NY Jets #70 - Part 1

The other day I was listening to "This American Life" about the twisted identities of Asa and Forrest Carter, two men who were in fact the same person, the latter resurrecting himself from the vanishing act of the former. Asa Carter was a violent, viciously racist would-be demagogue from Alabama who wrote George Wallace's inauguration speech of 1963. A radio personality with hatred for anything other than what he called "Anglo-Saxon" culture, Carter was so racist that when Wallace cooled on segregation and race-baiting, Carter decried him publicly, ran against him and then disappeared.

In 1976, Forrest Carter - a self-proclaimed storyteller of the Cherokee people - published his second book, The Education of Little Tree, a memoir of the care and teachings he received from his Cherokee grandparents and the lessons he learned about the "Way" of his people. It quickly became a staple of high school English classes. The novel preaches the importance looking toward nature to learn life lessons, and it teaches about the kindnesses that ordinary people of different backgrounds can show one another. It took at least two decades for the country to finally accept the fact that Forrest "Little Tree" Carter never actually existed. He was in fact Asa Carter - thinner, tanned, with a mustache, a cowboy hat and a softer, gentler demeanor. Forrest Carter was in fact no more full-blooded Cherokee than my dog. Asa/Forrest Carter died in 1979 as news was just starting to get round that he was, in fact, a fraud. After Oprah picked the book as one of her favorites in the 1990's, it went back on the nonfiction bestseller list, but the Times moved it over to "fiction." It continues to sell to this day.

I recognize that using Asa/Forrest Carter as a prelude here is not really appropriate at all, but that's never stopped me from making convoluted associations. In doing crack research on Gene Cockrell #70, I discovered two men with that name, roughly of the same age, living in Texas, and I wondered while studying their very separate existences if they were in fact the same guy. Both Gene Cockrells seem like fine, accomplished, good human beings, and unlike Asa Carter, the Gene Cockrells have nothing to hide. But one of the things about Asa/Forrest was his extraordinary talent at personal invention, and in this, the two Gene Cockrells seem well suited. Might they be one Gene Cockrell?

What is Gene Cockrell doing?

First, the player, the Gene Cockrell in whom we have the greatest interest. He was drafted out of Hardin-Simmons by the Browns but ended up playing all three of his NFL years with the New York Titans, which means that he also played at both tackle and defensive end for all three years of the Terribles' existence. In the football card to the left, he's approaching us with what looks like a tackle dummy. Was this a common routine at Titans' practices? Is this something from his college days? He looks almost as if he isn't taking no for an answer, and he's going to knock down the door himself. I want to believe that this was somehow Gene Cockrell's idea, this pose, though knowing how card manufacturers insisted through the ages on specific and ridiculous poses from their subjects, I doubt it.

It's a tea party. Get it?

Then there's this gem, taken from Tales from the American Football League, which shows five Titans planted next to the goal post of the Polo Grounds, overseeing the seeping of a giant cup of tea. One of them is Gene Cockrell #70. Can you guess the historical allusion at work here? According to Todd Tobias above, it's a tea party, and, if you follow the thinking of the guy who staged this amusing and slightly awkward photograph, there's a team coming to town to play the Titans that might be associated with an historical tea party:

The caption on back reads, “October 10, 1960 – The Boston Patriots will have no tea party these New York Titans players say as they gather in the “tea formation” to brew special plays for their Saturday night game, Sept. 17th, with the Patriots at the Polo Grounds.  

Tea formation! Tobias suggests that what we see here is the "simplicity" of the old league, but to be honest, I find the strangeness of the image to be the best part of it. It's not simple at all. Football players are sitting around having tea like something out of Lewis Carroll. Do each one of them get a sip? It's surreal. I understand it would be difficult to post something like this today without it being derided on Deadspin, but who thought this up? My money's on Harry Wismer, but some part of me wishes it had been Gene Cockrell.

