NY Jets #67 - Part 1

According to Bucpower, which navigates the 37 year-old history of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Darrell Austin played mostly on special teams in #69 for the Bucs from 1979-80, which means that he enjoyed the glorious 1979 season, when the team made it to the NFC Championship, only then to somehow lose at home 9-0 to the Los Angeles Rams. In the matchup that got them there, the 24-17 win over the Eagles in the Divisional Playoffs, Austin played almost the entire game at guard. Before he ended up in Tampa, Darrell Austin played at guard in #67 for the Jets from 1975-78. 

According to the site, Austin was nicknamed the "Colonel" because that was the military rank of the Six Million Dollar Man, the bionic Steve Austin. Apparently, Darrell had "an artificial small finger," which might mean he had small part of a finger, or maybe an artificial pinky finger, hence the name. Regardless, the idea that somebody's artificial finger could be used to compare to a man barely alive, entirely rebuilt by science is as humorous now as it must have been in the locker room the day someone first discovered Darrell Austin's artificial digit and put it all together. 

You can get a nickname in a millisecond, and it will stick with you. One of my college roommates, named Dave, instantly became "Phil Simms" for almost his four years after someone at a party noticed their resemblance. Eventually Dave had to make an all-out public relations assault on the name each time he heard it. I was watching a game of craps in the back of my school bus in middle school when one of its players satirically referred to me as "Bruno, the enforcer," which was my name for several years of my childhood. The speed with which it happens can be amazing. Since the Six Million Dollar Man ran from 1974-78, it's conceivable that someone in the Jets' locker room gave Darrell Austin his nickname, and if that's true, I'd really like to know who it was. 

This is the 1977 Topps Darrell Austin, which I have somewhere. This is the Jets' guard on the sideline looking lonely during 1976, easily one of the worst seasons in Jets' history. If you've been keeping score of late, that suggests some truly bad football.

I've been thinking about bad Jets seasons lately because, apparently, 2013 is supposed to be one of them. It will be, I suppose. People are predicting it with the same tone they use to forecast another terrible hurricane season, or a forest fire, or a stretch of impending tornadoes, or Lindsay Lohan's latest foray into rehab. Since we are, as a nation, addicted to bad news, the Jets' 2013 season - which will not be the only losing season for a football team this year - is predicted by the sports world with an anticipation and relish that defies all considerations of reason. It makes me realize how many people love storms, fires, crashes, mass destruction, or at best, displays of abject failure, hubris, and bloopers. But nothing sells like self-destruction, and everybody sees the Jets as a self-destructive team.

But back in 1976, when the photograph for Darrell Austin's card was taken, I used to thrill at any level of coverage directed toward my pathetic little football team from Shea Stadium. And while I have lots of bile about where the team is headed right now, I'm more disgusted by the entertainment quality surrounding the struggles of our club. It's as if in some way the Jets promised the cure for esophageal cancer this summer, and the media of Bristol and the metropolitan tri-state area are now expressing their subsequently righteous outrage at their failure to deliver. I understand that Rex Ryan has promised much over the years and delivered only just a slice of it, but methinks everyone just doth freaking protest too much.

Where in hell is Gerald Eskanazi when you need him? It's absurd. The Jets are our team. The fact is we have been through these kinds of seasons before, and while Jets fans are routinely cast as knuckle draggers, we remain, for whatever reason, loyal. Sean Newell of Deadspin scornfully suggests that Jets fans will turn on Geno Smith after a few games, and sadly I guess that's true. Jets fans can't be blamed for feeling manipulated about the quarterback position over the past six seasons. But - and it pains me to say it - it's just another bad Jets season. We have been here before, even if no one else in football reportage has, and we'll continue to be here (most of us decent human beings who don't feel deep hatred or bitterness in our hearts) when no one in the media cares about us anymore. We know what we're about.

As several people have pointed out, the fallout from Ryan's starting Sanchez late in the Giants exhibition game was also insane. Actually, it was more enjoyable than any circus I've attended, comparable with the wild outrage accompanying Miley Cyrus' VMA performance the very same weekend. As Miley danced horribly in a diaper, waving a foam finger as a substitute phallus, baring her tongue to the audience like a goat from behind the fence at a petting zoo, Mark Sanchez was hit late and left rolling around, holding his shoulder. The next morning, with synchronized precision, I was able to jump back and forth between replays of this young woman, barely out of her teens, slapping the asses of giant, oddly depressed-looking teddy bears and then images of Mark Sanchez getting hit in the Giants game, again and again. Each one was narrated in equal tones of hysteria. Miley, Mark. Mark, Miley. I got to feel as Lewis Black did about the TV coverage the day after Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction:

"I awoke...and watched...as my beloved country....lost its goddamned mind."

