NY Jets #70 - Part 4

Though he came to the Jets in 1994, when Pete Carroll coached the team for his first and only season, Leonard Marshall #70 is forever a Giant in our minds. We signed him and Ronnie Lott in 1993, and Art Monk in 1994. The Jets have often been a place both for great players to start their careers and for famous players to quietly end theirs. Marshall's single season with us offers very little to discuss.

The prevailing image that comes to mind is of him playing in the 1991 NFC Championship Game. Like the shark approaching the boy on the raft in Jaws, Leonard Marshall closes in on an unsuspecting Joe Montana. I have heard it said in many places - and I knew just from watching the game on TV back then - that it was one of the most brutal games ever played. I myself was on the cusp of being an adult; I was graduating from college in five months, and unlike all of my friends, I had no plans or ideas of who or what I would be. My girlfriend left me for a bank teller on Long Island. As much as it could for a relatively sheltered white boy, life left me feeling unmoored, tense and hazy.

The game itself was the sequel to a particularly close Monday Night game earlier in the season, which ended with Ronnie Lott and Phil Simms face to face, yelling at one another. The title game was a solid block of tension from the start, broken in the third quarter by a Montana touchdown pass to John Taylor. The tension returned when Jeff Hostetlor was hit at the knees by Jim Burt; what happened next may have been part of the ensuing outrage from the Giant bench.

Watching it, of course, you see why Montana was in such a position to be leveled by Marshall. As with anything related to the Giants' defense, Montana was so vulnerable because of Lawrence Taylor. Montana moved aside to avoid LT, but his preoccupation with the greatest of all linebackers left him in Marshall's path, and in a second, Joe Montana's career was permanently altered.

We watched it in my apartment on Oakland Avenue. My roommate was a itinerant tri-state area football fan, switching his allegiances back and forth between the Jets and Giants, depending on who was winning that season. The last four years he had therefore been a Giants fan, with some occasional gestures of sympathy toward me and my time in the dull Bruce Coslet years. On that night he invited all the Giant fans in his circle - including a guy dating a Tisch family relative just so that he could get free Giants tickets - and they all watched the game with the kind of focus and anxiety that they would someday give to watching their wives give birth.

When Montana went down from Marshall's hit, he immediately tried to regain a sense of his wheres and whens, like a collapsed drunk on an empty street. The guys gathered round the television in the apartment let up a great cry. One of them had chosen to watch the game in the next room - a behavior that I know I've adopted when I tried watching Jets playoff games - needing to be alone to simply process the intense strain. As they cried victory, he came out of the room and shushed them all like a chiding mother, reminding them of their manners. Even he could see how bad off Montana was, and it was terrible way to win the conference title.

"He's on queer street!" said to guy dating the Tisch girl. Queer in this case wasn't meaning gay by our present definition, but was based on its older sense. To whit, according to the 1811 Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence:

QUEER STREET. Wrong. Improper. Contrary to one's wish. "It is queer street," a cant phrase, to signify that it is wrong or different to our wish.

His words have stayed with me all these years. Late in the game, as Montana sat looking confused and disoriented on the 49ers bench, and as the Giants took the lead, Pat Summerall said it best when he reported the extent of the damages done to the greatest quarterback of the time.

"The word from the bench," Summerall said, "is everything hurts."

***

Monday was the 46th anniversary of the last Super Bowl the Jets have ever won. In two months, I'll be turning 46. I have always been in the peculiar position of measuring the subjective nature of time's passage with that coincidence. Young people are kind enough to show polite restraint when they find out how old I am, while most adult people don't think it's that old. Even if I have lately been feeling some aspect of an ongoing midlife crisis, I'm still mentally as old as I was the night Leonard Marshall send Joe Montana to Queer Street. Still, 46 years is a really unfortunate amount of time for a fan to be waiting with eagerness and devotion for the next championship.

It doesn't seem so long ago that Matt O'Dwyer #70 played for the Jets, but now I suppose it has been a while. His Wikipedia page rightly mentions that in his career he blocked for three great runners of the time - Adrian Murrell and Curtis Martin of the Jets, and Corey Dillon of Cincinnati when O'Dwyer played for the Bengals, starting in 1999. The front line to which he belonged in 1998, the page also points out, was one step away from the Super Bowl, and I can't help but put that year, the Jets and the Super Bowl in Miami that year together, for we were one quarter away. I vividly recall O'Dwyer and the others, lining up in the playoffs, looking more formidable than any other Jets front line since the one that played in another Super Bowl in Miami, the only one we've won. It seems like yesterday. They were one quarter away. That isn't that long ago. But in football years, it is.

NY Jets #42 - Part 3

I was in Memphis, visiting my parents when I saw the news that Ronnie Lott #42 was joining the New York Jets. This would be summer of 1993, after my horrific first year of graduate school that saw at least one major anxiety attack and certainly one nervous breakdown. Some things just look like good decisions from the start, and even though most of my professors thought I was wholly unprepared to do what I was trying to do, I was deluded into thinking they were wrong. I'm not sure that has anything to do with Ronnie Lott, but I was similarly deluded into thinking that when we signed Lott, Leonard Marshall and Art Monk, the Jets were trying to do something that other people thought they couldn't either, like make the playoffs.

And it didn't work out. Neither did grad school. Well, that's not entirely true; I got my degree, so technically it worked out. The Jets? Not so much. That's been the story of my life, I suppose. My life has more or less worked out so far, though I've spent an awful lot of time unconsciously wishing for my team's success, even to the point of half-willing away my own happiness. As the poet says, "May no fate willfully misunderstand me/And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/Not to return. Earth's the right place for love."

