists jingling with bling, their little purses in one hand and an iPhone in the other. He flashes you this look while holding the velvet barrier up for their passage. But those same women are now very effective investment bankers who may actually being playing their small part in a cosmic circle of corporate greed that has, in a domino effect, resulted in the devaluing of the bouncer's condominium. The look on Clarke's face says, "I got this." But I'm not sure that's true. Still, this is America. You can hardly blame him for ignoring the irony of it all.

****

Roger Finnie's 1970 helmet

Last week we found Dan Ficca's helmet for sale online. You might be surprised to know that Roger Finnie's (#61) 1970 helmet went for about $100 more, though it's not as old, and judging from the rather jaundiced appearance of the JETS logo, it's in worse condition.

Finnie played guard for the Jets from 1969-72, and then with the St. Louis football Cardinals from 1973-78 and the Saints in 1979, which is a pretty full career, all things considered. Consider what a battering to the head he takes day in and out, the offensive lineman would seem to have the least appealing position in football. Stoic, deliberate, silent, and dedicated, the offensive lineman is the opposite of someone like Ernie Holmes, whose flamboyance in facial hair was matched by an arrowhead mohawk.

On the other hand, consider that Finnie played alongside one of the most erratic and vocal of offensive linemen in the game's history, Conrad Dobler, whose years with the Cardinals were 1972-77. Dobler took the viewpoint that the offensive line was part of an invading, pillaging army, and not just a solid wall defined by its protection of the the players who were responsible for gaining yards. I don't know how Roger Finnie saw himself on the line, but he probably had to take into account Dobler's attitude because you simply couldn't ignore Conrad Dobler.

Dobler's current plights have been the subject of many articles. He was much reviled when he played, but Dobler could summon today the sympathies of anyone, even Cowboys fans. Certainly I've put aside the fact that he played for the Buffalo Bills in 1981, whose Wild Card victory over the Jets scarred me for life. He can barely walk, and he is beset by constant depression. In the LA Times, Jerry Crowe writes that "Dobler's knees are shot, one writer noting that they resembled 'misshapen melons in a discount supermarket bin.' So he gobbles pain medicine. A leg amputation is not a matter of if, he says, but when." An offensive lineman's knees are the most ravaged piece of equipment, for he stands rooted to the ground and in the face of 300-plus pounds of pressure against his chest, arms and head. Play after the play, the guard is pummeled, and his feet have to find purchase in the turf. Dobler aside, it's a quiet struggle characterized by constant, punishing repetition.

Roger Finnie #61

I found Finnie referenced at the very beginning of author Richard Kostelanetz's 1970 article about Dr. James Nicholas, the longtime surgeon-in-residence New York Jets. Perhaps wearing the very helmet advertised above, Finnie went down in a game that season, and Nicholas attended:

The doctor quickly diagnosed not only torn ligaments but a dislocated knee cap that accounted for especially excruciating pain. Nicholas first put his own legs underneath Finnie's knee, in order to take weight off the damaged leg, and then put his hand on the kneecap and delicately moved it back into place, reducing the pain resulting from dislocation, somewhat easing the tackle's discomfort. 

Finnie got surgery that year, as did Namath. Nicholas is still seen today as one of the pioneering physicians dealing almost exclusively with the injuries of professional football. He was responsible for extending Namath's career and, in a sense, he gave him the opportunity to be in the Hall of Fame. Though he doesn't have a number, he was and is an Infinite Jet, a person loyal to the club who used his position to discover how to make players play better and longer.

Yet as we know from the the evolving technology of the football helmet, for every improvement, there is something in the game's compulsion to destroy that also compensates, leaving the protected player somehow unprotected in some other sense. Many former players live long lives, but the recent suicides of Dave Duerson, Ray Easterling and Junior Seau paint an evolving picture of the retired football player's life as filled with vanishing memory, darkness and early death. Fortunately, the odds suggest that Roger Finnie is fairing better than that.