This unhappy obsession the sports world currently has with our team is making everybody angry, especially non-Jets fans. At work, near Philadelphia, friends of mine hold me responsible for the volume of coverage my doomed team gets on ESPN. Who cares about your team? they ask. Why do I have to see another story about Mark Sanchez? 

I want to tell them that when Darrell Austin played guard for the Jets in 1976, the team merited little more than a small column at the bottom of the Times sports page, which I would ask my mother for as she sat hovered over the paper in the morning, cigarette in hand. She would deftly tear the little scrap of paper about the Jets off the sports section without even so much as breaking her concentration. Back then, the Giants of Doug Kotar, Joe Pisarcik, John McVay, and Larry Csonka, who were nearly just as bad, got so much more print than we did. Now, much to Giants fans' dismay (though not Eli Manning's) the Jets get so much more. Back then, in sports at least, our Fourth Estate still believed that you should give more coverage to teams with the greatest potential for winning because success actually sold more papers than stories that rooted against losers did. How times have changed.

"Times being what they," the Player repeats again and again about the decay of theater to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as he trots out a hapless, homeless teenage boy named Alfred from his acting troupe to perform as a promiscuous woman in a sex show:

GUILDENSTERN: (regards ALFRED sadly.) Was it for this?
PLAYER: It's the best we've got.
GUILDENSTERN: (looking up and around): Then the times are bad indeed.

Indeed. Sure enough, at lunchtime this week, a couple of my co-workers and I went to a local pub, where a big screen TV with the sound down was showing ESPN's interview with Curtis Martin, discussing the Jets' "catastrophic" preseason.

"What the hell?" one of my companions said, pointing to the TV, his voice filled with indignation. "This what I'm talking about, Marty."

So I looked up and saw, to my delight, that while that was going on, another onetime winner that ESPN was now rooting to lose  - Johnny Manziel - was featured in the crawl below. I pointed it out.

"It's all in the game," I said. "All in the game."

"Thanks, Omar," he said, sitting down, looking over at the specials. "But I want my football season back."

"Well," I said. "You can have mine."

"No, thank you," he said. "No way."

I nodded solemnly, needing to eat my feelings. I ordered the corn beef special, and, despite our better judgment, the two of us waited for our food by staring back up at the TV, trying to decipher what Curtis Martin was saying.

NY Jets #53 - Part 1

Which of these 1974 Defensive All-Americans
is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?
Hint: the Jets didn't pick him

With a few exceptions, number 53's on the New York Jets do not exactly charge the memory. The names are like a list of car dealerships in the Tallahassee area. But in the worlds from whence they come, all of these #53's are famous to someone somewhere. The professional football world is as unforgiving to a college football star as it is to the thespian who wins a copy of Stanislaski's An Actor Prepares on awards night at a local high school and finds himself five years later asking for your order at a McDonald's in Manhattan.

Can you spot the Hall of Famer in the Playboy 1974 All-American college football defense? Hint: He was not drafted by the Jets. Another hint: That's not a very good hint. He was actually drafted by the Dallas Cowboys. At the top left hand is Randy White #94, defensive end out of the University of Maryland. The others photographed here, to greater and lesser degrees, had careers in the NFL, but none with White's success. But this is the way it is in life. The player depicted here from Auburn is #53 Ken Bernich, All-American linebacker. He was drafted by the Chargers and then suited up for the Jets in 1975, recovering one fumble, though I don't know in which game. After that, he was done in the NFL. Today he recruits for Auburn even still and is apparently a high school football coach, presumably in Florida.

For me, the only really galling thing is that, again, the only guy above in the Hall of Fame is the guy the Cowboys drafted. It's sick, actually. The Jets did not draft in 1975 until the second round, and they drafted Anthony Davis, the Heisman Trophy winner. I don't think many people know that. I don't know if Davis would have really helped them much, but they did not want to give in to his contractual demands (they had a fairly expensive, wobbly-legged quarterback who had actually won the last last six games of the Jets' 1974 season), so Anthony Davis went on to play for money in the short-lived WFL. The next year, the Jets would draft a first-round quarterback, at long last.

