Little Green Men - Part 2

Tyranny’s success depends on a misplaced sense of duty among ordinary people, and this was how Coach’s autocracy worked. He possessed the tyrant's mistaken sense of being inherently cheated by invisible forces of corruption. He often asserted to us in practice that the Pee Wee referees had made several unfair calls against him, and now we, his minions, needed to exact revenge.

A tyrant persists in a state of illegal authority and perpetual lies, and eventually the autocrat cannot help but share the gift of lying with his subjects. So Coach taught us how to cheat - specifically how to slow down a football game after your team has run out of timeouts. The best way was to fake an injury and be granted an automatic timeout. The referees - usually fathers volunteering from the community - came to understand what Coach was doing, and they resented him for it; they could hardly be seen to question a little boy's injury while he was crying with conviction on the field.

It became a part of our game plan. Instead of practicing formation and drills during the week, he now spent the bulk of time teaching us the nuances of faking an injury. He would tell us to keep a phony injury nice and low-key. He would insist that when called upon, you needed to choose an injured part of your body to hold or wrestle, but not too dramatically. Writhe around, yes, but just a little.

“Less is more, boys,” he said.

Coach emphasized the method acting direction of think about a time when you were really injured. It worked, of course. Pete Skolaski would feign a muscle pull and then Coach would call us over to discuss the next play. After hearing Coach issue a special code from the sideline, Brendan Farley would roll on the ground at the end of a play and be carried off while we strategized in the huddle. At first, several of us on the team told him that our consciences were bothered by this. Coach reassured us. Don’t worry about right and wrong here, fellas. You’ll forget all about it when you win.

Not surprisingly, we didn't forget it, for the Green Raiders entered the last week of the season with six losses, a tie, and no wins.

For the last game of the season, we played the “Chiefs,” a team with red uniforms and yellow trim just like their Kansas City namesakes. The Chiefs had gone undefeated all season. Their quarterback was Joe Nardi - a name we whispered among ourselves throughout the week leading up to the game. At the age of nine or ten, most boys might have only the makings of basic athleticism somewhere within them. But Joe Nardi was different.

Joe Nardi. We knew how great he was. We had dreaded him the whole season the way Russian peasants whispered fearfully to one another of Napoleon’s advance. We had heard that he scored every one of the Chiefs’ touchdowns. At quarterback, he ran with the ball on every play, and he never seemed to get tackled. We had heard of offensive totals of 48 and 56 points in some games. His coach ran up the score. He gleefully sent Joe Nardi out onto the field like the Angel of Death to crush the dreams of little boys who had once innocently imagined themselves growing up to be football players. So, on the day of the season’s final game, the Green Raiders stoically waited for their punishment at the hands of young Joe, whose talents in the fourth grade were the kind we would never possess in all our lives.

However, on this particular day Joe Nardi was a no-show. He wasn’t even on the sidelines. Why? Because, to our delight, he was playing in a junior league basketball game in Massapequa, and he and his father had decided to use his talents to win that game instead of wasting his time beating the witless Green Raiders. How fortuitous!

Suddenly we became unbeatable. At the end of the first half, we were up 21-0 against an undefeated team.

“This is it, boys,” Coach crowed at halftime. “Let's go out and finish beating these little peckers.” Conscious or not of his double-entendre, we saw that the coach was smiling, and that’s what was really important. We nodded to one another in disbelieving satisfaction. It seemed plausible. Maybe we could win. The Chiefs were obviously nothing without their Superman, and their coach had relied so heavily on the prodigy that he had never planned for his absence. So we took the field and kept the high ground but failed to score in the second half.

And then it happened. Fate came out of its drunken haze and pointed Its finger squarely at us. As a Roman Catholic Jets fan, my instinct to keep hopes dim had crept even more deeply into my consciousness, and this is why I may actually have seen what was coming before anyone else did.

A Pontiac Bonneville swung its vast rear into the parking space next to the football field. Out of the car came an ordinary young boy with his father. The boy wore shoulder pads and football pants; he needed only to put on his football jersey and his helmet. A horrible feeling overcame me - the kind I now regularly experience whenever the Jets take a lead into the fourth quarter. It was Doom.


Sports fans casually come to think of their team's winning as an eventuality, as a logically inevitable thing, whereas a Jets fan comes to think of a hefty lead as a terrible burden to carry for all four quarters. By the end of 1977, over the course of four seasons, I had seen the Jets win only a handful of times, whereas in my own life, I had never actually experienced a single victory with an organized sports team.

For Joe Nardi, though, a single victory was simply part of a day's work - sometimes not even a full day's. Word spread quickly among our team that he had arrived. He had been the top scorer in the basketball game earlier that day, and now he was ready for his next appointment with victory. His teammates saw him approach and were euphoric, turning to us with the bitter determination of besieged settlers whose sight of the cavalry has given them the spirit to throw away the hastily created surrender flag and stick it out after all.

Most stories such as these teach the traditional American lesson that what stands in our way are only the fears that persist in our own minds. It just so happens in this case that everything we had heard about Joe Nardi was true. He was a force of total destruction. He took the field in the fourth quarter like the hammer of the gods. He never gave the ball to another player; he didn’t need to. Not once. He simply ran, and perhaps it was because we were in awe, or because we had gotten too close to victory and couldn't handle the stress of it all, but it didn’t matter. No one could touch him.


By the time he was on his way to scoring his fourth (!!) touchdown, we were scraping and leaping at him with sobs of despair, not quite believing that Fate could be so feckless with grade school boys. With only one minute remaining, we failed again to score a second half point. The Chiefs got the ball back and Joe Nardi began driving downfield once again. It was all over, and we knew it.

And now Coach was upset. Really, really upset. I don’t know whether he was angry at the officials for permitting young Nardi to play so late in the game or angry at our collapse, but the Chiefs were now winning 28-21 late in the game, and he was beginning to lose control. He went fucking insane actually, screaming like a man who’d caught on fire. Meanwhile, parents began hurling criticisms at him from the stands: We thought you said this was fun. Losing’s not fun you asshole!

