NY Jets #71 - Part 1

Is it not enough to face the prospect of living in a country that in January will be led by a vulgar, overgrown child with a seriously untreated personality disorder, whose election was guaranteed by an FBI Director with connections to Rudolph Guiliani, or possibly to a Russian dictator? Is it not enough to imagine that this 45th President will likely be impeached and then succeeded by a guy who looks like Race Bannon and who also believes in gay conversion therapy? No. Because today, we must finally play the the first-place Patriots, a team whose coach and quarterback are - of course - good friends with a President-elect who gave off camera advice to a television personality on how to sexually assault women.

I did not know I could hate the Patriots any more than I do at this very moment. Don Shula's Dolphins? The '76 Raiders? The '77 Cowboys...wait, the Cowboys of any era? Big Ben's Steelers? I would gladly pledge an unholy allegiance to any one of these destructors if I knew they could bring Belichick's gray, dull, spiritless, predictable brand of football low forever.

***

Jeff Bleamer #71, played tackle for us in his last season in the pros, 1977. (I'd like to start out, however, by mentioning that the names for #71 are particularly good. In addition to a Bleamer, we have a Chalenski, a Lusckinski, a Krevis, a Pickel, a Stuckey and a Winkel. That is all.) Bleamer went to Penn State and was amazed to be drafted by any pro team in 1975, let alone the Philadelphia Eagles, who were, as he put it, "in my backyard." A 2015 Morning Call article outlines the terrific differences between the drafts of then and now by using Bleamer as an example. He may have been pleased to have been drafted, but the reason it happened is because Joe Paterno called Mike McCormack, the-then Eagles GM, and reminded him that the team had yet to draft a Nittany Lion. Bleamer was drafted. That's how things worked back then. I think we can all agree for reasons that don't need to be outlined here how that was both a better and worse system.

Mike Chalenski #71 is roughly my age and was, unlike myself, a USA Today high school All-American. He played well at UCLA and then, like Beamer, was drafted by the Eagles. I found his LinkedIn; he specializes in Information Technology and Services, but his Pacific Philadelphia Trading Card from 1996 (above), his only season with us, makes him seem a little more than mortal than his work in IT, though maybe it shouldn't be that way. I don't know. Maybe that's what's wrong with our country. But lettering three years at UCLA seems like a mark of distinction that never leaves you.

Maybe it's the fact that Chalenski recovered his only pro fumble as a Jet in 1996, arguably the worst season in franchise history. I don't know which game it was, but I do hope he kept the ball and has it somewhere special. Real life is a mundane and daily grind that should be punctuated by little bits of experience that possess all the resonance of childhood fantasy.

***

Jarron Gilbert #71 played on mostly the practice squads of the Bills and the Jets. He earned a BA in Sociology from San Jose State. To further reinforce the earlier point made by the Morning Call with regard to how much the draft has changed, consider the following:

This above is what the Chicago Bears considered upon taking him in the third round of the 2009 draft. Or perhaps, they, like you, were impressed by the video of him jumping out of a swimming pool.

Obviously this is something cool. One commenter on YouTube says, "It's harder then it looks! So all you people that sit on your ass... And dislike this video first.. try to jump on top of the 1st step of the stair case.. lol.. And if you don't bust your shit! LOL." Another thing that's wrong with our civilization is that a simple YouTube video can produce vitriol, both attacking and defending. Am I sitting on my ass? Yes. Am I disliking this video? No. In fact, what I like best about it is the odd Yo La Tengo- tinged-with-Dark Jazz soundtrack that doesn't really fit the grainy video itself.

***

As I write this, I have just been watching what are the likely winning points that the Giants have scored over the Browns - Jason Pierre-Paul's recovering a batted ball and taking it all the way to the house. The Giants now lead 20-6, with most of the fourth quarter to go, but in Brownsland, it's clearly another loss. The Browns had gotten a terrific 50-yard gain on a Terrelle Pryor Sr. reception.

