NY Jets #66 - Randy Rasmussen

It's a little cliche to speak ill of the world of Millenial children, but in the mid 1970's, I had simpler toys. It didn't take a great deal of technology to entertain any of us. I can enumerate what we did not have. We did not have the Internet, nor video games. We did not have simulated virtual experiences with avatars. We did not have cable. It did not mean that life was simpler, nor was it particularly enjoyable for a neurotic little boy. I recall feeling bored, lonely and anxious through most of my childhood. During summers, I went on long, solitary bike rides through the neighborhoods of my flat South Shore Long Island town, looking for nothing in particular. When I came home, I took pride and comfort from the sight of the Mego action figures of superheroes that I had lined up on the windowsill of my bedroom, welcoming me home. I could see their cheaply manufactured outfits and capes in primary colors from a half a block away.

Batman, Green Lantern, Shazaam, Superman, and Aqua Man. What a superhero wears can sometimes be as important as his powers. One day I decided to start switching up their outfits, just to see how strange each one would look. What about a Batman head with a Superman logo? What if Green Lantern and Shazaam switched up? Who would get the power ring? Dad came back from work one day, a little distressed to see what I'd done. I'm not sure of it was that I wasn't treating my toys with respect and care or that a boy was paying a little too much attention to the prêt-à-porter of the Justice League.

***

Mom called me downstairs. It might have been the spring, when school was still going on, or maybe it was earlier in the year, whenever it was in 1978 that the Jets gave us the big Reveal. 

"Did you know the Jets were changing their uniforms?" I heard her call. 

No. Hearing that was like someone saying that the sun would be changing positions in the galaxy, or like we were moving to India. How could I have not heard this before? Why didn't they tell me? 

"You'd better hurry up," she said. "Here they are."

I tore into the room, and I saw it all on the local news. Mom had been watching it in a director's chair in our den, with a scotch and potato chips, waiting for dad to come home for dinner. 

New uniforms, 1978

Gone from the helmet were the football shape containing the logo, the white with two stripes down the middle helmet and the kelly jersey. Their new helmet was now a solid forest green with an italicized logo, and, in case anyone was unclear, a jet shape moving forward on the right side, backward on the left. I loved it. It was exciting and clear and direct. Just the way a nine year-old would want it. Does what a hero wear affect his power? 

The player the Jets chose to display their new choice for attire on TV was Randy Rasmussen #66, left guard. The news didn't feature it as you can see in the photo above, but the away garb was modeled by Bruce Harper, who today seems like a great choice, a loved player, an overachiever, a Jet.

But Randy Rasmussen was himself known as "Mr. Jet," the longest-playing starter at the time and for several seasons still to come. He was a product of the mid-60's, coming out of Nebraska-Kearney, playing (however briefly) in the Super Bowl, and then playing well into the Disco era. (These days, when the word "Jetsiest" has become an adjective, "Mr. Jet" seems like an epithet for the type of guy who walks into a tree. The combination of the Jets' general personnel and coaching confusions this summer with the national media's delightful fascination would make the term satirical. We have become the nation's blooper show.)

What made Randy Rasmussen Mr. Jet was the super power of simple, basic consistency; there just didn't seem to be a time when Randy Rasmussen wouldn't be there. But that power does not usually earn a special place in the heart of child in any generation - no superhuman cape, no place on the windowsill, no Facebook credit. It's not until you are older that you realize that it is half of life.

***

Here's another picture - one extremely telling about the world of childhood versus the world of grown ups. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this picture below was taken during the Jets' 1975 home win over the New England Patriots, 36-7. Dad went to this game, and I remember watching it on TV with Mom at home. It was the last home game we would be able to watch in the TV blackout zone for three years. Emperor Hirohito of Japan was at the game, being given an opportunity to watch American football. The Jets did not disappoint the former deity of the sun, though they would not win another game for 10 weeks.

Randy Rasmussen #66, leading the way

This is the game that made me a devoted lifetime fan of John Riggins. He only gained 36 yards, but he looked bigger than your average running back. If I could have had a Riggins Mego figure on my windowsill, it would have been there. This is the Diesel in the prime of his youth, a human battering machine just learning the true measure of his own greatness. He was a running back who wore a collar guard, with a bandage on his nose. I think Mom had a thing for him. She kept mentioning him to me as we watched the game, and because it was impossible for a six year-old to imagine that his mother could have feelings for another man other than, well, himself, I took it to be high praise for him. 

"Look at the way he sits on his helmet on the sideline," she said.

It was an odd thing to find interesting. Maybe it spoke to Riggins' nature, to his love of flaunting the basic decorum, his ever so slightly counter-cultural manner, or at least peculiar and unique way he did everything. He always stood out.