They contradicted themselves, just as children's sports are always an inherent contradiction among the competing realities of fun, hard work, and losing. The parents had tolerated his craziness, but now the tyrant was vulnerable, and the crowd took heart.

Coach saved the best for last, though. With no timeouts remaining, as the Chiefs lined up for the next play, he yelled out in a hysterical tone the routine code for faking an injury. He directed it to a dull-witted boy on the Green Raiders named John Bean. We all recognized the signal.

* * * * *

A decade later, while watching the 1988 AFC Playoffs on NBC, I would have a visceral sense memory of that fateful day. They called it the "Seattle stall," a strategy used by the Seawhawks' Chuck Knox who instructed his players fake injuries to slow down the Cincinnati Bengals' no-huddle offense. In the end, it's a passive aggressive gesture, a classically defensive position of last resort. When the Bengals then moved on to the AFC Championship game against Buffalo, Marv Levy threatened to use the stall throughout the game. The Commissioner then declared the no-huddle off limits. Thus do effective strategies get punished when there is no legitimate way to counteract them. That kind of philosophy was something Coach Sutherland understood.

* * * * *

But the trouble was Coach had never requested the injury fake of John Bean before, and to be honest, Bean had never quite gotten the whole method-acting thing down in practice. More importantly, John Bean had also never quite grasped the concept that in order to successfully fake an injury, he needed to actually make contact with an opposing player. Joe Nardi was calling signals.


Instead of waiting for the play to unfold, though, Bean spontaneously crumpled to the ground without so much as anyone taking a glance at him, and he began wrestling madly with his knee. Several of the Green Raiders looked away, embarrassed by his crude, summer stock performance. By Coach's standards, it was a poor acting choice - certainly an overly stylized depiction, strictly amateur. It was so bad in fact that the officials at last had the evidence they needed, and they slapped Coach with the penalty they had been waiting to give him all season - a 15-yard personal foul, moving Joe Nardi even further into our territory. There was only a little time left on the clock.

In response, Coach Sutherland raised his long arms in mock crucifixion and declared in a shrieking tone that the game was a forfeit. He stalked off the field, got into his car and drove away, leaving both of his sons on the field, apparently to be driven home by someone else. It was finally over.

Under Mom's arm, I walked to the parking lot. There and then, I decided that I was done playing sports. From now on, I would remain a spectator, preferring the relative psychological comfort of the stands to the playing field. As Mom drove us away, she intoned, “We're getting out of this madhouse.” I stared out the window and waved farewell to my athletic career.

Little Green Men - Part 1

Enough with the schoolyard. Enough with Pretend. It was time to play real football. Here a departure from my portrait of the artist as a young fan. It’s time I tell the story of how and why I departed the athletic arena myself and became, exclusively, a spectator.

I persuaded Mom to let me play in the local Pee Wee flag football league, where players wore Velcro flags that opponents were supposed to pull off to create a “tackle.” She figured it would be safe enough. We soon discovered, though, that the removal of football's elementary violence did little to degrade its essential capacity for rage.

At the end of Pee Wee tryouts, we were introduced to our coach - the tall, reedy, red-haired Dick Sutherland - around whom we were told to gather. In his spare time, he was a real estate salesman. Coach lit a curved pipe, perpetually filled with Captain Black and exhaled the sweet-smelling smoke into the humid August twilight. “Hello, boys,” he said. He seemed mellow.

What gives a man the limitless authority associated with the title “Coach?” A “Coach” got a valued place in Long Island culture. Even the cretin or psychotic called “Coach” received a place of honor. Coach was supposed to possess a combined knowledge of combat strategy and human psychology. Even our gym teacher at Old Mill Road School was a man we simply called “Coach,” just as we were told to call priests “Father,” but I'm not sure what made Coach a Coach, other than the fact that he wore a polyester polo shirt, spandex running pants, Keds, and carried a whistle. Coaches were community leaders, so Dick Sutherland commanded our instant attention as Coach. In his dark aviator glasses (did I ever really glimpse his eyes?) and his pipe, he actually resembled General Macarthur.


All the parents and children participating in Sutherland's enterprise met at his home in South Merrick one late summer Sunday while we boys played in his backyard. Sutherland gathered the parents inside the house for cocktails in teardrop glasses and a talk about what was ahead for the Pee Wee season. I snuck into the house several times to catch the Jets-Giants exhibition game on TV, and I overheard him talking about “sportsmanship” and the need for “fun.” I liked him. So did Mom.

I had already witnessed some bad adult behavior in organized sports. I played Little League baseball the year before for a team consisting of the worst baseball players in Nassau County, myself included. The parents of our opponents would heckle us as we took the field: "You stink!" "Look at you in those uniforms!" "Bunch of sissies!" Yes, the jeering was strange, but to their credit they were working from what they saw.


Our baseball team was the “Beavers,” and our uniforms were yellow. Who would be so cruel as to think up such emasculation? The Beavers were a craven bunch, infected throughout with defeatism. Each of us approached home plate as if he were seeing his last moment on Earth, and opposing pitchers instinctively sensed that we were weak. My on-base percentage was comparatively good because I collected the highest number of walks and was often beaned. Once while limping to first base after being hit in the thigh by a pitch, I heard a parent hiss from behind:

“Next time he’s going for your head, you little bastard.”

Maybe, I thought, just maybe with football, I could give organized sports one more try. I welcomed Coach Sutherland's appeals to fun over competition. I was delighted that our jerseys were Jets’ green. But herein lay a problem.
The logo chosen for our helmets was a skull and bones, rendering my obvious choice for team name irrelevant. What's worse is that we became the "Green Raiders," which, to me, was an oxymoron. First, Raiders are generally pirates, and they certainly aren't green, unless they are either seasick (in which case they need to look for a new line of work) or because something has gone horribly wrong on the ship itself.
Secondly, football Raiders were from Oakland, they were black, and they were the sworn enemy of the Gang Green, the real emerald team.

