NY Jets #51 - Part 3

There were a collection of players drafted by the Jets in 1976 who were integral to the team's growth over the next few years.  Richard Todd was drafted in the first round; Shafer Suggs was drafted second, and Abdul Salaam was drafted seventh.  Greg Buttle #51 was drafted third.  He had the face of a player who was new to me in every way.  He had a little bit of the Dan Haggerty/Grizzly Adams look about him, gazing out upon the new frontier and finding solace in the ursine arms of Gentle Ben.  He was part of the New Way.  The post-Namath Jets - my Jets, not my Dad's - the team that I would watch be rebuilt from scratch, and damn, damn, damn if they didn't just kind of almost pull it off.

No more would I rely on my father's stories of leather-necked men like Al Atkinson, Ralph Baker, Verlon Biggs, Paul Rochester and Jim Hudson.  The Jets would be stocked with nothing but youth.  In terms of average age, the Jets were in 1978 the youngest team in the pros, which is why SI predicted that year they would go 1-15.  They broke even.  By then, Todd, Suggs, Salaam and Buttle were all starters, as were guys drafted in '77.  Buttle played for the Jets his whole career.  He is on the radio for the Jets, and you hear in his voice his North Jersey accent.  Here he offers what I feel is a nice little tribute to Shea Stadium as the Jets' home.  We never got to the game early enough to see what he recalls as throwing footballs into the stands and shaking hands with the fans, but Buttle is right about the closeness to the field.  Fans could get so close that they were right behind the players and couldn't see the game.  Hey, 51.  Move.  And the fact is that fans frequently ran onto the field during the game.  I saw one guy in 1980 run off with a helmet during an impossible Jets loss to the winless New Orleans Saints.

Like his predecessor in number, Greg Buttle came from Penn State, where he was a standout.  My first introduction to him was the home game against New England in his rookie season, which the Jets naturally lost 38-24.  Buttle recovered an Andy Johnson fumble for the first Jets' touchdown of the game, and then intercepted Steve Grogan to set up the second, all in the first half.  Enjoy the harpsichord and Jon Facenda's sonorous voice of God as he speaks at the 5:40 mark.  Facenda quotes Buttle as saying,

"They pay me to practice.  Sunday, I play for nothing."  Facenda adds:  "If all the Jet youngsters hold to that thought, the team will be headed  to the right direction."

Perhaps this is actually the way God looks at us.  If Roche can live up to his resolution to avoid cake in the middle of the day, he should be moving in the right direction.  But I cannot say.  I have no control.  I merely narrate his endeavors at the behest of Ed Sabol as if I can.    

I remember the off-duty cop in front of me turning around and hugging me when Greg Buttle scored that touchdown, his parka smelling like a mixture of cigarette smoke, aftershave, bourbon and leather seats - the smells of postwar men.  I remember his expression when he pulled away, of absolute surprise and delight, a look that I didn't know that a grown man could have.  I suppose I realized then and there what being a fan could do to a person.  The world of men as I had seen it from watching faces as I held my father's hand walking through Queens, was a loud, explosive, mustachioed, grumpy place filled with raspy voices.  My wife says that in the 70's she imagined that her adulthood would be filled with the hairy, grass-smoking people who wore tight white linen shirts and white bell-bottoms, walking along Malibu Beach, listening to Eagles and Carly Simon songs as they played on eight-track.  That's what she saw in her mind's eye as she grew up in Boston.  I imagined the adult world as the off-duty cops who sat in front of my Dad, whose expressions were made dour by the frown of their mustaches.  They were vigilant, dissatisfied, yet hazy all the same.   

I thought it was a world I would have to grow into, but then it never came to me.  It was actually a world in its death throes when I got to it, passing out of existence.  By the time I was an adult, sports was for families and (with the absolute exception of the Lincoln Field in Philadelphia) would no longer tolerate men who smoked cigars in the stands and snuck hard liquor into games.  That was the world of Shea, a place for angry men who waited amid deep sighs and bluster for an instant to turn briefly into children again.  It rarely happened.  But it could happen.  