Then, the turnover then happened on the very next play - as if on cosmic cue. The sound from the remaining Browns fans in the stands was a poignant combination of resignation and bitter laughter, as if they had been waiting for this particular piano to drop on them, as it always does. I'm certain it wasn't the Giants fans laughing. People who are proud to follow a team they know will break their hearts must respond this way. Otherwise why are you there?

JP-P looked like a tight end on his way to the end zone, at least compared with the man who was the first to greet him there - the Giants' Damon Harrison, who was once briefly a #71 for the Jets, and then our #94. Considering the serendipity of this moment, and the uncertainty with which I may be navigating the blog by the time I get to that number, I decide to discuss Harrison now. Who knows what kind of country we'll be living in by #94?

Are the Jets worse off without him? What's unfortunate is that it there are so many missing pieces in the Jets that it hardly seems worth exploring the question. The Giants have won five straight, and they've done it with much more than Damon Harrison. The Jets are just simply a worse team in many ways.

Here are some random cool facts about Damon Harrison:

1. He is, of course, "Snacks." It's one of the best nicknames in all of sports.

2. He opened up to the Players Tribune about fighting depression and suicidal ideation after Hurricane Katrina devastated his hometown. Any time giant men talk about their feelings, it's a good thing.

3. He was All-Pro last year.

4. His first recorded NFL sack was on Tom Brady.

5. After this year's defeat of the Cowboys, the Giants still had zero sacks. Newsday pointed out, during the game that Harrison tried to sack Dak Prescott, but realized that it might register as a late hit, so he pulled up. (Snacks did not sack Dak. There. I said it.) He is a popular player, and still well liked by his former teammates on the Jets, probably for saying something something like this - When he was asked about not sacking Prescott, he said that "I told coach today that it’s kind of good I didn’t get it, because at no time should I be leading the team in sacks. We’d be in trouble.”

***

Giants top Browns 27-13. As the game winds down, there aren't any Browns fans left in the stadium. The fans in Cleveland will return next week in the game against Cincinnati because that's what people who are proud to remain loyal do. If only that dedication could be put to some useful purpose.

Let the Anxiety Commence

Back from Paris, where my wife and I spent nine days. The trip was wonderful. Parisians are friendly people. With the exception of a snippy little man in an information booth in Gare de l’Ouest, every person I came in contact with was thoughtful and kind. If you try a little French, they appreciate it, and all I possess is the ability to create broken sentences with verbs in the present tense. Hello, thank you, I'm sorry, please, and good night were pretty much the only things I said. It was like being a robot programmed for only politeness, or maybe a simple child.

There are no fat people. It's extraordinary to visit a place where overweight people are the exception to the rule. And a walk down any busy street in Paris for an American is striking because very few people are on their cell phones. Very few are playing with their iPhones. In a city as large as Paris, there is excellent, efficient and predictable public transportation. Big book chains are the exception in Paris. Small bookstores are everywhere. In Philadelphia, we are down to barely a handful of really good, small bookstores while the colonizing force of Borders has retreated, leaving a desolate browser’s landscape in its wake.

***

Though the United States gropes even more blandly toward the precipice of total economic collapse, at least the National Football League and its players have come to an agreement. And although I was hoping that Brett Favre would start flirting with his final disaster by thinking about the Oakland Raiders, his story has gotten even better now that he appeared recently in a Phillies hat, signaling that he's interested, perhaps, in playing backup to Michael Vick here in town. Just when I thought Andy Reid had done all he could to court collective dysfunction, he does me even prouder. What can anyone say? He's like a woman who picks all the bad men and knows it. The ego of Favre and the personality disorders of the Eagles' fans would make for awesome combination. Alien versus Predator. I only hope it happens. And now we watch to see which receivers the Jets will hold and which will leave. How much disorientation has there been to the offense due to the impasse? Let the great anxiety commence.

