NY Jets #66 - Howard Glenn

Two years ago, I wrote about the late Ernie Barnes #55 - football player and artist - who played briefly for the New York Titans in 1960, a team that he referred to as a "circus of ineptitude." We all know that the Titans were the most ragtag of the new AFL teams. Many Titan players like Ernie Barnes, who had previously played in the NFL, were shocked at how poorly organized the team was. His most severe criticism of the team, however, was related to the death of his teammate and friend on the Titans, Howard Glenn #66, one of the very few players to die as a direct result of events within a specific football game. To read Howard Glenn's story is to know how expendable football players really were back then.

Howard Glenn #66

The photograph to the right is taken from Howard Glenn's last game, the week five away matchup at Jeppesen Stadium against the Houston Oilers on October 9, 1960. Hours later, he was dead.

The official cause was apparently a broken neck, however it's unclear as to whether or not the worst of the damage to his neck was sustained in Houston. The official report suggested that an injury he sustained the week before in Dallas against the Texans was the main cause of his eventual death. Perhaps a hit he took in the Oilers game was the fatal blow, but there are differing opinions among eyewitnesses as to when this hit actually occurred. Yet another player opens up questions of heatstroke.

The confusion itself is a product of many years that have passed since Howard Glenn died and of what little information can be gleaned out of the fledgling league's first year. But it's also obvious how little Howard Glenn's death meant to the business world of football and to the media of 1960. Just consider the magnitude of a player's death in the modern era. Instead, Ernie Barnes insists Howard Glenn died "a lonely death." For his family, it must have been devastating, while many of his teammates were left traumatized by it.  

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Information on Howard Glenn is sparse. He came from the Pacific Northwest, then played high school football in Louisville, Kentucky and then played at Linfield College in Oregon. He played a season with the CFL Hamilton Tiger-Cats and then joined the Titans in 1960.

One of the things that drew Ernie Barnes to make friends with his teammate Howard Glenn was Glenn's interest in art and drawing. Barnes was already a practiced artist, and the two shared their work with one another; it was an uncommon mutual pursuit in a violent game. Titans defensive back Eddie Bell #25, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, came to know Howard Glenn as his roommate on the road in Dallas and in Houston, two cities where African-American players like Barnes, Glenn and himself were expected to lodge together, apart from their white teammates. Also, Don Maynard, one of the original Titans who played in Super Bowl III, insists that he knew Glenn when he practiced or perhaps even played for the Giants, as Maynard did, before going to the Titans. 

A little over two weeks before the Titans played the Oilers in Houston, Howard Glenn turned 26 years old. 

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What exactly happened in the Oilers game, and when it happened, can sometimes seem unclear. One thing that several eyewitnesses mention about that day was the extreme heat. The temperature was somewhere in the 90's with terrible humidity. In his own description of the events that day, Ernie Barnes says that he was so covered in sweat that his pads kept slipping out of position.

In his 2010 article in the Houston Chronicle Jerome Solomon talked with Don Maynard about Howard Glenn's death. Maynard also mentions the pernicious heat that day. He also says that "toward the end of the game, Howard had been complaining about not feeling well." He recalls that a trainer told the him and other players that "too much heat and too much football were to blame" for Glenn's needing to be taken to the locker room. In his article, Solomon says that "Glenn was believed to be injured from a collision with two Oilers just before halftime, (and he) staggered off the field holding on to a teammate," yet Head Coach Sammy Baugh told him to go back in.

Todd Tobias also wrote about Glenn's death at the great Remember the AFL site. Tobias writes that as a guard, Glenn would fill in for players who were in need of a timeout or were injured. He was playing that day for Bob Mischack #67. Tobias says several players remember Glenn complaining of feeling poorly during the game, saying, "I don't think I'm going to make it." 

The question is when he actually began complaining. Tobias writes that Glenn was injured the week before, against the Texans, and was claiming to be in pain even before the Oilers game:

The week before, in Dallas, Glenn had suffered what was considered to be a minor injury that took more than the usual time to revive him.  The following week while practicing in Houston, Glenn had complained of headaches, but everyone figured that it had more to do with the Houston climate than anything else. Still, Glenn was ready to play against the Oilers on Sunday.  Back in these days, if you walked, you played.  No one complained about injury and medical attention was nearly non-existent.