NY Jets #61 - Part 1

Is there anyone out there who's interested in New York Titans cuff links? I don't have any to sell, but that's not the point. The question is rhetorical. In Islam, conspicuous consumption and greed are defined by having so many possessions that you cannot stand upright. Of course, Ben Franklin also rightly said that an empty bag can't stand upright, either. But is a man at the upper levels of society likely to buy Titans cuff links? Would Titans cuff links be a good addition to the board room? Isn't it too ironic to impress anyone? Irony doesn't impress anyone the way cuff links are supposed to. Irony is the refuge of those who will never know what it means to win - those who will never stand upright because they have nothing.

What can any of this can tell us about Dan Callahan #61, who played for Titans at guard from 1960-61? Twelve men walked on the moon between 1969 and 1973; roughly 150 men played for the New York Titans, an AFL organization run by a former sportscaster who drank himself to death. Some men are in the right place at the right time; how you want to define "right" in this instance is irrelevant. If anything, Callahan was unique because of his time and place. Rich or poor, or somewhere in between, if he's still alive, Dan Callahan may be the right person to buy cuff links that commemorate his specific time in a specific place. So there's your answer.

Frank D'Agostino may have been the first Titan to wear the number 61, before Callahan. Other than that, I only see that he played for the Eagles in 1956. Or maybe it was Leon Dombrowski #61 who wore it first. All three men are listed as starting in 1960. I'm not sure the cuff links will mean anything to them, but I might be wrong. Just keep in mind, they cost $60. Cuff links could hardly be said to encumber anyone, but whether I made such an investment for myself or received them as a gift, I know I would be psychologically burdened by what a rip-off they are.

Dan Ficca's 1965 helmet

On the other hand, would you like to buy Dan Ficca's (#61) helmet? That's also a rhetorical question because the bidding is over, and now the auction is just an online memory. It sold for $940, which is pretty cool. Check it out here, and you'll see how rudimentary a football helmet was in 1965, Ficca's last year with the Jets. A mere pad at the top of the head and canvas straps on the side protect the head from the outside blows. It's almost quaint to imagine something like this protecting anyone from anything, and whether they meant to be humorous or not, the sellers put quotes around the word padding, possibly to suggest that its structural protection was always purely symbolic.

The truth is that while wearing a helmet like this, Dan Ficca had to reckon with people like the legendary behemoth defensive lineman Ernie Ladd of San Diego. In Ed Gruver's American Football League, Ficca says the following about Ladd:

He broke my nose, and then he broke my cheekbone. Then he broke the cheekbone on the other side, but by then, my head was numb.  

(On the same page, Gruver writes that apparently the only way to soften Ladd's imperious power was to "compliment" him, as former Patriots guard Charley Long did. "What could we do?" Long says, sounding like a helpless member of an animist tribe about the wrath of a god, "I told him how great he was - just praying that he wouldn't get mad and hit any harder.")

Against a 6'9" monster like Ladd, the helmet above stood very little chance. The industrial-gray face mask looks like a relic from the late 50's, but this must have been Ficca's preference. The white-on-green football logo is slanted decidedly upwards, as it was throughout the 1960's, headed toward the sky like so many things optimistically were - jets, satellites, space capsules. Click on one of the images at the link, and you can happily magnify each one to needlessly large dimensions - the old Riddell tags and the handwritten "61" in blue ink inside. It's old, but back then it must have looked as fragile as the delicate human head it is meant to protect, and since we now know that no helmet is adequate against head trauma, the one we see above is testimony to the carefree optimism of its time.