Before getting back to work, I will first tell you of two stories from my trip. I saw a surprising number of Parisians walking around in Yankee hats. While dropping into a park along Boulevard Haussman, we came across two people being entertained by a guy who looked crazy wearing one. Seeing an obvious tourist, he came up to me and, much to the entertainment of others, began kidding me in French, knowing I wouldn't understand. I pointed to his hat and said, "Yankees?" He stopped and stared at me, blankly. "Monsieur," I said, tsking and shaking my head. "Mets." I don't think he knew what I meant, but then I don't either.

This man doesn't know that he's confused.

Then there's this. You might think this is a photo taken on an autumn day in any major American city, but the weather in Paris was wet and cool all week. This is a Parisian and not an American. Crossing Boulevard Sebastopol, he is wearing a bastardized Patriots jersey; you might not be able to make out that instead of Tom Brady's name on the back it reads, "New England." His hat reads, "New York;" you see the Yankees logo in the right hand corner. It's kind of like an American wearing a Real Madrid baseball hat and an FC Barcelona basketball jersey. That was worth stopping in the middle of the street to see. I live with a lot of contradictions; most of us do in some way or another. Are we any better off for knowing what they are or why they exist? Do we benefit from really knowing which were given to us by Fate and which we chose for ourselves to carry around? Does it really do any good for us to know that others see them as easily as I was able to see his from across the street? At least he lives in a culture where this particular paradox doesn't matter. He's lucky. Would that I could live with such contradictions, so blithely and untroubled, going about my day.

Divisional Playoff: NY Jets 28 New England 21

Over the many years I've looked in the mirror, the same ashen expression of wan care has been there to greet me. There is a sinking face there, a boy turned into pale middle-aged man who seems to be looking through his reflection, over his shoulder for the next terrible, imaginary thing that threatens to ruin whatever piece of mind he possesses. Written into the contours of my face are the usual litany of avoidances, the fatty, reassuring foods, staying up late, alcohol, avoiding humanity except at work; we neurotics find ways to comfort ourselves with the very worst choices in order to stave off the pain of losing what little we imagine we never quite had.

Buddhism suggests rather strongly that what a human being needs most is found at the very seat of his soul. What he needs is already there; he needs only to call upon it through meditation and be present in a moment of acceptance of what already is. But having grown up with the mixed bag of ideologies and faiths belonging to the Western tradition, I have both a powerful sense of individuality and yet a deep sense that what I possess is intrinsically flawed. Perhaps if you dig into the DNA of people in Belgrade, Moscow, Munich, Glasgow and Everton, you will find this same worried look, the same basic absence of serenity. Some turn to religion to fill the space that the soul finds so cleverly absent. But I suspect that many like-minded people in all those places do as I have over the years and maintain an unconditional belief that somehow, someday, some way his football team (whichever football) will make it all OK.

It's an illusion. I felt elated when they beat the Patriots last night, but this morning I felt like killing people. I left a Starbucks this morning, suggesting within earshot, that I wanted to destroy all the Starbucks in Philadelphia, which (and I want to say this to anyone surfing the Internet at Homeland Security tonight) I do NOT intend to do. It's the understaffing, the chipperness of the barrista that really conceals a perceptible hostility, it's the ridiculously overrated food, the paralyzing range of beverages with names like no-whip macciato, two-whip latte, a vivano smoothy with a shot of expresso, a soy frappacino, a misto, a red eye, a creme brule latte, and other things that are probably also available at Dairy Queen, only with soy. All I want IS A MEDIUM COFFEE AND THE NEW YORK TIMES, DAMN YOU ALL. AND NO. I STILL HAVE NOT LEARNED WHICH SIZE WITHIN YOUR EXCESSIVELY COMPLICATED SIZING LINGO DERIVED FROM FAUX ITALIAN CONSTITUTES A "MEDIUM." YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT BECAUSE I AM USING OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE. GIVE IT TO ME.

I merely use this as example of how ephemeral and meaningless joy is when it is associated with something not intrinsic to our being. And when the Jets beat the Patriots 28-21 in the AFC Divisional Playoff (and I say this with a residual tingling sensation at the base of my scalp) I felt a euphoria that, all the same, could only last the week, if not a day. It's a hard truth we must all face. We are only as happy as our own willingness to accept and to seek serenity through understanding what constitutes the true realities of our existence. But then I look at this.

