NY Jets #70 - Part 1

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

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

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

What is Gene Cockrell doing?

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

It's a tea party. Get it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Audrey"

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

NY Jets #67 - Part 2

The conversation, somewhere in Queens in 1975 or '76, must have gone something like this:

ME:     "Dad, what's wrong with his voice?"

DAD:  "Well, I think he has an accent, Marty."

The voice on the radio about which I was speaking belonged to Dave Herman #67, former tackle and guard for the Jets from 1964-73, who was now the color commentator for WOR-AM's coverage of the Jets. Our conversation reveals something about the way I viewed the world at a very early age. First, without knowing any better, I think I came to assume that most things in the world were essentially flawed. It may have been that rooting for the Jets had already enabled this sense in me or maybe this way of being was merely the perfect breeding ground for a Jets' fandom. Regardless, when I heard Dave Herman's voice on the radio, I assumed that something was wrong.

To further complicate my understanding of the world, this is how I actually understood the conversation:

ME:     "Dad, what's wrong with his voice?"

DAD:  "Well, I think he had an accident, Marty."

To a sheltered South Shore Long Island boy, Dave Herman's voice sounded different from anything I had heard before, and while I didn't know what an accent was, I knew what an "accident" was. It was a blanket term for a variety of things that had happened or could happen to me. An accident was what you claimed when you spilled orange juice across the kitchen table, but it was also something that you heard had caused the death of a neighbor down the road who drove into traffic coming home from work one evening. Without knowing any better, it seemed to me that if something was wrong with Dave Herman's voice - and to me there was - then it made sense that something happened to him - an accident - something that had disabled his voice.

Dave Herman was actually born and raised in northwestern Ohio, in the town of Bryan, and he attended Michigan State. So what was I hearing? Well, according to Rick Aschmann's mind-blowing map of American dialects, Herman's hometown is an area of the Midwest located at the crossroads of a variety of intersecting dialects - the basic "Inland North" dialect that is also heard in upstate New York, the "General American" accent found throughout the US, the "Midland" accent and the unique "Indiana North" accent. Where Dave Herman fits in any of that, I don't know, so I will leave it to you to figure it out. I'm just glad I could hear him speak again.

Other than the linguistic confusion that Herman's accent offered, it was his "accident" that somehow made me believe that if even of the world were flawed, it was still could be a good place, offering compassion, opportunity, and a chance at recovery. It seemed as unrealistic back then as it does today that a man injured in some kind of accident such that his speech was affected would land a place on the radio, and yet apparently, in my impressionable mind, WOR did just that, and that was nice to know, albeit erroneously.

***

Super Bowl III is seen as Joe Namath's moment, an apotheosis of one man's will. Jets fans are unique in seeing the game of football this way. We have this basic belief that a quarterback will save us, just as he did that seemingly hopeless day in 1969. But their victory that night relied on a monumental team effort that seems sadly missing from our ranks in 2013, and that's the essential problem. We buy into this false myth that the charismatic quarterback we either bring in or draft - Richard Todd, Ken O'Brien (not you-know-who), Browning Nagle, Neil O'Donnell, Chad Pennington, Kellen Clemens, Brett Favre, Mark Sanchez, Geno Smith - will save us from ourselves.

In 2009, Jeff Miller did a fair service to the legend of Super Bowl III by suggesting a new wrinkle - that its MVP should have been Dave Herman, not Joe Namath. Herman was put on the right side for the latter part of the '68 season, which meant that he was in charge of guarding Ike Lassiter in the AFL Title Game and, most importantly, the taller and faster Bubba Smith in the Super Bowl. That Smith only got to Namath once for a sack in the third quarter was a testimony to the game plan itself.

Dave Herman #67 in front of Bubba Smith #78

The Colts were a machine that ran rather unimaginatively on a series of assumptions that the Jets were able to exploit. One of these was that Bubba Smith could get past anyone to Namath, while the other was that Smith would neutralize the running game. The Jets took care of the latter by running Snell left. Dave Herman took care of Smith because he was an excellent, experienced lineman who knew how to stop a second-year player from his own alma mater.

