NY Jets #68 - Part 5

Kevin Mawae #68

There are players that you never really let go of, and considering the number of great ones who've been let go by the Jets, the dropping of Kevin Mawae #68 in favor of Nick Mangold has always seemed like the kind of bargain football demands of its fans. Mawae was the victim of a sport that fashions a player into a machine's specific part that can be easily replaced.

You are not versatile in football; you are the position you play, and aside from football's era of the titans and giants (mythologically speaking) when men played 60 minutes, the only player in the modern era I can think of who was radically changed from one position to another was Marlin Briscoe, and I wonder if it was because of his race. Baseball engenders versatility in the great ones who are still wanted on the team. When Jim Rice was put in left field, Carl Yazstremski was put at first base. In football, there are no second acts. Kevin Mawae was released after going to the Pro Bowl six times with the Jets, perhaps with the idea that he was going out to pasture. Instead he would go the Pro Bowl three more times with the Tennessee Titans.

I have a fellow fan who only keeps a Mawae jersey in his closet and no one else's. My friend Nate has never lost the image of Mawae hiking for Testaverde and Pennington at the end of the last century and at the start of this one. Since Nate's a little younger than I, those are his Jets, the ones that sealed his ferocious fandom. For me, it's the Jets of the early 80's which took my childhood loyalty and shaped into it a volatile love affair that will last a lifetime.

Nate comes by his love honestly. By right, 1999 - Mawae's second season with us - was absolutely a Super Bowl season in the making, and just as I was once filled with flimsy dreams that were ruined by AJ Duhe and Dade County, Nate remembers how opening day 1999 crushed those dreams entirely. Vinny's front line was formidable (it allowed him the touchdown that never was against Seattle at home in 1998), but it couldn't save his Achilles' tendon. (Being a Jets fan is knowing that both moments were defined by a bad decision over field conditions. Miami neglected to put the tarp down before the Mud Bowl; the Meadowlands had a new turf that caught Vinny's foot. It was put down just prior to the opener to replace the grass they used in exhibition.)

The 1999 season was the quintessential one of the Parcells era, with promise, bombast, and terrible disappointment, followed by a quick exit from the Tuna himself when he became bored with the whole thing, as he was wont to be. Everything after 1999 is the current era, with its three coaches - Edwards, Mangini and Ryan (never mind, Al Groh) - bobbing us up and down, in and out of the playoffs, as we kept waiting for something like Parcells' overpowering team of 1998-99 to return. To me, Kevin Mawae is the star of that team, opening up the way for Curtis Martin.

"It's Meh-why," Nate reminds me. "Not Ma-way. You're embarrassing yourself."

Nate's in his early thirties, shortish, nattily dressed to teach science each day. But he is among the surprising number of Jets fans at the school outside Philly where I teach. He's prematurely gray at the temples and in his goatee.

"Can you spell Augustyniak?" I ask him in the school cafeteria. We have lunch duty that day. It's not unlike sitting as a teenager back in my old high school in New York, as we needle one another about sports. My old high school friend Doughy was a Giants fan, and we used to have borderline hostile conversations in the cafeteria that shifted back to a kind of neutrality when one of us needed the other for the Math homework.

"Auga-what? Who's that?"

"Never mind," I say. "Meh-why."

Kevin Mawae was also the NFLPA Leader during the 2010 Lockout. An article from USA Today talks about his role in the process and how he felt in some ways that the end of his career, one way or another, was hastened by it. He speaks about the players he has met over the years who suffered irreparable damage playing the game. To Sports Illustrated last summer he was adamant about something I know bothered me as well about the NFL's settlement with veteran players. Although the $765 million deal allowed suffering players to receive compensation, Mawae said it also drains future bargaining power for current players. He says, "the rest of us have lost the ability to take the bully behind the shed."

I love that metaphor. The league doesn't do anything without calculating how it can win the battle in the long run. Like any corporate entity, it knows what it can do to its workers, and the money that its players are given is always the devil's argument for the league to use and dispose of its workers any way it wants to. Did this deal make future bargaining with the league more difficult? After all, what players need is compensation beyond a pension, but as the years roll on, and further compensation is needed for the current players and recent retirees, it's never going to come from the league without a fight. The more the league relents and gives, the more it will find justification to fight to give nothing later on. We already gave you guys money. It's a tricky endgame.

