NY Jets #67 - Part 5

An an analyst on ESPN this week, former Jets tackle Damien Woody #67 said that the Giants would be green with envy to have the Jets' defensive line. If this comment ends up being the highlight of the season (and it probably will be) then I'm fine with that. Neither the Giants nor the Jets distinguished themselves on either side of the ball this weekend. And I'm not a Giants hater; much of my extended family are Giants fans. But since December 25, 2011, my life as a fan has essentially been the long nightmare that immediately followed the pass from Eli Manning that Victor Cruz took for a 99-yard touchdown.

That year, after being manhandled by Philadelphia, we held out a bizarre sense of hope that we would beat the Giants in Week 15. Big Blue looked a little lame at that point, but of course they would go on to win the Super Bowl. Rex Ryan's public notes of confidence going into the game were his usual misjudgment, the kind of braggadocio made by a drunken uncle at a backyard barbecue. Blue had the last laugh. They always seem to. But there we go. No sooner am I talking about Damien Woody than I'm talking about the past, the past, the miserable past, and the sweet, burdensome pain that it brings to any Jets fan. What would be without our sense of torment? I guess we wouldn't feel like fans.

Rex and Damien Woody in happier times

Damien Woody's career was a fine one, moving through New England, Detroit, and the Jets, from 1999-2010, managing to miss Detroit's winless 2008 season and then enjoying two winning seasons with us. His last game was the Jets' 17-14 Wild Card Playoff win over the Colts, which sent us off to their playoff win against New England. He tore his Achilles' tendon in the Colts game, and I seem to remember him being led from the field, though I know that we didn't know he had blown it out until the following midweek. I remember feeling a sense of unease that should have bit deeper than it did, if only because Wayne Hunter replaced him.

After the Patriots game - the happiest moment in my fandom - came the AFC Title Game loss to Pittsburgh. But here I go again, trying to mine through the recent past to make sense of where it all went wrong. Maybe it didn't all start with Cruz's touchdown, but with Woody going down for good against the Colts. No wonder his praise for the Jets' defense resonated with me this week. I'm still wading through the bad signs from the past to find the sign that things are going to get better again.

***

Kimo Von Oelhoffen in 2006

It seemed as if everything was going to change. Years and years of losing were on the verge of being forgotten by a single, elusive playoff win. I speak not of the 1981 Jets, but the 2005 Cincinnati Bengals, hosting the Pittsburgh Steelers in the second round. On the second play of the game, Carson Palmer was hit below the knee by Kimo Von Oelhoffen #67, and the Bengals were on their way to losing in the playoffs once again. Even after apologizing to Palmer through the media, though not to the quarterback himself, Von Oelhoffen was released by Pittsburgh at the end of the season and picked up by the Jets. His single hit changed Palmer's fortunes; he's obviously never been the same.

Von Oelhoffen lasted a season with us, another year with Philadelphia, and is today retired and settled in Washington state. More importantly, his name was given to a special addendum to the rules guarding quarterback safety during the offseason in 2006. It's the "Kimo Clause," which penalizes defenders who do not take as many measures as they can before hitting quarterbacks low. If his name had been "Bill" I don't know if there would be a "Bill Clause," but such is the way with names.

The clause came up for discussion again when Tom Brady was injured in 2008 after being hit by Kansas City's Bernard Pollard, who had been taken down, got up again and then hit Brady below the waist, injuring his knee and taking him out for the season - an event about which I don't remember having any feelings. Various observers, partisan or not, considered that Pollard had broken the Kimo Clause, leading immediately to the institution of the "Brady Rule," which says that if a defender is brought down in pursuit of the quarterback, then he must stay down, otherwise he will be penalized, unless he is blocked into the quarterback. This seems a bit more easily enforceable, whereas the Kimo Clause suggested rather absurdly that defensive players somehow go through a mental checklist of items mid-flight the way a pilot of a plane actually does before flying.

Established in much the same way that violations are written and rewritten by kids playing among the amorphous boundaries of a suburban backyard, these hastily written rules and clauses are absurd after a while. Basketball and baseball don't have to worry about these kinds of things. Basketball is a game that's made organically complex by the infinite strategies that can be applied to its rather simple structure. Baseball is inherently complex and is allowed to remain as such because its loyalists are such rabid traditionalists that the game is impervious to fundamental change.

Regardless, the constant changes in pro football, which are almost all dictated to defenders, favor the offense and the passing game, which makes football as great as it is. The problem is that it's not really what football originally was meant to be. In training and drafting we are constantly trying to mold and shape defenders into superhuman giants who would have obviously towered over players in 1927, yet we somehow expect these defenders to still play the basic 1927 game, with smash and grind, even while we are also hoping that we can keep the ball flying in the air. We want everything out of football. So we nip and tuck at it, searching for the right formula.

But football is also characterized by the two impulses in American life - violence and litigiousness. Football has always been an unmanageably violent game because we like it that way. We're talking about a culture that took boxers, put them in a cage and let them beat one another into senselessness and called it UFC. But our conscience also compels us to use rules and clauses to manage our violent obsessions and turn football into the perfect game we all imagine it to be. A rule here, a clause there, and maybe, just maybe football will find itself working just the way we idealize it, with players hurt and challenged on the field, but nobody permanently damaged. I cannot tell if a vanishing pipeline of players from high school will kill the game or the game itself will become obsolete through its contradictions. Probably neither.