In his memories from the buildup to the Super Bowl, Joe Namath remembers that it was Dave Herman who spoke up (in what he describes as a country drawl) during the hours of preparatory film and said something to the effect that they should stop watching so much of it because it was making everyone over-confident. While in Countdown to Super Bowl, Dave Anderson writes that Herman was in and out of a state of agitation throughout the time leading up to the game. On the morning of the game itself, Herman apparently sat at team breakfast, staring into space, repeating to himself over and over that he was going to kill Bubba Smith. During the weeks waiting, Herman seems alternately buoyant and anxious, reading only the Wall Street Journal for reports on the stock market. Now that the game itself is on the horizon, he seems uncertain, more afraid, or simply trying to visualize what he needs to do in order to stop one of the most feared players of his day.

When I took my six-hour Master's comprehensive exams years ago, I got our of my car, approached the department building on campus and thought about Dave Herman barely touching his breakfast, psyching himself up to kill Bubba Smith. Perhaps we love sports so much because our life is filled with little contests whose magnitude we can represent to ourselves as resembling the ones our teams play - contests over which, ironically, we have no control and which have no actual meaning to our lives, except in terms of the strange feelings they evoke in us. A job interview, a certification test, a meeting with someone to resolve a dispute, or a first date - we suddenly realize we are just an hour away, and we must now come to grips with the fact that this thing that we had thought about only abstractly is now very close at hand. It must be because it has to be. It has to be because it must be. It's an elliptical syntax that doesn't allow any doubt to enter.

In 2009, when Jeff Miller told Herman that he made him the MVP that should have been, Herman "didn't seem surprised or overwhelmed." Instead, he seems to know what the Jets' front office has lost sight of - that a true championship is not the miraculous work of one charismatic individual. Such things are only the property of myth. A quarterback solution is not a team solution, and while many of us await the second coming of a Namath, returning on a fiery chariot to vanquish our enemies, the truth is we could use more Dave Hermans, Randy Rasmussens, Winston Hills, Jon Schmitts, and Bob Talaminis. They kept Namath safe and kept the holes open for Snell to run. And we had Snell, too. And Maynard, Lammons and Sauer. And a relentless defense that forced turnovers. So many puzzle pieces that seem to be missing today.

***

Mike Gisler #67 was one of two other vital pieces of the New England Patriots' offense that came to the Jets, courtesy of Bill Parcells' influence in 1998. The other two were Keith Byars and Curtis Martin. Byars retired at the end of the season, and Martin is in the Hall of Fame. Mike Gisler played two seasons with the Jets, and then retired. I have no way of knowing if he continued his playing career somewhere else.

Where else could he play? Well, professional football began in the United States on Thursday with Denver's dismantling of Baltimore, but it's also important to remember that some degree of professional and amateur football is played everywhere, by teams like the Silver State Assassins, the Wenatchee Valley Rams, the Braintree Cowboys, and the Middle Tennessee Honey Badgers. My favorite is the Midwest Nightmare.

These are all teams in the American Football Association (AFA), a league promoting semi-pro and minor league football. For players whose dreams of NFL play are dashed, there is always a game somewhere in pads and helmets. One of their mottos is Ernie Banks' own - "It's a great day. Let's play two." As their site points out, players must play for the love of the game. What other reason would there be? Money seems scarce in the AFA.