But we've talked more than enough about a running back who played only five seasons for us. I'm 44 years-old now, as old as the number worn by the hero of my youth. The plain truth is, as I sit here, slightly overweight, graying more rapidly than expected, hairline receding, unable to stop the cracking that my body does when it gets out of bed, I know now that children should pay more attention to the men whom their idols run behind. In this case, as in many cases from 1967-81, that man at left guard was often Randy Rasmussen, whose regularity through some of the best and worst seasons ever for a franchise remains a great example to grown people like me who wonder if anything they're trying to do with the same consistency is having a single good effect. 

Randy Rasmussen started in a total of 198 games, all with the Jets. As the excellent JetsBlog points out in its Hall of Fame salute to Rasmussen, his season with the least starts was ironically the year the Jets scored the Super Bowl title, and this is because Bob Talamini was brought out of retirement to take the position. Rasmussen then took it back afterward and had an unbroken streak of regular starts that ran from 1971 to 1977.

Playing over the years with a Jets team that would get progressively worse makes him somehow just as special in my mind as the legendary offensive linemen who today occupy their place in Canton. Rasmussen's consistency was rewarded with not a single All-Pro or Pro Bowl honor, but he maintained a presence on the team that meant something else entirely to different generations of players who came and went through the franchise. Weeb Ewbank referred to him as the most coachable player he had ever known, but there are no posters advertised in Sports Illustrated for such things, no action figures, no awards for such things except for the promise of a consistent spot week after week.

Actually, in August 1978, Sports Illustrated did briefly feature Randy Rasmussen in an article about the relationship between performance and the promise of greater and greater money. We see him reclining in an Adirondack chair in the backyard deck of a house that looks like so many suburban decks I knew as a kid growing up, with his legs stretched out, his hands behind his head. A beautiful golden retriever sits at his feet, and he is wearing a pair of leather sandals that my father also wore throughout his summer weekends when I was young. Randy's is a round smiling face, one of the most recognizable faces of my entire childhood, one that was there in every program of every home game I attended as a boy.

"I just love to play," he says. "I don't know anybody that really produces who doesn't think that way. Guys who play just for the money aren't around long."

Maybe he looked so midwestern, so unlike the world of Namath's blown dry appearances and the long nights of Manhattan. He looked like a football player, sure, but also like a guy who lived a world of backyard decks and barbecues of my neighborhood. Like a neighbor who's borrowing your lawnmower, or one who's relaxing after an afternoon clipping the hedges in the front of his house. He looked like someone's Dad. There are no Mego superhero figures like that, either.

In 1979, at Hofstra training camp, at the end of a scrimmage, I got Randy Rasmussen's autograph. It's impossible to recall that night as vividly as I would like. The passage of time and the hyperbole of memory hijack the whole thing. All of the sudden a startlingly familiar, friendly face, one I recognized from my earliest memories - a member of the long list of "Daddy's friends" as my grandmother referred to the Jets - was standing in front of me, haggard, sweaty, tired and determined for sleep. I handed my training camp program to Randy Rasmussen and he scribbled his name wordlessly, and moved on. 

With no place on my windowsill, no room on my wall for him, I still kept his autograph for years. It may have seemed less cherished than the others I got that night because I just assumed that next year I would be able to get Randy Rasmussen's autograph again, and maybe the year after that too. He was that reliable, that predictable. And now, as I'm poised to go back to work tomorrow and begin it all again - the long struggle, the futility, the small victories, and the day in and out - Randy Rasmussen's scribbled name seems to me all too valuable.

NY Jets #65 - Joe Fields

The reason why we only have three entries for #65 is because of Joe Fields. Growing up in New Jersey, drafted out of Widener University in the 14th round, Joe Fields is often described as the best deal the New York Jets ever got out of the draft. He ended up playing 13 seasons for us at center, and then one more for the New York Giants. The JetsBlog has a great profile of him which quotes from their regular commenters about Fields' ranking among the great centers of his time - men like Mike Webster, Jim Langer, and Dwight Stephenson. 

SackDance99 says that "Fields was great at every part of being a center and did it without snapping to a Hall of Fame quarterback or blocking for a Hall of Fame running back." In spirit, this kind of thing also has to be said about Wesley Walker and Winston Hill. Players are routinely kept out of the Hall for their teams' lack of presence in the postseason, and yet it's the consistency and high performance under adversity, and in the shadow of being lesser known, that makes a player particularly admirable. Maybe I've just been a Jets fan for too long, but that's how I've come to feel. 

