NY Jets #67 - Part 4

The other day I was reading a profile of Bryan Cranston, who referred to the character he plays on Breaking Bad as "the role that undoubtably will be the first line of my obituary." After years of solidly working in small and larger projects, he has now become one of the most vital actors in an age when people like Walter White are a fascination. As a superpower who slowly destroys everything valuable around him, Walter reminds us of something. But no matter what he does from here, it's likely that Cranston's future work will always be measured against Heisenberg, Walter's alter ego, the one who knocks.

All of us will have a first line to our obituary. Considering what that means for most of us, Cranston is obviously lucky. For some of us, the first line will be bad, wincingly bad. Martin Roche, who attempted to write rather subjectively and disjointedly about an underachieving football franchise, died today after a short battle with liver cancer. No, I'm not sick. Not that I know of. But whatever I imagined my life would be has constantly adjusted to the simple tolls of time. I was going to write my first novel by the time I was 30, my first published novel when I was 40. Now I try to take solace from knowing that Louis Kahn still didn't have a sense of his artistic vision until he was well past 50. But what will I do when I get to that point, and my grand work of supposed genius is still not done?

But what if your moment has already come and gone, leaving you no choice as to what you'd like that first line to be? What if your claim to obituary fame will be "Buttfumble?" What if that thing is really beyond your control? What if you are Everett McIver #67? Only Everett McIver can answer that question, and my guess is that he'd answer it favorably - I am well, I have a life, and I don't have to answer to anyone, and I applaud that. But popular culture doesn't care about people as actual human beings, so it's likely that McIver will be known for "Scissorgate."

It may be that he doesn't mind that. As many people who were witnesses to what happened at the Dallas Cowboys' training facility on July 29, 1998 say, McIver did nothing to provoke what eventually happened to him. The entire story is vividly retold in a 2008 article in The Guardian about the Dallas Cowboys of the 90's. To whit: Cowboy players were receiving complimentary haircuts, McIver sat down into the chair when his turn came up, and even as the job was being done, teammate and clinically insane wide receiver Michael Irvin entered and demanded, on the basis of seniority, that McIver immediately give up his seat and let Irvin get his cut instead. The two argued, eventually coming to blows, and Irvin stabbed Everett McIver in the neck with a pair of scissors, a laceration that required seventeen stitches. Rather than allow Irvin to face the legal consequences of the assault, the Cowboys apparently offered six-figure hush money to McIver, which he took. 

Everett McIver vs. Bruce Smith -
Let's see you try this.

If you do an image search of Everett McIver, you will often find Michael Irvin. Some of us are simply destined to play no role of distinction in this life, and yet some others must play a supporting character in another man's Hall of Fame story. Yet McIver has a success story of his own in that he was an entirely undrafted free agent when he first signed with the Jets, his first professional team, and managed to keep a starting role through much of his career. At 6'5" and well over 300 lbs., I remember McIver as this enormous oak tree standing at the guard position, a vast abutment making his jersey number seem smaller than everyone else's. He began his career in #74, but then moved to #67 in 1995, his final year with the Jets. He found greater success with Miami, and spent two seasons with Dallas, playing one year quite regularly beyond Scissorgate.

But dig a little deeper still, and McIver comes across as a guy who continued to bounce back from challenges both big and small. The simple truth is that the very worst thing that could happen to a person happened to him in 1991, when his infant daughter died during surgery on her heart. Deadspin put McIver in their top 100 Worst only for being unable to block Bruce Smith in 1994 as a rookie, which is ridiculous. But then what the hell would he care? I would suggest that McIver is probably the kind of person to look at life - and maybe even the promise of whatever his first line will be - with a fair measure of clarity and perspective that we might all envy.

***

As we discovered a few weeks ago, Howard Glenn was playing in place of Bob Mischak #67 on the Titans in 1960 during the weeks that Glenn was gravely injured and then died. Mischak went on to have an AFL All-Star career that ended in 1965, after playing for both the Titans and the Raiders. But Mischak earned his earliest fame while playing for Army in one of those moments that become immortalized.

Against heavily favored Duke in 1953, Army was about to seal a 14-13 upset, when suddenly Duke appeared poised for a score. Red Smith waxed rhapsodically about what happened next because a Duke player also named Red Smith took a reverse downfield, with seemingly no one to stop him. In his biography of Vince Lombardi, David Maraniss also talks about this moment too, since Lombardi was at the time on the Army coaching staff. Smith was moving toward the goal line, when Bob Mischak came from behind with incredible speed, caught up with him, and stopped Smith from scoring. He saved the game.