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Khary (pronounced "Cary") Campbell #53 was linebacker for the Jets from 2002-03, out of Bowling Green. He played sporadically for us and then became a regular with the Redskins at a time when Jets players went to DC like panners to the West. He finished his career with the Texans in 2009. He was a special teams captain with the Redskins, as is depicted as such in the fascinating "men in suits" shot Jim Zorn insisted upon during his brief tenure as Washington's Head Coach. He wanted his captains to exude a look of professionalism which Campbell described as "gangster." (Another teammate preferred to describe the look as "deacon.") Campbell is second from the left.

In February 2009, Campbell took the floor dancing the Macarena at a Redskins fundraiser which featured, yes, former Lt. Col. Oliver North selling raffles table to table. Campbell appears to be a good guy, not really doing the Macarena but dancing to it in order to keep an otherwise dull team obligation a little amusing for everybody. But now I'm wondering what I would do if Oliver North came by my table asking if I'd like to buy a raffle ticket. I'd ask him a couple of questions, maybe. The first would be, "Who the hell let you in here?" The second would be, "Didn't you knowingly divert United States resources to make worthless contacts with military elements in a terrorist-sponsoring nation?" The answer to the first question, of course, would be to some degree former Redskins coach Joe Gibbs and ultimately Daniel Snyder. The answer to the second question is, of course, yes.

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"Often times, 'overachiever' is code for something like "This team is so bad, they've got Cascadden logging serious time." Slow, unskilled, overwhelmed - the model Jet of his era."

This is how Jeff Pearlman describes linebacker Chad Cascadden #53, who ranks 99th in the Top 100 Worst NFL Players Of All Time, on Deadspin. I'm happy to remind you that Jets players make up 10% of the list. Cascadden is technically the best of the Jets' worst, whereas their worst of the Worst on the list remains Johnny Lam Jones. This is all debatable and frankly skewed. Many, many players in the NFL try their best, but many, many players have no business suiting up. To continue the analogy above, how many actors have you seen in any medium whom you realize simply cannot even find the paper bag out of which they are supposed to act? As a teacher, I've seen a lot of bad teachers. I haven't been pulled over for speeding by many cops but when I have, two out of three have been - by this taxpayer's measurement, at least - really dumb, inarticulate cops. Many of us in this world are slow, unskilled and overwhelmed.

The trick of Pearlman's list is trying to discern the absolute draft washouts (like Lam Jones, theoretically) and/or hyped superstars (like Anthony Davis, who figures at #46!) from pure incompetence cloaked in feigned praise. Actual Underachievers vs. "Overachievers." I'm not sure Cascadden deserves his ranking, though as Pearlman points out, the "overachiever" was often the model Jet during the Kotite era. He had three tackles in eight games in 1996 and five tackles in four games in 1998. Back in the day when our expectations were so low, an "overachiever," which is exactly what I thought of Cascadden during this time, was our hero. It was hard for a Jets fan of the 1990's to judge who was and was not the worst. Our best were often the ones with the best attitude, and on a 3-13 squad (1995) and a 1-15 squad (1996) what the hell else can you expect? By this measurement, Wayne Chrebet was just as good at his position as Chad Cascadden was at linebacker, which of course is not actually true. But when your team is bad for a long time, it's hard to tell real talent from the untalented guys who just work hard.

And while we're back to the topic of draft choices, does anyone know what makes Barry Gardner #53 special? Drafted in 1999 in the second round by the Philadelphia Eagles, he had the benefit of less scrutiny than the top pick, Donovan McNabb. He played three seasons with the Eagles, two with the Browns, one with the Jets in 2005 at linebacker, and apparently one with the New England Patriots where he broke his leg at the start of the 2006 season. Today he is listed as a free agent even still, which means, I believe, that he's retired. His numbers don't put him on any lists of worsts or bests, but that's probably as much as any of us can say for ourselves. This is the way it is in life.