Anthony Corvino #67, replacement player-scab for the Jets during the 1987 strike, went on in years to come as a second team All-American with the Marlboro Shamrocks, a good team to play for in the Eastern Football League, especially from about 1983 to 2004, when the Shamrocks won 15 Eastern League titles. However, the team doesn't appear to be on the league's current list. All periods of dominance must ultimately come to an end, and with them even the team itself, whether out of mediocrity, which I trust it will soon for the Patriots, or financially, as it did for Rangers FC. More than one fan of the Middleboro Cobras is today enjoying the absence of the Shamrocks from the standings, especially since the Cobras dropped six title games to the Marlboro club over a period of 14 seasons, acting as Wilt Chamberlin to the Shamrocks' Bill Russell. But last year, the Cobras beat the Worcester Mass Fury (my new favorite name; sorry, Nightmare) 39-6 for the EFL title. Perhaps Jets fans of many types can take comfort from that news, though not fans of the Broome County Jets, whose team doesn't seem to exist anymore, either.

NY Jets #66 - Part 2

Donald Evans #66 came to the Jets in 1994 as the club seemed vaguely optimistic when Pete Carroll was named coach. It died that season - though, to be fair, it took longer than usual within a given Jets losing season to deteriorate. It took 12 weeks, and then this.

Evans started all his games that season, and then started only four in the next brutally bad season of 1995 before retiring. If you're too young to remember those years, then you're lucky, I guess. But I've always felt that years of struggle as a fan can temper you for the ups and downs to come, and if you're a Jets fan, then you come to know bad years pretty intimately. Sometimes it helps to remember the really bad times to get through the run-of-the-mill bad times.

Evans recorded two sacks among his last four games in 1995, and both of them came in the second week overtime home loss to the Colts. Did it feel like just a day at work, or a really good day at work? 

He is also the highest drafted player to come out of Winston-Salem State University, where apparently a training facility is named in his honor. 

Billy Shields #66 also came to us at the end of his career for three games in 1985 after playing a long career with someone else, mostly on the offensive line with San Diego. Shields and Wes Chandler are the two players who famously helped Kellen Winslow leave the field after the Chargers' famous overtime duel with the Miami Dolphins in the 1982 playoffs. In 2011, his name came up as a questionable character in the Sierra Madre Tattler over the development plan for an assisted living complex in Sierra Madre, CA, but whether or not that's the same ex-Charger Billy Shields (as one angry commenter at the above link suggests) I don't know.

But the shortest career in #66 that we have is Vince Jasper. Three games in 1987. Yes, it's time to talk once again about the 1987 NFL Strike, that absolute nadir in the history of the NFL that saw "replacement players" put in for the regulars, a ruse that still angers me today. I can't blame Vince Jasper - a chance to play football professionally for three days must have been exciting. He even got to travel to Indianapolis, so at least there's that.

***

Tomorrow is the first exhibition game of the season. Before all of the drama of this season begins, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of you folks in the Jets blogging hemispheres a healthy and happy season ahead. It may be a long year, a year of wailing and gnashing our teeth, and I want to wish you the kind of happiness in your own lives that, perhaps, our beloved team will not be able to offer.

As the poster put it best, "I want to believe." The predictions vary. Our power rankings are very low. The very few optimists suggest 9-7. Personally, I predict 6-10; 8-8, at best. Maybe I should be more positive. The last few games of the season might redeem Rex Ryan, but I feel that his considerable weight loss will be his only real source of pride at the year's end. I wish him well, no matter what. For reasons that only a Jets fan could understand, I feel he's one of us. 

And just in time for such speculations, Rex and Bronx native Willie Colon #66 both suggest that the season will be better than people think. They seem hurt by the bad predictions and believe the bad tidings will actually motivate the club, though they may not actually feel that way. Maybe that's what they feel they have to say. Gird your loins, people.

NY Jets #64 - Part 2

My searches through the world of Infinite Jets usually yields five things, one more than the Godfathers' song suggests - birthplaces, education, football statistics, retirement life after football, and sometimes mortality. It has all made me not a little philosophical about life, and given me a sense of the ephemeral quality of everything. I feel that if you're a Jets fan, you're inclined to think this way, anyway. How else can you explain a football team that goes from two consecutive AFC Championship appearances to being the laughingstock of the league two seasons later? Have I introduced you to the team that is the permanent object of Bill Belichick's personal curse?