Deeper questions remain, though. Where did they get the props? For a team like the Titans, whose expenses rarely ever met the basic needs of running a football team, the extravagance of a giant tea set seems shocking. The fellas up there appear to be good sports, and it's nice to know that despite worrying about whether or not their paychecks will clear, the Titans' players are still upbeat. It's still 1960 - very early in the Titans' existence - so the cash for big tea place settings and historical metaphors may not last much longer.

After his football career was over, Cockrell returned to Texas. He went into rodeo and then became a rancher, and a successful one at that, owning ranches in the US, Australia, Brazil and a gold mine in Costa Rica. In an article in the Amarillo Globe-News covering his induction into the Pampa (Texas) High School Hall of Fame, Cockrell speaks kindly of Titans coach Sammy Baugh, and adds, "I've thoroughly enjoyed my life."

I've thoroughly enjoyed my life. I'm still amazed that anyone can say that, and I'm slightly horrified by the notion that I've never heard anyone say it before either. I don't imagine being able to do so myself. I've thoroughly enjoyed my life. The other day I was chatting with a colleague about trying to quit smoking, and she said that what kept her from doing so was "the psychic pain of living in this world." I don't know what precisely she means, but in spirit, I know exactly what she means.

"Audrey"

But then there's another incarnation of Gene Cockrell. There's a man bearing a resemblance in age and appearance to the rancher and rodeo man. This is Gene Cockrell who lives in the town of Canadian, Texas, known for his remarkable roadside art. His most notable work is a one-ton sculpture that sits atop a hill overlooking the road that leads in and out of town - a yellow-spotted brontosaurus dinosaur named "Audrey," named for Cockrell's wife, a love token as grand as the Taj Mahal, as one writer put it. As the Roadside America site notes in the above link, he has also created renderings of all sorts of animals, space aliens, statues of Jesus and Cowboy cheerleaders, most of which adorn his Canadian (Texas) home.

Looking at the images of the two Gene Cockrells in the different stories above, I see similarly wrinkled, sunlit faces, square chins, smiling eyes, and the long gangly ears of old Texas men. A little closer, though, and I see that the sculptor is probably ten years older than the rancher, and so the rancher alone is our man. There are two Gene Cockrells after all.

The questions that survive Asa/Forrest Carter are about the contradictions in his own words - how could one man preach such a different messages about tolerance and intolerance? That he made himself into an entirely different person suggests (as Allen Barra says in the link above) that Fitzgerald was right and that there are no second acts in a single American life. It's why, like Don Draper, he needed to create an entirely new persona. The most optimistic (and probably most simplistic) interpretation of Asa Carter is that he saw the error of his ways, and he found a platform that allowed him to be a gentler human being.

Is this why I want so much for the two Cockrells to be one person? I want to believe that Gene Cockrell, a self-taught artist of large and small proportions, is also the rancher who has traveled the rodeo circuit and dug for gold. I suppose I want to believe that there are no limits to the possibilities of our lives, no boundaries to the human experience, regardless of how much time is left to us. I want to know what it means to thoroughly enjoy one's life.

***

Whenever I dwell on these kinds of things, I know it's also time to bring up yet another member of the NFL Strike "replacement" squad for the Jets in 1987. In this case, it's Tony Garbarczyk #70. Drafted out of Wake Forest but then cut by the Buffalo Bills in 1986, Garbarczyk answered the call the following season for interested persons to replace the starters as scabs in the middle of one of the worst seasons the NFL has ever known. He is on record as playing two games at defensive end and that's all, though considering that Mark Gastineau and Marty Lyons both crossed the picket line, it's hard to say how much starting time he got. Originally from Hauppague, NY, dead center of Long Island, he was a Jets fan, and it was only a ride along the Long Island Expressway, through the tunnels, onto the Garden State Parkway, and then to the Meadowlands to get to his dream.

In one article I found on Garbarczyk's college days there's one snippet suggesting that he was so enamored of Mark Gastineau while at Wake Forest that he wore a black glove over his hand after he broke his thumb, just like Gastineau. How surreal it was for him - if only for two weeks of the strike - to suddenly be in the locker room with Gastineau himself, and potentially playing at the same position. One wonders if the Long Island boy took one look at Gastineau, who at the time was a fashion casualty, and saw everything he could dream of being. Or, instead, did the scales fall from his eyes, and suddenly all he could see was everything that's wrong with pro football?