Apparently Dan Ficca was traded to the Jets from Oakland at the beginning of the 1963 training camp, and, in a move that may have started the antipathy between the two clubs that decade, Al Davis apparently neglected to tell the Jets that their new guard still had six months of military service to perform. The Jets should probably have checked that out ahead of time. Ficca played at guard for the Jets for three seasons, from 1963-65. There are bits and pieces of contemporary news about his whereabouts in his native Pennsylvania, in what is known as the Lower Anthracite Region, most specifically Mt. Carmel, which sits near the center of the commonwealth. As a local boy done good, he seemed to have been feted in newspapers in the years after leaving town, even having the birth of his first child mentioned as a news event in 1966. In 2009, he is back in his home town, where he has probably lived since retiring from the game. We see him hosting the Mount Carmel Area Athletic Alumni Association's scholarship awards for high school seniors. In 2011, his face is shown among residents at town meeting that addressed the community's fears about people using bath salts to get high. Such is small town life.

This was apparently one of two helmets that Ficca auctioned off. The other, auctioned on Ebay at some point, was probably more valuable - the 1964 helmet with the green-on-white logo that the Jets had for just one season. I suppose when I look at the one at left, my eye is drawn to its outdated shape and the slight bulge at the ears, but I can't help staring at the little football resting beneath the streamlined JETS. The little football at the base of the current logo has large laces pointing outward. Here the laces point up. The old logo was also a brighter green than the current one.

But what always gets me is ghostly "NY" behind the team's name. When I was four, my parents gave me a little kid's Jets football helmet with the logo, and I used to just stare at it. The logo on top of the initials made me think about infinity, about layers and layers of things ad infinitum and about how nothing is ever quite known without knowing what's behind it. I once had a Giants fan tell me that the Jets logo looks like a bad high school art project, but that's no matter. That has no bearing on the things to which you attach yourself as a child, when all you desperately want is to belong to something greater than yourself. Obviously, as an adult, I see myself as being greater than my own fandom, but then such realizations belongs to the realm of adulthood, a place where ideas are less permanent, less stable, less certain and always more malleable than they were when you were a child, when everything pointed optimistically upward.

The Jets and the NFL Bounty: Declarations of Dependence

I've been reluctant to write lately, here or anywhere. I'm on vacation this week and am still exhausted by work. Usually the months between football seasons are filled with making up for lost time with respect to the Infinite Jets. There's more to discuss because there's only so much time you can devote to real life and the draft before it becomes all too redundant - the commute to work, the usual looks of reluctance and disdain on the part of my clientele, the same commute home, walking the dog, making the same dinner, having the same conversations with everyone. A single human life is dull - ask anyone who has one - but, as the late Harvey Pekar would say, who am I kidding? What would I be without my routine?

So it's not life getting me down or any of that. I have medication to thank for getting me through what Harvey calls his daily life: "a major struggle." No, I think I know what the answer is.

First, it's the Jets, naturally. I know I'm not supposed to be talking about this anymore and that we're all supposed to be moving on. The nice thing about the trauma induced by fandom is that it's not real trauma; real trauma takes actual psychological help to undo. It cannot be fixed by forgetting alone. Fandom's trauma can be undone by forgetting, even when, as we all know, none of us ever really forgets. Still, it's all going to be OK.

The disparate outcomes of the two teams that claim New York in 2011 was sort of like having my wife leave me for a guy whom I was forced thank after he punches me in the groin. That's actually never happened to me, but being humiliated by the Giants on Christmas Eve and then having no choice other than to root for them against New England in the Super Bowl was fairly close.

At my college, about 25 years ago, the majority of my friends were from New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. New Yorkers and Connecticuters were solidly Giants fans and then split their affiliations in baseball between whichever New York team did better, which varied differently back then, though that may be difficult for younger readers to believe. The Mets made the postseason in 1986 and '88. The Yankees did not and would not for several years to come. Guys from Mass were solid Red Sox fans out of practice and tradition, though they harbored a little hope of seeing the Patriots return to the Super Bowl, but they loved basketball because it meant rooting for the Celtics. Like the Puritans of old, my Massachusetts pals felt justified when their teams' fortunes eventually changed for the better.