Maraniss says that what Mischak did was pretty extraordinary; he managed to help the team redeem the season: "When Bob Mischak made that unlikely play, what (Head Coach) Blaik called 'a marvelous display of heart and pursuit,' Army's football team regained its soul. Not just Lombardi, but all the coaches, and even the stoic colonel (Red Blaik), cried in the locker room after the game..." The play itself entered into Army lore, apparently even becoming part of West Point's lessons in leadership.

It's difficult to comprehend what Mischak's play meant to people at the time. In the years beforehand, the West Point team had seen players go on to multiple wars, and the endeavor of football itself had taken on the quality of historical events as large as the deeds of Patton, Eisenhower and Macarthur. These were moments of great skill, lionized to mythology. It was just football, but it wasn't.

The title of Maraniss' biography of Lombardi is When Pride Still Mattered, one of the very best sports books I've ever read. The title itself is a test of the modern aesthetic. Can you actually say it without laughing? But that's the point. Players played for pride and were rewarded for playing only for that. Lombardi is often seen as the representative of that tradition, its last lion, dying just before he had a chance to see it wither into nothing. Now, pride as a motivation for courage is often honored like the memory of Lombardi himself, yet so far from the reality of contemporary American endeavors that it seems like a Saturday morning cartoon version of a way of life. As a pro, Mischak played for a team that couldn't even afford to pay its players on time, but he would always have the memory of playing for Army, stopping Duke's Red Smith, and inspiring Red Smith of the Herald-Tribune. He was the essence of pride for its own sake.

If you consider the modern quandary of paying college players to play - which is truly fair in a market sense - and imagine the ripple of consequences that it will then have on college tuition, enrollment, housing and program funding, then suddenly pride - harmless, virtuous pride - seems like the ideal reason to play. But that's not who we are now, and pride may have once mattered, but it ceased to be sufficient a long, long time ago.

Given the lingering legacy of Bob Mischak, and what he represented to a world long gone, I found this odd online tribute to Mischak himself on YouTube to be affecting, even appropriate. I can't quite put the pieces together. It's a kaleidoscope of images, mostly of Mischak looking proud on pro football cards from his days with the Titans and Raiders. In the background, you hear what sounds like the strains of a lone guitarist playing something sentimental and melancholy. But occasionally, a few other images pop up - a corporate photo of a man, whose face is concealed from us, certainly too young to be Mischak. Another is the torso of a large, heavy, anonymous man wearing spandex, holding what looks like a foam legs of a dummy.

What do these have to do with Bob Mischak? Who are these people? Are they all metaphorically Bob Mischaks? Are they other people named Bob Mischak? Do they have the spirit of Bob Mischak? The images then cut back to Mischak himself again, but they study his number, then maybe his chin, never quite getting the full man into focus, almost as if this is some video art piece that, if nothing else, reminds us that whatever mythological power Bob Mischak represented to all the Reds - Blaik, Smith and Smith - today it's nothing more than an unfiltered mess, a random set of images, destined to remain ambiguous forever.

NY Jets #65 - Part 2

The other day somebody asked me that Proustian question: what is the lowest form of human misery? I answered quickly: regret. There are better choices, but regret possesses an addictive mixture of pleasure and pain. We regret the love affair we let go of, the one we never had, the life we could have had, all the while knowing that these alternate existences about which we are wondering will only serve to intensify our present misery that much more, though we'll also never know what kind of misery an alternate life would have brought us.

I'm referring of course to the NFL draft - that string of long-lost love affairs that Jets fans know very, very well. Someday I'm going to assemble the kind of football team the Jets could have had over the years if only they had made all the right choices in the draft. It would be both horrifying and ridiculous to contemplate, and therefore perfect for the Internet.

Jimmie Jones #65 has a rare distinction in that he was drafted in 1969, the only year the Jets were champions of professional football. He was linebacker who came to us in the sixth round.

There were two other linebackers who were available in the second round that the Jets could have picked up - the great Bill Bergey and Hall of Famer Ted Hendricks. They chose offensive lineman Dave Foley in the first round (a good choice overall) and quarterback Al Woodall from Duke in the second round. They had no pick in the third, but then look at who was available in the fourth - Bob Kuechenberg and John Zook. There was not a single player in the fifth, sixth, and seventh rounds who made more than an average distinction as a pro in the game (including Jimmie Jones, who played for the Jets from 1969-70 and then three seasons for the Redskins) but then, amazingly, two players picked one after the other in the eighth round were legends of the 70's - Larry Brown and James Harris. Missing out on Larry Brown was OK, as the Jets were fine at running back, and John Riggins would come in the first round two years later, but imagine James Harris taking over for Namath when he was injured throughout the early 70's and not, say, a rookie quarterback out of Duke? Most incredible is LC Greenwood, sitting all alone in the tenth round, waiting for the day that he'll be wearing those yellow shoes.