****

A few years ago I was teaching a star athlete in my Honors English class, which is highly unusual.  Honors English in senior year is usually for the art kids, the kids who take European History and the ones who want to be teachers someday.  Athletes aren't really in that category, but this kid, a lettered track and soccer player, was probably my best student.

Except being the top kid in class wasn't enough for her.  She wanted more.  I don't give out 100% grades on papers, but I do give out A's.  I would give her A's - 93, 94 - but she wanted more.  "What's it going to take for me to get a 96?"  She asked.  "A 97?"

"Look," I told her, "you get good grades.  Why do you need more?"  I know it seemed silly to ask, but these were the highest grades.  She was a senior.  Other students in class were in the slack of spring, uninterested in doing better.  I had to worry about my 11th graders who were failing English in my other class, the ones who cut class and didn't do their homework or were suspended.  I confess I had become acclimated to senioritis in my battle with my juniors.  But not her.

"I need a push.  You have to push me," she said.

"But you already work hard," I said that.  "I recognize that.  I do."

"You don't understand.  You have to push.  You have got to make me give more.  I need to do more."

This is the way athletes are, I realized.  They relied on inspiration from people that mattered to them, and in this case, I was her coach.  I?  A coach?  Since I had never been a successful athlete, I didn't know what that would look like if I tried.  But I had read enough about effective coaches to know what to say next.

****

Bryan Cox #51 played for the Jets from 1998-2000 and was specifically brought to the Jets by Bill Parcells, who loved players whom most of the league had written off as washouts.  I always admired this about the coach, and I do feel like it is the only redeeming thing I can find about him remaining in me.  Consider Ottis Anderson, Jumbo Elliott, Vinny Testaverde - guys that Parcells kept going and working collecting a paycheck.  It always seemed as though these players could alternately mentor the younger players and also prove to the boss that they could still play - a matter on which, it seemed, the boss never seemed to appear entirely convinced.  That's the thing.  In the modern era, it takes a psychological artist to compel people to play for him and him alone.  As he moved from team to team, Parcells took these devotees with him.  Keyshawn Johnson, Richie Anderson and Testaverde all went to Dallas with him.  

Cox is now a defensive coach with the Dolphins, Parcells' current managerial home; it is also where Cox began his career in the early nineties.  In only his second year, he became one of the most feared linebackers almost overnight by recording 14 sacks.  He was the first player I ever saw wear that oversized neck protector.  In the context of the times in which he played, with the heated nature of the rivalry between Buffalo and Miami during that time (in which the Jets played only a bit role) Bryan Cox was seen as the man with the target on his back.  He took the field at Rich Stadium rather famously with his middle fingers extended.  It was hard to take his side, but it was enjoyable to see the fans of Buffalo aghast at him.

Were they so innocent?  This is not a conclusive (or speedy) link, but Cox suggested that the racist hate mail he received from Buffalo fans prior to the game so unnerved him that he behaved "like a child."  It might have been around the time Jack McDowell gave his own Yankee fans the bird.  Good times all around.  I remember taking a ride around Buffalo in a crowded car when I was on a business trip as a glorified assistant, and our tour guide referred to the neighborhood passing by as "where the blacks lived."  That was 1997, some five years after Bryan Cox flipped Buffalo off and became known afterwards an "out-of-control player."  When he came to Jets, I worried like the sensitive fan that I am about his "presence in the locker room."  Today he is a defensive coach and possibly moving up the ranks.  There you are.

My favorite story about him comes in two interpretations.  The first is from the time that the Jets were clinching the AFC East in beautiful 1998; Cox comes to his locker and Parcells has left a gift for him:  a gasoline can half-filled with water, with the simple message:  "Merry Christmas."  In a story about Parcells for 60 Minutes, Cox clarifies the gift by saying that the note also asked Cox if he has "any gas left in the can."  Did he have anything left to give?  The coach needed more.