NY Jets #6 - Part 2

Until recently, the most important #6 in New York Jets history was Ray Lucas, and for half a season - the ill-fated one in 1999 - he was the Jets' starter. He was the greatest overachiever at a position that is traditionally mixed with promise, hope, misery and disappointment for the Jets. When all of us had so many big dreams for that season, starting quarterback Vinny Testaverde went down in the opener with a snapped Achilles tendon, and there was literally no one ready to take his place. You can blame Bill Parcells for both those situations. Right before the season opener, he ordered the grass they were planning to use be replaced by an artificial turf that caught Vinny's foot in the hot sun and helped snap his tendon. You can blame Parcells for not having any decent backup. I still do.

By the bye week, the leaderless Jets played themselves out of the playoffs. But then Ray Lucas took over and lead the Jets to a .500 finish. Parcells called it (at the time) his finest achievement in coaching. I prefer to thank Ray Lucas. He became a Dolphin in 2000 and then fell off the high wire, but for eight games in 1999, Ray Lucas was one of the the most successful QB's in the AFC. Today, if I wanted to say anything bad about Mark Sanchez (and it's going to be a half-hearted effort below to do so, let me say) then I would wear Ray Lucas' jersey to a Jets game.

Joe Prokop #6 is found in many of longtime Jets' placekicker Pat Leahy's best photographs because Prokop was the holder on Leahy's kicks during the 1990 season, the year Leahy was voted team MVP. Prokop was also the Jets' punter from 1988-90. He would be our Booth Lustig Award winner if not for a man named Bubby Brister. That's distinction in the world of the Gang Green for you. But on one very dull afternoon in another one of Bruce Coslet's (er, Joe Walton) unfortunate seasons (1989) Joe Prokop apparently took the ball at the snap of a Pat Leahy field goal and ran it in for a 17 yard touchdown in a losing effort against the Patriots. This must have been the design of the play. The well-traveled handler and punter was given his moment, and he took it. Life is worth living for a host of reasons that may seem mundane to anyone not looking very closely, the way one never really notices the man holding the ball for the placekicker. Doing your job well and dependably is its own reward, and I hope I don't sound too much like a high school teacher when I say that such things make life worth living. But who in the world would sneeze at the chance to run it past the point of things as they are? Who wouldn't consider such an opportunity even more worthwhile?

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Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes I make dumb mistakes. In this case, I called Reggie Hodges #6 "Russell" Hodges in my last update and was properly corrected by davidill (as seen below). Now that I have failed to even so much as get his name right, I owe it to this man to paraphrase the very best of the mere tip of the iceberg that the web invariably offers - and who knows, maybe even more. How could I have lost the opportunity to talk about this man? Where to begin?

1) You can follow him on Twitter, and when you do, you will see a man who is happy with life, or at least happy in the way that Twitter presents all of us, in 140 characters or less. Reggie exists in a spectrum of experience by which I am fascinated. He believes in Jesus as an active, living presence in his life. I grew up Roman Catholic, and though there are many ways of believing in Christianity as a Catholic, I confess I never wrote or thought about Jesus in quite the way that a believer like Reggie Hodges does. I often wished that I could as a child, but always He seemed distant and mysterious, talking of love and the end of time all on the same page. Thinking about Jesus truly appears to make him happy (Twitter happy, maybe, but I believe it's the real thing in this case). For me, as a Catholic, Jesus always reminded me (without meaning to, no doubt) of my deep limitations as a human being (Jesus wouldn't have called Reggie Russell, for example, nor vice versa). He was always an example of what we should try to imitate, and He still is. There are people who talk about a personal relationship with Him. I know they're not crazy, but that's not what I have felt. My loss, I guess.

But theology classes never helped cure my sense of alienation from Him. Never mind how extraordinarily diverse the character of Jesus is when you start looking at Him historically. Read Bart Ehrman on the subject (Misquoting Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet) and you are shaken. Jesus has been many things to many people throughout time, but who he actually was historically is a subject of debate. Who He is to a believer like Reggie Hodges, a person of faith, is a matter entirely different. To Hodges, He is as real now as He was then. Hodges says, "I am a servant of God disguised as a punter." That's real stuff. I have always felt that the disguise I wear is just one that sits over another and another and another, to the point where who I am depends on whom I'm talking to. I suppose that this is often what life is like. I always imagine people like Reggie Hodges to be exactly who they say they are to every person to whom they speak, and I suppose that they may be happier than I.