My friends followed winning teams. I was a Jets fan. I walked around the dorm in a kelly green t-shirt with the Reagan-era streamline JETS logo, and guys looked at me like I had joined the Hare Krishnas. I lived with guys like this; they liked me, but they didn't understand me, and that was fine. They studied finance, marketing and law, the disciplines of winners. I was an English major. No one wins in literature. People get married in the end of comedies, people die meaninglessly in tragedies, and otherwise everybody else learns sobering lessons about how hard human life is. That's not winning. This year's Super Bowl was like wearing that stupid t-shirt again, being reduced to the losing circle in every way. Jets suck, Roche. Great. Tell me something I don't already know. Welcome to my life. Just remember, if I didn't have this routine to go through year in and out, I wouldn't be anything at all.

****

It's also football. American football, the game you and I love. And before I become overwrought, let me first make clear, I'm not declaring independence from anything. I made my bed, and I'm sleeping in it. I have loved football for as long as I can remember being human, and I have been a Jets fan for at least that long. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with myself if I don't watch football this year, and there is no other team I can call home. So that's settled, and everything will inevitably return to normal.

Yesterday, while listening to recordings of Gregg Williams' tirade before the playoff game against San Francisco, I was struck by his emphasis on three points:

1) "The NFL is a production business," he says. "Don't ever forget about that." There isn't a single NFL coach, assistant, or executive who wouldn't disagree with that, and the degree to which that production involves sacks, tackles, assists, or legs, heads and spines is, in American football, a source of confusion, for both players and fans, and it's a confusion that we know we live with all the time. As long as you win, you will be paid. You are paid to win. Winning means killing. Ergo?

2) "Kill the head and the body will die." It makes me think of Frank Rizzo. I may be attributing far more distinction to former Philadelphia Mayor Rizzo than he deserves from a bleeding heart, but I think one of his mottos was Ego frendo caput capitis, which stands for pretty much Gregg Williams' philosophy on why his defense was so good. I've always said that moving to Philadelphia a year after Rizzo's death was like moving to Spain a year after Franco. Suddenly there was air to breathe again; you were no longer being told that the reason why the city was a great place to live was because you were being protected from some horrible element by a military-styled government. Here I take the blogger's cue to expand my musings - the head is the source of imagination, creativity, wisdom, inquiry and reason. The body will die without it, but the head makes us human. And like other violent exercises - coercion, terrorism and warfare - the goal of a good defense is to do nothing else but to make the noble mind think twice because it's suddenly beset by fear (Yes, phantom reader, another link to Dune) the mind-killer.

I remember a briefly poignant moment in Bill Buford's gripping Among the Thugs where a police officer in Sunderland asks Buford about fan violence in American football. How many people attend football games in America? he asks. Buford says about 50-60,000, sometimes 80,000. The constable blanches at the thought. And there's no significant violence to speak of? he asks. No, Buford says. The constable looks vexed and perturbed. How can that be? he seems to ask. Buford doesn't supply the answer; the point is that he is trying to say something about the violence endemic to the English people - it's ageless and elusive, at the heart of every human person who spends time on that island nation. But American tribes of violence are priced out of sporting events. Yes, fans get stabbed at Raiders games. Mostly, there are armed gangs outside the arena, weaving their own mythologies of loyalty and manhood the same way that hooligans do from station to station. Even then, even if no tribe will have you in America, you need only a gun and a state law written for a backward-minded people that suggests you can interpret the right to stand your ground for yourself and kill another human being.

3) "It's a great game. It's a production business." It's sort of repeat of one. Every sport is the symbolic gesture of its culture's anxieties and conflict. Hockey belongs to the hatred of English to French and vice versa. Soccer transcends them all, possibly because it's so maddeningly sublime that its suspensefulness is too much for the racked mind, and while clubs have largely priced hooliganism out in England, the beautiful game engenders a fear that everything or nothing can happen in 90 minutes, and this can bring out the most guarded resentment absolutely anywhere.

