NY Jets #41 - Part 2

Almost 30 years ago, I came home from school and Mom presented me with Matt Snell's autograph. She had been having lunch that day with Uncle Mike, and he showed her this little momento of an earlier night out. It was written on the base of what looked like a bar tab, not even the size of an index card. Uncle Mike had held Jets season tickets at Shea with my Dad for years, and he certainly recognized Matt Snell's almost perfectly square-jawed face from across the crowded bar. He asked that the autograph be dedicated to the biggest Jets fan Uncle Mike knew. The inscription reads, "To Marty - Go Jets - Matt Snell."

I just moved into my first house since leaving for college 22 years ago. Since that time, I have lived in dorms, in a rooming house in England, in a commune in St. Louis, in five different rented apartments in Philadelphia, and now here, in the East Falls section of the city, I live in my own house. Matt Snell's signature has always come with me wherever I have gone. I can't describe it. It's not something I show to people, and if I do, my little framed companion elicits no more than a slightly bemused, "Well, how about that."

I think I've unpacked everything. Lots of things are still sitting around in the dining room, waiting to be put somewhere. But my little framed detached base of a bar tab has yet to show. It's impossible that it should have gotten lost. I've always had it. I would not have thrown it away, and I know for a fact that my wife would not have either. It doesn't make sense. It simply does not make sense.

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Here is Matt Snell on the cover of a program for a Jets home game at Shea against the Chargers in October 1966, a game Dad and Uncle Mike must have attended. The Jets won 17-16, and the player featured on the program scored the Jets' first touchdown of the game. Matt Snell emerges like a Marvel Comics character from what looks like a large gun, the barrel of which is obviously a gutted out football. Talk about mixed metaphors. Snell himself looks utterly impassive about the wanton destruction he is causing all around him, and without his helmet. And though all around him exists in color, Matt Snell's face is apparently black and white. The artist is renowned sports cartoonist, Murray Olderman.

By this time, Snell was a fixture in the Jets backfield. It's interesting that he was the focus of this particular program, which makes me think it was probably drawn a year or two earlier. By 1966, Joe Namath was already starting quarterback for the team and the franchise player and the League marquee all in the one. Two years earlier, Matt Snell was the first bonus baby of sorts for the Jets. Drafted in the fourth round by the New York Giants out of Ohio State, he was taken in the first round in the 1964 AFL draft by the Jets. This might explain a particular aesthetic choice made by Olderman. It would make more sense for players of AFL teams to be shown being thrown around by Matt Snell emerging from his football/gun, but take a closer look and see that at least one of the sprawling figures looks suspiciously like a member of the New York Giants, right down to the stripes along his leg and on the helmet.

Matt Snell had a couple of firsts. He is the first running back to gain over 100 yards in a Super Bowl. Throughout Super Bowl III he is seen lowering his head and placing one crushing blow after another on the heads of Colts defenders. Specifically, he knocked cornerback Rick Volk out of the game but apparently sent him flowers the following day, which was a nice gesture. Snell also emerged like a bullet out of a human-sized football/gun in his rookie year when he gained 948 total yards, which is somewhat remarkable by rookie standards. In a 16-game season, he would have gained well over 1,000 yards, which I realize is becoming less and less of a big deal. Successful running games are such a key to so many teams' success even now that many running backs are simply worn down to a nub. And this was true of Matt Snell. He would never approach his rookie yard mark again.

Part of that was the reliance on the passing game, but Snell would also spend most of 1967 out with injuries, and knee problems would keep him from his earlier efficacy for the remainder of his career, though he did go All-Pro in 1969. His last two seasons in the early 70's would simply be spent standing in a uniform. But when I was growing up, my mother constantly reminded me that Matt Snell was always expected to block effectively for Namath, and block he did, like a lineman. I feel this was intended as a lesson in unselfishness and that no important role is too small for anyone. I'm not so certain Matt Snell thought of it that way, but I'm sure it worked on me.

In 1973, a year after he officially retired, Matt Snell was also the first athlete to be featured in a Lite Beer ad. In the history of marketing, this is the equivalent of the first hit of DiMaggio's streak. Lite Beer ads were an institution for anyone watching a sporting event in the 1970's and 80's, and mostly, they were all worth watching every single time, no matter how stale they got. They were a reassuring reminder to me that I was not in school; I was at home on a weekend, watching sports on TV instead of, much to my Dad's dismay, enjoying a beautiful day outside. As we see in a lot of ads today, not every athlete is funny, but Dick Butkus, Billy Martin, Boog Powell, Tom Heinsohn, John Madden, Bubba Smith and, certainly, Marv Throneberry could be almost as funny as Rodney Dangerfield. Yet while Snell's ad may have featured the famous Miller Lite tag line for the first time, it was the only one (other than this one, I suppose) that was not written to be terribly funny. Firsts do not remain famous for long.

NY Jets #41 - Part 1

Where were you when Matt Snell #41 went across the line for the Jets' first and only touchdown in Super Bowl III?