2) There is something poignant to the punter's life. Unless he's Ray Guy, the punter going to be shuttled around as needed. He is not a glorified personage. His #6 is not as desired as, say, Mark Sanchez's. In six seasons, Hodges has officially played for eight teams, though he is signed with the Browns through 2012. His player's biography resembles that of a picaresque's nomadic hero. The Jets signed him when Ben Graham's punts kept falling short and sent him off the following spring. Signed by the Titans the following Fall, he was cut a month later. And though he didn't do it as a Jet, Hodges did something that ranks as a remarkable act among punters. He took a fake for 68 yards, the longest run for a punter in NFL history, and - if it is to be believed - the longest run from scrimmage for the Browns all through the 2010 season. And there you are. God works in mysterious ways.

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I remember sitting at a wedding once next to an older woman who claimed that she had spent some time in her early 20's in Miami during the weeks leading up to Super Bowl III with Joe Namath. She never said in what capacity this time was spent. When you read about Namath's record of liaisons in Mark Kriegal's biography, it is remarkable. Any man who dated Suzy Storm alone is a star. He had poise.

Mark Sanchez #6 might someday get his own entry on our gloriously unread blog. At first, the funniest part of Mark Sanchez's fame was his overstated attribute of "poise." Deadspin used Sanchez as a poster boy for sports media's absolute dearth of original thought in its profligate use of the word. Because poise was all we were looking for in him, our expectations of his rookie year at the starting position were minimal. What else could we expect from a young, overpaid underwear model? Neil O'Donnell had poise, too, and it didn't do us much good, but he was an old man by football's standards when he was a Jet.

What we've discovered is that Mark Sanchez is intelligent on the field, with a manner of being that is Namath incarnate, the manner of champions who use their own self-confidence to deflect away the fear of failure. I suppose that's what poise is, isn't it? He played like Namath in his first season because he threw more interceptions than touchdowns, though made very good decisions in the postseason in January 2010 which did not involve red, green, and yellow colors on his sleeve, or even handing off to Shonn Greene.

Then in 2010, his numbers improved. He reversed his touchdown to interception ratio, with a QB rating that moved from 63.0 to 75.3. The Jets did their December dive, but they rebounded. When they took the field against the seemingly unbeatable Patriots in Foxboro, I noticed that Sanchez ran out of the tunnel with a calm, blinding confidence in his own happiness that Colisseum spectators must surely have seen in an occasional defenseless Christian who was about to be fed to the beasts. I suppose I would have still remembered that expression even if the Jets had lost. But they didn't. He is our quarterback.

But in case you haven't noticed, people in the field of athletics are twisted. They post very easily found videos about their wives' feet. They father children with different women with the speed of Genghis Khan. They accidentally shoot themselves. They also rape women in the bathrooms of bars, or possibly (well, "possibly" in Sanchez's case) even on college campuses. They send photographs of their penises to women who give them only the vaguest sign of professional interest. Then it all ends up on Deadspin.

Mark Sanchez's possibly/possibly not heated romantic relationship with a 17 year-old fits somewhat squarely into this paradigm - one that befits a person who has grown up believing, through community and educational reinforcement, that he is above the moral law. When people have razzed me about Sanchez's rendezvous with Eliza Kruger, I have caught myself nearly saying the same thing that Eliza said to Mark about her being legal in New York. How can I possibly defend it? I cannot. I certainly know the difference between an adolescent and an adult, but a 24 year-old man should, too. It's not exactly trapping a woman in a bathroom, but it's still morally wrong.

And what's remarkable is that, like Joe Namath in his time, Mark Sanchez could have any woman in any borough of America's largest and most culturally diverse city. But instead he texted a 17 year-old girl from Connecticut. This is also an aspect of the successful athlete's experience. His pampered life cloisters him from the real experiences of failure and success that the rest of us had to have with romance. Apparently the key to a great athlete's psychological growth is his ability to "forgive" himself when he fails on the field. I'm not always so sure that such failures are acceptable off it. This isn't a rationalization, but it is a psychological explanation for why men who take the field against an unbeatable team with the smile of a winner can also appear completely unable to grasp that a sober, intelligent grown woman might be interest in him for something other than his own vanity.

More likely, Mark Sanchez was not interested in conversation, but in exactly the kind of ephemeral, superficial adoration that a 17 year-old girl bestows on the high school's hottest football player. One senses that he needs to join the adult world, not just as an athlete, but as a human being.