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.  

***

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. 

***

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.

***

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 #61 - Part 1

Is there anyone out there who's interested in New York Titans cuff links? I don't have any to sell, but that's not the point. The question is rhetorical. In Islam, conspicuous consumption and greed are defined by having so many possessions that you cannot stand upright. Of course, Ben Franklin also rightly said that an empty bag can't stand upright, either. But is a man at the upper levels of society likely to buy Titans cuff links? Would Titans cuff links be a good addition to the board room? Isn't it too ironic to impress anyone? Irony doesn't impress anyone the way cuff links are supposed to. Irony is the refuge of those who will never know what it means to win - those who will never stand upright because they have nothing.

What can any of this can tell us about Dan Callahan #61, who played for Titans at guard from 1960-61? Twelve men walked on the moon between 1969 and 1973; roughly 150 men played for the New York Titans, an AFL organization run by a former sportscaster who drank himself to death. Some men are in the right place at the right time; how you want to define "right" in this instance is irrelevant. If anything, Callahan was unique because of his time and place. Rich or poor, or somewhere in between, if he's still alive, Dan Callahan may be the right person to buy cuff links that commemorate his specific time in a specific place. So there's your answer.

Frank D'Agostino may have been the first Titan to wear the number 61, before Callahan. Other than that, I only see that he played for the Eagles in 1956. Or maybe it was Leon Dombrowski #61 who wore it first. All three men are listed as starting in 1960. I'm not sure the cuff links will mean anything to them, but I might be wrong. Just keep in mind, they cost $60. Cuff links could hardly be said to encumber anyone, but whether I made such an investment for myself or received them as a gift, I know I would be psychologically burdened by what a rip-off they are.

Dan Ficca's 1965 helmet

On the other hand, would you like to buy Dan Ficca's (#61) helmet? That's also a rhetorical question because the bidding is over, and now the auction is just an online memory. It sold for $940, which is pretty cool. Check it out here, and you'll see how rudimentary a football helmet was in 1965, Ficca's last year with the Jets. A mere pad at the top of the head and canvas straps on the side protect the head from the outside blows. It's almost quaint to imagine something like this protecting anyone from anything, and whether they meant to be humorous or not, the sellers put quotes around the word padding, possibly to suggest that its structural protection was always purely symbolic.

The truth is that while wearing a helmet like this, Dan Ficca had to reckon with people like the legendary behemoth defensive lineman Ernie Ladd of San Diego. In Ed Gruver's American Football League, Ficca says the following about Ladd:

He broke my nose, and then he broke my cheekbone. Then he broke the cheekbone on the other side, but by then, my head was numb.  

(On the same page, Gruver writes that apparently the only way to soften Ladd's imperious power was to "compliment" him, as former Patriots guard Charley Long did. "What could we do?" Long says, sounding like a helpless member of an animist tribe about the wrath of a god, "I told him how great he was - just praying that he wouldn't get mad and hit any harder.")

Against a 6'9" monster like Ladd, the helmet above stood very little chance. The industrial-gray face mask looks like a relic from the late 50's, but this must have been Ficca's preference. The white-on-green football logo is slanted decidedly upwards, as it was throughout the 1960's, headed toward the sky like so many things optimistically were - jets, satellites, space capsules. Click on one of the images at the link, and you can happily magnify each one to needlessly large dimensions - the old Riddell tags and the handwritten "61" in blue ink inside. It's old, but back then it must have looked as fragile as the delicate human head it is meant to protect, and since we now know that no helmet is adequate against head trauma, the one we see above is testimony to the carefree optimism of its time.