The JetsBlog's piece says everything that I need say about Fields. He went to the Pro Bowl, he was Jets' co-captain for many years. Charley Winner recruited him directly to the team, talking to him by phone while Fields was finishing up at Widener. Wayne Mulligan had been at center for two seasons up until Fields started in 1976. Before then, John Schmitt had been the starter at the position since 1966. If football teams could be said to have periods could be more broadly understood, then why not know them by centers? The 60's and early 70's are then the Schmitt era, while the mid-70's and most of the 80's are the Fields era. When Fields began starting regularly at center, I was seven. When he had finished with the team, I was a freshman in college. Those formative years for a young person are filled with such change that all of time seems to take forever just because everything in life is so new. Time was slow in the Fields Era, so it just didn't seem possible that anyone but Joe Fields would ever play center for my football team.

***

I remember in the 1980's seeing a New York Times article on the friendship between Fields and Joe Klecko. "The two Joes," I remember it mentioning. They were somewhat unlikely as friends apparently, at least by size. More than one player has pointed out that Fields did not resemble a behemoth in or out of uniform and that Klecko was a monster by comparison. 

But friends they were, and after their careers were done, they co-wrote a book published in the 90's called Nose to Nose: Survival in the Trenches of the NFL. I never did read it, but I recall when it came out. Much of the discussion surrounding the book initially centered around its criticism of Joe Walton, who coached the bulk of the 80's years. The authors said that Walton was paranoid, insecure and coached with a corrosive negativity that affected the team. According to a discussion forum at the Landing Strip, the book's also surprisingly critical of Dr. James Nicholas, who is normally cast as team physician who lengthened rather than shortened players' careers. But again, I never read the book, so I don't know anything more about it.

Several commenters on the Landing Strip forum link above mentioned that Klecko and Fields both admit to steroid use in the book, though apparently Fields asserted that a very brief period of steroid use helped him bounce back from an injury. It would be very difficult to imagine that the great linemen of the 80's were not all taking steroids at some level. It's impossible to imagine that its use is not continuing today in a league that is so thirsty for greater corporate profit that it's likely putting off dealing with steroids in any real way, other than punishing isolated cases. Someone on the forum also suggests that after the book was published, Fields and Klecko had a falling out. I can't imagine how two authors of a book could do otherwise.

Now that the era of good feeling for the present-day Jets is over, more and more fans are beginning to remember the 80's fondly. I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, the organization brought back the uniforms as a throwback gesture every once in a while (though, please God, make it the '78-'89 uniforms, not the '90-'97 ones). Greg Prato's 2011 book Sack Exchange: The Definitive Oral History of the 1980's New York Jets is enjoyable for allowing many of the players to speak about that time themselves, and there are several great comments about Joe Fields there. What stays with me is how Fields is not just represented as the consistent center but as a fundamentally smart strategist who saw the game unfolding better than anyone else.

In Prato's book, Bruce Harper is quoted as saying that "Joe Fields was like the quarterback on the field." If you read it literally this just takes a moment to digest as funny because an offense by definition has a quarterback, but you get the idea. How would Richard Todd have taken that? But the idea is that he had to think like one. Fields' nickname was "The General," which is also a common term for the quarterback. "He was the director of the line," Harper says, " -- he was the one who called the plays." 

Wesley Walker says that Fields was "one of the those blue collar workers - can play, knows the game, smart, very impressive. I love guys like that." Marion Barber adds that indeed "the center is almost the quarterback," and that "Joe was well respected by his peers." He "played hurt - as so many players do," Barber says. "He was good to his peers and he kept everybody in check...without being a prick about it." 

I like that last one. It's difficult to lead and not be a prick. The simple truth is that leadership is easy for people willing to lead, but very few people can balance the elements of charisma, discipline and respect and not look like a prick, a person who might lead competently but is roundly disliked for being haughty, narcissistic and sometimes cruel for the fun of it. While American slang allows that the two mean the same thing, a dick is someone who won't let something go to the point of getting in everyone's way, while a prick is someone who just seems to enjoy making your life difficult because he can.  Football has lots of each. 

Joe Fields is a good example of a beloved teammate who earned his respect from the many players who came in and out of the organization during the Fields Era. He played consistently - longer than Dermontti Dawson or Jim Langer or Dwight Stephenson for a franchise with considerably greater ups and downs, which perhaps should be just as much a measure as high for a Hall of Famer as are multiple playoff appearances, but we know that won't change. The Hall is for guys who play for winners, and in the world of the Jets, our greatest players have little advantage in the running. Winston Hill, Marvin Powell, and Wesley Walker can take little consolation in this. That's why JetsBlog put Fields in their Hall of Fame, and it's why we give him his own entry as an Infinite Jet. Assign what worth to the player you feel you should. Even if the fan has little say in the world of American sports, we will remember our favorites long after a league that treats its veterans like strangers will.