I made these salient points to the team on the first day. Right away, I could see that no one was going to back me up on this. To my first point, one teammate told me, "Shut up, asshole." So, one down, one to go.

When I argued that as a Jets fan it made no sense to be a Raider, Coach Sutherland looked at me and said, "Who's this kid?"

I identified myself.

"Your last name's a damned six-legged pest, you little creep," he said. "Are you going to change that?"

That wasn't my point, but I saw to quit while I was way behind. I was a Jets fan, after all.

To add to the chromatic confusion, our football pants were purple, making us look more like henchmen of the Joker than a football juggernaut. When Namath's number 12 was already picked and Riggins’ 44 unavailable, I chose number 15.
“Bart Starr,” Coach murmured when he handed me the uniform.
I shook my head. “Babe Parilli.”

He looked at me.

“Joe Namath's backup on the Super Bowl team.”

He gave a look of bewilderment and gestured for me to move on.

I was the team's wide receiver for about five games. Then I got replaced by a shorter kid. It didn't matter. This was American football - manic, disturbed, angry, vituperative. I confess I enjoyed the subtle air of malice that began collecting around practices. One night before the season began, I performed uncharacteristically well on a drill in practice, and Coach made everyone but me run extra laps around the field. No one had ever included me in the business of making fun of other people, but Coach was kind enough to let me give it a try. For the moment, he put aside his disdain for my surname.

“Lookitem,” he said, gesturing to the winded boys taking another lap. “Biggest bunch of pussies you ever saw, huh?” I laughed lustily along with him, quietly wondering why cats were pejorative.

Still, we were a numbskulled lot, more like Little Green Men than Green Raiders. The real trouble began when Coach’s two sons were placed on the team. Adam and Gregory Sutherland were fraternal twins - fat and small, respectively. While Adam was enough of a size that he could move people at the line, he was uncoordinated and furthermore possessed no visible intelligence. Gregory was a ferrety boy who ran away from blockers and refused to touch the ball on the grounds that he would be tackled if he did so.

To further complicate things, it also became apparent that Coach had very little strategy of his own to communicate to us, and while we learned some pass and block plays, his game plan was inevitably to make players “just go very far out” for a pass. In his own mind, Coach must have believed he was trying to teach us something because he became more and more angry at us when we failed to deliver what he wanted.

In practice before our first game, he began screaming at all of us. He declared that we were, at the average age of 9, morons, shitheads, and dumb fuckers. His worst act was to find a scapegoat in his son Adam. During that same practice, I ran too far outside my prescribed pattern. In response, Coach ran over in my direction. I saw him coming, and I thought to myself, OK, it’s been a good life. But it’s done now. What did I last say to Mommy? I thought about running, but I was just too scared. There really wasn’t much to do but take the advice I had heard in the nurse’s office at school about shrinking into a ball when confronted by a bear.


But Coach passed me by. Instead, he reached for Adam at center and gave him a head slap that Deacon Jones would have envied, sending the boy wordlessly to the ground.

“You dumbshit!” Coach said, pointing down toward his son. “Don't let me ever see you do that again!” It was meant for me. Wasn’t it?

“What'd I do?” Adam mumbled.

"You know goddamned well what you did!” Coach shrieked, walking back to the sidelines. And as if accustomed to it, Adam picked himself up in the storm’s wake and got ready for the next down.

The season arrived and quickly felt like a forced march. His barrage of insults grew. Coach’s halftime speeches were priceless. He would often cite one player as inept and then finish the tirade with a ruthless jab at one of his sons. Sometimes his overly-magnified sense of drama actually made him funny, though we dared not laugh:


“The cups are for your penises, boys,” he said after a particularly bad half. “Don't forget that. You're playing like a bunch of pussies without penises.” Coach then left us behind in our halftime huddle to consider the simile.

A cat? one of us wondered aloud.

No, someone said within the huddle.


By the time we were supposed to be back on the field, the one among us with the best knowledge of female anatomy had already explained to the rest of his teammates what Coach had meant. This only raised a new series of questions that, for the moment, had the capacity to distract us from anything, let alone a miserable little football game.


Gradually, we performed more out of fear than volition, like a pirate ships' captured crew. It didn’t make winners out of third graders. By the last game of the season I was sick of it, but as she helped me on with my pads and uniform, Mom told me to just go through with it anyway. She said it would be more honorable to play out one last game than it would be to quit, and that quitting would haunt me forever.

Whatever. I’m grateful now that I took her advice, but not because of anything having to do with honor. What followed made it all worthwhile.

Leahy

As he would in years to come, Pat Leahy played the key role in the season’s biggest drama. He was the lead scorer for the AFC that year, but he made one crucial mistake at the worst possible moment. I’ve never known a kicker to play such havoc with the circulatory systems of his fans, yet Pat Leahy would keep kicking for the Jets through 1991, getting better and better every year. In 1978, though, his timing was tragic. Even his looks conveyed it - his comb-over, his broken smile and an Irish sense for misfortune’s omnipresence – and it made him a complicated person to heckle.

Leahy, you suck. It feels bad just thinking it. You don’t heckle Charlie Brown; you laugh with him, and when you don’t, you pity him. I may be alone among Jets fans in this, but you didn’t heckle Pat Leahy. Yes, it is a notoriously unforgiving position. Leahy always carried an air of vulnerability that made him more human.

Even his All-Pro Topps card as the leading scorer of the AFC in 1978 captures him in a moment of pensive self-reflection that fits my picture of him entirely. The thought of seeing him line up for a crucial field goal makes my stomach turn in anxiety and empathy. God, Pat. You can’t shank this one. Please… For the love of humanity.

The 1978 home game against the Patriots toward the end of the season is the sharpest in the season’s catalogue. I should remember it foremost as the weekend my parents went back up to Westchester to look for houses again, and they bought some land. Jamie and I were back in Brooklyn with Grammy. When Mom and Dad returned, they were covered in mud. They had decided to go pioneering and buy a plot on which they would build an entirely new house near Pleasantville.