***

Opening Day at Shea, 1964

Back in 1963, when the dominance of professional football was a mere gleam in the eye of a disoriented postwar superpower, back when players took water refreshment on the sidelines out of soup ladles, Jim Price #67 played linebacker for the New York Jets. He had been drafted by the Dallas Cowboys, only to be washed out and picked up by the AFL Jets the same year, playing in the franchise's last season at the Polo Grounds.

On New Year's Day 1964, he became part of what was apparently the biggest AFL trade ever; he, Dick Guesman, Ed Cooke, Chris Janerette, and Sid Fournet went to the Denver Broncos for Gene Prebola, Gordy Holtz, Bob Zeman, and, most importantly, Wahoo McDaniel. By securing McDaniel, the Jets had what would be for a year a marquee player, or rather for what passed as one for the newly revamped Gotham Football Club. But say what you will, tens of thousands more fans attended the first football game at Shea, the season opener of 1964 against Denver (as luck would have it) than ever attended the Polo Grounds to watch a pass thrown from Dick Wood or Al Dorow. The Jets won 30-6.

Now, as a linebacker for the Broncos, Jim Price got to see what he was missing. When his replacement made a tackle against Denver, the Shea announcer would playfully say, "Tackle by....you know who...."

And the Shea crowd learned to dutifully answer: WA-HOOOO.

And so was born the football-as-entertainment model that the Jets have more or less followed over four decades. A jet car patrolling the sidelines, a professional wrestler and Choctaw warrior at middle linebacker, a bonus baby quarterback, the Sack Exchange and Gastineau's Dance, Keyshawn Johnson, and Rex Ryan's clown car - these are all pieces of a larger puzzle that is the Jet way. It all began with Wahoo McDaniel, and, by default, with Jim Price's departure to Denver, although Price might not have thought of it that way.

***

As Wikipedia points out, Dwayne White #67 "was nicknamed "The Road Grader", for his run blocking prowess and as such is also considered the first to receive that name." 

The first? You read that right. Personally, I didn't know the name was up for controversial discussion. It's a great nickname, though, and it fits White's size and position. What running back, especially the elder Freeman McNeil, Blair Thomas, and the assorted other unknowns who ran in the Jets backfield from 1990-94, would not have appreciated the road being paved before them with the bodies of opposing defenders?

I say "pave" here, but that's a misnomer. Dwayne White was a road grader. A grader prepares the road that will eventually be paved. A grader creates the road as it can first be imagined into being. The road paver then lays the asphalt. Dwayne White - laying blocks where he was supposed to, perhaps even traveling with runners on a sweep - would by definition therefore be grading roads unimagined and unheralded. In this way, the grader is really a misnomer. Guards and tackles always travel on the paths that all offensive lineman throughout all of the game's history have traveled. They don't create any new roads. They retread the old ones. They're really just pavers, or re-pavers.

But I love the name "Road Grader," and I'm glad that Dwayne White, who went on to play two more seasons for the Rams after leaving the Jets in 2004, was given that nickname. After all, none of us are really grading absolutely new ground in this life, but we like to believe we are, and given the pitiless nature of human life in the scope of historic time, maybe we deserve to believe it. What option do we have?

NY Jets #57 - 9/23/01

The weekend came and went. When we were not in praise and remembrance for the fallen, we were thinking about how much the country has tilted toward oblivion in the past ten years. We are a more divided country, a poorer one, an angrier one, a less important one in the eyes of the world, and yet the terrorists did not win, nor will they ever. Generations to come will wonder what we were thinking during this time, and I suppose we'll wear the same look of bemused frustration that my parents had when I asked them about living through the 60's. It was a strange time, we'll say. Stranger than usual, and it became difficult to see the difference between what was real and what was just our imagination.

I had an argument with a colleague of mine this week about whether or not it would have been better to make the memorials for the fallen in Schwenksville Shanksville and New York more of an affirmation. Why do we need to build holes in the ground to show where the towers were? he asked. Why can't we have something that reaches for the sky? I think sometimes he just enjoys a good argument. My brother narrowly escaped the World Trade Center that day and ran for his life uptown until he reached my cousin's office at Park Avenue. A colleague of mine once dated a fireman from Queens who was lost in the towers' destruction. The stepsister of a friend of mine was a flight attendant on one of the planes that hit the towers. Everyone on the east coast seemed no more than three degrees separated from someone who was witness or victim that day. Ten years later, given what little comfort we can take from our country's present state, it's appropriate that a void be the main symbol of our remembrance.

***

Two days after JFK was assassinated in 1963, my mother went out on a date with a guy to watch the football Giants play the football Cardinals at Yankee Stadium. She met him at his apartment, arriving just in time to see Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live TV. She remembers being unable to take herself away from the networks showing it over and over, like instant replay. Her boyfriend wanted to get to the game, but she couldn't stop watching it. All the while in her mind she kept wondering, What's going on? What's happening?