It's a great game because it's a production business. American football allows others to act out that rage for us. It pays handsomely for men to destroy one another, and we all know it. It's the American way: as long as you're being paid, what do you have to complain about? We already know that money justifies everything. The logical extension from being paid to win to being paid to kill in order to win is something we all know from our own values. It's what tobacco companies do, what distilling companies do, what oil companies do, what drug dealers do, and it's why all of these groups are so successful. We all accept the trade; in order to win, you have to kill. In order to enjoy this sport, people must be disabled, must fall apart and die an early death. That's what they're being paid to do. Human life is cheap.

Which brings me to musing at long, long last about what this means. It means nothing. I will still be grateful for football's return, and I will be (just as I am now) overly optimistic about the Jets' chances (seriously, they're not as bad as everybody thinks). Remember the father of our head coach is the poster child for the bounty. I will watch every NFL game I possibly can because I would rather watch a football game than anything else on TV, even Mad Men. I have no choice in this matter (other than, say, reading or exercising). I have already accepted the reality of this larger agreement among men and machines, that this game is what it is and that bounties are surely omnipresent because they are a logical extension of a game and the culture that produced it. I am merely a part of it all.

NY Jets #15 - 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.

My birthday just recently passed, and an inordinate number of people sent me pictures on Facebook of Tim Tebow #15, mostly to annoy me. My brother sent me a wordless image of Tebow at his press conference. One friend sent me a picture of himself Tebowing on his lawn for me. All of these had the purpose of reminding me what all middle-aged people are conditioned to remember when they turn another year - that life is futile, fleeting, and that if something can get worse, it will. This was apparently my birthday present - the gift of a man who appears to win week by week by virtue of his sheer will, though of course the irony is that deluded people like Tebow himself - people who probably vote for Rick Santorum - believe it is solely the will of God.

The will of God. Growing up, I guess I never thought of God being particularly interested in the New York Jets doing well. I could see how God preferred the 1970's Cowboys, as He was apparently in regular communication with Tom Landry. God didn't particularly love the Steelers, but He gambled away his lifetime grudge against the franchise to the Rooney family in a 1969 poker game - a true story. The Raiders of that era were part of God's experiment with self-dominion, and He was eventually horrified what He saw happen at Alameda Coliseum, no doubt just as He probably was horrified by Lucifer's fall, but by the time the Raiders had moved to Los Angeles, God decided to let them burn themselves out like a bunch of washed out Hollywood porn stars. The 49ers of the 80's and 90's did so well because God was an enormous fan of the West Coast Offense. Growing up, the Jets seemed the way I always judged myself to be in God's eyes - not as particularly important and not terribly fortunate, but appreciated for the effort. 

Anyway, our subject of late has been backups, probably because we’re revising all those typically "quarterback" jersey numbers. But nothing gets to heart of football's mythology quite like a quarterback controversy. American football is a game that sets a tremendous pressure on the signal caller. Obviously defense wins championships, but the quarterback is the titular leader, the model of the team itself. He is the figure with the greatest symbolic resonance for a franchise. So the pairings of two generals on the same team always seems like stars crossed in the same endeavor: Unitas-Morrall, Morton-Staubach, Montana-Young,....and Sanchez-Tebow? (Sigh.) That last one doesn't quite fit. Perhaps it's of little surprise that John Elway disposed of his team’s most inconveniently nettlesome symbol by sending Tim Tebow to the Jets, for Elway never had to share the spotlight with anyone, and he certainly didn't want to allow a cartoon character to occupy the sacred quarterback position.

Will Tebow accept the role of a backup? Does he demand equal billing with Mark Sanchez, the way Steve McQueen needed to be on a vaguely equal credit billing with Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno? The analogy is a poor one, for neither quarterback can lead their team to the Super Bowl the way that Newman and McQueen enabled Fred Astaire and OJ Simpson to reach safety. Maybe it’s like imagining who deserves equal billing between child actors, like Kirk Cameron and Fred Savage - the squeaky-clean Fundamentalist cyborg and the modern day Beaver Cleaver who's got a history of female trouble.