They told of a place high atop a hill, with an incredible view of the county. They could hardly wait to get started. So, we were moving.

“We were attacked,” Mom said suddenly.

“Well, not attacked,” Dad said.

She ignored him. “By Doberman pinschers that were sent out to sick us.”

Dad interjected with a muddy hand, “Clearly, they were from an estate somewhere in the vicinity.”

“We were chased. We were on their property.” She had the look of someone who hadn’t had this kind of excitement in her life since chasing a bus in the Village. Her eyes were wide.

“Wait a minute,” Dad said, looking over in her direction, “we were clearly not on their property. In fact, I think the dogs were being friendly to us.”

“They were wild animals, Marty.”

“They were not,” Dad said, now somewhat impatiently.

“I managed to escape the worst of it, Marty, but I didn’t run. I slid!”

My father gestured with exasperation. Enough, he said. My grandmother handed him a towel before he could track any more mud around.

“Really?” I asked excitedly.

“Slid down the hill on my derriere. The whole length of the way down the muddy hill. Dad got the worst of it, though.”

He called from the other room. “No I didn’t!”

She kneeled in toward me. Grammy tried to stop her from letting more brown crusted soil of a mysterious estate fall on her old carpet. “The Dobermans probably saw him in his puffy down jacket and thought he was a trainer in one of those padded outfits. You know? Like the kind we saw those German shepherds go after on TV?”

“Yeah,” I said excitedly.

“They were pretty disappointed to chomp down and discover goose feathers in your father’s coat!” She began laughing, covering her mouth with her dirty hand. “Daddy came back looking like a shipwrecked man!”

I had never seen Mom so excited, or so oddly deranged. It seems unlikely that she had taken a drink between falling down the hill and coming to Greenpoint. She reported it all, however differently from Dad, with enormous anticipation in her voice. Things were going to be different now. And for Dad, this was the next great phase in his career. We were moving from the Island.

Just then, though, Dad broke the spell of the day with some news. “Oh, Marty! I can’t believe I forgot. The Jets are sold out tomorrow! The game against the Patriots, at Shea. It’s sold out.”

Mom looked slightly disappointed. She knew her story ended there.


This meant only one thing. Only one thing. The game was on TV. Tee. Vee. The Jets had a record of 7-5 as they entered into that most crucial of home division games against the first-place Patriots.

Time slows down profoundly right here.

Something about the Jets being back on TV made me care very deeply about every moment of the game in careful detail. They were poised to go to the playoffs. The potential epiphanies were limitless. To actually go into the game’s moribund details would be ridiculous, even for someone like me. To me, the days and nights I recall leading up to the game are more telling. There were night sweats all the week beforehand, my fingernails bitten down to the nub, then two more jittery nights of sleeplessness before the game, and a resulting head cold. I kept it all to myself, for if I revealed too much to Mom I might have jeopardized my watching the game.

That day, I isolated myself from everyone. My parents, Charlie and - unbeknownst to me - Eddie O’Fallon, were all upstairs watching the game. I didn’t want to be disturbed. This was a layered moment in my history. I made that very clear. This was It. This was a religious moment. The Jets were going to go to the playoffs if they won. This was The Most Important Game of The Season For Which I Had Been Waiting All My Life. When Eddie came by for a visit during the fourth quarter, Mom very wisely told him to stick around with the rest of them above ground until it was over.

Yin, Yin, Yin and Yang. The Jets played brilliantly for three quarters and took the lead from the Patriots 14-10. But then Tony Franklin would make three field goals to Pat Leahy’s one such that it was 19-17 Patriots with under a minute to play. Matt Robinson drove the Jets brilliantly downfield, hitting Jerome Barkum and Wesley Walker for first downs. Pat Leahy was brought out for the winning field goal.


This was my first view of the Jets playing at home on TV in a while, and I had forgotten a critical thing about Shea Stadium. Whereas most arenas allowed for a normal wind flow through their confines, Shea took the wind from Jamaica Bay and cylindrically re-processed it into a mischievous swirl. To his defense, Pat Leahy was about to kick into that swirl. Yet I sensed a familiar foreboding as Leahy dug into the ragged turf and tested the November air.


Then, the snap. The kick. Even today, in my mind’s eye, the kick looks good. But suddenly I hear Mom scream upstairs. Dad howls with rage. It had to have been good. Didn't it go through the crossbars?

Yet upon replay, again and again, Leahy’s kick sailed wide right. It was no illusion. A sound of despair forced its way out of me, and I collapsed on the rug of the basement, having already spent the length of the game tensely dancing in front of the TV on the balls of my feet. The final stayed 19-17. The playoffs drifted errantly away into the swirl. Poor Pat Leahy reacted to his miss like a Greek tragedian, tearing off his helmet, and covering his face, uttering an obvious, Shit. He fell to his knees. It was such a big miss that a New England player came over to him and offered a consoling word. The Jets had never brought my hopes so high before.

I became disoriented. I wanted to cry. It felt like the right thing to do, but I couldn't let it out. So instead, I promptly passed out. When I came to, Eddie was standing over me. What could he say to console me? He sat me up as I came back to consciousness.

“Itth only game,” he said, more like a question than a statement. It was a nice attempt, and kind in Eddie’s fashion. He was correct, of course, but he and I both knew that it wasn’t true.

Yang

So this was it. Finally. This was the season I had been waiting for all my short life.

Mostly.

But now I had a new problem. I couldn’t now just simply live with the old expectations of losing all the time. Here is the fanatic’s true psychological quandary: Once they start winning, do you keep a distance from your team so as to not feel anything when they lose, as they invariably will?


Or, once they start winning, do you up the ante of expectation and look for more from them, week after week? If you answer yes to the first, you run the risk of not experiencing the deep, paralyzing, devastating joy when they surprise you and win big games - the way I felt when we beat Denver at Mile High. Only the birth of one’s child, the rush of heroin, or an orgasm can provide anything remotely euphoric than that. And I was unfamiliar with those things at 9.


