NY Jets #24 - Revis Revised

"Who? I don't know who that it is. Once I step on the field it doesn't matter who's out there. I don't pay attention to numbers or names. I go out there and I focus on what I'm supposed to do. That's not a slight on him, or whoever he is. I just go out there and play football."

- Terrell Owens, quoted in Newsday, November 21, 2007

"Who?"

"We are accustomed to Bill Romanowski speaking ill of us and then pounding us in the divisional round. Revis' interceptions are like works of leaping, pirouetting choreography. He is a star. We have so few in the history of these numbers and names. This is what one looks like. This is no Albert Haynesworth. This is Darrelle Revis. That's who, Terrell. That's who...

"For so long, on any given Sunday, 11 men seemed to make absolutely no difference whatsoever. So why would one? This isn't a logical thing...So I wish they had signed him back sooner than Labor Day 2010. The club that keeps track of its conscession (sic) stats even in preseason should have been able to dig very, very deep much earlier and given one of its best investments exactly what he richly deserves. Yes, a contract is a contract, but as the white collar parasite CEO's of America will tell you (between taking sips of infant blood in diamond-studded carafes) there are always exceptions for people who are deemed indispensable."

- Me, September 5, 2010

Back then, another AFC Championship appearance was still on the horizon. Giving the very best what he richly deserved seemed like the right thing to do. Revis is to the cornerback position what Lawrence Taylor was to the position of linebacker - a player so gifted that entire offenses needed to shift their strategy in order to manage him. No person in any field can ordinarily expect himself to fit that kind of criteria. At best, most of us are just good at what we do. More often than not, we simply strive for adequacy. Darrelle Revis is the exception to most things.

At some level, he must have known it would come to this, that he would be gone; in fact, he probably wanted it this way. It was time to get off the clown car. As for the metaphor of The Revis Island, it remains an ironic state of affairs. For every pass Darrelle Revis has broken up, there have been twenty more that never even took him onto the equation. More than once has a writer decided to make the literary allusion to John Donne's warning in Meditation XVII that "No man is an island entire of itself..." Indeed, the complete resignation that offenses have shown to Revis' side has also changed the nature of his efficacy. Warren Miller's New Yorker cartoon is applicable to Revis Island:

A version of something that Jon Gruden could have said about Darrelle Revis, but probably didn't.

Darrelle Revis remains unique. Modern baseball is a sport that rewards individual expression and performance on the field yet stresses uniformity of mind in the locker room and on the street. It's rare to find a true individualist in style and manner in baseball the way there was once a Bill Lee or a Dock Ellis. On the other hand, football's sense of team identity on the field encourages the self-expression of an Ochocinco or a Polamolu on the sidelines. But it's rare to find an athlete whose actual performance is so very unique as to make him beyond category, and that's what Darrelle Revis is.

But this distinction is now a disservice. Now, for his exceptional play and even greater reputation, no one throws at him, and he has, one could argue, become irrelevant. I suppose his season-ending injury last year means that offenses will be tempted to throw in his direction again, but if he is able to do this kind of thing again, they won't for long. So I'm ready to let him go, knowing that we're not better off without him, yet probably (and I mean this with all the respect he deserves) no better off with him either.

***

I have a particularly sleepy-eyed student in one of my classes whose first words to me as we gathered yesterday were, "Hey, Mr. Roche. Are you aware that your team was completely destroyed today?"

"Come again?" I asked, noticing that he was relishing this a little.

"That Darrelle Revis signed with the Bucs?" he said.

I knew it already, but if I hadn't heard the news, I would already have known it in my heart and soul - the way I always knew it would happen over the past few months. The ridiculously vapid way the Jets have handled his status with the team - similar to the red-light, empty streetwalker glances they gave John Riggins before letting him go in 1975 - the general atmosphere on the club about the future built into what we all know is a ragtag effort at free agency acquisition - all of these things spelled his end with us months ago.

"You just let your best player go," he said. At least he used the you to represent me and my team, as if I had done it. "Your season is completely ruined."