Anyway, instead of being like the 1990 San Francisco 49ers, the Jets ended up looking more like the 1962 New York Mets, gathering future Hall of Famers - and NFL All-Time Team members, I think - like Monk and Lott who were at the tail end of their efficacy. As I recall, upon being signed, Lott said something to the effect that he hoped other talented NFL players would take the offers of the Jets' free agency cash. Ah, I always liked Ronnie Lott. Maybe he thought the Jets would make the playoffs in 1993. But younger, talented players around the league demurred. He pulled an average year in 1993 and started 15 games in 1994, a legendary season among Jets' collapses. Duke Snider is in the Hall of Fame as a Dodger, Richie Ashburn as a Phillie, neither of course as a Met, despite (or because of) their sporadic appearances in the 1962 lineup. Lott is in Canton as a Niner. Monk is there as a Redskin.

****

There was once a time when the New York Times allowed you to read any of their articles online for free so long as you were a member. Obviously those days are over, and I half convinced myself that a downloading binge I went on two years ago was responsible. "There's some idiot in Philadelphia who's pulling up every article on the New York Jets' seasons in the 1970's, and we're not seeing anything in return!" Obviously that's not the case, but I'm a serious person. When I was 13 and apparently friendless, or at least certainly without the possibility of anything resembling a girlfriend, I spent most of my free time in my high school library, trolling through spool after spool of Time magazine on microfilm, reading back issues going back at least 20 years. It was as if I had returned to consciousness after a two-decades long coma, trying to find out about all I had missed. More likely I was what I was - a baffled child in the Reagan years of nationalist sleepwalking when all the country was ignoring the wake of cultural revolutions that were making it seasick. I'm not sure Time really helped clarify all that, but, again, I was 13. And there was no Interwebs.

Anyway, I just paid the New York Times $4.50 to double-check some information on Cliff McClain #42, Jets' running back from 1970-73. Maybe it's an extravagance when for the same amount of money I can buy myself an afternoon's on-street parking in Center City Philadelphia, sure, but bear with me. Cliff McClain might have been part of a moment that could have changed the course of professional football history. As with anything else, it all rests with the little things.

Cliff McClain

You see him here in a small photo courtesy of WireImage against the Cincinnati Bengals in the last game of the 1971 season. The Jets won it, 35-21, but more importantly, Cliff McClain scored one of his two career touchdowns in it, a 63-yard run. I suppose this was his highlight as a pro. Otherwise, Cliff McClain had a fairly ordinary football career; at the risk of offending the subject himself, one might even go so far as to say his career was not particularly successful and that he probably saw little play time. He gained around 400 yards over four seasons, and he retired a Jet.

On November 19, 1972, the Jets traveled to the Orange Bowl to play the undefeated Miami Dolphins. By this time the Jets were 6-3 while the Dolphins needed only one more win to clinch the AFC East. The Jets had been a split-personality team in 1972 - a "jittery" one, as Sports Illustrated called them. The truth is that they were almost a good team, certainly not a great one, playing what most people believe (not me) was the greatest team of them all. And by the start of the fourth quarter, the Jets were winning, 24-21. One of the hallmarks of the Dolphins that season is that when they went down, they always came back, and they did come back and win that game, 28-24, clinching it on a Mercury Morris touchdown. No surprise.

No surprise either also that the Morris touchdown was enabled by a Jets turnover in Miami territory, in this case, on what is reported to be a muffed handoff between Namath and Cliff McClain with the Jets ahead. It's the little things. We are free to place blame all around if we like. I'm sure there are ways of finding out what happened, but it's true that this particular turnover midway through the fourth was the start of what eventually sent the Jets to the showers. Instead of placing blame, let us suggest instead that Cliff McClain was simply witness to a piece of history, a crucial turning point. Once the Dolphins rallied, they would then go on to win every remaining game of the season handily and saunter into the playoffs. The Jets were their last real challenge before the postseason.

Now, imagine if the handoff had actually gone well, and then a variety of almost reasonably fortunate circumstances eventually led to a remotely possible Jets score - let's say, even another Namath touchdown pass, maybe to Rich Caster or Don Maynard. I know this is unlikely, but work with me. History is filled with options and possibilities that, reason tells us, could have happened. It is the responsibility of historians to find those turning points in history and see how much really rests on them. It's also the responsibility of a loyal fan of a traditionally losing franchise to waste countless hours of his thought conjuring all such similar moments, especially when such things provide an assurance that it's not just Fate, but luck - and bad luck, of course - that has traditionally kept your club from its appointment in your lifetime with destiny.

Thus, a Jets touchdown later in the game would have meant that the Dolphins would have had to have mounted an even greater comeback- which, in all likelihood, they would have - in order to win. According to what I know, there was enough time.

But imagine if they hadn't succeeded. The possibility is remote, I grant you. The Dolphins' third touchdown earlier in the game is indicative of how remote it would have been. This was scored by Earl Morrall, on a 31-yard bootleg. Morrall was 38 years old by that point, which means he was older than the number of yards he scampered on the play. According to Al Harvin's article in the Times the following day, Morrall said, "I think that must the longest run of my career," adding, "I think I ran 25 yards in college once." If Earl Morrall could find that kind of hole, how much more would the Jets have given up to a rallying Miami offense late in the game? So again, I grant you.

But consider the possibility of Cliff McClain not fumbling and suddenly you are taken down one circuitous route of conjecture after another: the Jets might have held on to win at the Orange Bowl, and then the 1972 Miami Dolphins would today be simply regarded as a great team but second to the 1985 Chicago Bears (whom I feel reign supreme) as the greatest ever, and they would never have held the one true record that has eluded the Patriots and the Colts in our era - that of complete perfection from September to February. The mind reels. Just as in high school, the mind evidently has nothing better to do.