Thus, the rabid fan, a born endorphin junkie, cannot help but pour himself entirely into the struggle, expecting better and better performances with each win his team racks up. So yes on the second question as well, thank you.

But then there’s your problem right away, isn’t it? Here’s where the real quandary appears for the true fanatic: the Jets lost the following week to New England at Foxboro by a staggering 55-21, and I quickly became despondent. I didn’t know yet that investing oneself that much into winning was always going to be a losing battle with the Jets, but by then I was already a junkie.

Once you’ve been through enough of the mania of winning and losing during a season, you come to realize that the pain of a disappointing loss feels more intense than the joy you feel when your team wins. I just didn’t know that yet as a boy, but even if I had understood it, I don’t think it would have made any difference because I know it now, and it doesn’t help matters any better than it might have when I was, as Mr. Walsh put it, a little maniac.


A brief digression here, but what was it with Foxboro anyway? A 41-7 loss on Monday Night Football in 1976, the trouncing in '78. Then there was the astounding 56-3 loss the following year. What do you say at the end of a game with a score like that? “That Pat Leahy’s got a golden toe?” Whatever identity issues the Patriots needed to work out - as evidenced by their weirdly kinky "Superpatriot" of the 70's - they were definitely working them out on the Jets.

We listened to that game at Foxboro in the car radio. We were traveling north, looking at the autumn foliage but also looking at neighborhoods in Westchester County to live. We toured a few houses, I think. Each time the New England Patriots touched the football, they scored. You actually ended up feeling better when the Jets lost week after week with no expectation for them to win. And what kind of terrible fan would want his team to suck?

Me?

We went to New York City to see the decorations for Christmastime and listened on the radio while the Jets beat Miami 24-13. Then Dad astonished us again - he got tickets for all of us to the home game against the Baltimore Colts. That meant my little brother Charlie was coming, too. I felt that it was my duty to instruct him in my magnificent obsession, just in case he decided to join the tribe.
I explained to him what Shea Stadium would look like outside and inside, what the game would mean for the Jets if they won (probably a chance at a Wild Card appearance in the playoffs so long as they beat Cleveland the following week). I mentioned how I had seen Baltimore in the past and how much better they used to be. I was doing for him what I thought Dad should have done for me - laying the emotional groundwork for insanity. Charlie took it all in, but I could tell he didn’t care. The Jets won 24-16.


This 1979 Topps card for Matt Robinson was taken at the game. Football cards had the annoying habit back then of blotting out the team insignias, but I recognized Matt's distant Fu Manchu and the sickly green of Shea's field.

He threw two magnificent touchdowns to Wesley Walker, one of which was the result of a tiptoe dance Walker was compelled to do along the sidelines. I got so excited when he scored that I climbed up the railing of the upper deck where we sat and began waving my hands wildly in the air with nothing to keep me from falling to the Loge below. I was insane. Mom screamed. Dad grabbed me and asked what the hell I thought I was doing, but I just kept laughing like a madman, wagging my tongue at him, delirious with joy.

Yin

From here, I remember every game of the 1978 season. Every week there was something entirely new happening, and it speaks to the low expectations of well-mannered children - or perhaps to the obsessions of a neurotic few - that even though the Jets would only break even, I felt like I had witnessed someone walking on water when the season was all done. As with everything to the rabid fan, my personal memories are bound to the outcome of each game.


We could have watched the game against the Philadelphia Eagles on TV since it was away, but instead we took my grandmother to Sagamore Hill, Teddy Roosevelt’s homestead. I had been there before on class trips. The best part was looking into the bedroom of his youngest son, Quentin, who died in World War I. I loved looking at the illegible handwritten message Quentin had made on a closet door as a boy.

On the way home, I got car sick and threw up. We pulled over just in time, and my grandmother scolded me. She thought that I had been reading a book on the Presidents I had bought in the gift shop. Don’t you know that people get sick when they read in the car? she asked. They did, but the issue (figurative and literal) was Jets’ offense, which had been unable to produce more than two field goals against the Eagles. Preposterous. Sickening. Which Jets team would show up week by week was now anyone’s guess. Yin and Yang.

It was near dinnertime the following week for the away game against Denver at Mile High. The Jets’ quarterback in place of Todd, Matt Robinson, was doing an exceptional job. (Indeed, are those the lips of God speaking in Matt's ear as he rolls left? Or is it Robinson's conscience, manifesting itself in the form of Walt Michaels, proactively warning Matt about playing with injuries?)

The Yin and the Yang were each well represented. The first half belonged to my fatalist sense of things because the Jets trailed at the break 21-7 to a superior Broncos team, but then the second half belonged to my newly prodigious capacity for hope. The Jets fought all the way back and trailed 28-24 with about a minute and a half to play. Then, dinnertime.

Dad had been raised by a German gourmand mother whose claim to fame was that she was reputedly perfect in the kitchen, so Mom always felt self-conscious about her own cooking. Here she became a mystery to me. Despite her fire and wrath, she also lived with a durable inferiority complex with respect to preparing food. There were days it seemed more than cooking issues, though. She sometimes looked out the window when no one but I was listening and say, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.” She must not have known I could hear her, but sometimes I wonder if she thought I was the only one who would know how she felt.

One way for Mom to feel in control was to cook for Dad as successfully as her mother-in-law had. It had the curious effect of anxiously galvanizing everyone in our home into the cause. Everything in the evening was timed with her meals because it was her performance, and “Everything” included the last minute-and-a-half of the most important game of the season thus far.

But I begged. Please. The Jets had the ball in their own territory and were beginning their last drive of the game. Please. Pleeeeaaasssse.

“Can’t I wait until the game’s over?”

“Turn off that damn TV,” my father commanded.