Well, enough of that. Let's just relish some of this happiness...

****

Let me begin with a confession: at times last night I might not have been rooting for the Jets quite as much as I was rooting for the Patriots to lose. Some of my New England friends (and my own Patriot bandwagon students!) seemed to approach this game with a haughtiness that was uncharacteristic of the New Englanders I knew at college back the late 1980's when I went to school up there. On days when we felt flush enough, my housemates and I would go a McDonald's in Providence whose walls were adorned with New England sports heroes of a distant time. There were faded images of Carlton Fisk, Bobby Orr, Steve Grogan, all sharing uncomfortable space with their only successful champion of the 80's, Larry Bird. And with bone spurs in his heel, Bird's star was beginning to fade. I felt sad and sympathetic for New Englanders. Aside from the NBA crowns, they never won anything that made them feel like winners.

And especially the Patriots - a team that didn't even manage a winning season in my four years at college. The Rhode Island live sports call-in Sunday night TV show with Chuck Wilson was a bleak, sad place to find yourself after the Patriots played miserably hours before. This may sound apocryphal, but the show actually fell into disrepair when my roommate managed to get through live and asked Wilson, "Hey Chuck, what's with the cheesey stache?" He created a monster. All the calls that followed week after week basically imitated him and digressed from there, and soon Wilson was gone. I think he went on eventually to have a good career on ESPN radio, so there we are. But the point was there was nothing to talk about in the New England autumn, except the premature end of the Sawx season and the start of the B's and the Celtics. I remember this. I was witness to this. I remember when you guys were nothing.

I don't think I'd recognize my old Boston and Warwick friends today. Their streets are paved with gold, their clothes are made from the finest silken hair of virgin maidens. Perhaps their silence after tonight's game is a sign of what all good Americans are taught to say when they lose: Forget it; it didn't matter, anyway.

But I know it did matter. The Patriots lulled you people into believing in your team they way they did during the Perfect Season. And now they haven't won a playoff game since 2007. Belichick handled this loss the same way he handles them all, the way he handled his loss to the Giants in the Super Bowl. He simply made it clear that his team didn't execute or make the right plays. The thing about HAL 9000 is that the he lacked the human element of acknowledging weakness and error, so he had to kill all the human onboard the ship; Belichick's programming, which looks a great deal like narcissistic personality disorder, prohibits him from saying that his opponents outplayed him. Hal, Bill. Bill, Hal.

Yet the Jets did what the Giants did when they beat the Pats that fateful night. They pressured Brady into making very bad decisions. On at least three occasions, with either Calvin Pace or Shaun Ellis in his vicinity, Tom Brady actually flinched, even ducked, even when opponents were still a few steps away. He looked frail and confused. He blamed rookie Aaron Hernendez when he threw behind him. That's the Brady I've been waiting to see all year; the Brady I remember watching buckle under pressure before. The Patriots will continue to build, build, build teams that will keep me miserable for years, but they will never be The Team Of Destiny that they pretended to be for eight solid weeks this season. Brady's star is beginning the stages of fading over the horizen. Is that an overstatement? Yes, probably, but it is fun to say, isn't it?

And to all my dear friends in New England who are talking about injuries, excuses, the way Belichick did the year Brady got injured two seasons ago at Kansas City, let me suggest something I hope you'll find as unpleasant as it is meant to sound: your insistence upon remaining, in your own minds, the only team to beat, even when your team is staying home for the conference championship for the second year in a row, is making you sound like the very creature you were taught to despise from the moment you were brought into this ridiculous world. You sound like Yankee fans.

****

Now, let's look ahead.

There aren't many Steeler fans I know, but there are a few. They live like an uneasily welcome minority in Pennsylvania's more cosmopolitan city of Philadelphia. Sure, Philadelphians are a notoriously crude bunch. Santa Claus, Michael Irvan - Philthies don't really like anyone. Even in a 1969 biography of Vince Lombardi, documenting his only season coaching the Redskins, one sees an illustration of a Sonny Jurgenson effigy hanging from a Franklin Field rafter. "Philadelphians," the caption read, "doing their thing."

