NY Jets #70 - Part 5

The Jets won today. That's not a phrase I use lightly or, for that matter, often. They won in Jetsy fashion. Todd Bowles benched Ryan Fitzpatrick against the Ravens, started Geno Smith, who managed to get a touchdown pass to Quincy Enunwa before getting injured in the first half, perhaps badly. I don't know why the gods have such a thing about Geno. He is probably not a bad person, and he is, statistically speaking, not a talented enough quarterback for the gods to treat him with such feckless jealousy.

I have a former student who's now in the tenth grade, originally from Lithuania, who's a Jets fan. I don't know how it happened. I don't know what the basis was for his choice. Did he happen to catch one football game in his new country, a Jets game, sort of like the one the Jets played today - one where they benefited mostly from the opponents' miscues? Did he suddenly and misguidedly tell himself, That's my team? It's too late now, and he knows it. His loyalty is branded on his brain. Win or lose, he wears his Jets swag each Monday, but he's lately taken to walking into my classroom when I'm not teaching, and look at me with incredulity. Five times this year he's come to see me after five losses.

"Mr. Roche...," he says. Nothing else. He shakes his head.

"I know, kid," I say. "I know."

He says nothing.

"We're in for the long haul," I say encouragingly.

But he speaks frankly. "That doesn't help me."

"No. They'll probably win a Super Bowl in your lifetime, not in mine."

"That's even more depressing."

"Not for you, though," I try to salvage as we walks away. "Not for you!"

****
The blog is back. I don't know why. Why was this Sunday different from any other? Maybe I'm just avoiding the 90 freshman papers I need to grade. For a long time, I forgot my password to the blog, and I just let it slide. When I recently figured it out and returned, I found a handful of kind email messages from people wondering if I was okay, wondering when I would write again. I appreciate that. It's been almost two years since I last wrote, and some things in my life have really stabilized since then, while other things just keep me up at night. I'm probably just like you. It's been so long since I've written that I would visit the blog just to see if it was still there (why wouldn't be?) but after a fashion, the Google search for "Infinite Jets" would return with Did you mean Infinite Jest? No I did not, but never mind.

I did get a number of comments on past entries from family members and friends of players, some of whom had recently died. One guy wanted me to know that his mother was one of the original Jets cheerleaders from the late 1960's, and I managed to find some film I had somewhere of some of those gals cheering on the sideline and asked him if maybe one of them might have been his mom, who had passed away sometime earlier. He opened the link I sent him, on Easter, with all his family gathered, and indeed, one of the images was his mom. It was emotional moment, he told me. That was pretty cool.

I hope you're still out there. Hope you're doing better than our football team. I need to write more and at the very least finish number 70. There have been a lot of new players who've gone in and out of numbers that we already covered; I can't say I'll be able to backtrack and revise those entries. Maybe I'll try. Otherwise, I'll just keep moving forward by looking backward and hope that I'll serve you well. If you're reading this, thanks.

****

Between 1978 and 1984 there wasn't much to be concerned about. I was nine on the front end of those years, and 15 at the end. If he's lucky, a boy's life between those ages can be simply summed up as playing late outside with his friends until, to turn a Joycean phrase, his body glows, until it's too dark out to see the ball. When he goes home, there's a reliable meal on the table. When he needs to be somewhere, he rides his bike with abandon. When my dad came home from work at night, I hugged him, and his trench coat smelled of the city and of the train car's cigarette smoke. I was not always a happy kid, but most of the time there was nothing really outside of my own mind to make it unhappy. During the years I taught at a high school right outside West Philadelphia, I had already seen more than enough children who did not have the slightest glimpse of such a simple, contented life as the one I had known.

And then there was the Jets. In those years, they offered lots of promise, chances at what appeared to be greatness, but always, always in the end, an early exit. There are few things in life that I have loved with such unrepentant emotion as I did my football team between the ages of nine and 15. What else is there?

And so say the name Stan Waldemore #70, and I can immediately picture his face, his uniform. I can hear Marty Glickman or Spencer Ross naming him on the play. He didn't always start, though he started pretty regularly late in his career. He is a regular at retired player meet-ups. When I mentioned that I was writing about him, my wife noted that his last name is similar to the notorious villain of the Harry Potter novels. I think he replaced Randy Rasmussen, who was a Jet forever, a player who was invariably blocking in front of Matt Snell in all of the childhood stories I read about Super Bowl III. That must have been a bit of a challenge to follow after Randy Rasmussen.

He had a good career. This is about all I can say about him, though in his book The View from the Bench, former offensive lineman George Mills talks about losing his job on the Nebraska Cornhusker line to Waldemore when the latter was just a freshman in 1974. He makes sure we know that Stan Waldemore was a good guy. Mills had to constantly petition line coach Monte Kiffin that he was better than Waldemore, all the while acknowledging that injuries were prohibiting him from really competing with Waldemore. It was nothing personal, though. It was a career at stake, masking as a boy's game.

As for Dakota Dozier #70, our current wearer of the number, I do not see any record that he has started a game on the offensive line this season, but he might take comfort from Mills' book about being an unused football player, or perhaps he might be reminded that he is earning good money without having to worry as much about permanent brain damage as Sunday's starters will. As a former consensus All-American, that probably doesn't mean much to him.

****

Woods (at left) and teammates from Tennessee State University, before he was drafted by the Lions. I did not know I could want anything as much as I want the jacket worn by Alvin Coleman in the middle. At the right is Robert Woods, another future Jet, and Larry's brother.

Larry Woods #70 played for the 1973 Super Bowl champion Miami Dolphins and then signed with the Jets, playing for us from 1974-75. I do not remember seeing him play, but I remember his face among the player pictures in the game program. He has the distinction too of being a member of the original 1976 Seattle Seahawks. He started only three games for the Dolphins and was able to play considerably more for the Jets. In a Times article during the 1974 preseason, Woods admitted that the prospect of playing more often was more meaningful than being guaranteed a chance to go to the playoffs on the bench. By the end of the 1975 season, the year I first saw his face in the program, I was happy rooting for the Jets, so the experience was branded on me, even as they lost, over and over. By the time I was 16, like my Lithuanian immigrant student, out of the glow of an ordinary little boy's life, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. But it was too late.

NY Jets #66 - Randy Rasmussen

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

New uniforms, 1978

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

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

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

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

***

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

Randy Rasmussen #66, leading the way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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