Apparently Dan Ficca was traded to the Jets from Oakland at the beginning of the 1963 training camp, and, in a move that may have started the antipathy between the two clubs that decade, Al Davis apparently neglected to tell the Jets that their new guard still had six months of military service to perform. The Jets should probably have checked that out ahead of time. Ficca played at guard for the Jets for three seasons, from 1963-65. There are bits and pieces of contemporary news about his whereabouts in his native Pennsylvania, in what is known as the Lower Anthracite Region, most specifically Mt. Carmel, which sits near the center of the commonwealth. As a local boy done good, he seemed to have been feted in newspapers in the years after leaving town, even having the birth of his first child mentioned as a news event in 1966. In 2009, he is back in his home town, where he has probably lived since retiring from the game. We see him hosting the Mount Carmel Area Athletic Alumni Association's scholarship awards for high school seniors. In 2011, his face is shown among residents at town meeting that addressed the community's fears about people using bath salts to get high. Such is small town life.

This was apparently one of two helmets that Ficca auctioned off. The other, auctioned on Ebay at some point, was probably more valuable - the 1964 helmet with the green-on-white logo that the Jets had for just one season. I suppose when I look at the one at left, my eye is drawn to its outdated shape and the slight bulge at the ears, but I can't help staring at the little football resting beneath the streamlined JETS. The little football at the base of the current logo has large laces pointing outward. Here the laces point up. The old logo was also a brighter green than the current one.

But what always gets me is ghostly "NY" behind the team's name. When I was four, my parents gave me a little kid's Jets football helmet with the logo, and I used to just stare at it. The logo on top of the initials made me think about infinity, about layers and layers of things ad infinitum and about how nothing is ever quite known without knowing what's behind it. I once had a Giants fan tell me that the Jets logo looks like a bad high school art project, but that's no matter. That has no bearing on the things to which you attach yourself as a child, when all you desperately want is to belong to something greater than yourself. Obviously, as an adult, I see myself as being greater than my own fandom, but then such realizations belongs to the realm of adulthood, a place where ideas are less permanent, less stable, less certain and always more malleable than they were when you were a child, when everything pointed optimistically upward.

NY Titans #55 - Part 5

Robert "Bob" Marques #55 joined the newly created New York Titans and apparently played linebacker.  There isn't much to go on in terms of the stories of his career. He is mentioned, however, in The Coffin Corner, an ongoing history of professional football. This issue from 1999 includes "Fantastic Finishes: Three Weeks with the New York Titans." Here Bob Marques shows up in a mention of the Boston Patriots game against the Titans of New York at the Polo Grounds, 1960. Early in the game, the Titans lead, 17-7. William Ryczek writes:

Titan middle linebacker Bob Marques was enjoying himself tremendously at this point. A graduate of Boston University, Marques was well-acquainted with Boston assistant coach Mike Holovak, the former Boston College star and coach, and Alan Miller, the Patriot fullback who had also played at BC. Marques shouted a number of uncharitable remarks across the field to Holovak as the Titans built their sizable lead and was quite vocal about the poor performance of the Patriots. During one Boston drive, on fourth down and one, Marques blitzed and tackled Miller in the backfield. He laid on top of him after the whistle, holding Miller down and forcing the cursing fullback to wrestle himself free.

Marques had gone to Boston College while Holovak had coached at BU. Why not razz him? We can imagine history repeating itself, can't we? Shaun Ellis getting a hold of Shonn Greene and having a few words for Rex Ryan? I remember going to the old Spectrum in Philadelphia during an ill-fated bachelor party many years ago when the Celtics were in town. Eric Williams was playing for the Celtics at the time and was going up and down the court against the hapless Sixers. We had courtside seats, and when one of the guys in the party found out that Williams went to my alma mater, he insisted that I come up with something with which could heckle him. I told him which dorm Williams lived in at my school, so he started yelling, "Hey Williams, go back to Stephens' Hall!" It worked, sort of. Williams stopped in the middle of a fast break and bent over, laughing. The Sixers still lost.