But ironically, Philly people view folks from Pittsburgh as mildly civilized Hill People, while Pittsburgh fans in this city seem to brood out of a gloomy sense of their own tragic superiority to their adopted city. Philly is American history's cradle; Pittsburgh was America's blacksmith - until it wasn't anymore after the mills closed. They lost their place their in American history, yet they are made of harder stuff than the Philadelphia snarl. We settled the west, their looks seem to say. We dealt in iron and coke; we built the nation, we provided the material to free the world from Fascism, and then they took it all away. In exchange for our jobs, a sympathetic God made us football champions, time and again. You walk around in period dress. You have Andy Reid. Who the hell are you?

Here are four Steeler fans I know. One is an author and scholar from Western PA who now a college professor in Michigan. He is that rare thing: an academic with an actual knowledge of a sport that produced only about two advanced minds that I can think of: Dr. Frank Ryan, Physicist and Browns championship quarterback and Alan Page, Purple People Eater and Minnesota Supreme Court Justice. He left me a one-line message today: "So, we meet again. Old friend." By "again," I know he's referencing the January 17, 2005 playoff game against the Steelers, when Doug Brien missed two field goals that would have sent us to the conference championship. Nice.

There's my cousin in Pittsburgh. I threw a few friendly salvos across the bow. When my brother reminded him that he was born in Wantaugh in Suffolk County and not Western Pennsylvania, my cousin informed my wife that she was married to a "soft" man and had a "wimpy" brother-in-law.

There was also a guy who used to live down the street from our old apartment who was a Steelers fan. He kept his Steelers banner outside all year. His car was covered with Steeler regalia. He even pasted Steeler stickers on his ground floor window, which is usually the sign of an unhinged mind, or a five year-old. He was the former. He kept a sign on the driveway gate between his building and his neighbors that read "Parking for Steeler Fans ONLY." The only thing is I think he meant it. Parking was shared between the homes, and he appeared to fight over it; or so it seemed when I would hear his neighbors complaining to police. The neighbor was gesturing to her marble front stoop, which had been covered, a la Jackson Pollack, with gobs of black and yellow paint.

Finally, there is a long-term substitute teacher who's been sharing our lunch period with us, and she's a Steeler fan, a farm girl from the west country of the Commonwealth. She's built like a rural, pretty, sturdy, hearty, optimistic gal, the kind who says, "Bless your heart" when you make her laugh. She is about as out of place in our snarky town as, well, a country girl. She is so very young but married, and her Christmas present to her mister was to stand in the freezing rain at Heinz Field and watch the Steelers beat the snot out of the Bengals. But just when you think you've put her into a convenient stereotype, you mention the Steelers' loss this season to the Jets a few weeks ago, and her eyes take on an unfamiliar darkness filled with solid dedication. "They didn't have Polamalu," she said. "They will next time."

I didn't know there would be a next time, but she apparently did. She's been giving me dirty looks all week. It's explains my cousin's uncharacterstic smack. She speaks almost as if to say that she knows the Steelers will win (so do I) but she also resents my team (or any team) coming to town to challenge the integrity of the deal the Universe made with these proud people, and the world that was taken from them. We all root for our beloved teams for our own reasons, to serve our own demons.

Our 300th Post - Patriots 45 Jets 3

While the Jets were being pummeled by the Patriots in the first half of the Monday Night game, I felt a bit like the drunken washout I resembled when the Jets fell to the AFC Champion-to-be Raiders in the January 2003 playoffs, about five months before I dried out. It was an awful feeling, having nothing else but inebriation to shield me from feelings of cavernous loss. I wouldn’t have cared if the world had caved in. My disappointment was at least tempered by the fact that I eventually had no sense of, well, anything at all. There was no other consolation.