Not even a negotiation. There was no debate. He gave me the Face. If dinner got cold, Mom would feel as if she let Dad down, even though he wouldn’t have interpreted it that way; it didn’t mean nearly as much to him as it did to her, but technically, he had little to do with it.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized the delicate logic of such an unspoken arrangement, of how common it is among couples, of how strangely effective it can be, and how it appears to serve the best interests of all persons in the house to keep it exactly the way it is, with genuine love intended for all. Everyone would be let down if dinner failed. She would let herself down, therefore letting Dad and us down, and though I didn’t quite understand the semantics of all this, I instinctively knew that I was a link in the chain. Even though the Jets were trying to upset the defending AFC Champions in one of the most difficult stadiums for a visiting team to score a victory, I still needed to turn the TV off and come to dinner. Anything else would inadvertently set off a catastrophe. Come to the table, Marty.

“Fine,” I said with grave misgiving.

“It’s not like they’re going to win,” Dad reminded me.

“We’ll keep the radio on,” Mom said judiciously.

“No,” Dad said, petulantly. “That’s silly.”

But Mom won out as usual. She told me to say Grace. I had managed to get the prayer before dinner down to a record speed:

Blessusohlordinthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceivefromthe
bountyofChristOurLordAmen.MayGodprovideforthewantsofthepoor
andmaythesoulsofthefaithfullydepartedthroughthemercyofGodrest
inpeaceAmen.

Then: “Mom?” I said, turning toward my ally.

“Yes.”

“The radio? Please?”

And then…

And then.


And then as soon as Dad reluctantly clicked the transistor back on, Sunday’s manifestation of God’s Grace arrived, right on cue. It was the first great miracle of my life as a Jets fan, and coming as it did when I was 9, after three and a half seasons of solid devotion, it seemed a long time coming. Spencer Ross’ voice on WCBS blared across the kitchen in mid-sentence, but what he said couldn’t have been true. Out of nowhere, he was saying something about a long pass thrown to Wesley Walker for a touchdown. But that wasn’t possible.

I leapt in the air, and much to my delight, so did Dad; we vaulted out of our seats. We were going for the living room, pushing each other out of the way to watch the replay on NBC. It was unbelievable and true. In slow motion, Matt Robinson’s long pass disappeared from the top of the TV screen for a single instant. The half-blind Wesley Walker was suddenly visible, running, watching the invisible ball linger in the air, moving with those little stutter-steps he used - waiting, waiting…for what seemed like forever. But then the ball was there in his arms! Wesley Walker was there where he needed to be, in the end zone with the ball. The game was over, and the Jets had beaten the Broncos 31-28. Again and again on replay!

The Jets were now a winning team.

A Little Maniac

The very fact that the Jets were winning as many as they would lose over the course of 1978 was still such a new experience that each weekend remains like a snapshot. Over the years (too few unfortunately) the Jets have posted records better than 8-8, but it would be another 20 years before I would experience a season so new like that again.

After the opener against Miami, there was a win at Buffalo; Todd threw to Barkum for the winner within a minute to play, and Mr. Fitzgerald from across the street, who loved to drunkenly needle Dad, called us up on the phone and said, “Guess it was a stupid idea to give those tickets away, eh?” Dad laughed on the phone and then muttered his real feelings under his breath after he hung up. "Stupid jackass."

He didn't mean himself. In the weeks to come he didn't have any further evidence to convince himself he was wrong.

The Jets dropped three in a row - first to Seattle, at home, 24-17. This shot of Steve Niehaus overwhelming a nameless Jet offers an apt metaphor of the Jets futility that day. The Jets wore white at home, presumably to draw attention to the need to avenge the humiliating 17-0 loss to the Seahawks the year before. At least the Jets scored 17 themselves this time. Dad and I drove to Queens to visit his aunt in Woodside that day. It was a strange existential experience for an autumn afternoon to be so beautiful and clear while I felt so bleak about the Jets. You mean other people aren’t devastated by this? I thought. What kind of people are they?


They were people like my cousin Aidan from Hollis, Queens, who came visiting the week the Jets played John Riggins and the Redskins. Aidan was my age. He couldn’t have cared less that the Jets lived in the same borough as he. Dad took us to get pizza on Merrick Avenue. Aidan was looking through the jukebox at Joe’s Pizza, finding the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I kept standing on my tiptoes at the register and watching the Jets-Redskins game on the black and white TV set behind the counter. Dad told me it was rude to not pay attention to family, but Aidan was sophisticated; he cared about things that didn’t matter to me yet, like music. I was a neurotic kid.

All I cared about was the only thing that mattered - that Richard Todd had broken his wrist and was out for six weeks while the Jets lost to the Redskins, 23-3.

The next week, I was forced to play outside with some friends because Dad forbid me to listen to the Jets game on the radio. The Jets were playing Pittsburgh. The autumn that year was so beautiful. “If I had wanted you to stay inside,” Dad said, “we would have stayed in Queens. Now get outside, play with your buddies, dammit.”


Fine, I thought. I endured another round of playing in the street with a few kids in the neighborhood. The Jets lost, but then I expected it; they were playing Pittsburgh, for God’s sake. As yet another fistfight broke out among the kids, I snuck inside and saw that the final of the game was 28-17. Funny how I don’t need the online archives of Jets history to look up the score, yet I don’t even remember what kind game we were playing outside.

Then, when the Jets beat up on Buffalo at home 45-14, we traveled to visit the Walsh’s summer house in Sag Harbor, out at the Island’s end. Again, Dad kept me away from the game. But I privately asked Mr. Walsh to check the radio for me and give me the score from time to time. When he reported that the Jets were killing the Bills, I thought that at first it must have been a trick. Mr. Walsh was lying. He was fucking with me. He must have been. I remembered how he had told me to stop crying a while back. For some reason, I got the sense he encouraged Jake to be the way he was toward me.

“Don’t lie to me, Mr. Walsh,” I said.

“Don’t - what?” he asked, appropriately confused. “I’m not lying to you.”

“You mean it? For real?” I was pointing at him, threatening.

“Yes,” he said, huffing, resentful. “What the hell you talking about? You think I’m lying?”

“So they are winning?!”

“God,” he said, startled now. “Yes. You little maniac.”