I still miss Kevin Mawae. It's hard to replace someone who works like the heart of a team. To Nate he is an emblem of a time when his team made him the most excited, and I suspect it's because he represented what was best about them back then. For me, he is the guy who wants to take the bully behind the shed. Everybody needs somebody like that in their lives. He is an Infinite Jet - so much so that I hope he will soon have a place in the Ring of Honor, though I would have preferred that he go into the Hall someday in our uniform.


***

Schmitt, Johnson, Grantham, Namath, Talamini and Stromberg in 2008

In the 2008 photograph above, we see Mike Stromberg #68 who was on the Jets' roster during their championship season of 1968. Behind him, I see the omnipresent sunglasses of Joe Namath; there's Curly Johnson and John Schmitt, both looking well. Number 60 is Larry Grantham, a true legend, part of the Ring of Honor. His expression is cartoonishly grim and resolute. He is a man who seems to dwell on the basic truth that this is probably the only trophy his longtime team will ever hoist. As a result, with the knowledge that the only Infinites who will ever enjoy this privilege are the ones who are beginning the last acts of their lives, he is understandably somber on what is obviously the occasion of the team's 40th anniversary of Super Bowl III.

Of course that's not what he's really thinking. The truth is that's what I'm thinking. Larry Grantham may have been not feeling well that day in 2008 as he has struggled with his health in the last few years. He's one of those guys who's second acts in life make him a hero. As for Mike Stromberg, he may have traveled up to the Meadowlands that weekend with Earl Christy, who evidently lives in the Tampa area as well; Christy is the emcee for a Tampa-area bar that specializes in catering to transplanted Jets fans each Sunday of the season. Ladies and gentleman, give a warm Jets welcome to Super Bowl III veteran, Mike Stromberg.

***

Rich Cimini ranks David Ware #68 as one of the worst picks in the draft that the Jets ever have made. That's a weighty claim, as we know. The single fact that Ware never even played in a game for the Jets after being drafted in the fourth round in 1993 makes him a good candidate, though. The other might be what I discovered about Ware as he was trying to return for the '94 season. Apparently, he seemed unhappy with the idea of even playing pro football.

By the end of an article from August 1994 in the Times, Gerald Eskanazi suggests that Ware ultimately made up his mind to return to play (or sit on the bench), though we know he didn't even make it through camp, whether because he was cut or he just quit. The intriguing thing is that Ware was also considering going into teaching instead of returning to camp at Hofstra, and though he may have been momentarily talked out of it, he may have taken the path and joined us in the profession, as many former players do. Pete Carroll, who was beginning his career as a head coach for the Jets that summer, apparently had a conversation with Ware that at first convinced him that Ware wanted to stay. Ware's confusion over what to do was, according to Carroll, one of those situations "where people get their priorities out of order." Or, perhaps, in order, depending on how you look at it.

NY Jets #68 - Part 3

According to Rich Cimini at the start of this season, the Jets were as young at potential starters as they were the last time they were the youngest - 1979. The season started with a home game against Cleveland, a long, laborious, agonizing exercise on the baseball/football field at Shea Stadium that the Jets lost 25-22. Eric Cunningham #68 was one of four rookie starters on that day. The others were Marty Lyons, Donald Dykes, and Stan Blinka, all of whose careers went further after that day than Eric Cunningham's.

According to the Football-Database, Cunningham started only one game in his career and apparently remained on the sideline until 1980, the last year of his career. Does this mean that the only game he started in his entire career was his first as a pro - that warm, dusty, error-laden game - the beginning of two frustrating Jets seasons to come? I remember the feeling I had during the first game I started at wide receiver in peewee flag football, when I was nine, a year before Eric Cunningham began his pro career. It was my only football season as a player. It was hilarious and terrifying fun. To a little boy who had watched football with a sense of fascination on his parents' Sony Trinitron, it was impossible to figure out how it really worked on the ground. I was like a fish in a blender, just waiting for the spinning to stop.