So what was my consolation tonight? Oddly, I found myself listening to the Beatles. From their newly published catalogue on iTunes, I downloaded everything essential gone that's gone missing and stolen over the years, especially Revolver and Hard Day’s Night. The latter became suddenly important to me as the Patriots tagged on a 21-point lead going into halftime. I found Richard Lester’s film A Hard Day’s Night on YouTube and watched it while psychologically checking out of a humiliating blowout. The game played on in the background. We may play in the playoffs and have a revenge, but more than one fellow fan has wondered to me if the Jets will even win another game this year. Ah well. They will finish with a winning record for sure, but I knew the Jets shouldn't have given Danny Woodhead away.

But meanwhile, what came up in the foreground of my view were the Beatles. I first listened to them through my Mom’s stereo as a little kid. She owned A Hard Day’s Night, Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper’s, and Abbey Road, her least favorite, a gift from her drugged-out brother-in-law. Each Sunday, while living in Queens and later in North Merrick, my parents would return from Mass, cook breakfast, eat, open the Sunday Times, and listen to two albums – Eileen Farrell’s Puccini Arias and A Hard Day’s Night. The music emanated companionably, twining together like an odd couple not unlike Mom and Dad, themselves – one part classical, one part modern. They insisted on liking both, refusing to choose either at a time when the classical and the modern were entirely separating.

Both albums were recorded before I was born, each a remnant of the early 60’s, back when my parents first fell in love. Though she was more partial to Sinatra than opera, Mom loved Farrell singing “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Gianni Schicci, which I would later hear in the Merchant Ivory film A Room With a View. Dad preferred opera almost exclusively, just as he considered himself a Rockefeller Republican until he met Mom. But in 1964 he found himself voting for Lyndon Johnson and going with Mom to see A Hard Day’s Night in a hot Manhattan theater so crowded with screaming girls as to prohibit a clear sense of exactly what was going on in the movie. But my parents went back again, and despite the fact that they had both skipped over Elvis in their adolescence, they suddenly discovered there and then for themselves the four British men who were already changing the world.

One night, when I was a little boy, and Channel 5 was showing Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, my parents pulled the RCA black and white into the kitchen for us to watch in its entirety while we ate at the table. I was about six. I may not have been aware of it, but Mom claims that while the music in the film came on, I bounced up and down as I ate. It's an infectious response to the Beatles that I’ve seen in my nieces and my friends’ kids – they’ll all perk up at the sound of Harrison’s Rickenbacker, Starkey’s drums, Lennon’s ooo I need your love, babe and Paul’s Hofner. It's a simple human language of love.

There was once a time when my brother and I could practically do the film from start to finish. Richard Lester presents a colorless picture of an England that I grew up desperately wanting to see for myself someday. When I went to England, I found that The Beatles weren't of anyone's interest, any more than someone on a Memphis street had something to say about Elvis to a Japanese tourist. The Beatles are more an American obsession, but Lester's England was there in England for me to find in its colorless towns and the natives' cheekiness. The movie is more English than the group themselves. The Beatles were already reaching well beyond the simple English trains they run in and out of in A Hard Day's Night, away from the screaming girls from the provincial towns where they play. What makes the movie special is Lester's dialogue.

There are so many great scenes from A Hard Day's Night. In one sequence the film turns toward Ringo’s private sojourn. Having been talked into it by Paul’s Irish grandfather (“a king mixer,” Paul says) Ringo decides to leave the group and go “parading before it’s too late." He's going to find himself as an artist, taking photos of the bleak scenes he encounters. While he walks along a dingy riverside, he collides with a little boy's rolling car tire. The boy is Charlie, aged “10 and two-thirds,” whose face is lashed with dirt. He doesn’t know who Richard Starkey is. To him, Ringo’s just another guy. Charlie says he doesn’t want the tire anymore.

Why? asks Ringo.

“Ah, you can have it. I’m packing it in. It depresses me. It gets on my wick.”

“That’s lovely talk, that is,” says Ringo. “Why aren’t you at school?”

“I’m a deserter.”

“Are you now?

“Yeah, I’ve flung school out.”

“Just you?”

“No. Ginger, Eddie Fallon, and Ding-Dong.”