I jumped up and down. It was the best news of the week. If I had possessed the wherewithal to reflect upon it, I might have noticed that the simple news that they were routing the Buffalo Bills made me happier than I, a child, had been all week. If that wasn’t a sign of a mild dysfunction, I don’t know what is. I did a victory dance in front of Mr. Walsh that made him look at me even more peculiarly. How did he interpret my actions? What was I doing, anyway? “You’re a troubled boy,” Mr. Walsh said, walking away. Like his own son the tattle, Mr. Walsh reported my behavior back to my parents, and on our drive home to Merrick, Dad eyed me warily in the rear view mirror.

Not Just My Imagination

It’s a little late for a contemporary memoirist to be asking this, but it vexed me when I was 9: what should actually be considered as imaginative, anyway? Were the contents of memory allowed to contain the fictions of one’s imagination? Is any part of the imagination inherently true? I wasn’t exactly studying Deconstruction in grammar school, but these questions were unavoidable for me even in the third grade.

Mrs. Fulgham had asked us to create our own “books” with text and illustrations, and she brought in her pretty high school-age daughter to hear us recite our books. Mine was picked to be read: Super Bowl III - The Greatest Upset of All Time. Once again, the class rolled its collective eye. This shit again.


I drew Joe Namath accurately, paying close attention to the placement of his sweatbands, the green stripes on his signature white shoes, and the tan that he had picked up in Florida during Super Bowl week, 1969. I offered accurate statistics - the yardage of Jim Turner’s three field goals against the Colts; Namath’s weight compared with the bigger Lou Michaels of the Colts, the Baltimore player whom he heckled beforehand. I wrote down the correct attendance at the Orange Bowl. Illustrations, text, evidence. The Punt, Pass and Kick Library should have been so thorough.

After I was done reading it aloud, Mrs. Fulgham turned to her daughter and said, “What an imagination he has!”

I sat down, disappointed. Imagination? What? Did they think I was just making this up?

Then, on the first day of fourth grade, we were asked to draw what we did on our summer vacations. Amid a summer trip with my family to Maine, visits to Jones Beach and a week in Illinois visiting my uncle, I chose Wesley Walker’s season-opening touchdown catch in the far corner of our end zone, signaling the beginning of a new era of domination over the Miami Dolphins.
I paid close attention to rendering the Jets’ new uniforms. What could have been more important than that? On Back-to-School night, Mom came over to see my artwork, and immediately looked aghast at my drawing of the Todd-to-Walker pass. “We paid all that good money to stay at a motel in Bar Harbor,” Mom said, tsking with embarrassment, “and this is what’s important to you? People are going to think your father and I lack imagination when it comes to summer vacations, Martin.”

Imagination again. It wasn’t as if she had just met me. If this weren’t important to me, then what the hell was? “Oh, God, Teddy. Of all the…,” she continued, trailing off.

And sure enough, Mrs. Ronato peeked over to see Mom’s reaction to my artwork. “He clearly has quite an imagination, doesn’t he, Mrs. Connelly?” she asked.

“He certainly has,” Mom said. “We actually went on vacation, I’ll have you know. Twice. Not just to football games.” She looked at me. “He went one football game.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Ronato said politely.

“Football season isn’t even summer vacation.” Mom looked at me.

“Right,” said my teacher.

I lamely added, “Summer ends in September.”

“Such imagination,” Mrs. Ronato repeated. “Such creativity.” Mrs. Ronato walked away. So there I was, still misunderstood by all.

“How could you?” Mom asked me.

Apparently I was supposed to be careful not to reveal our household’s hidden unimaginative streak. But as the 1978 season wore on, the Jets won more than ever before. I look back on that entire season, and I can recollect what I was doing and where I was with each weekend. We are supposed to only retain a photographic memory only of cathartic times or times of great epiphany. The 1978 season provided both.

Bigger Than Jesus

John Lennon got in trouble for aptly pointing out that the Beatles were becoming more popular among young people than Jesus.

More than ten years later, Jake Walsh tried to tell me that the Jets weren’t the most important thing in the world. We were walking home together from school.

God, what an asshole, I thought.

“What about Jesus?” he said in that needling voice. “You think the Jets are more important than Jesus?”

I threw up my hands in disgust at such a preposterous comparison. All of a sudden he was a theologian; was I John Lennon? was he Billy Graham? Jesus hadn’t had access to football in his day, as Dad had already pointed out to me - and a good thing, too. Had he been a fan, he would have accomplished very little on Sundays, which was okay because it was technically not his Sabbath, anyway. He would have been a fan of the college game. My unanswered prayers only reinforced my suspicions that He was not a Jets fan, if a football fan at all.
Certainly God must have been a Steelers fan, with old NFL loyalties, since the Steelers had won two of the last four Super Bowls and were on their way to winning it again. Not to mention the Immaculate Reception alone.

Jake loved diming people out. He took my reluctance to answer his theological question as an affirmation. “Hey,” he said to a man raking his yard. “Hey, mister? Here’s a guy who loves the New York Jets more than Jesus.”

The man stopped raking and shrugged. “I’m Jewish.”
“Jewish,” Jake said in response under his breath.

“What?” he said.

We had all learned what prejudice was recently. Saying the word “Jewish” in such a nasty way sounded wrong. Jake was undaunted, though. He wouldn’t give up the battle for Christ’s preeminence. He found a woman walking her child in a pram down the sidewalk. “Lady?” he said running up to her. “Lady, do you think you go to hell if you love the New York Jets more than you love Jesus?”


The woman looked confused, then horrified. Jake Walsh would eventually grow up to be a graduate of Harvard Law, a successful attorney, and no fool. He knew what he was doing. His pitch to the jury was successful. The verdict was: “Why that’s horrible, little boy,” she said to him, stopping dead in her tracks. “Where’s your mother?”

“Oh no, ma’am,” he said, straight-faced, turning slowly, almost reluctantly toward me. “Not me. My friend here, right? He says that the New York Jets are more important than Jesus.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “Jake, I hate you.”
“See?” Jake offered.