By the third game of the season, the coach - a tall, borderline personality case - sent my friend Pete out to run a pattern that was made for the wide receiver. Probably one of the four patterns I was supposed to run - the down-and-out, the down-and-in, the post, and the buttonhook. After losing consecutive games, maybe coach was just trying something new. Pete ran out, turned around, and our quarterback had the ball exactly where the pudgy-faced little kid needed it, and Pete headed for the sideline, which he ran along for the touchdown. It was the end of my career at wide receiver. The game had slowed down for Pete enough that he made the play that I couldn't and probably wouldn't have made.

I'd lie if I said I wasn't hurt by it, but it was the first of many valuable lessons in how sports can sometimes mirror a world where sentimentality and affection mean little to nothing. Life is a casting off of things, as Mrs. Loman says. We are here, then we're not, and someone is there to take out place - maybe even someone as nice and friendly as little Pete was in real life. Did Eric Cunningham watch his chances leave him that sandy afternoon, not quite even knowing what was awaiting him the following week? Did it end just after it began? Was he badly injured? What happened? The air is full of our cries to know.

Charles "Tank" Marshall #68 was drafted in the third round in 1977, two years before Cunningham. But Marshall came with greater expectations and hopes, especially for a team that had never adequately replaced its defensive line with anything resembling what they had in the late 60's and early 70's. Out of Texas A&M, Marshall played only a few games for the Jets and then his NFL career ended. I have the vaguest of memories seeing him in the 1977 yearbook as a valued lineman to be, with a future ahead of him.

What the future held for him is unclear, but as a former standout college player, he was at least alive and well enough to give an interview at the TexAgs site where I learned that his nickname has two possible origins. At almost six feet in the sixth grade, he broke a teammate's helmet in practice with his forearm, compelling someone to remark that he hit like a tank. His brother also referred to him as "Tankhead" when he was little because of the size of his skull.

At the link above, there is an audio of a radio interview done with Marshall who sounds very well. Apparently he has been a presence at many Aggie training camps over the years, and unlike the way I often picture old men whose best football memories seem to be from college, Marshall today seems to see his experiences in the past as a gift that keeps on giving to generations of other players. As a self-described elitist Northerner, I'm so compelled to love the professional game but to disparage the Southern collegiate one that feeds the pros. But though Tank Marshall still resides in the past, he's very much in the present too. Much like South itself.

Though he does note that as an African-American player from Dallas, he was only taken aback when he first arrived at A&M by the strange custom of his classmates chewing Copenhagen and leaving cups of spit behind in the classrooms after lectures.

NY Jets #63 - Part 1

While watching the Jets lose to Pittsburgh on Sunday, I found myself much more cognizant than in past years about the collisions players are having with one another. Whereas I was once conscious that players were at great risk, it's clearer now that we are watching people injure their brains on live TV. It's such an obvious thing to write now, but for that to be on the mind of someone like me who's predisposed to almost unconditional denial, it's a new experience.

When Shonn Greene collided with Ryan Mundy in the game's first half, and stood up as woozily as a collapsed denizen of Dirty Frank's Bar, I felt a strange combination of feelings. One, the usual: Shit, there goes Greene. Damn it. The other: I wonder if he just screwed up his brain. The first is what a fan always feels when he sees his player get injured - that the pity of his team's losses are his losses and that they are an offense to him. The second is obviously part of a new recognition - that these are human beings who are being paid a king's ransom to possibly ruin their future peace of mind. It's not as if such things are happening for the first time in league history. It's the first time that so many of us admit what we've all been pretending to ignore. We're watching people permanently damage themselves every week.

Ted Banker #63, who played for the Jets at center and guard from 1984-1988, is one case in point. ESPN ran a story of a cocktail hour for the Gridiron Club at the Waldorf Astoria in early 2012 where Joe Namath walks into the room looking no worse for wear, while on "the other side of the ballroom, the quiet side," Banker sits near former teammate Wesley Walker, and the subject of football's permanent injuries comes up. Banker says he suffered "eight documented concussions" and then shows Rich Cimini x-rays of the steel rods in his lower back. Banker is just over 50 now. Walker has one steel rod in his neck for every season he played. That's 14 total.