If you're a Jets fan, you see cycles and patterns to everything, the way oppressed peoples sometimes derive a sense of edification from being cursed by suffering. Or maybe being a Jets fan simply makes you more cognizant of the cycles of the human experience. Birth, school, work, death. There is no success without failure, or without what might be eons of mediocrity. Such is life.

Martin Cornelson wore #64 for the Jets for three games in 1987, which means that he was a replacement player, otherwise known as a scab, during the work stoppage of 1987, also known as a strike. He graduated from NC State in 1983 and played linebacker at college, I think. For three weeks or so in a season no one remembers, Martin Cornelson played professional football. Then, ten years later, JR Conrad #64 played the entirety of his professional career for the Jets in 1997. He was drafted out of Oklahoma in the seventh round by Pete Carroll's Patriots and then presumably cut and taken on by Parcells' Jets. He is listed as playing center, tackle and guard for 12 games.

Birth, school, work, death. I have three of the four for each man. Each was born in a city approximately 200 miles from where he went to college (Cornelson, born in Clinton, SC, some 284 miles from Raleigh; Conrad born in Fairland, OK, a little over 200 miles from Norman, OK). Their work was brief. They are each still alive, and by virtue of what they did, they are, Infinites. Are we anyone's Infinite?

Tom Budrewicz, future Titan, leading the way.

Then, here is a lone image I found of Tom Budrewicz, an offensive lineman who was the first man to wear #64 in our franchise's history. Like Martin Cornelson he played three games for us (or, in this case, for the New York Titans) and during 1961, the year that Martin Cornelson was born.

Budrewicz is seen above as a member of Brown University's football squad, leading the way for running back Paul Choquette in 1960. The staged photograph should not be seen as a commentary on the Brown Bears' absence of fans or players. These two are here depicted as the standout offensive stars of that season, both doing what they do, one man running behind another. But taken out of the context of an actual game or play, Tom Budrewicz looks almost like the personal detail of another man's life. Wouldn't we all like to have a Tom Budrewicz running in front of us, blocking us from false dreams, illusions, and bad decisions?

Playing as he did for just three weeks for the Titans, Budrewicz could have been offered something better by the Fates, like three games with the Green Bay Packers, or even three games with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Though Art Rooney's team won one game less than the Titans that season, he probably managed to make good on all the paychecks he issued to his players. If I didn't know any better, I would actually say that the above photo appears to be taken from an actual Titans game, although the field does look like it's in too good a condition. No, Tom Budrewicz probably deserved better than three games with Harry Wismer's misbegotten club, but then we go where we go in this life. Even with a Tom Budrewicz in front of him, Tom Budrewicz might have ended up where he did. An offensive guard doesn't lead you to daylight on every play.

It got me to thinking about another player from Brown who was originally a standout running back at my high school when I was a freshman in the early 1980's. This one guy wore my favorite number 44 on our football team, and as a senior, he ran through offenses with a terrifying grace. He was the top player in the region. He would practically score on every drive kick, or kick field goals and point afters. This was the one time in my life that I was witness to the manifestation of a Golden Boy in my own backyard, a Paul Hornung - the one of a kind of player who seems to float through the hallways, existing in an ethereal realm that transcends normal high school life, one filled with the awe and adoration of others. Midway through his senior year, the New York Times actually did a small feature story on him, and in the accompanying photograph, he can be seen sitting on a bench, lacing up his shoes with one of his teammates, not knowing that he is actually leaning against my gym locker. I don't think I was ever so proud.