Still, the game was played, and she went. So did approximately 63,000 other fans. Richard Rothschild wrote in the Chicago Tribune that he attended the game and remembers no music, no extra sound effects, no halftime bands, nothing extraneous being done and that the crowd in attendance was solemnly focused on the game, with cigarette and cigar smoke wafting everywhere in the late autumn sun. There are legendary (and possibly inaccurate stories) of the tomb-like silence of the big stadium that day, so much so that people claim they could hear the whistles clearly from the upper seats. Bob Shepperd Sheppard called for a moment of silence at the game's start.

The news of Oswald's death buzzed around the stadium. Most people who were at the game got there too early to see it happen on TV as Mom did. They missed an event that would shape their country to come - a man's murder, caught live, witnessed by millions of people who had already been stitched to their TVs in a effort to comprehend the incomprehensible. As for the Giants, they were upset by the Cardinals 24-17, playing poorly throughout. Pete Rozelle later said the Sunday games should never have been allowed to go on, though apparently he had been given permission from the Kennedy family to let them play.

In his article above, Rothschild gives the sense that for the Giants' fans the game was entirely separate from the events of the weekend. They all comprehended that something terrible had happened, but the game itself was an honest distraction in the meantime. Football was a game. Kennedy and Oswald were real life. What separated those two worlds of reality was a void of knowledge, an absence of the intrusive media that we have today, though it could be said that the events of that weekend in 1963 ensured that such a void would not remain for long.

But even today, the world may change, but the games stay the same. You might have voted for one candidate three years ago and are now already following a fashionable wave of indifference toward him today, but three bad seasons for your football team mean nothing to you. If they do, then you're not really a loyal fan, you're an enthusiast. And that's fine; you might be healthier that way. Once the commemorative ceremonies ended, there was still the Jets-Cowboys season opener to play, a game very like one played ten years ago or even forty-nine years ago, and Tony Romo still gave the game away with turnovers, just as Tony Romo often does.

***

Rothschild's article was written exactly ten years ago today, perhaps to give some perspective on why the NFL was reluctant to repeat Rozelle's mistake; they skipped a week after 9/11 and returned to action on September 23, 2001. The Jets played the Patriots at Foxboro in a game intended to unite the two teams, their fanbases, and the entire football community in one knitted brow of sorrow and determination. One sign in the Foxboro stands read, "GO PATS. GO JETS." Both the Jets and Patriots played listlessly, just the Giants did back in the day, just as one imagines two teams would at a time of massive grief.

But this Jets-Patriots game represents a different ten-year milestone - a pivotal moment that signaled a radical change in the history of the two clubs. This was the night that Mo Lewis #57 knocked out Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. There were little more than five minutes left, and the Jets were ahead 10-3. Bledsoe scrambled for the sidelines and was nearly there when he was blindsided by Lewis and hurled to the ground. You may be able to hear the hit in the video below; many people on the field claimed it was the hardest hit anyone had ever heard. A blood vessel burst in Bledsoe's chest, and he was unable to get up. Backup quarterback Tom Brady went in for him, and the rest is, as they say....

In order for a truly great rivalry to develop, one team has to be preeminent and the other the spoiler, the underdog. Since that night, the Patriots and the Jets have been repeating a pattern built by the consequences of that hit. They were already trading coaches and players, but as soon as one of them became a Super Bowl champion later that year, the war of words and gestures that followed developed into one of the great spitting rivalries in the game. Until September 23, 2001, the Jets and the Patriots shared similar spaces near the bottom floors of the five-team AFC East, occasionally seeing one another take a trip to the penthouse, only then to end up in the same space again. After 2001, the format changed, and both teams have been consistently more competitive than Buffalo and Miami, but in the end we all know who's really better, and we all know why.

So the question begs: what if Lewis had pulled up? It's hardly right to blame him for not doing so. Though an excessive hit, it was a legitimate one, and the quarterback is fair game. In a quiet, defensive struggle, Lewis was simply doing his job; he had a fine career with several poor to underachieving Jet clubs, and it is unfair to spend this entire entry talking about him solely in the context of this one moment. But it did make a difference. It's a moment that haunts Jets fans because they're always inclined to believe that Fate works directly against them and in favor of the Patriots, and in this case Fate made a visit on the night football was supposed to return to normalcy.

Let's say Bledsoe stays as starter, and Brady goes somewhere else in the NFL. It's difficult to imagine a Belichick team excelling without Tom Brady, though you could say that 2008 was as close as an example of that as we will find. Where would Brady have played, if not for the Patriots? Would he have ended up a good quarterback on struggling teams, as Matt Cassel, Kevin Kolb or Matt Shaub have? Was he special all along, with or without Belichick?

Drew Bledsoe can be forgiven for not anticipating any of this. As he lay in pain on the Patriots' sideline, he certainly knew his night was done, but he probably never entertained the possibility that his career with the Patriots was over, too. Nor could he have known he would be replaced by the greatest quarterback in football history. We can all be forgiven for being unable to see the Hand of Fate in the form of Mo Lewis.