The Jets might be a towering inferno, though. They may be a full-on disaster film next year, a hellish catastrophe. Inferno, for Tebow, is also the literal hell, the place bad people go when they die, perhaps even the place where non-born-again Christians go when they die – and that might make up a great deal of the Jets fanbase. It might be said that the Jets themselves play in the belly of the Beast, the New York tri-state area, the Sodom of America. Certainly all of that includes me.

I’ve examined this topic more fully in my piece on the Lunch Break. I use an extravagant number of metaphors, similes, and analogies. I even make reference to 1836.

Richard Sandomir tallied up all the #15’s recently (I wonder if he had a little help), and among others he mentions Bob Davis and Babe Parilli, and we’d like to devote the rest of this entry to these two, both of whom were Namath’s backups.

According to the Wikipedia entry for #15 Bob Davis, backup quarterback to Joe Namath in 1970 and 1971: "I was actually a much better basketball player in high school than I was a football player." If you are a Jets fan and a connoisseur of Jets history, you can recognize the humor in that. The Jets had the jewel in the sport's crown as their QB, yet Namath was fragile and prone to all kinds of injuries - knees, shoulders, elbows all going wrong. Bob Davis stepped in during the 1971 and '72 seasons.

Among the names of Namath's ragtag backups, New Jersey native Bob Davis ranks as the best, probably. He started half the games of the 1971 season, replaced in the famous loss to the Niners when Namath nearly brought the team back from a 24-7 deficit. As 70's seasons went, the Jets went a respectable 6-8 in 1971 when Bob Davis lead them on the field, with rookie John Riggins and Emerson Boozer splitting nearly 1400 yards between them. As recently as 2007 he was the President of Rumson-Fair Haven Bank and was quoted in a Monmouth County newspaper about a branch being opened in Asbury Park.

Babe Parilli, doing his best Joe Willie

Sandomir focuses his article about #15's on Babe Parilli, the backup to Namath on the 1968 championship team. He points out that had Namath gone through with his threat top retire at the beginning of the following season, Parilli would have been the starter for the defending Super Bowl champions. This obviously did not occur. Sandomir quotes Parilli as having returned to training camp that season and, assured of Namath's own return, was quoted as saying, "It's a relief to the whole club."

I forget which book it came from, but I recall reading a 1968 story about a couple of girls seeing Joe Namath at an airport or bus station as the team was traveling together. They approached him, looking to get his autograph. Namath said, "Sorry ladies, but you've got the wrong guy." He pointed at Parilli standing nearby and said, "That's Joe Namath right over there." When the girls approached Babe, the backup quarterback rightly pointed back at Joe Willie, who then sent them back to Babe. And so on.

Was it easy to confuse them? Obviously, no. But Parilli did hold the Patriots' passing record for a season (1964), broken later by Tom Brady in 2007. His nickname was "Goldfinger," apparently for being one of the best placekicking holders in the game. He threw early and often to Gino Cappelletti as a starting QB for Boston, but Cappelletti was also the team's placekicker kicker, with Parilli the hold. Parilli then held for Jim Turner on the Jets; a backup must often needs be the holder, the one who can make or break a kick based on his ability to catch the ball, place the ball, turn the ball and move your hand away. Simple? No. 

Get close to the details of his life, and Parilli resembles Namath, somewhat. Both men started for Bear Bryant at Alabama. Both men came from Beaver County, Pennsylvania, an area of the country that bred quarterbacks.

With an iPhone, two otherwise unknowing teenage girls would probably be able to figure out the difference between Tebow and Sanchez, though comparatively speaking, I have it on an otherwise completely independent female authority that Sanchez's dark looks and curly hair are the winner. (We'll put aside the easy jokes about Sanchez's appreciation for young women.) I have no idea how each man would handle a real confusion of identity, though they have in common an essential characteristic - they have each been to the conference championship, yet neither may actually be that good. Can two wrongs make a right? We have no choice in deciding the matter. We are fans. We must rely on the will of God.  

NY Jets #11 - Part 3

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.