Paul Hornung was the only player to successfully navigate Vince Lombardi's melancholia, simply by being himself. Our Golden Boy was also the only one who could bring a smile our perniciously mean-spirited high school football coach, a man frequently compared in his sallow-eyed darkness to the Dark Lord of the Sith. Our Golden Boy was handsome, powerful, pensive-looking and brilliant. It was as if the Fates had granted him as many Tom Budrewiczs as he needed to navigate the complexity of a world that otherwise seemed so completely overwhelming to a thin, wispy little boy like me. The Golden Boy went to Brown, which, I believe, does not give out athletic scholarships.

And yet, with Google, there are no more masks and no more mythologies. This past week, I typed his name with "Brown University" into the computer, and within a second, Google Images produced a slight man, probably as tall as I, staring back at me through designer eyeglasses, looking strangely humble at the bottom of a list of investment strategists working in a small office in Connecticut. Now obviously there's nothing wrong with that. He certainly makes more money than I, and he probably enjoys a good life for all I know. But the curled Athenian locks of old are gone, and his hair is shaved closely and has receded. I had always assumed that since I never heard his name again after his graduation that he had committed some terrible transgression or had suffered some kind of calamity that had somehow kept him from being as great in the larger world as he was to us schoolkids, when the waves parted for him in the hallways of my little high school. But instead, with or without a thousand Tom Budrewiczs, our Golden Boy simply graduated from college and became a normal person. No more masks. No more mythologies.

NY Jets #58 - Part 1

There are names that scream out for a caricature, especially names that sound like the stuffy rich guys in a Marx Brothers film - a millionaire of self-important privilege whose wife Groucho is going to insult or whose drawing room will be used by Harpo as a stable. Names like Lynwood Alford and Aubrey Beavers.

But then these guys are also actual human beings, with lives, feelings, thoughts, and most importantly histories. Aubrey Beavers #58 ended his career with the Jets in 1996, after playing two seasons with the Dolphins. He had two interceptions in his first season, but then he started only one game in 1995. Promise, then silence. In the epics of antiquity, only men who have been cursed by the gods or who have to be punished for a wrongdoing against nature are sentenced to places where no man can happily survive. Napoleon was eventually banished to a place as inhospitable as St. Helena. And with stomach cancer. But nothing Aubrey Beavers did in his life could have earned him a fate just worse of not playing at all - that is, playing linebacker for the 1996 New York Jets. Real life is much less fair than history or in myth would lead us to believe.

But then consider Lynwood Alford #58, who played linebacker for one game in 1987. That's right. Alford was a replacement player for the 1987 replacement New York Jets. In a poignant article in the Times on October 5, 1987, Alford talks about what it meant to be in uniform and living out a dream he thought had long ago passed him by after graduating from Syracuse in 1985:

''It was a dream come true,'' Alford said about playing in an N.F.L. game. ''It was something that I'll never forget, something that I'll tell my grandchildren. I don't care if I was just on the kickoff return unit. I was in the game.'' 

Alford played in only one game in 1987, and it was the only game in his whole pro career. He was not even a starter in a loss to the replacement Cowboys.

I was in the game...something that I'll tell my grandchildren.

A paycheck is a paycheck, but I confess I felt slightly humbled by Alford's words, if only because being "in the game" is where so few of us end up. I once had a literary agent for four months, but like a girlfriend who is trying to let you down, she stopped returning my calls. The dream was over. The game was over.

But they will never be able to take that away, any more than they can take the replacement game away from Lynwood Alford.  His experience of covering a kickoff, technically, took place in an NFL game. You can look him up on the NFL's website. He's there. No one is taking that away. Replacement or not, he played in what the League construes as an actual game. His one distinction is simply putting on #58, going onto the field, and making a brief contribution. That would be enough for any of us who've never been anywhere that we always wished we were.

The article above about the 1987 strike talks about "Integrity and Dreams" being the replacement players' inspiration during the strike. But there were two particular regular players on the Jets who were scabs that year: Marty Lyons and Mark Gastineau.