If we had only known how Eric Williams would someday aspire to a career as a porn film director and recruit his wife's friends for nude scenes - and would throw a drink in his wife's face on Basketball Wives - well, just imagine what we could have said to him at courtside. By the way, Bob Marques' heckling went for naught. The Patriots ended up beating the Titans 28-24 at the Polo Grounds in 1960. It was the first meeting between the two franchises.

Pasquale Lamberti #55 played for the Titans in 1961, but he was known as "Pat." Though no real bits of information seem available, Lamberti has the following write up on yet another site where they also care about who played in what number and where - "Denver Broncos Greats By the Numbers" at Mile High Report. According to them, Pat...

Was drafted 146th overall in the 1959 draft by the Chicago Cardinals. Pat never played for them, instead choosing to wait two years so he could jump into the fledgling AFL in 1961, where he played twelve games for two teams without starting a game. In his seven games with Denver he intercepted one pass and ran five yards with it.

His seven games with the Broncos were preceded by five games with the Titans. After that, Pat Lamberti is nowhere to be found. He clearly played alongside Larry Grantham at linebacker. He was from Woodbridge, NJ, and he played football for the Richmond Spiders in college. And he died on December 19, 2007.

With or without football, I'm usually in an autumn Sunday malaise that doesn't start wearing off until later in the week, roughly Thursday night. But last autumn I was at least guaranteed a TV lineup that distracted my Sunday ennui even before it had a chance to settle in. The 1:00 pm game was very likely the Jets game, or at least an Eagles game in Philadelphia, which was typically operatic. (No team has bigger expectations this year than the Eagles, so no team will disappoint in quite the Wagnerian way that the Eagles will in 2011, and you will be able to thank Andy Reid for it.) Then comes the hysterical buildup to Hockey Night in Canada on NBC, with a very, very awkward pregame program, followed by the Sunday night game itself.

Then, I would switch over to AMC later in the evening, and there was the brilliant but canceled Rubicon, which I agree was convoluted, but then so are most good things. And then I would be able to end the night with Mad Men, which has become so popular now that its mere reference in a blog is as obnoxious as mentioning Stephens Hall to Eric Williams. But I did back then, so I will now right now. So far, Mad Men has covered the years 1960-65. My mother worked in Manhattan at the time the show takes place, and like Peggy Olsen, she was an impressionable, smart, well-meaning, astute, conscientious, hard-working Irish-Catholic young woman surrounded by barely functioning alcoholic executives who believed most of the time that they were geniuses. Granted, Peggy's no angel, but my mother worked as a secretary for the same firm for 13 years, and she knew how to handle people.

But if you're really interested in the history of the advertising agencies of the 60's, apart from the Lucky Strikes and the Rob Roys, then consider the New York Titans center and linebacker Alex Kroll #55.

Alex Kroll's 1963 card (he did not 
play for the Jets)

According to Jimmy Wales' free site, Kroll was accepted to Yale in 1955 but was thrown out in his first year. "He played on Yale’s varsity football team," it says "but a physical argument with a young associate professor got Kroll expelled during his sophomore year."

He punched a young professor? Now I was intrigued by Alex Kroll. He then went into the Military Police. My Uncle Mike was an MP in the early 50's, and I have never quite understood how he made it in there considering that the average height for an MP was roughly Kroll's, at six foot-plus; in order to put soldiers in the clink you needed a height and weight advantage. My Uncle Mike is only about 5'7", and he believes he was made one because Michael Patrick Colahan signed his name "M.P. Colahan," which I'm not going to argue over one way or the other. After the army stint, Alex Kroll went to Rutgers and became an All-American at center.

He played in 1962 for the New York Titans, and rather than work at Sears in the off-season, he became a trainee at Young and Rubicam, the famed advertising agency in New York. The company was responsible for developing a variety of campaigns that helped shift the industry into a contemporary aesthetic. Today, their clients are Land Rover, Gap, VH1, the Red Cross. In the 60's, they were the first to do TV advertisements in color.