Drafted in the second round in 2006, Kellen Clemens #11 was supposed to be the man-in-waiting for the end of Chad Pennington's career. Is there any more hopeful gesture in the football universe than the drafting of a quarterback? I don't mean drafting someone like Andrew Luck, Matt Leinart or Mark Sanchez, in the first round. I mean drafting someone like Kellen Clemens in the second, a thrown hope in a field of hopefuls from many positions. Sitting there, seemingly innocuous, he may well be the future of the franchise, for all you know. Ah, but then let's not go there just yet. Not just yet. Ah, but maybe. Maybe.

You look for pictures of him online. You find this picture at the right. You imagine him in a Jets uniform, coming off the bench when Chad Pennington will eventually wither or be injured, and suddenly you witness the seas parting and the staff turned to a snake. A drafted quarterback represents the richest hope that a football fan could wish for because this is a game made and determined by the success of its signal caller, whether he can make good decisions on his own or follows the bidding of his coach through a microphone in his helmet. We are, as a nation, by our very nature, drawn to principles of self-reliance and individuality. We don't like people telling us what to do. But there is in the quarterback the embodiment of another American archetype, the single general in charge of everything, upon whom all things rely. The One. Every drafted quarterback is potentially The One who will make us all #1.

But not most quarterbacks, and not Kellen Clemens. Today he is technically a backup in St. Louis. His #11 was taken from him and reduced by ten to #1, a jersey number which is often ironic in this game because it is the number everyone wants to be, but not to wear. You cannot name anybody successful in football who wore #1. You barely find a kicker who wears it well.

Another #11 drafted backup is J.J. Jones. He was the first African-American quarterback for the New York Jets. A rookie from Fisk University, Jones was the sole backup to Namath, and like the others before him in the 70's - Demory, Woodall, Davis - Jones' primary goal was to hand the ball off to John Riggins (though the others handed off to Boozer, too). As depicted in the card to the left, he was obviously put into Ken Shipp's first game as coach that year, a 37-6 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals, probably in the fourth quarter, after one of Namath's passes was returned for an interception. He started against the San Diego Chargers in week 13, after Namath apparently missed curfew during the week. It was a gesture, merely. Jones threw about six passes total, and then Namath went into the game at the start of the second quarter. The Jets lost to a poor San Diego team, 24-16. It was his first and last starting job as a pro.

No sooner did that moment pass into oblivion (or my memory) than - according to the alumni newsletter from Fisk University - J.J. was named a Presidential Appointee by President Gerald R. Ford to the U.S. Department of Commerce's Office of Minority Business Enterprise. He was also a co-founder of Pacific Northwest Chapter National Black Chamber of Commerce in Seattle in 1996. He became a fairly respected member of the community, and that's why his death in 2009 was newsworthy. He died in a house fire, apparently, the work of an arsonist, very likely his nephew, a mentally ill man who had been living with Jones and his partner.

At JetNation, the news of his death was joined with an update that Jones himself gave back in March 2008 in reply to the question, "What happened to JJ Jones?" In reply to JetNation's all-points request, Jones made a provocative comment about Lou Holtz that's worth reading. He made an excellent point about himself as a pioneer, for he was. Seeing an African-American at quarterback position was a sight to which the eyes of the nation needed to adjust in the 1970's, and whether at backup, or starting, as James Harris did in Los Angeles, or starting for the injured Terry Bradshaw, as Joe Gilliam did, the black quarterback was seen as an anomaly. To my mind, this has only recently changed.

Warren Moon is a Hall of Famer who, as Jones points out, credited "James Harris and a couple of others" in his induction speech. Moon won the Rose Bowl for the University of Washington two years after Jones retired. "I met Warren Moon when he visited Mount Zion my church home in Seattle," Jones writes, "and I told him I was one of those 'couple of others!" Most of us are backups like Clemens and Jones, and perhaps that's all we will be. But all of us, whether we realize it or not, are one of a couple of others to someone somewhere, offering a place for someone else to fill, even when the person who benefits from it never knows who we are.