Where I'm Calling From

No, I no longer live in Jets' territory. I live miles away in Philadelphia, where I have formed a simple, appropriate bond with the local people - they hate the Giants, and they feel cheated by life. We are in agreement.

They are Philadelphia Eagles fans, and while the Jets' regular season game against Philly this year isn't going to test my loyalty to the Jets, I have been to the valley with these people more than once. I have seen how a rare euphoria that accompanied their appearance in the Super Bowl a few years ago plunged with surprising alacrity into a morass of deep, endless doubt - the kind, I realize, in which Eagles fans normally live. This is the city whose fans booed Santa Claus at a game in 1968.

How can I not feel at home?

However, Eagles fans have a singular nastines that I still haven't found in the Jets faithful. It's the mean side of the surly father, an already aggrieved personality just looking for someone to piss him off. Much has been written about the Philadelphian - the supporting characters in "Invincible," dissatisfied fans booing Santa Claus at home in 1968, booing Donovan McNabb when he was chosen for the draft, the only in-stadium court house for brisk conviction of violent gametime offenders. I am a wary person by nature, so I've never stepped on any land mines with Philadelphians, but nothing brings out their sullen sense of entitlement and victimization like a New Yorker. Case in point - a conversation with a stranger in a bar once:

MAN: Where you from? You sound funny.

ME: Me? New York?

MAN: (beginning to simmer) Oh yeah? The city?

ME: Kind of. Born in Queens. Then I --

MAN: I've never been to New York. Never going to. What the fuck's the point, really? I'd never fit in. Just be treated like shit, right?

ME: Well,...uh, I.... No, I don't think so.

MAN: Stuck-up motherfuckers. Mostly, right? No offense.

ME: No, none taken.

MAN: Yankees fan, right?

ME: No. Mets.

MAN: (more intense now) Giants fan?

ME: No. Jets.

This satisfies the man to whom I've yet to be formally introduced. That I root for the "other" New York teams not only means that I'm less offensive to him but that I might also fit in a little better with the natives. Maybe I'm a "real" fan because I have obviously chosen to hitch my star to something much far more ponderous and unrewarding than a bandwagon. He knows where I'm calling from. Of course he now takes this as an invitation to begin slicing up the myths and mystiques of the city of my birth, looking over his shoulder occasionally to make sure that the real New Yorkers - the chronic winners and boasters - are not somehow listening in on his conversation. He must alternately know how ridiculous it is to expect a New Yorker to listen in on his conversation in a neighborhood Philadelphia bar, sort of like the sullen nerd who takes a second to see who's around him in the careferia before speaking ill of the high school jock of whom he's both jealous and afraid. That kind of insecurity always seems to produce the most curious combination of self-conscious paranoia and narcissism in the aggrieved. That's the Philadelphia fan to a T. Mon frere.

The Philadelphia Phillies are on the brink of recognizing the 10,000th loss in their franchise's history. This represents more losses than any other baseball franchise has endured - a staggering statistic almost as significant as the fact that it's also more than any other organized sports team in the world has endured (to be fair, baseball teams play 162 games a year). Pioneers may have settled West in the hopes of finding a place to start a life where it would be more possible for their dreams to come true. I moved to Philadelphia and was lucky to find that these people are tormented by false expectations and the sense of pervasive loss. A city of falling anvils. Feels like home to me.

A Day in the Fan's Life - 6/6/69

It's a little premature to be doing this, but one can't resist dredging even the remotest of strange things in Jets history, and for a Jets fan, the Strange is the norm. On this day, Joe Namath declared he would quit football because of a dispute with Pete Rozelle over Bachelors III, the nightclub he co-owned that apparently featured enough riffraff clientele to get the Commissioner nervous. He worried about Namath's performance being compromised by the small-time gamblers who were probably more interested in getting Namath's autograph and girlfriends than a piece of his game. The Commissioner said Namath had to quit the nightclub; Namath told the Commissioner to take a leap. The squabble is charming by comparison to Tank Johnson of the Chicago Bears, whose recent cache of firearms drew a police intervention, or Cincinnati's Ordell Thurman, whose rap sheet is impressive even by that franchise's current standards.

Obviously I was too young to recall Namath's temporary retirement. If I could return back in time (as for some reason I think in the afterlife I will be able to) I would head to Bachelors III and have whatever the owner's having. This is the era when booze was advertised in popular magazines the way investments and computers are today; drinking was was still less demure than personal business in 1969. As Mark Kriegal writes in his great biography of Namath, the draw of the club was the chance to brush shoulders with the Man himself, for Namath was often there.

The only interior shot I have ever seen of Bachelor's III is less inviting, though. It shows a working-class stiff in a windbreaker standing at the bar, probably awaiting sight of Namath, nursing a drink that probably cost more than he would rationally have spent anywhere else. Above the liquor shelf is a LeRoy Neiman triptych of Namath, while a bored-looking girl tends bar in a makeshift "12" away jersey, staring off into space like A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. It doesn't seem like that great a time.

When I was in grade school I read about it all in a biography of Namath written for kids. Writers obviously didn't know how to describe his actions. He quit, they said, because he was impetuous, but he came around to the big boss' point of view in the end, and all was well again. Still, for a boy growing up on Long Island, oblivious to the radical transformations of the 1970's, Namath's actions made ironic sense: "Don't fuck with the merchandise. You don't own me. I do what I want with whom I want." Seemed okay.