A BBC program from 1967 shows Young and Rubicam creative director Steve Frankfurt as the focus of a documentary about the typical United States ad man, about how he balances work, creativity, change, family and so on. It's a vanity project, very much like the one the good people at Sterling (Cooper?) Draper Pryce try to get Don Draper to do, though he refuses at first because he's not actually Don Draper. He's Dick Whitman. While Steve Frankfurt would be out of Y&R by 1970, he would also create posters for some of the most memorable films of the next decades. His poster for Rosemary's Baby proclaimed, "Pray for Rosemary's Baby" when really people should have prayed for Rosemary, but then that was the point. And yes, Frankfurt later came up with "In Space, No Can One Hear You Scream," which haunts people who market movies to this day.

But when Frankfurt was let go of Young and Rubicam he was replaced as creative director by Alex Kroll, former Titan, former trainee turned advertising superstar, and apparently Kroll lead the company in new and profitable directions, eventually becoming CEO in 1985 and then stepping down in 1994. Here's his somewhat cloudy Horatio Alger tribute, complete with a cheesy medal around his neck. To his credit, he apparently tried to lead an exploratory committee to help Bill Bradley run for President in 2000. 

If you are as intrigued as I am by the tough rooms filled with smoke and spirits that execs encountered at ad agencies in the 1960's, take a look at the last part of the BBC segment on Steve Frankfurt below and you'll see Frankfurt leading a discussion in Creative about the agency's plan to get Spalding to sell golf clubs to women. As one of the two women in the room point out (there's only one at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, mind you) most middle class women had the luxury of playing golf all day, whereas men could only play on weekends (in 1967, at least). Women needed golf clubs, too.

But the most vocal proponent in the tough room for the idea is Alex Kroll, the then up and coming man at Y&R. Compare the football card above with the assertive man with glasses who is sitting down in the video below, and tell me if they don't match.

"Women," he says in the video, "comprise 20% of the market, and the market's growing as fast as you want it to." Then the camera focuses on Kroll, so much so that you wonder if it's been staged. "Nobody's ever done any advertising to this particular segment of market; as a matter of fact, it's the fastest growing part of the whole market. And there's like seven million golfers. A million two hundred thousand of them...," he hesitates for a moment, almost catching himself, and reverts back to locker room talk, "...are broads."

Still, he insists a few minutes later, again to both Frankfurt and the camera:  "There are a million two hundred thousand women in this market," he says, "and nobody's paying any attention to them."

I certainly know even less about advertising than I do about the New York Titans, but I do know that the great success of advertising in the United States after 1967 grew out of a recognition that women were consumers of something more than just household goods during the week. To draw broad conclusions based on one or two moments in a carefully staged film would be silly, but Alex Kroll would eventually become a CEO at a time when more and more women would be in higher places on the corporate ladder, which meant that more women would definitely be playing golf.

NY Jets #44 - Part 3

When John Riggins left the New York Jets as free agent at the end of the 1975 season, there was no one really left on the team who possessed his qualities of speed and power at running back. Clark Gaines was speedy, certainly, and had several good seasons with the Jets. No one else would come close again until Freeman McNeil was drafted in 1982. Before then, at the very least, Tom Newton replaced John Riggins in uniform #44, from 1977-82.

I remember him most vividly from the 1978-79 teams, and I wasn't sure why until I looked at his statistics from 1979. He gained 145 total yards rushing but scored six touchdowns, which must mean he was regularly brought in for short yardage situations close to the goal line. As the Jets' talented backfield coach, the late Bob Ledbetter put it in the Jets' 1980 Yearbook, Tom Newton had "that old knack of smelling the money at the end of the line," which, really, sounds like a line from a pulp novel. It obviously meant he was also a regular blocker, too.

It's hard to recall these things clearly, but I must be thinking of him fondly, as I sit here, writing. Pavlov would obviously see the combination of elements at work here. Newton scored touchdowns in three of the eight precious wins the injury-ridden, confused squad had in 1979. And he scored a 51 yard touchdown in one of the worst losses I remember from that season, the 46-31 loss in Buffalo, a game that revealed that we were much worse that we thought and that Buffalo was much better; they would ultimately win the division. For years Buffalo had been a reliable win for us, even through the 9-33 seasons from 1975-77.