Cimini writes:

These are the forgotten heroes, the former players that suffer in relative anonymity. These are the players from the 1970s and 1980s, the guys who played with concussions because that's all they knew. This was before "brain trauma" and "dementia" became part of the players' vocabulary, back when a concussion was known as a "ding."

Commissioner Roger Goodell has placed an emphasis on player safety and has raised the awareness of the concussion issue -- positive steps. This will help the current and future players, but what about the 55-year-old retirees wondering if what they didn't know then will kill them now?

The answer is that the league is not doing enough. That dementia and memory loss might be just around the corner for men who are only ten years older than I is something I can fathom now that we're all more open about discussing the mortal violence of football, but what I cannot fathom is the reluctance of the league, of the franchises, of the fans, of the current players to do more for players who earned less in an era where a concussion was just a "ding."

I understand that Shonn Greene is more protected in an era when the Commissioner shows a little less denial over the issue of concussions, but then also why did he return to the game? Maybe it really wasn't all that bad. Maybe a man who needs to be guided to the sideline by his quarterback is really just shaken up, but I feel unsure of the decision. The team has had a deserved reputation in the Mangini era for being lax about concussions and the nebulously termed "head injuries," so I assumed that they learned from that, and that when Greene went back in, he passed the league's newly rigorous protocol for being cleared for action. So I still assume, but I don't have as much faith in the league's judgment as I so naively did before. I admit it's something that I think about all the time now when I watch a game and see someone get stomped.

Cimini says Wesley Walker is bitter - one feels rightly - about the league's slumbrous reaction to long-standing needs of veteran players; Banker is less so. He recalls being knocked out of the 1986 Monday Night game against Miami - when the Jets were 10-1 and the world seemed full of possibility - and the Jets lost, 45-3. Overall, he has no regrets and believes that the game is doing what it can, right now. "I hope it never ends, the game," he tells Cimini. "What would Sunday be without a football game in the fall?" It's a theoretical, but much more real, question now. It would be horrible, yes, but it's also impossible to watch it this season in exactly the way I used to.

****

Jim O'Mahoney #63

Pittsburgh continues in our thread when we mention its native son Jim O'Mahoney #63, who played guard for the Jets from 1965 to 1966, his only two seasons in professional football. A man with a name as Irish as I can think of and a face that looks squarely like the map of Ireland itself. If I had a dime for all the guys I've known who've looked like Jim O'Mahoney, I'd be as rich "as Roosvelt," as my grandmother used to say. But there's something frozen in the innocence of time about Jim O'Mahoney's expression, as he stares happily off into the distance - something that makes me hope that he is well and happy somewhere.

Every weekend, my wife and I have lunch at DiBruno's, a restaurant/market in Center City Philadelphia that grew out of an originally smaller and less fashionable cheese shop in the Italian Market. We were there at the beginning of the opener against the Bills, which they were silently showing on the TV's in the dining lounge, and I unconsciously offered an audible "Fuck!" when Sanchez threw an interception on the first drive. When Revis intercepted on the subsequent series, I involuntarily threw up my fists. I knew we had to get out of there.

If you're ever in town and looking for a cheap buffet of good food, it's terrific, and if you come between 11 o'clock and one on Saturday or Sunday, you might find us up there, eating more than we should. My wife and I have come to believe that, among many others, some of the clientele of DiBruno's are actual time travelers who have been correctly told that there is a reliable time portal near the rest rooms in the back on the second floor. There's significant traffic upstairs. The stairs are worn on the right side as one looks at it, going up, but there's very little tread going down, suggesting that the portal serves as a hub point, an entry rather than an exit point for people visiting contemporary Philadelphia. Who knows why they come and go? Is there something they know that we don't? Well, obviously, yes. What could it be?

The time travelers can be easily spotted - a middle aged man whose dress is of our time but also curiously not - with a straw hat, a strange handlebar mustache, and a pocket watch. A woman wearing cat's eye sunglasses and far too much makeup. A nondescript collection of white adolescents and middle aged people whose members are sitting at a table with such discomfort that one can only assume that they are strangers traveling through time and posing as an average family. Either that, or an average family.