****

I am through with Bill Parcells, but I knew what I needed to say to my student.  I sat down with her and examined several very specific places where her writing needed stylistic improvement and asked her, tentatively handing the paper back, "Is there any gas left?"

"What?" she asked.

"You heard me," I asked.  "Is there anything left?  Can you give me more?"

She narrowed her eyes.  Suddenly she wasn't in English class.  She was on the field, being pushed for more.  She knew I'm no more a coach than Rex Ryan is a professor of absurdist drama, but I was playing a role.  And she got it.

"Yes," she said.  And the next essay she wrote was not just her personal best but also the overall best of the year.  

Old and New

These videos may have originally appeared around the time that the West Side Stadium was still an issue, but there's still resonance here for those of us who remember seeing the Jets at Shea Stadium, the now ex-ballpark seeing its last gradual disintegration in Flushing Meadow-Corona.

First, former middle linebacker Greg Buttle talks about the feeling of intimacy that Shea unwittingly afforded to fans of football, particularly at the first and second levels. He talks about it as "a big-market stadium with a small market mentality." The franchise and the stadium as one, so to speak (even if the stadium didn't actually belong to the Jets).

Then Wesley Walker - one of my all-time favorites - speaks similarly about Shea. But he also says that though the players did not want to leave Shea, "we weren't allowed to really talk about it." Finally, there's a great shot of one of his touchdowns against the Dolphins at the 1978 opener at Shea, which I saw with my Dad and brother. It was the Sunday before the start of school. I drew a picture of that touchdown when I was asked to draw "what I did on my summer vacation," which drove my Mom crazy on back-to-school night.

Finally, more present problems: who's going to coach our team? I for one am glad Bill Romanowski is not interested in coaching us the way he is with the Broncos. Still, how many people do we need to interview? Caroline Kennedy? Don Maynard? The defensive coordinator of every team? Anthony Fucilli's conversation with ESPN's Larry Hardesty evokes our frustration. I appreciate Hardesty's bemusement at the Browns hiring Mangini when they could have hired Jim Fassel.

And further, returning to Wesley Walker again, this is an article that made me ashamed to be a football fan. He says that if he had known the pain football would bring him in his 50's, he would never have played.

Shea Stadium Being Demolished

It is an hour and counting to the Phillies' renewed Game Five with the Rays of St. Petersburg, and all I can say is that if anyone doubts the cosmic energy of fandom, he needs only sit among Philadelphians this week to feel their bipolar energy. Up three games to one, many were planning their day off to attend the victory rally. Stymied by the wind and cold rain Monday night, many began to imagine the hand of God working through Bud Selig's machinations against them. One friend of mine has invoked the Fog Bowl throughout all of this, pointing out that extreme weather is a reasonable last resort for the powers that be - always so long as Philly loses the big one. Whatever. I hope they win. It would be a nice place to live in for a while. No one is suggesting that Philadelphians will be any happier or nicer for real, but it would be nice if they had an excuse to pretend to act that way.

Meanwhile, I found myself publicly shedding a tear at work when I opened a cautionary e-mail from my brother with a link to the first videos I've seen of Shea Stadium being taken apart piece by piece. I pass this lugubrious gift onto you. I guess I've said everything I've needed to about this, but the first thing I thought of when I saw the scoreboard go down was that Shea was where my Dad took my to my first sporting event - the Jets-Colts home game of 1975. I still called him "Daddy" back then. I was six.

So while watching the scoreboard get pulled down, I'll be damned if I didn't just plain old get weepy, in front of adult people no less. Women are good for when you get weepy because they get weepy with you, and it was mostly my female colleagues around me at that point. One of them pointed out that at least the Vet went down in South Philly in one fell swoop. That was easier to endure. Now you see it, now it's an instant memory. It sat as a massive, formless pile of gnarled concrete wire and rubble for a long time after the Citizens Bank Park opened next door. As such, it didn't even look familiar anymore. Just a pile, and though I never had much of the same attachment that others have around here for the old concrete serving dish that was Veterans Stadium (a stadium that never got around to having a corporate re-naming, thank God) I think Shea reduced instantly to a pile of rubble would have been easier to handle. Like rubble, memory is formless, and rather beautiful that way, I think. Seeing images of Shea in its increasingly skeletal stages of decay and death is, as Charlie pointed out to me, very hard to watch. So, steady, old friend. It's almost over. It's almost done. You'll be at peace soon.