What was the "minor injury" in Dallas? According to several accounts, this was the broken neck that apparently contributed to Glenn's death a week later. This is corroborated in William Ryczek's Crash of the Titans. Ryczek says that after the Dallas injury, and "throughout the next week, although not normally a complainer, (Glenn) was quiet and moody and spoke of frequent headaches." According to Ryczek, the Titans did not use x-rays for gametime injuries. The Dallas injury might have been interpreted at the time as a concussion, but Titans personnel, like many such teams in 1960, would likely have given little attention to it. 

Another note in Tobias' article comes from the now late Dr. James Nicholas, who was not yet the franchise physician. Nicholas says that Howard Glenn had a "history of heat exhaustion." Nicholas did not travel with the team to Houston that week, and he suggests in Tobias' article that he might have been able to prevent Glenn's death knowing what he knew about him.

Tobias also mentions a hit in the Oilers game that took Glenn out, but he says that it came in the third quarter, not just before halftime as both Solomon and Ryczek report. In Andy Piascik's oral history Gridiron Gauntlet: The Men Who Integrated Pro Football, Glenn's roommate Eddie Bell also affirms that Howard "suffered a head and neck injury during the (Oilers') game," but he doesn't say when. 

Ernie Barnes' painting "To Know Defeat"

The most vivid account of the game comes through Ernie Barnes in an article by Sandy Pawde, dated March 17, 1967 in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Barnes expresses regret at how, during the game, he and everyone around Glenn urged him to keep playing, to tough it out, even as Glenn kept saying, "I'm sick, I gotta go out." 

Strangely though, Barnes adds the detail that during the game Glenn was emitting a terrible odor from his mouth. "There were flecks of foam in the corners of his mouth, and there was the faint smell...almost like sewage." He says that the smell became so pervasive in the heat that it "made it cling all about us." 

Barnes does not mention the hit that took Glenn out of the game, though he saw Glenn back again in the locker room after the game. Though he does not mention it, according to Ryczek in Crash of the Titans, Glenn also behaved erratically, even belligerently toward everyone in the locker room. Regardless, both mention what happened next. Barnes says Glenn became barely conscious, sitting in a metal chair: 

"We backed away, looking at his body twitch. He was straining to breathe and that odor was still with him. He still clutched the towel to his chest. 'Why in hell don't you get a doctor to him?' (Art) Powell shouted at the trainer."

Barnes says that Glenn coughed up a "smelly, yellow-green mucus" and was then taken away to a Houston hospital, where he was eventually pronounced dead. At the end of the article, Barnes says the official pronouncement from the hospital that it was "a broken neck suffered in the game with Dallas the week before," but he questions this. In his online biography Barnes insists that he and several of his teammates believed Howard Glenn simply died of heatstroke. 

Again, an Internet-trolling layman can see that Glenn's symptoms also resemble those of heatstroke, but the mystery of the smell surrounding Glenn throughout the game and his condition in the locker room afterwards raises other questions that one can only be answered by actually taking a look at the postmortem report performed on him in Houston. According to Ryczek, the examining physician in Houston said that, despite Glenn's complaints the week leading up to the Houston game, the symptoms of his severe injury were not instantaneous. However, Glenn's neck fracture had gradually cut through his spinal column.

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Howard Glenn's death haunted Ernie Barnes and his fellow players, particularly his African-American teammates on the club, who found out about the news just after boarding their plane back to New York. Barnes said, "The news shook my heart. He was dead. I felt nervous tremors racing up my spine and tears streaming down my face. Next to me, Art (Powell) covered his face in his hands and turned his head toward the window."

According to Ryczek, the Titans took measures for safety in the wake the tragedy that would today seem rudimentary. X-rays were to be available for every game. Dr. Nicholas was engaged as the permanent physician. But it's clear that Glenn's death was absolutely preventable, even by the standards of the time.

The death of Howard Glenn embittered Ernie Barnes toward the Titans of New York and, increasingly, toward the game of football. Barnes asked to be released from the team two days after Houston. He went on to play in the 60's for San Diego, Denver, and in Canada, and then went on to a very successful career as an artist.