But there are occasional visitors from the past. I half expect to see that beaming face from the past come to our present - Jim O'Mahoney's face, to be exact - arriving out of the portal, down the hallway from the back of the restaurant, suddenly stopping before the stairs and gazing out at what the new world hath wrought, looking the way he does in his portrait.

NY Jets #52 (Redux) - John Schmitt

During the spring and summer of 1972, while my Mom and Dad were expecting my little brother, they began looking for a house. At the time we were living in a rented apartment in Flushing, a mere long walk from Shea Stadium in the autumn, a subway stop in winter. Up until this time, they had never owned anything except their clothing, their cutlery, their furniture, their books, a TV and a 1967 Volvo. Now we were moving to suburbia, to Long Island, a logical step along the narrow strip of land to Nassau County from Queens. 

Now they were diving for more. Dad had known a little of the town and country life growing up as a small child in Braintree, Massachusetts, but his family soon hit very hard times, and he became a city child. Mom had never known anything but the city, in a railroad apartment where she and her siblings slept in the same bed. She wanted my little brother and me to have our own rooms.

I have vague memories of being driven around in the backseat of a Saab by a realtor, looking at houses. I was three and a half, and I recall very few details of the trip around the South Shore neighborhoods. I remember seeing more tall trees than ever before. I saw a car that advertised a product with a plastic German shepherd dog attached to the roof. I wish I could remember what that company sold. It's killing me. What I don't remember is what my parents told me many years later after I became a Jets fan. Among the many houses we saw, we also looked at #52 John Schmitt's house in Hempstead.

Apparently he was moving out. He was Joe Namath's starting center from about 1966-73. Like my Mom, Schmitt was born in Brooklyn. He had already made the move out of New York City to the Island, settling near where he went to college at Hofstra. I always assumed that we were looking at his house back then because he wasn't playing for the Jets anymore, but I see now that he still had another year to play for the Jets when we were there. So where was John Schmitt moving?

I just know that as a boy each time I read about the Jets in Super Bowl III and saw a passing imagine of John Schmitt - his white towel attached to his back belt so Namath could wipe his hands before the snap, the peculiar cleats the offensive line wore with the circle on the heel - I always felt like he had been rendered a little less magical by virtue of knowing him to be a regular person, with a home, cutlery and china, a TV, books, and a car in his garage. Suddenly he was like a member of my extended family, or at least a family friend, for why else would a person allow me into his home? No matter how distant these people were from my devotion, I had to realize too that they had lives, sometimes decorating them with vestiges of the lives of the city they left behind. There was no mass-produced, fixed accounting of personal taste in the 1970's; things were pretty loose, and there was no IKEA. All the accoutrements of real life only served to make the paradox that much more incomprehensible to a little boy: the Jets of the mythical time of 1968 were immortal, but all the same merely human. John Schmitt was the first to be filed in my understanding of the world in just this way.


***

John Schmitt #52, playing with pneumonia

In When Pride Still Mattered, David Marraniss' excellent book on Vince Lombardi, one of the coach's primary lessons was that to be a successful in the game, a player had to live with and accept constant pain. Running back Jim Taylor specifically said that Lombardi taught him the lessons of how to recognize his own limits for pain and to then push through that limit to a new place where the player gave that much more than his opponent. It made the Packers of the 60's fearful from more than a strategic point of view; it made them psychologically impenetrable.

Yet Marraniss also points out that Lombardi's own ability to face pain was constantly at odds with what he demanded from his players. In his own private experience, Lombardi was apparently greatly afraid of physical pain, perhaps as any normal person is. But football is not normal, not the real world, and while Lombardi became the first professional coach to embody lessons that could be apparently applied to the real world, his insistence on his players being intolerant of pain is not part of the normal world. It belongs in the fantasies of football heroism, where it erodes the mind and spirit of many of its players.