I looked at him. "Oh, I wouldn't worry," I said. "I'm a Jets fan. It's much worse than that. The season was ruined already." I smiled and narrowed my eyes to make my point. "I'm in the for the long haul. I've been doing this for a long time."

"How long is a long time?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Maybe someday you'll find out."

"Probably not," he said, honestly.

"No," I said, looking away, half in envy. "Probably not."

****

During Darrelle Revis' 2010 holdout, I suggested that I was so desperate to bring him back to the team that I was willing to offer up my 1995 Toyota Corolla (still my only existing source of transportation) as a gesture of loyalty. He could bring it to his estate, gather his friends and entourage around for an expensive celebration, and light it on fire as a sacrificial sign of his power and glory.

When I mentioned this idea to my friends at work back then, a colleague of mine photoshopped the little piece of glorious creation you see above. Today, you can read into the image of the car whichever metaphor you like - the lost years we spend rooting for our teams, the money, the energy, the love, the blind desire we possess for someone else's victory at the expense of our own. "I can get up an hour early each day and take two trains to work," I said. "I just need the Jets to have a shot at the division before the 2011 lockout. As I travel on my morning commute and watch each station pass on the sunrise elevated subway blue line and stare out of its yellow windows, I will think to myself, "No, no. This is right.  He can have my car. This is good. This is as it should be."

And now, he's just another Infinite Jet who wore #24. Contrary to what I once thought, he will certainly not be the last #24 in our club's history. We'll just wait and see who'll be the next one to wear it, even as Darrelle moves out of the picture, leaving forever the now charred remains of the clown car in his wake.

NY Jets #42 - Part 2

What do these two men have in common? Are they New York's most relentless crime fighters? Its trigger-happiest detectives? Anzalone and Harper?

No, but they do wear the same uniform.

Not just the same number, but the same name and number, which no one else so far in our journey can claim for himself (or for someone else) - unless he can somehow lay claim to meeting himself, maybe in Milliways, which, as the Guide points out, is fairly embarrassing if not, of course, completely impossible.

First, the man on the right. This is Bruce Harper, who wore #42 from 1977-84 and is considered a universally loved Jet. Players like Bruce Harper are permanent fixtures in the memories of longtime Jets fans because, like Wayne Chrebet, they represent something of the indispensable underdog. In a franchise that ritually backs into the playoffs, such persons are always important. Bruce Harper is best known as a return man for the Jets; his 82-yard punt return just before halftime in a 1978 home game against the Bills at Shea was one of those moments that helped us to believe in a turnaround season when we saw one. Harper blazed down the sidelines. I was visiting Jake Walsh in Sag Harbor at the time, so I didn't see it on TV (I don't think the Jets sold out that season at Shea until the Patriots game, anyway), but I saw the replay the following week on This Week in the NFL, with Harry Kallas narrating the play, with the run documented in slow motion, taken from a camera positioned atop the right field upper deck. How do I remember such details. It's sad. But Bruce Harper had arrived to my world.

And he made himself indispensable. Though he was a return man, the 1978 runback was his only career return for a touchdown. Look at his statistics, and you see that he gained more on pass receptions than from the backfield, and he scored touchdowns on more pass plays than on the run. His career is even more impressive when you consider he was all of five foot eight. And from little Kutztown University in Central Pennsylvania. And a New Jersey native and current resident, no less. You couldn't have a better formula for a Jets hero, unless you were a walk-on from Hofstra. Bruce Harper is a man who represents the team's spiritual core. A six foot player is an underdog. Bruce Harper came from beneath the underdog. We are all Bruce Harper.

This might then explain the other man in the picture above. He is Ed Anzalone, or Fireman Ed, the Jets' "superfan," official fan of sorts, and universally recognized supporter of the beloved Green. He wears Bruce Harper's jersey. Why? I don't know. I guess I want to believe he wears it for the same reason that I think Bruce Harper represents the essence of who we are as a team.