In Ernie Barnes' own obituary in the Los Angeles Times, it's said that Barnes believed that art had the capacity to educate. As an artist, he would return to images of football in his painting again and again, often depicting it as a murderous exercise, as it is in the above work which is also found on the cover of his published collection, Pads to Palette. The players are gladiators who punish one another as a hapless referee and a distant audience of spectators both look on in what looks like a Roman arena.

I was pleased to see that only a few months ago on the Jets' web site fan forum, several fans also mentioned Howard Glenn's death and suggested that the Jets should put him in the Ring of Honor. The Vikings retired Korey Stringer's number when he died in training camp from heatstroke in 2001. The Chiefs retired Stone Johnson's number after he fractured his vertebrae in a preseason game and died 10 days later in 1963. They did the same for Mack Lee Hill, who died from an embolism in the midst of surgery to repair a ligament he damaged in a 1965 game. I don't necessarily see the Jets agreeing to that, but at the very least, Howard Glenn's place in the Ring of Honor would be a reminder that this team has a larger legacy that needs to be commemorated, player by player. 

So I agree with the forum's suggestion. By putting Glenn in the Ring of Honor, the Jets organization would also play some part in acknowledging the enormous risks players endured back in the early days of the AFL, when men took the field for practically nothing, went largely unprotected, and played in near-empty stadiums to little acclaim. Those players are the foundation for multi-billion dollar industry and a modern sport that this country has now adopted as its own.

NY Jets #55 - Part 1

I foolishly assumed that the Jets would win the bidding war for Nnmadi Asomugha, and while I'm glad he didn't go to Dallas, it surprised me that the hometown Philadelphia Eagles got him instead. A loyal fan of any NFL team should know to assume nothing, though the safest of all assumptions was that, at the very least, Asomugha was leaving Oakland.

But this is also an assumption that illustrates a strange paradox about my football fan life. When I was a kid, there were nine planets, 12 apostles, seven continents, fifty states, and three counties to the self-descriptive piece of land known as Long Island. There was the Soviet Union. Cable TV was for rich people. There was no water on the moon. Today I'm more inclined to believe simple geographical truths over astronomical, geopolitical or theological assertions. But when I was a kid, one assumption remained true no matter what scientists said. The Oakland Raiders would go to the playoffs, and the New York Jets would stay home.

This 1969 picture goes to illustrate a moment when these two forces in American football were first sent into opposite orbits. More to the point, it helps highlight Jim Carroll #55, who played his last season in football in 1969 with the Jets, at linebacker. The 1969 season ended with the Jets' senseless playoff loss to the eventual AFL and Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs. In this picture, though, Carroll is shown defending in the Jets' 27-14 home loss to the Oakland Raiders. This game signals a cosmic shift between the Raiders and the Jets, equal AFL rivals in every sense up until that point. From here, only one of the two teams would go on to have winning seasons year after year. Only one would go on to cement an outlaw status that was itself simultaneously a violation and a vindication of the American way of life, further emphasizing this point by winning the Super Bowl in the year of the Bicentennial. The other team was the New York Jets.

To me it's poignant that the 1969 season was the last of Jim Carroll's football career, for it was an ending of a kind for the Jets, too; it represented their last postseason appearance until 1981. Conversely, in 1981 the Raiders posted their very first losing season in 17 years. Since 1969, the Jets and the Raiders, who will be meeting in Alameda once again this season, have existed in direct oppositional orbits circling around the same binary point. Take a look at the win-loss totals for the Raiders and Jets, and an eerily perfect inverse manifests itself. The Jets, one of the teams we assume will be a competitor for the playoffs this coming season (and may the gods not smite my team for this assumption) have a franchise record of 351-418-8. The Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders have an overall record of 418-343-11. When I was a kid, the tradition of excellence in Al Davis' Raiders was as predictable as the planetary list of the Solar System that ended with the name of Mickey Mouse's dog. Now, like Al Davis' Raiders, "Pluto's not a planet anymore, either." Like Charon, the Jets are locked into an eternal orbit with the Raiders' Pluto, their eyes fixed forever on each other in their respective fortunes, destined never again to meet in on equal ground.