In North Dallas Forty, a violent mid-day practice before a key divisional game against a fictional Chicago team ends with a receiver going down with a pulled hamstring. From high above the field in a tower overlooking the whole practice, Head Coach B.A. Strother speaks evenly through a megaphone to the trainer below. Is the player ready? he asks. The trainer admits he can't tell but he doesn't think so. Wide receiver Phil Elliott, a sometimes sour veteran, a free spirit, not at all to Strother's taste, is the next man up. Strother doesn't like Elliott's independence, his "lack of maturity,"  and Elliott doesn't like how the coach stokes the racial tensions on the team to create a greater hunger on the squad for violence. But they need one another. He calls out from the megaphone for Elliott, and he takes a walk with the receiver. Can you be ready for a whole game? he asks, knowing that Elliott will have to be shot with pain killers to play.

Of course, says Elliott. "Hell, I ain't afraid of needles," he says, walking away, but not before adding to Strother, "I guess that's what's called maturity."

Where's the fine between a distorted maturity and pride? When I consider John Schmitt on the day of Super Bowl III, I admit find something admirable in his masochistic determination to compete. Apparently in the New York Daily News back in 2008, John Schmitt admitted that he had played the Super Bowl while seriously ill. Rich Cimini of the Daily News writes: 

"Schmitt...said he played Super Bowl III with pneumonia. By the fourth quarter, he was on the verge of exhaustion. He was so ill that, during the postgame prayer in the locker room, he vomited. Namath, kneeling beside Schmitt, scooted away in a hurry." 

There is Schmitt, hulking over in pain and puking during a solemn moment, and there is Namath, kneeling at his greatest moment of professional pride and very nearly hit with something that would have been difficult to explain to the reporters amassed around his locker without first trying to use the towel tucked into the posterior end of his center's pants. 

***

Someone mentioned to me today that he was taking comfort at work from remembering to see things as they are, not as he hopes they will be. It's strange because I've been doing the same lately, and finding myself mostly reassured by the results. Keeping your expectations low can wedge you through lean days when it seems as though that what you planned to accomplish in the most rudimentary way will simply not get done. Some people complain endlessly at my job, and it might be because their high expectations are always dashed. It's human for us to hope, to aspire. But should we see things as they are? As a Jets fan, I have been given the unique privilege of practicing a life of low expectations but found myself still bitterly humbled in 1983, in 1999 by things as they truly were.

But consider Rich Cimini's recent article on the miraculous reappearance of John Schmitt's Super Bowl ring. According to the story, in 1971, not long before my parents began following their hopes for a new house, John Schmitt was surfing in Hawaii when the ring that signified his heroic part in one of the most important games in professional football history vanished into the Pacific Ocean. It slipped off his finger and disappeared into the blue. The entire story is circuitous. A lifeguard found it some time later and gave it to his wife, but it became part of a niece's estate. The niece then had it appraised and contacted Schmitt recently to let him know that it still survives, saved from the waters of Waikiki. 

What do you believe you have lost that you still wonder about after all these years? Are you diving beneath the surface, despite your own exhaustion, hoping to find what disappeared into the abyss? Is it recoverable? A perfect love lost to your years of selfishness and dissolution? A friend whom you suspect might wonder about you too? Is it a book you loaned? Words of consolation that you know might have made someone smile, helped remind someone that she was loved, that he was important? As the song goes, you must come to the surface and come to your senses, though it's a very deep sea around your own devices.

But there are times when it seems as though that what we have lost, what we have missed all these years, is retrievable, after all. The remnant of our beautiful, innocent hopes are suddenly glimmering through waves and sand, and someone discerns them, recognizing instantly something of value. Suddenly it seems that nothing is lost, everything is recoverable. Perhaps that's why Cimini felt it worthwhile to add that Schmitt's ring is the stuff of larger legend, a sign for others to begin to imagine hopes just as impossible and miraculous:

When Jets fans read about Schmitt's ring discovery Friday night on the Internet, some began tweeting it's a sign of luck and that the current team is destined for the Super Bowl. They haven't been back since 1969.

When the words "luck" and "destined" are found in the same sentence, you realize that you should come to the surface, you should come to your senses. But it's a very deep sea. It could be down there anywhere.