Favre 42 Cardinals 28 Mets (Kaibashed)

It's Monday Night, already. In a single day, Brett Favre tied Joe Namath's 36 year-old Jet record for touchdowns in a game, while the Mets showed once again why they are Fate's pet monkey. Favre's heroics against the equivalent of a Junior Varsity NFL defense were admirable (but was it necessary for us to allow the Cardinals to score 28 points?). I'm grateful that the Cards' Anquan Boldin is alive and well. I was glad too that the Jets' Eric Smith was fined for the hit he put on Boldin, even if the hit also rendered Smith unconscious as well. What a thing to wake up to. You're out 50 grand and you may have paralyzed another human being. Frankly I would rather be out the money, even if it's very close to my annual salary.

I myself have never been unconscious from anything other than experiences rendered through sheer exhaustion or extraordinary intoxication. I've blacked out, sure. I remember passing out in the middle of the Our Father in Mass as a boy, but not for any shady reason. My hangovers in Mass didn't begin until I was in college, which might explain why I eventually stopped going to Mass. Ah me.

Mom still goes to Mass. Yesterday, while the Mets were flailing for their lives, she was waiting in the parking lot of her church. She and Dad had just driven eight hours from a strange trip to South Carolina back to Virginia yesterday and hadn't even bothered to go home yet. There was enough time to make the last Mass of the day, so that's where they were. She called from the parking lot on her cell, wanting an update on the Mets last game of the season.

"What are you doing?" I asked. "Why aren't you at home?"

She didn't answer. I knew what she meant by this. This is what real loyalty looked like. Going to Mass on a wet, late Sunday when the Church still offers dispensation for missing Mass to its weary travelers was what real faith looked like. She had been traveling north for hours, allowing herself to linger in the dusky haze of not knowing how the Mets were doing, dreading and hoping without any news at all. Mom and Dad do not have call waiting on their home phone, nor do they own anything so contemporary as a cell phone with access to the interweb. These were the last people on their block, God bless them, to own a VCR. Was I watching? Yes. The Mets were losing on TBS, even while the Jets were far ahead of the Cardinals - the most beleaguered of NFL franchises - a team whose owner looks like a dilapidated patrician Philosophy professor. It was 3-2 Marlins in the 8th. She wanted an update before she went into a 5 pm Mass.

"I'm sure it would be OK with God if you just went home, Mom."

"I'm going to call you again when Mass is over," she said, without responding. "Tell me how it ends."

When she came out, I had to break the news that not only did the Mets fail to rally, but the Brewers had also rallied against the Cubs. Yet another Mets season had come to its improbable, excruciating end. Shea was now finished for good, left behind in a fog of terrible voodoo, the structure itself now marked by the nightmares witnessed over its two final Septembers. But there was my Mom, obviously crying on the other end of the phone in a church parking lot in Virginia. I felt awful for her and guilty for abandoning a God that she had gone to that day with an open heart. I half think that she went inside church with the same kind of faith that all true fans have. Maybe this time. I've been so loyal for so long that it's got to work out this time. It's got to. It's just got to. Please.

****

While going to my classroom this morning, a colleague accosted me with the newfound generosity of spirit some Philadelphians are showing Mets fans. It's temporary. "My heart goes out to you," he said. "Thanks," I replied. "But maybe it's just time to destroy Shea." I said this with only a slightly veiled anger, ignoring New York State's prohibitions against demolition by implosion - ignoring too (much to my appalled realization seconds later) that the colleague to whom I was speaking is named "Shay."