We don't have a mascot, thank Christ. Instead, we have Fireman Ed, one of many such superfans around the NFL. Each team theoretically has one. Usually this person is a fan whose excess of spirit has made him a character of some local color who becomes so empowered by the subsequent attention that he develops into a self-appointed cheerleader. Every stadium has one, and if they are like Ed, they garner a following that the team then co-opts, hoping that they are not dealing with someone who has a severe mental illness. As we know, Fireman Ed hoists himself atop a larger man and leads the now famous cheer than anyone who finds out that I'm a Jets fan offers to me as if it were a lodge greeting. According to his bio, Ed has been leading the cheer since 1986, but I remember hearing it at Shea Stadium as far back as 1980; who knows when it began. Heard in full throat by the tens of thousands, it's highly formidable, almost like what totalitarian dictators crave when they stand on a balcony in platform shoes, hands on hips. The fact that the cheer is a four-letter word repeated thrice for those who missed it the first time, makes it - in my humble opinion - that much more charming.

"What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a teacher, actually."

"Wow, what's that like?"

"T! E! A! C! H! E! R!" TEACHER! TEACHER! TEACHER!!"

Nope. Doesn't have the same ring to it. When last we heard of him, Fireman Ed was going to be publicly roasted by Chad Ochocinco in the Jets' season finale, which didn't happen of course because Darrelle Revis is the finest cornerback in the world. Apparently in order to compensate for making Ed a part of his ongoing Vaudeville program, Ochocinco offered to fly the superfan out to Cincinnati for the Wild Card game. The oracle of Wiki tells us of Ed that, "though he was appreciative of the offer he declined to take (sic) on the moral ground that he did not think it was right to be flown out to the game by the opposing team. He did however say that if the Jets made him an offer he would take them up on it, though no offer has been made." Only men named Barrel Man, Chief Zee, Crazy Ray, Colonel Joe, Horse Lady, Arrowman, or Sign Man can see in such a circumstance the potential absence of moral judgment. They are something more than their team. They have their own reputation to uphold.

Perhaps when a famous fan's attention to his work begins to eclipse his team itself the fans and the world at large begin to turn the worm. Under "Everyone hates Fireman Ed," there's the usual rant from a Jets hater on Deadspin; I beg to differ. A superfan is a superfan, whether he's in it for his own fame or not. I write a blog no one reads. If someone made me a superfan of the Jets, such that under the New York Giants' guy named "Big Blue" you saw a new New York Jets superfan named "Martin Roche," I'd be flattered. What am I going to say? No? Probably. Still, Fireman Ed is less convoluted than Arrowman; he's less flabby and disturbing to look at than Barrel Man. He is what he is. If he weren't the superfan, some other person would be. Someone always is.

But the Deadspin rant offers an interesting wrinkle to the uniform riddle. Apparently Ed's favorite player growing up was Paul Warfield of the Cleveland Browns and, most damningly, the Miami Dolphins. The trouble is, do you know what number Warfield wore? It's the same as the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything:

42.

You see? Like I say: I want to believe.

The Bright Side of Things, Really

Well, it's time to update, isn't it? Whatever any of our expectations were of this season, a second round appearance in the playoffs is the very outside edge of my own definition of success. I love that we "backed" into the playoffs. Let freedom ring. I love that Rex Ryan swings into bipolar moods of euphoria and ponderous disappointment. I am glad that I am forced to feel shame and self-criticism every time Shonn Greene plays to his potential and well beyond my recent criticism of him as a washout. I was wrong in every way. God Bless My Stupidity.

And while we're at it, let's take a moment to praise the New York Jets for drafting well over the past five years, something that I don't think the franchise has ever done over such a span: David Harris, D'Brickashaw Ferguson, Kerry Rhodes, Nick Mangold, Brad Smith, Leon Washington, Drew Coleman, Dustin Keller, Dwight Lowery, and of course, Darrelle Revis. Oh, and Mark Sanchez. And Shonn Greene, provided that neither man is responsible for more than two turnovers each in San Diego on Sunday evening.

Listen to me. There I go again.

And while we're at it, I want to thank everyone who made this possible. I don't think we have a chance this weekend. Our last outing here last year was disastrous. But I have to go to bed. It;s going to be a long weekend.