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 #54 - Part 1

I started collecting football cards when I was six, just after I saw my first Jets game with Dad.  My collection wasn't that large.  I remember that the most important players I got from the 1975 Topps season were Coy Bacon, Mel Gray, and Randy Vataha.  Not a Jet in the bunch, which was heartbreaking for a small child, but familiar in the order of things.  I was a Jets fan, after all.  I assumed football cards had the same significance in the world as baseball cards, and it took me all of four more years of collecting to see that this was not true.  "Why do you get those?" Jake Walsh, a classic know-it-all friend, would ask in that way that was intended to remind me that I was stupid.  In 1978, Jake followed the Red Sox until the end of the summer, when suddenly the Yankees hit their stride.  Then he was with the Bronx all the way.  Eddie O'Fallon kept the dream alive, though, and we constantly bought and traded football cards in front of the deli on Merrick Avenue, between Orchard Street and Old Mill Road during the summer before the start of the season.

Sometimes you'd see distracted men coming into the unwelcome sunshine from the Lucky 7's Cocktail Lounge on the corner of Old Mill Road.  They seem like they were awakening from their sleep, tilting and reeling, listing like wounded ships.  I remember how one of them tried to chat with us in a voice that registered as a growl as we stood there, straddling our bicycles, going over our loot.  You guys got cards, huh?  What you got?  Who you got?  When we wouldn't answer or would just stare, he quickly renounced his offer of friendship and told us we were ungrateful children for the world we had inherited.  I couldn't help but notice the Lucky 7's windows, diamond shaped, colored and frosted, concealing the bleary light within.  Today, my old football cards are somewhere in my house, in a narrow box, kept from the light and the world like those afternoon drinkers, and I wonder where Eddie's are today, or where he is, rather.   

I gave up collecting football cards by 1979, though I had made my best collection that year.  I had become weary of the poorer characteristics of Topps cards.  They didn't show a great deal of action, and even when they did, the cards had no logos on the helmets.  Here Jake Walsh may have had a point; at first I assumed that there were some games during the season when teams played without logos on their helmets; maybe they were out being cleaned, or maybe players were sometimes asked to pose with a blank helmet.  I didn't realize the lost art of touching up the photos on cards, in the same way Stalin would have portraits touched up to remove people from reality.  Topps had a less pernicious reasoning for editing out the logos - to avoid copyright infringement.  That never happened on baseball cards, except when an entire mop-up revision needed to be done to convey a change of team for a player, as with Oscar Gamble in 1975.   

This is still better than my college roommate's fake ID

This looks like #54 Troy Benson's driver's license, but it's his 1989 NFL ProSet card.  It just happens to do something that I have never seen; it puts his face on the back of the card, alongside the statistics. As the write-up points out, Benson posted fairly good numbers in tackles, finishing "alone in second" in tackles on the team for 1988.  Now that's a phrase, isn't it?  "Alone in second."  It really conjures a sense of being a Jets fan.

Anyway, this might as well be Troy Benson's driver's license photo for 1989.  He has the look of a man who has been waiting on an unconscionably long line, being commanded by perpetually angry people to sit in one area, move to another, then go back to another waiting area because he has not completed his paperwork in full.  Other than that, he looks like an average football player I knew in high school, with his nose wide and flat, his large chin taking up half his face, and his eyes far apart and dull.  His hair sits flatly on his head with a fashionable part down the middle; he has the signature blond mustache of the era, with the look of a man you will run into when you both coincidentally need to pick up a case of Bud Light at the Circle K - that is, if you didn't live in Troy Benson's home state of Pennsylvania, with its Blue Laws.
****

Stan Blinka, LB

Stan Blinka #54 is looking up at us as if we are twelve feet tall.  Perhaps he is looking up at the football gods, asking for some help.  Blinka was a fairly accomplished linebacker for us from 1979 to 1983.  He played one season alongside with the Denver Gold in the USFL.  I found him on Facebook, and he looks healthy, happy and satisfied.  I suppose that's how I look on Facebook.  Does anyone ever offer up a Facebook page filled only with images that conjure the bleakness and fear inherent to the human condition?  At the risk of sounding like George W. Bush talking about Vladimir Putin, I looked at Stan Blinka's picture on Facebook, and I thought I saw enough of him to say that this man has a good soul.  On the NFL database, I found only statistics on interceptions (he had three in his career) but sadly nothing on his tackles or assists. 

There are two things on the Interwebs I found about him. Though he was born in Columbus, Ohio (day-dreaming of playing for Woody Hayes, I presume?) Blinka went to Sam Houston State in Texas and was then drafted by the Jets.  Here's a good article on his return to his alma mater in 2010, along with many other SHS alumni, to inspire last year's players as they took the field at Reliant Stadium to play rival Stephen F. Austin University (the Lumberjacks).  The players left the tunnel with old SHS players standing in a line, rooting them on, which is nice.  I wonder if any other players there would be labeled "NFL stars," as Blinka is in the article.

The next set of stories though are a little less flattering to Blinka, but I would argue that they represent a larger problem that defenders are dealing with even now.  After the Jets' 15-13 victory over the Green Bay Packers in 1982, Packers Coach Bart Starr filed a complaint with the NFL over a hit Stan Blinka leveled at Packers' receiver John Jefferson.  Here is the New York Times story on it.  Here are more stories on its immediate after-effects.  It seems to me that the hit, which I do not recall, was one of those that makes officials, coaches, players, reporters, and league executives mindfully stop and reflect (or more likely pretend to reflect) on the true nature of the game.  What can be done to stop football's worst brutalities? they ask. So Blinka was fined and briefly suspended for the hit.  If you scroll down and find Dave Anderson's article on the issue (which has two grainy photographs of the forearm hit to the head) Anderson notes that the league claimed that, up until that hit, it had been 63 years since anyone had been similarly fined and suspended as Blinka was that week in 1982.

Anderson is right to point out the hypocrisy of this decision.  He gets Pete Rozelle to look at Stan Blinka's record of penalties to show that Blinka was, to that point, statistically a clean player - especially, Rozelle admits, "for a linebacker."  Anderson also maintains that it is difficult to believe that the league would really require 63 years to find as egregious a hit as Blinka's apparently was.  Without any real precedent, the punishment seemed fairly arbitrary, except that the Blinka hit occurred only three and a half years after Darryl Stingley had been paralyzed by Jack Tatum.  The league felt that it could concretely deal with the inevitability of paralysis.  They did not even realize that someday they would also have to devise a strategy for understanding the long-term psychological, physical, and emotional effects of even ordinary week-by-week contact; of course, they still don't know how to respond to such realities today, though they claim to try.  The league tries again and again, often in vain, to reduce the number of horrors that the game, by its very nature, creates.

What stays with me most, though, is that in trying to find out specifics about Stan Blinka's career (other than those from my own memory, of hearing Spencer Ross say his name on WCBS) I discovered only information about this now largely forgotten moment.  How little we really know of each other from the Internet, yet it is fast becoming our sole source of all knowledge.  It behaves like our own memories, holding onto only the fragments of things we would otherwise soon forget or enhancing those things that we have sugarcoated into believing about ourselves.  There is much more to Stan Blinka's career - the career of an otherwise clean player - than the one moment we find in cyberspace.