“Ah,” Ringo says, taking off his camera strap. “Ding-Dong Bell, eh?”

“Yeah, that's right,” Charlie says, nonplussed.

When Charlie asks Ringo why he isn’t at work, the world’s most famous drummer says he’s a deserter, too. Just another dropout.

****

The Jets’ travesty sped its way into the fourth quarter.

I know full well that the Beatles' melodies have kept me aloft through most of my depressing episodes of the past, some real, some imagined. Things like losing at Foxboro 41-7 in 1976, or 55-14 at Foxboro in 1978, or 56-3 in 1979. Or when the first place 10-1 Jets met the Miami Dolphins for a Monday Night Game almost exactly 24 years ago in 1986 and lost 45-3 - and then never won another game during the regular season.

Well, anyway. Whatever the degree to which they are a little too legendary, looming too large in our legend, to turn a phrase from the movie, The Beatles have always existed well beyond the grasp of my own self-inflicted misery and are therefore always a consolation. They sit behind Mom and Dad, and the Jets, right behind Catholicism in the list of the longest looming influences of my childhood. And I’m a little like Charlie tonight. In the film, Ringo eventually abandons his sojourn and gets back with the group in time enough to go onstage for the live show in the film. But what happens to little Charlie? Does he stay a deserter? He throws the tire aside.

It depresses me. It gets on my wick.

****

Where are Ding-Dong Bell and Eddie Fallon. And Ginger?

“Ginger’s mad,” Charlie says. “He says things all the time.”

What things? I wonder.

NY Jets #12 - Part 2

Dad also promised he would take me to the Sunday game in November against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and I was holding him to it, even if I no longer harbored any actual hope of seeing them win. The only lingering interest he still had was probably for my benefit. He had been traveling on business a great deal of late, and his absences were creating anxiety for Mom, for she was now the one parent in charge.

Other women in the neighborhood would sometimes try to encourage Mom to try craft making, to join the PTA, or be a den mother. What she really wanted was an occasional respite to go shopping in the city. She couldn’t do it if Dad would return from business trips and then to go to Shea on Sundays with me or Uncle Mike, leaving her alone again to play Mommy. Things had to change. So just before the Buccaneers game, Dad felt torn. We came home from Mass, and while I was prepared to go almost immediately to the game, he suddenly told me that we needed to rake the leaves in the backyard.

I froze. He was kidding. He was kidding, right? It was noon, and kickoff would be in an hour. I looked at him. He didn’t entertain the gesture but simply handed me a rake, and to the backyard we went and got solemnly started. He went about it with an eerie calm, as if he knew something that I didn’t. I became worried. What follows is quite clear in my memory:

“Does this mean we aren’t going?” I asked.
“No, no. Not unless you don’t want to go,” he answered, suspiciously.
I looked at him.
“Dad, there’s a game today, right?”
“Yeah. Tampa Bay.”
“At Shea?”
“Yeah.”
“At one o’clock?”
“What the hell is this, twenty questions?" he asked with uncharacteristic impatience.

Then, he adjusted his tone a little. "Yes. Now rake that side.”

He motioned toward the other side of the oak tree in our yard. He had already filled one lawn bag which he casually left open, and began unfurling another. “Hold this one open,” he said. Precious moments were ticking by. What was going on? I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Dad we have to go.”
“We have to do this first.”
“Why didn’t we do it yesterday?”

He looked at me, and in that instant I saw something, a withering look, one I would only understand myself much later in life as a husband with chores to do.

We kept bagging and raking; in the process, he actually turned on the transistor radio, with Marty Glickman doing the one-hour pre-game show on WOR. Dad seemed almost to be teasing me now, to be illustrating the time wasting away. This is a test, I thought. Either that or some kind of joke, and perhaps Joe Namath was around the corner of the house ready to throw the football around the way he did with Bobby on The Brady Bunch.

Then it hit me.

He was testing me, but not so much to discover the depth of my loyalty to the Jets, but to see if he had a kindred spirit. For the first time, I realized it. I knew what was going on here. He was leaving the Jets behind. He didn’t want to go to the game.