****

Perhaps this vision of a victorious Brett seriously intends to stay, even if I'm wary of feeling good about his big day. How great was it to see Brett Favre throwing in the uniform of the failed ur-Jets - the mighty blue and mustard incarnation of New York's Titans? I predicted they would be 2-2 by now. But questions abound. Does Favre need to play only in yellow pants in order to win? Can somebody get this man a pair of canary slacks?

Shea Stadium: The Long Goodbye

It is impossible to overstate how important Shea Stadium was to me as a kid. It was where I first fell in love - with two teams, with a city, with a borough, with nostalgia at an early age way before my time. Everything I needed to know about life I learned in the short space of a few years watching the Mets and Jets play there. Life is a brittle and ephemeral experiment with happiness. Most all else requires patient, persistent, devotion and love, even when it is not merited. This I learned at Shea.

When I was a kid, it never struck me as reasonable that the All-Star Game wasn't played at Shea (it was, back in 1965). Why wasn't Shea as beloved as Yankee Stadium? Would people someday rhapsodize nostalgically about Shea the way they did about past National League parks like Ebbets and the Polo Grounds? I did not understand that what I felt toward Shea was a bit like what my Mom felt toward me as she overlooked my unruly, mangy hair, my lisp or the huge gap between my teeth. She loved me as I was, and thus I loved big ugly Shea.

My wife and I traveled from Philly to Flushing last Saturday to catch one last game at the home ground. For sheer Shea style, the experience did not disappoint. It's clear that the landlords are providing the bare bones of facility comfort as they await the patient's demise. The area beyond the battered-looking outfield wall is like an empty lot unto itself. There was a once a picnic area beyond the 410 mark that today is the front step of the "rotunda" they are building for Citi Field. There were at least five major brawls you could follow by looking for the heavyset security men in mustard shirts amassing to break it up. The Mets and Cardinals went 14 innings with the home team losing 10-8 in a sprawling offensive struggle that saw two homers from Carlos Delgado. A lovely night and a very, very long goodbye. My wife and I managed to get to bed at three.

Here are some snapshots, with the banal observation:



From our seat, the view below, with the pocked (drainage?) turf.





The home run apple, originally bearing the words "Mets Magic," from back in the day when the Mets were proclaiming that "The Magic is Back," circa 1980. How wonderfully incomprehensible that the magician pulls an apple from the hat. It reminds me of Nick Hornby's memory of a footie game where the PA system played "I've Got a Lovely Batch of Coconuts" to celebrate a victory. The apple makes sense, I know, but it's a mixed hat of metaphors at best. No rabbit to be found anywhere. The apple is no Mackintosh; it looks its age, its membrane a battered, faded red. My wife hopes they take it to Citi Field. It's no Bernie Brewer home run slide, either, but the apple is the perfect Shea accessory. Look at the makeshift manner in which the newly recovered leaf is attached to the fruit in question.

It is not seven after three, although I think that's when we finally turned the lights out at home. If you look closely, you see that the time is actually 9:07 pm. Armitron doesn't bother to object to the poor product placement.


As night fell, as the wee small morning hours crawled in, the eerie Shea lighting became an interesting thing to observe. The powerful string of lights near the ends of the semi-circle offer the bulk of the light cast on the players. The rest of the semi-circle is in relative darkness, creating what I have always felt is a rather stark light on the field.

There he is. Cow Bell Man, or "Cow-Bell Man" as his Mets jersey reads. The crowd genuinely loves him. A man and his cowbell, or "cow-bell." He came visiting for a Mets-Phillies game at the Vet about eight years ago, and the back of his jersey read "Cow Bell-Man," which was confusing. This has since been corrected. Cow. Bell. Man. Cow. Bell. Man.


Farewell, old friend. See you at the implosion.

Shea

The great second wave of blight in Jets history would begin with the Ken O'Brien era, but every Jets fan really knows it most likely came with the passing of Shea Stadium at the end of 1983; or rather, it was the ejection of the New York Jets from the ruddy, badly surfaced football grounds of Shea. The New York Mets had formally requested the city give the Jets the heave-ho, and the Jets left New York to play in Giants Stadium, in the Meadowlands of East Rutherford, New Jersey.