I didn't understand any of the details of the affair, but by the time I was starting to love the Jets, six or seven years after Bachelors III, Namath was already over-the-hill, and the charm of it was rooted in pure wish fulfillment. Dad didn't clarify it any more than saying, "Well, Joe didn't want anyone telling him whose boss, right? Nobody likes that. You don't like it when I tell you what to do, right? But you gotta do it."

Right. Exactly. So naturally I pretended to be Joe Namath when I ran out onto the recess ground. It didn't matter if his play had deteriorated by the time I was in first grade, for it was the way he carried himself on the field that mattered. I jogged around in his half-caring, limping slouch so often that the school nurse wondered if I had some neurological problem.

We take for granted that the athlete - usually male, usually irresponsible and single-minded - will do the wrong thing because he doesn't know better. Joe returned to work a few days after his weeping resignation to the press, but he shrugged off the reprimand with the careless elan of an incorrigible boy. The child pretended to be the man who pretended to be the child. The stiff standing at the bar of Bachelor's III was already too old for that drink, yet a boy could still dream of never growing up. That singular quality of Namath's superseded all of his missteps in all of the terrible games I saw him play in his twilight years at Shea.

Chargers 24 Jets 16 - Monday Night, 1975

I'm starting to get that sadness that comes with knowing that although rookies have started wearing pads, random numbers and their last names on white, label-less helmets at Hofstra, it's still months to go. To that end, Monday evening seems so bittersweet. Always has. The Jets have amassed a reasonable Monday record to offset an ignominious Monday Night Football record dating back to my earliest time as a Jets fan.

My first Jets season was 1975. A dreary one among many to come. I was six. Dad told me the Jets would play San Diego Monday night late in the year, and the Jets' 3-9 record going into the game didn't dampen my enthusiasm.

"But Dad," I said, trying to liven him, "it's MONDAY NIGHT," thinking already as all good American males did in the 1970's that something magical did indeed happen on Monday nights. Surely the Jets could beat lowly San Diego. Surely.

"Maybe," Dad said. He was the original Jets fan. A Giants fan who couldn't get tickets. "But, really, kid," he said, "believe me," he said of our team, "they're really freakin' horrible. They...," he checked his slang for a moment's glance at my mother, who glared over her reading at the kitchen table. "They suck eggs," he said somewhat weakly. "Come on, kid," he said, trying something else. "You want me to read you a story or something?"

We would have this conversation so many times. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right. He went to the AFL Title Game against the Raiders at Shea while Mom was still pregnant with me, sitting at home, watching Curt Gowdy do the game on NBC, knitting the pink footsies she knew would look perfect on what she knew had to be a daughter. "She gives me agita like a daughter will. Every morning. That's how I know it."

So Dad had seen it all. Couldn't I at least see my first Jets Monday Night Football game?

"No. To bed," he said, gesturing his hand toward the stairs. "For your own good."

I whined, I cried. I caught a glimpse of ginger-haired John Riggins, playing in what I didn't realize was his second-to-last game in a Jets uniform. A still shot, with the plain mustard all-caps lettering of the ABC caption at the base of his picture. God, I loved him.

And the next morning, when I found that they lost to lowly San Diego 24-16, I felt just as robbed as I would have had the score been the other way. It didn't matter. What mattered was that I wasn't there to hold their hands while they screwed it up once again. I didn't realize I had a problem, but today that's when I see it all so clearly, like a sober alcoholic sees back to his first real drunk through the heartless veil of thousands that followed. Pure powerlessness at its origins. Monday, Monday.

With Feathers

Obviously for a Jets fan, Long Island's Newsday will probably provide logically better coverage than, say, the New York Times because one of the Jets' spiritual homes is Long Island, not Manhattan. Anyone needing an illustration of this needs only to turn to the lengthy, prolonged, needless and embarassing slap in the face the team got when we tried to get a stadium on the West Side.

Tom Rock's Newsday articles on the Jets are helpful. In one piece on the talented Nick Mangold, Rock (I can't call him T-Rock; feels too personal) mentions that players are cozying up to the new Jet Thomas Jones, searching for evidence of the afterglow, looking for insight into what a Super Bowl appearance is like. He is their one player who can say. An entire set of X and Y Generation fans are wondering that same question. I don't know any Bears fans or Colts fans to consult; I mean, I know bandwagon fans for the former, and I don't actually think anyone outside Indianapolis roots for the Colts. I've been to Indiana once. There are dunes, by the way, off of one of the Great Lakes there. They're pretty amazing. Real sand dunes. No kidding. I don't even know if people from Indiana know they're there. I assume now that they know the Colts are not in Baltimore anymore.

So I sit here and wonder. A Super Bowl. What i-

Stop.

"Hope is the thing with feathers," said Emily Dickinson, and I have already noticed the familiar feathers of minicamp. In a few months I will use them in a metaphorical sense to fly to Hofstra and see the Jets for a day in training camp. I am a sucker - but better yet, a servant to my faith. The early Christians first believed that Jesus, as He promised, was coming back imminently. Like, any day now. And when that didn't happen, it wasn't as if the next generation took up Jainism or something. They hung in there. They revised their predictions, even forgot the misplaced predictions of the past and got ready for the long haul. That's what belief is. That's why I know that this business has got me and will not let go.

So I wonder. Helplessly, one might say. But with feathers, all the same.