Holy shit.

We were raking leaves because he knew he should have done them the day before, because he now possessed a guilty sense of abandoning his wife to a mundane world, and because he wanted to see if I’d tell him to forget about the game. That’s okay, Dad. There are lots of enjoyable things a father and son can do together instead of another Jets game.

But no way. It wasn’t even a question. I helped clean the yard but then stared apprehensively at him when it was all done. He knew my answer. It was hopeless.

“I’ll get our coats,” he said, looking dejected.

“The wind will be bad. It might rain,” he added.

“I don’t care.” I didn’t.

It didn't rain. Actually, the game against the Buccaneers took place on a sometimes sunny afternoon. It would be Namath’s last victory in a New York Jets uniform. His poor play all year had been the product of countless knee injuries, a failing arm, bad protection in the pocket, inferior coaching, and the latent effects of an irresistible man’s colorful life. Tampa Bay was an expansion team that year, going 0-11 into the game. The Jets would shut them out 34-0, scoring 21 by halftime and 13 in the second half. For once, Namath seemed perfect; his passes still arched oddly in the wind, and he couldn’t scramble out of trouble any better than before, but he managed to look like a winning quarterback for one more day. Clark Gaines went over 100 yards, too. And it was beautiful.

The crowd went mad. Men like Dad had howled for and at Joe Namath for 12 seasons, and they were now howling appreciatively one very last time before letting the idol of their fantasies go. After all, Jets fans were not Namath's metropolitan playboy. He was an envied bachelor who got a great deal of action, while they were working class stiffs from Queens, Jersey and the Island.

Namath was Dad’s friend and he was their friend, too. By mere proximity, he had given them the weekly illusion that they were as hip as he, and in return they wanted Joe Willie to fade gracefully away into history. This is what fans and players do for one another; each provides the other with an illusion, and I daresay that with the exception of players’ salaries, it is the fan who eventually receives the better end of the deal. The fan is as close as he can be to someone else’s victory, with no expectation other than to be near it. John Riggins may have shown me that money mattered above all things when he left the team, but I suppose that when a player's salary runs out and the career is over, he then has to rely on the fans’ collective memories in order to move on, or perhaps profit from the past. Even still, no amount of money made at celebrity appearances or at memorabilia signings can bring back the authenticity of the player’s first-hand experiences, which is probably why at such events the player and the fan finally come face to face.They are finally at common ground.

And so this was Joe’s last winning experience on the field of his beloved city. Even at the age of seven, I knew that this was a poignant moment, and as the time ticked away, I began to cry. Dad looked at me. “Jesus Christ, Marty,” he said, hopeless, “they’re winning. What the hell is wrong with you?” The cops heard him and surreptitiously looked round, only to have my father quickly use their own line on them:

“Nothing to see here,” he said.

“I know,” I said, sniffling in response to his incredulity. “It’s just…” I grasped at superlatives, “…beautiful.” I felt transcendent. The player’s greatest gift to the fan was given to me at last.

And, if nothing else, the Buccaneers game finally made me believe the Jets could win when I was there. The Marty schneid was over, at least for now. We counted down the seconds, I tallied up the statistics for Clark Gaines, and as we left, I begged Dad to put off his impending divorce from the Jets. I asked him to take me to the next home game against first-place New England; he said yes. There was no We’ll see. He smiled.

But it wouldn’t last. The following week, despite going ahead by 10 against New England in the first quarter, the Jets returned to normal, coughing the ball over to a vastly superior Patriots team, missing tackles, and with Namath returning to form throwing key interceptions. The final, 38-27, seemed significant to me because the Jets had scored a whole 27 points against a first place club, but on the cold platform of the number 7 line, Dad dismissed this facile observation. Despite my protests, he angrily insisted on leaving the game at the beginning of the fourth quarter. There was no persuading him otherwise. My identification with the Jets as noble failures was no longer charming to him, and as we waited for our train, I sensed that this would be my last home game for a long, long time.