"Dreams" belonged to guys like Lynwood Alford. But when he was asked why he was playing during the strike, Marty Lyons invoked the "integrity of the game." That will never sit particularly well with me. Lyons is and always will be a legendary Jet, but I'm a union man, too, and if there was one thing my mother told me when I left home and went off into the world in 1987, when I was 18, it was "to never cross a picket line."

Alford talks about his otherwise impossible dream as something he will be able to talk about to his grandchildren. In the Times article, Lyons invoked something of the same when he said that crossing the picket line was about creating a future for his "little boy." He said that his decision was one that "he will live with for the rest of my life." At least he understood there was a legacy for every decision and action. Both men left a legacy that season, and it's best to say nothing more.

But then remember that Lyons and Gastineau were both drafted for the 1979 season, and they were members of the Sack Exchange. They represented a period of hope of the the team after years of terrible play in the 70's, and that finally came to an end in '87, a year when the Jets played in a division so bad that they might very well have won it had they just one a few more games. But they didn't. Gastineau was a clown, a rube. He says in the article above that playing during the strike made him "uncomfortable," as if that would explain away his decision while Bridgitte Nielsen blew kisses at him from the stands. Lyons was still an anchor (just as he is the Jets' commentating voice on the radio each Sunday) and when he crossed the line that year, he made all my unambiguous devotion to the team change into something else, to be defined later. Being a fan would never really be the same after he did that, and it's probably just as well.

Recently, Lyons talked about his 1987 decision in light of the most recent lockout, contextualizing it as a matter of how Gene Upshaw and the NFLPA did not take into account the money needed for players down the road, past retirement. After this year's lockout, we have still a long way to go before players start thinking about the money they won't have later, as opposed to the money they get now, so it's at least good to see Lyons speaking up for retired players and the pension fund. Lyons is also the head of the Marty Lyons Foundation and has a long track record of philanthropy.

Bobby Bell #58 was a replacement player in 1987, too, although for the Chicago Bears. Prior to that, he started a handful of games for the Jets in 1984 at linebacker. He came from the University of Missouri and was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, which makes sense because his father was also Bobby Bell, the Hall of Famer who played for the Kansas City Chiefs and went to the University of Minnesota. Bell the younger must have played with heavy expectations, though if you're going to have a father who leaves a legacy, let it be Bobby Bell, the elder.

NY Jets #42 - Part 4

We're finally getting through #42. But not before we talk about Maurice Turner.

He wore #42 for one game in 1987. Having said that, the first thing that should pop into your head is "replacement player." And that he was. He played a season and a half with the Vikings and was traded near the end of 1985 to the Green Bay Packers. Then, two years later, Maurice Turner played one game for cash in a strike season. He was a replacement player, easily replaceable.

Why do we include replacement players in our roundup of all the players who've ever played in a Jets uniform? Aren't we just rewarding corporate fraud? Mom always told me as a kid to never to cross a picket line. Aren't we just suggesting that all of us are replacements in this life, with replacements of our own waiting for us, as the fictional Langley Collyer suggests in E.L. Doctorow's recent novel, Homer and Langley?

About Langley's "theory of replacements," Homer tells us:

...I remember thinking there as something collegiate about it.

I have a theory, he said to me. Everything in life gets replaced. We are our parents' replacements just as they were replacements of the previous generation...

I said, Langley, people aren't all the same like dumb bison, we are each a person. A genius like Beethoven can't be replaced.

But you see, Homer, Beethoven was a genius for his time. We have the notations of his genius, but he is not our genius...Besides, it's not what any of them achieve but how they stand in relation to the rest of us. Who is your favorite baseballer? he said.

Walter Johnson, I said.

And what is he but a replacement for Cannonball Titcomb? One of the constructions is for us to have athletes to admire, to create ourselves as an audience of admirers for baseballers. This seems to be a means of cultural communizing that creates great social satisfaction and possibly ritualizes, what with our baseball teams of different towns, our tendency to murder one another. There will always be in America for as long as baseball is played someone who serves the youth still to be born as Walter Johnson serves you.