For himself, Jones grew up in South Carolina but went to Wichita State. A year after being drafted, his alma mater's football team was nearly decimated by a plane crash in Colorado that killed 31 players and staff members. Jimmie Jones must have known or been familiar with the players on that plane. Remarkably enough, the shattered remains of the plane and the wreckage the crash created around the mountain are still visible today. An SI article in 1970 on the crash some weeks afterwards indicated that pilot error was the cause but so too were decisions Wichita State made regarding the contracting of outdated planes for their team's travel. It paints a picture of what real regret looks like. It's remarkable to think that only weeks later the same thing would happen to the famous Marshall team of that season, and with greater casualties.

***

Brandon Moore #65

For lesser casualties, there is Brandon Moore #65 whose career is an illustration of the simple truth that hard work, dedication, consistency, and skill will be punished by one brief moment of calamity that is in no way your fault and that can be watched again and again on YouTube and put to the music of the Benny Hill Show, at least until such time as the grid goes down, the Cloud is destroyed, civilization in the digital age collapses, and the sun turns black. I speak, of course, of the Buttfumble.

I come to praise Brandon Moore and to symbolically bury the Thanksgiving Buttfumble, certainly for his sake. For though people will come to games at the Meadowlands next year with #6 jerseys bearing the name "Buttfumble," Brandon Moore goes through his days trying to forget that his is the butt they're talking about. It's not as if his butt was pushed into the way of Mark Sanchez as he was furiously looking around for an open receiver. Like a child running from a house fire, Sanchez sprinted ahead without looking, and he collided with an offensive lineman just trying to hold his ground, which more often than not, even in last year's terrible season, is what Brandon Moore did. Anyway, for those of you still in need of yet another depiction of this metaphor for 2012 season, for our relationship to the Patriots, for perhaps our entire history as a franchise, I can direct you to my favorite, put to cartoon music; if you ask me, it's better than the Benny Hill version.

As of this writing, Brandon Moore was released by the Jets after 11 seasons of playing consistently week in and out. He is still not picked up by anyone, but surely he will be over the next few weeks. As he has graciously acknowledged in interviews, he was initially undrafted, was then forced to change positions from defense to offense, and was released by the Jets once before and then picked up again back in 2009. Luck and hard work have made his career, and usually people who emphasize the former without harping on the latter are well respected by their teammates, and that's what Brandon Moore has been. He will be missed.

Back in May, Adam Waksman for Bleacher Report made a good argument for bringing Moore back. Moore is in his early 30's, and certainly for the Jets remaking what was a low performing offensive line is important. I have thrown away my supposed expertise about the team. I don't know what they should do. But someone should pick up Brandon Moore. Two things Rex Ryan said about Moore in the BR link above (from 2012 training camp, obviously; Ryan's thinner, Moore's mentioning Tebow with a vague hopefulness) stand out - first, he says he's been insisting "ever since I got here that he's the best guard in football." We know Ryan proclaims his people's skills hyperbolically, but I agree that traditionally Moore has been that good at his position, and I'm not just being sentimental. Not just.

The other thing he mentions is that Moore is a "self-made" player, referring again to Moore's having to change from one side of the ball to the other and then mastering the new position. Much as we love the skill players who were apparently born to play their position - Adrian Peterson, Tom Brady, Lawrence Taylor, Darrelle Revis - there's a lot to be said for a player that learns a new position as a rookie while learning to play pro ball as a whole.

And the longer I spend on this ship-in-a-bottle of a blog, the more I admire the offensive linemen, the silent warriors of this very unkind game. If I had an adolescent daughter, and she insisted that she absolutely had to date a football player, I would a) seriously wonder where I went wrong as a parent and b) recommend that she date with an offensive lineman, and hope for the best. They are the steady, dedicated characters of the game, the ones who are forced to live with the knowledge that it's their butt in question, yet they're also the ones with humility enough to handle that uncomfortable truth. I don't have any of my usual lamely rueful observations about how the winds of time are cruel to the body and mind of the football player. After 11 seasons, I'm just sad to see Brandon Moore go.