It made for a perfect closure to my childhood. Shea Stadium had been the terrible house in which I had been raised, but it was the dump I called home. I can't make the memories speak through the games I saw there because the games are now romantic illusions - moments so cherished that if I'm still this demented a fan when I die, I will choose to relive them again and again in nirvana.

I remember once sitting beneath the Shea mezzanine during a game and felt cold drops of water pelt me on the head and thinking that a menacing bully lurked somewhere around. I was pointed by a fan nearby to a leak of acidic water from the level above that was also permanently staining my jacket with droplets of industrial Jet-green slime. I remember once watching the scoreboard flash "NEW YORK JETS VS. MIAMI SEAHAWKS" as the Jets prepared to take on the Dolphins.

I remember the embarrassing baseball diamond showing through the football field in September. I remember the feedback from the loudspeaker, and the airplanes whose serial numbers and landing gear tire brands could be easily read from the Loge section as they passed overhead. You learned to pace your conversation around domestic flights coming into LaGuardia, and your ears rang from the hissing of airplanes, never from the roar of the crowd. (Do I ever remember cheers? I remember sighs, pouts, screams of agony and despair, mocking laughter, and the boos -the incessant, blood curdling boos).

I remember the beverages in the waxy Harry Stevens cups and the numbing wind and drizzle. I prayed for a sunny day upon a visit to Shea, and when I got one on the day the Jets' opened the 1978 season with a victory over the Dolphins, I felt somehow as if the sun garishly revealed the stadium's insecurities a bit too forwardly - as if its inconveniences were better suited to another blatantly disappointing performance under the skies of a soft autumn day.

I remember when the fans booed Governor Hugh Carey while the city's Mayor Ed Koch was cheered during the pregame festivities honoring the '68 coach, Weeb Ewbank. Why did they boo Carey and not Koch? There had been a dispute over funding for the city. Dad tapped someone in front of him and asked.

"Just getting ready for another season," the man said.


The Jets and I would cross the Rubicon to our respective territories - they to Jersey, I to adolescence, knowing that pieces of what we left behind were appropriately richer and more intrinsically ours than anything we would know in our new worlds. The Jets might have stayed in Queens a bit longer, but their staying at Shea wouldn’t have offset the ravages of their next few years’ performances. Time marches on. With a 34-7 loss to Pittsburgh, the Jets said farewell to Shea in appropriate Jets-style.

I didn’t cry. I kept close to the things I had loved as a boy: its frame gray and lifeless, punctuated by those garish, corrugated blue and orange aluminum shingles that were removed even before the Jets left. Maybe when the cheesy shingles were gone, the magic of staying at Shea was gone, too. They had been placed there originally to spruce up the hulking concrete arena during the '64-'65 World's Fair next door. Could the removed shingles of Shea have survived a better fate? Maybe they were piled onto the sea-faring barges that carry New York City's trash around the world in search of a home. I wonder what a dock worker in New Orleans, Villa Cisneros or Caracas might have made of a corrugated pumpkin or royal blue shingle if he had seen it.

Trash. Just as Leon Hess viewed Shea itself, the shingles would probably be viewed as ugly, with no purpose. Having shed all the symbolism of their dwindling glories, the Jets were now willing to innocently take on their troubled maturation with Ken O'Brien at quarterback into Giants Stadium. I cannot remember if I felt it boded well or not, but I have since then never met an older Jet fan who does not miss watching a game at Shea, and like demented pilgrims, Jets fans are looking forward to the day we return to our homeland.

   Yet with the passing of the West Side Stadium, and a newly planned Jersey venue to be shared with the Giants, this will never be. A Jets stadium in Manhattan would have been like a bacon cheeseburger served with fries at the Four Seasons. We know where our heart's true home is - Queens. Something was left behind in Flushing Meadow, and it would take the Jets years to retrieve even a semblance of their greatness again once they left Shea. We now see the whole thing as a terrible omen from the start.