The notion is chilling, especially when we think about how replaceable all athletes are, from the Walter Johnsons of our time (LeBron for Jordan) to the monstrously nameless multitude - the rest of us - who play out our positions and our roles ever without distinction, and fade away from the cosmic memory. When one considers the great numbers of college football and basketball players who will never graduate, let alone play a professional sport, you begin to appreciate why Doctorow uses sports figures as object examples to illustrate Langley's theory. You begin to comprehend reasoning like Langley's. The fact that one man wears a departed player's number simply reinforces this lugubrious train of thought all the more.

But everything depends on the view one brings to things, and though blind, Homer Collyer also recognizes in Langley's voice that his brother is probably making up his theory as he goes along. Homer also comes to suspect that the Theory of Replacements is merely a product of Langley's "bitterness of life or despair of it."

****

Rashad Washington played in #42 for the Jets from 2004-07. I try not to be lazy about these things, but if you really want a beat on Washington's career with the Jets - which encompasses his NFL career - then take a look at his page on the all-time roster, which features all sorts of unmoored statistics on his work in special teams. The basics are these: injured at the end of 2004, he saw frequent action in 2005, and then some in 2006. Then less in 2007. There are few statistics that really give dramatic worth to the role of special teams player, but Washington's lends a hand with phrases like "special teams tackle," which are "recorded," "tallied" or "notched" (always curious synonyms for "made"). One of Randy Lange's articles on the Jets' web site from the beginning of the truly disappointing 2007 season concerned Washington's ability to roll with change and, implicitly, disappointment. He did not finish 2007, and though he recorded 24 tackles the year before, he managed only four the following year. Either the competition to which Rashad Washington alludes in Lange's article got to be too much or he was simply out of gas. The numbers don't lie, but they don't tell very good stories, either.

But what I want to know is Clyde Washington's story. This #42 played at defensive back from 1963-65. According to his page on the Jets' all-time roster, he had come from the Patriots to the newly revised Gotham Football Club and "pleasantly surprised" Weeb Ewbank. The last detail on him from the 1964 New York Jets Yearbook indicates that "still single, the 26-year-old Washington lives in Carlisle, PA," a rural college town. Still available, ladies of 1965, and very much interested in a long-term commitment.

But after that, there's the little one line paragraph that follows:

"Clyde passed away Dec. 28, 1974."

That was the same year my grandfather died, but he was 76. Clyde Washington was all of 36 years old when he died. Three days on either side of Christmas and the New Year, how and why did Clyde Washington die?

I've looked and found nothing so far. We become so accustomed to the notion that the Interwebs will reveal everything we need in order to sate our desire for something, anything we want in the moment (usually it's something morbid, like the reason for people's deaths) that we assume there isn't anything we can't know. But the truth is that no matter how powerful it becomes, the Web can only scratch the surface of human meaning. It loves facile things that are destined to be replaced out of memory by newer yet equally facile things. Its existence is the product of desires that belong to a people with low expectations for human knowledge. And no matter where I look, I can't find anything about Clyde Washington's death. There is a town called Clyde in Washington State, though.

This has been bothering me for weeks. What happened to Clyde Washington? If anyone knows, I'd be grateful to find out. This is more than just a passing whim or a moribund itch. If we go by the number itself, Randy Beverly was eventually the replacement for Clyde Washington, sort of like Johnson for Titcomb. Looking at him there in his 1964 Topps card, he stands steady on his feet and hunched ever so slightly in the manner of the defensive back who is ready to move backward at the snap of the ball. But the more I look at it, the more I notice that he also looks strangely undecided, as if he feels like the play isn't really going to get off. Clyde Washington appears vaguely prepared for whatever is next, just as we all imagine ourselves to be in our life's work. But he also stands as a solitary figure against the yellow void, suddenly looking vulnerable, reminding us that in the end all men die alone, destined to be replaced.