And what of Jim Carroll? It's hard to hear his name and not think of the late author of The Basketball Diaries, who died nearly two years ago. I saw that Jim Carroll interviewed a few times over the last ten years of his life and was horrified by how he aged so profoundly in his last four. At 60, he looked like a spectral version of himself. I can't help but read him and think of another dead author and addict, Frederick Exley, who wrote about his obsessions in and around sports. Like Walter Kirn, I met people in literature classes who thought both men were like self-sacrificial literary saints. Frankly, Jim Carroll #55 who played linebacker for the Jets fared better. Though perhaps not an artist, he is at least still alive.

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We were recently talking about football players-turned-artists, and offensive guard Ernie Barnes #55 is probably the most famous associated with the franchise, although he often took pains to mention how unhappy he was with playing in New York, specifically for the Titans in 1960. In his online biography, we learn that

Barnes loathed being on the Titans. He said, “(New York) was a circus of ineptitude. The equipment was poor, the coaches not as knowledgeable as the ones in Baltimore. We were like a group of guys in the neighborhood who said let’s pretend we’re pros.”

If the AFL was the Mickey Mouse League that NFLers claimed it was, then the Titans were its Goofy. We know that the real culprit was Harry Wismer, the sportscaster turned entrepreneur who ran the team out of a New York City hotel room. But Barnes maintains that the club's lack of character was represented in the death of his friend Howard Glenn #66, whom we will talk about later. Barnes believes that the organization - such as it was - never really told the truth about Glenn's death. He thought that Glenn didn't die of a broken neck sustained in a game against the Los Angeles Chargers, as the team maintained, but of heat exhaustion, a cause of death that would have cast Head Coach Sammy Baugh in an even poorer light.

In 1959, Ernie Barnes was drafted out of North Carolina College by the Washington Redskins, a team that didn't hire black players. His name was "Ernest Barnes" officially, and it would seem that a player named "Ernest" wasn't someone of color to George Preston Marshall's racist organization. Once they realized it, the Redskins disavowed him. After playing for the Colts that season, Barnes was labeled "Ernie" in the Baltimore press, and the name stuck. After the Titans, he would play in the AFL for San Diego and Denver before retiring from football entirely in 1965. But even when he quit the Titans after their game against the Chargers, Barnes was already an artist. According to his biography link above, he studied art at college and frequently painted scenes from football and elsewhere, honing a craft that would ultimately sustain him in a way that very few artists could ever hope to imagine.

His work ultimately enabled him to be picked as the official artist of the 1984 Olympics, but you also recognize Barnes' painting if you watched Norman Lear's 1970's sitcom Good Times. Early productions of the show featured Barnes' painting of the Evans family in the closing credits. Later episodes, though, featured one of Barnes' most famous works, "Sugar Shack," which was also used on the cover of Marvin Gaye's 1976 album, I Want You. The Evans family was one of the very few black families on American TV at the time, other than Lear's Jeffersons. I watched the famous episode where James Evans dies, suddenly struck with the same kind of horror I felt when Jake Walsh brought me into the laundry room in our basement to show me where my parents hid my Christmas presents. To a cloistered white boy from Long Island, Good Times provided a view of African-American life that wasn't exactly accurate, but it was vivid and alive, like Barnes' shack.

Ernie Barnes' "Sugar Shack" (1976)

Barnes' final revelation that he wanted to quit his day job for good and paint for a living apparently came to him late in his football career while playing for the Broncos, when he says, "The sun hitting the unmuddied parts of the uniforms created a yellowish white, it was just gorgeous. I knew then it was time for me to get out of the game." In his 2009 obituary, he is described by friends as believing that art could educate. In this sense, the game was merely a vehicle through which he could find new meanings in a world that defined him narrowly by his race and by his job.

As a fan, I can understand at least the bit about finding out something valuable about human life by accident in sports. At a certain point, even when we go number by number, the love of it has nothing to do with football. Even then I don't always expect to learn something as broad and profound as I did reading about Ernie Barnes. Football was a paycheck that enabled him to explore his designs on painting, but I still feel his unhappy time with the Titans is as revelatory about him as anything he painted. Whatever our assumptions about football players, the man who quits a team in disgust over the death of a friend is perhaps an artist at heart.