The founder of the Hare Krishna movement, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada was in Los Angeles, possibly writing a letter dated that day to his controversial protege Kirtanananda Swami about the construction of seven new temples in the United States. On the same day that their first album was released in the U.S., Led Zeppelin was preparing to open a show for Country Joe and the Fish at the Fillmore West. Living in Tehran with her family, Christine Amanpour was celebrating her 11th birthday, possibly thinking about going to school later that year in England. But none of these people probably knew who Matt Snell was.

My father was sitting in his in-laws' living room in Brooklyn, watching his beloved team take the lead in the Super Bowl after an impressive first half drive lead by Joe Namath and mostly Snell. My mother sat with him, watching on her parents' white Zenith black and white, excited no doubt as well; she is the most ferocious sports fan I know (for the Mets, that is). As yet two months from my own birth, I resided comfortably on the other side of conscious existence, perhaps hearing sporadic sounds of excitement, my mother's heartbeat, the bright tenor of my grandfather's voice calling to his wife for a cigar, or my grandmother possibly asking my father if he wanted more to eat. I remained as unaware that the Jets would become a source of obsession throughout most of my life as I probably did about the fact that soon my relative comfort would be rudely interrupted at St. John's Hospital in Woodside. One sensory experience adds to the other, though, and knowing what things transmit by osmosis to an unborn child, it is possible that I registered the audible cheers they gave to Matt Snell's 4-yard touchdown in the manner of a schema, a building block for later learning.

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Where were you when Apollo 11 landed on the moon?

I was a little over four months old when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, so just as with Matt Snell's touchdown, there's nothing actually there about it in my memory. In fact, for many years as a child, there would little or nothing so joyful in the world at large (or in Jets' history) to make my mind take that snapshot. Instead, I remember having a sense that Richard Nixon was in trouble because I watched Mom do her ironing in front of the Senate's Watergate Hearings on TV, but I don't even remember his resignation the following year. I remember staring at a cover of the Daily News when I was eight years old the morning after Elvis died. I remember delivering Newsday's the morning after the Son of Sam had been caught. I remember when I heard that John Lennon died in 1980 and when the Pope was shot a year later. I remember when I heard about Columbine. I even think I will forever recall the moment I heard that the King of Pop was dead.

I remember both where I was and who gave me the news about the planes hitting the Twin Towers, an event that instantly went from the cosmic to the personal in its horror because my brother worked across the street from the World Trade Center. He made it out, and ran for his life, like everyone else who had the opportunity. Thank God.

I suppose it has been a long time since we've heard about moments of happy, glaringly joyful achievement, like the moon landing - an event so monumental that NASA and its international equivalents would be hard-pressed to do it today, to even know how to do it today, or how to pay for it. Excluding the ending of our various wars, I cannot think of another historical moment of happiness that can be equivalent to Apollo 11; maybe the U.S. Hockey Team's victory in 1980 over the Soviets at the Lake Placid Olympics.

Sports are good like that. Sports provide records of small and slightly larger individual achievement that can shield us from remembering that our society has lurched forward without a singular mark of great achievement like the one three Americans made (with their government behind them) in July 1969. Most of the snapshot memories I mention above are marked by death and destruction. Consequently, I've grown up with the notion that I missed out on something even more than a moon landing or a Super Bowl. In 1969, my family had the distinct pleasure of knowing that their football and baseball teams were the champions of their respective sports, and that, yes, their beloved nation had also conquered the moon. The amount of overtime work done to clean up the refuse thrown from buildings in celebration during that year must have been staggering for New York City's sanitation department. Their life in New York was swelled with justified pride. Sports and life coalesced in a singular time of joy.

Such are my delusions. I forget that Mom and Dad were probably most of all happy that they had a child. How like me to feel as though that by being born in a momentous year I was therefore born unlucky. It should be comforting for a Jets fan to remember that one's life is marked by the individual experiences we have with family, with work and people, and not necessarily with a historically troubled football team. Yet it's always been a challenge for a fanatical fan born in the year of his team's greatest triumph; I missed a moment by which I could mark time, and since my childhood, I have used my football team’s subsequent history as one way gauge my own.

And that's why this entry on #41 finishes before barely even mentioning Matt Snell. We freeze the mental snapshot at a single moment from a single game, snapshots Matt Snell is asked to sign all the time. I will return to him at my site. His touchdown has an immortal place in sports history, in American football history, in Jets history, and in my own. Such is the nature of being a fan. It passes the time, but it allows a lens through which, for better or for worse, you measure time's passage.

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Charlie Flowers was a casualty of the AFL's earliest years, and because he was the first Titan to wear #41, he is our first point of discussion with regard to the characters from our beloved team to have worn #41. He played at fullback in sunny Los Angeles for the Chargers in 1960, and then in sunny San Diego the following year. He played at the Polo Grounds for the New York Titans the year after that, and his career ended there before he could become a Jet. A couple of hundred yards total. He was originally drafted in 1959 by the Giants, which might have meant he could have been Don Maynard's teammate on the Giants before becoming Don Maynard's teammate on the Titans. But he appears to have never actually played a down for the Blue (Giants' blue, that is). Fate is fickle, odd certainly, perhaps even negligent.