But the worm turned at the halftime of that game. In the first half, Tom Newton took a breakaway touchdown, and then followed it with a one-yard run, giving us a 17-6 lead. Anything seemed possible. Yes, this most definitely must have left its mark somewhere in the abandoned rooms of my childhood museum. And he wore #44. How can I not feel instinctively good about Tom Newton?

But then the Jets buckled in the second half, and Tom Newton and the Jets became human again. Perhaps as the understandably human inheritor of the #44 - the number that had previously belonged to a peerless, grunting mass of offensive power - Tom Newton embodies the pain that comes when the belief that our illusions will live on forever finally dies.

****

That's right: Bert Rechichar #44. The first of his number, playing for the New York Titans in 1961.

Here he is in his glory days, looking as if he's steadying himself against a possible tremor. Back when men were men and they drank Ballantine because it's made with Brewer's Gold. Actually, until Tom Dempsey kicked a 63 yard field goal with half a foot in 1970, Bert Rechichar set the record with 56 yards for the longest placekick in 1953 while with the Baltimore Colts. Kicking was obviously an imperfect science back then, even with all of one foot, usually requiring a simple head-on doink to the ball. There was probably more to it than that, but it became so much more complicated with the arrival of Pete Gogolak and Jan Stenarud, and men named Raul. Doink was all that was required. Linemen could be kickers, running backs could be kickers. Men were men, women were women, but anyone could be a kicker. It was the 50's one public allowance for promiscuity.

Moving on, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, I would like to congratulate Bert Rechichar with having a last name that's funny for sounding like something you should never do.

But we're also fortunate to have this testimony by way of Alex Hawkins, a 1950's and 60's Baltimore Colt of impeccably eccentric character with his assessment of Bert Rechichar:

Bert carried all his money with him, leading the other players to call him the "First National Bank of Rechichar." No one knew where he lived. When Coach Weeb Ewbank finally released him, Bert asked Hawkins to give him a lift to pick up his belongings. Alex jumped at the chance to finally learn where Bert lived. Instead, Rechichar directed him to half a dozen back alleys and side streets where he picked up a pair of pants in this building, a jacket in that one, a couple of shirts here, a pair of shoes there. After an hour of this, Bert said, "O.K., that's it." Hawkins concludes: "Would you say that Bert Rechichar was a totally sane man?"

No. But is that a problem? Again, no. The New York Titans had him for one season. Obviously, it seemed like a role he had been waiting to play all his life. A man who keeps his pants in odd places should play for a man like Harry Wismer who couldn't cover his checks.

Finally, there's Lonnie Young, the Grover Cleveland of #44. He played for Bruce Coslet from 1991 to 1993 and then returned to the Jets again for the Kotite years of 1995-96. What on earth did he do to deserve that? His better years with the Jets were in #31 when he recorded 102 tackles in 1992, but when he returned, he was given #44 and recorded 32 total tackles over two seasons, with one interception. I won't even bother to find out where and when it happened. Do any of us really want to relive 1996, and I mean for any reason? Think about it. Honestly.

But here again, I must turn to the wild and the wacky. I confess I know nothing about video games, and it seems as though this Wikipedia entry is talking about something older than dirt in the gaming world, but it makes for great reading anyway. Here goes:

Lonnie Young appears on the Phoenix Cardinals roster in Tecmo Super Bowl for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nobody knows exactly why, but he has the highest running speed attribute of any player. Robo Lonnie Young is an Ultra Beast.^{[citation needed]} Some believe his elite starting speed is due to a programming error or glitch. It has been a mystery to Tecmo fans since 1991, when the game was originally released.

All of us should be so lucky as to have our best abilities, even in the simulated world, be as a result of a glitch. My glitch is depression. So what's the deal? Why did the Glitch Fates pick Robo Lonnie Young to be so fast? Why was he made an Ultra Beast? Why can't I be an Ultra Beast?