“Why, what’s your name, son?” the woman asked me tenderly, bending down a little.

“Jake,” I said.

Jake shook his head with exasperated sorrow. “That’s my name,” he said. “See? He’s a liar, too.”

She straightened up a little. “Well, I don’t know what’s going on here,” she said, looking at me, “but I think your mother would be very…,” she shivered a little, “…very upset to hear such things. I don’t care how important the New York Giants are to you.”

That only made it worse. “Forget it,” I said.

“I will not.” She seemed unusually old for a woman with an infant, but it may have been those cat’s eye glasses that nobody but my Aunt Ann still wore. Without a priest present to guide her, she figured out what my penance should be. “I think you should go right over to that statue of Jesus over there,” she said, pointing toward St. John's Church.
“I want you to kneel and pray in front of it. Do it now. Both of you.” She looked at Jake. “You go and pray for your friend.”

“Oh I will,” said the Devil himself. “I promise.”

She made us go; from across the street she stayed still and made sure we went to Jesus and knelt at His feet. Though I did not understand the concept of irony, something within told me that the generic, white-stoned, Anglicized Jesus, with His arms raised in benediction, looked a good deal like a referee signaling a touchdown.

“You’re an asshole,” I said to Jake, pretending to pray. “An asshole.”

Jake’s saintly expression had yet to leave his face, even still. He leaned in, and pointed to the Man In Question. “Are you talking to me or to God?”

“I hate you.”

“That’s a sin, too. Hating’s a sin.” The prosecution rested.

Todd to Walker

The 1978 season began with Dad’s totally unexpected announcement that he had gotten tickets to the season opener against the Dolphins. I should have some memory of him actually telling me this, but I honestly think it was such a shock to my system that I didn’t have the schema to retain it accurately in my mind. But there we are, just as I remember it, in the 1300 section of the upper deck of Shea, far enough away from the field to see the full view of the Mets’ baseball infield, hash marks across it and all. This was the first time I had seen it clearly, which should tell you how good his old Loge seats had been. Because the Jets were still renters in the Mets’ stadium, they were condemned to play football on a baseball field.

An advertisement on WOR said that baseball and apple pie were as American as Chevrolet - not football, mind you, the brutal, ugly American game. Football was considered an inferior sport to America’s Pastime. Everywhere it was like that. Candlestick Park in San Francisco, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, Jack Murphy in San Diego, Alameda in Oakland - on every grass field remaining in the NFL, football teams shared second place to baseball teams. You can see in the 1964 photo below how Shea's infield ended at the 50 yard line.


The scales fell from my eyes. The Jets were visitors in their own city.
“It looks cheap,” I said to my father.

He looked at me as if I were crazy. “The Mets didn’t even let the Jets play any of their first four games at home until just recently. Can you imagine that?” That didn’t soothe me. He looked at me askance. “These tickets weren’t cheap, I’ll tell you that.”

No, but by today’s standards, they were - $22, total. They would cost five times that now. The Jets still did not sell out games, and though the seats were largely filled, there was still a sense of a day at the beach among the crowd. Fans did not dress in jerseys for a football game as they do today. The NFL had yet to master the art of merchandising, so the only time fans really wore the team colors and logo were in winter, when you wore the team’s winter-weight parka or wool hat. But even these things were nondescript unless you looked closely.
You rooted for the team with your voice, but otherwise it was difficult to tell the outwardly enthusiasm from behavior associated with binge drinking. In the first week of September, thousands of shirtless, hairy local men were out of the house on a Sunday and in the stands of Shea Stadium - drunk, yes, or getting there, stoned maybe - looking for one of the last tans of the waning summer.

At the start of the game they got loud, though. The Jets had not won an opener since 1972. And, between 1970 and 1977, they went without any kind of title, while specifically going 2-14 against the Miami Dolphins, who themselves had gone to three Super Bowls since that time, winning two. From the beginning of the decade, the two organizations had gone in opposite directions. At last, in 1978, the Jets would win both an opener and a game against Miami in one game. To the amazement of the crowd, and certainly to my own, the Jets took the lead at the beginning and never really let up.


It began with a first quarter touchdown pass from Richard Todd to Wesley Walker, who was perfectly placed in the corner of the end zone nearest us. Bob Griese was injured, and Don Strock was in his place, but Miami’s Delvin Williams made a circuitous touchdown run from midfield that was beautiful to watch, even for me.

Still, it was the Jets’ day, and forgive me for being swept away with remembering names and plays, but Christ, I was happy. The Jets were always one step ahead and won, 33-20.

When I got home, I made sure I saw the game’s replays on all the local stations. There was no Internet, no ESPN SportsCenter, no cable where you could watch replays again and again, so this required the kind of channel surfing whose art is now lost to the ages.
We had no remote control, just a switch you turned with your hand, and I sure did. Three networks and three local affiliates (this was New York). Channel 7, Channel 4, Channel 2, Channel 9, Channel 11, Channel 5. Back and forth, with time again for another shot at seeing it. I particularly needed to see the replay of the opening score: Todd to Walker, Todd to Walker, Todd to Walker. And, repeat.

This enraged my father, who always felt that the channel switch was just moments from breaking off the set. But then Dad also firmly maintained throughout my childhood that TV would literally melt my brain if I watched too much of it and that the refuse would pour out of my ears. His theories were taken with a grain of salt. Maybe he was just trying to get me to turn off the TV and think about something else other than the J-E-T-S - again, to no avail.

Training Camp 1978

Mom suggested to Dad that they bring me to the Jets’ August training camp scrimmages at nearby Hofstra University. I would now enter more fully into the world of the real fan, the one who speculated as to the season before the season began. Like most teams back in the 70’s, the Jets opened their camp practices and evening scrimmages free to all spectators, and afterwards fans were encouraged to stand next to players and ask for an autograph.

Today, I would need to be a successful Wall Street attorney’s child, or a successful Wall Street attorney, wearing a special badge to have such privileges. Sports are the least egalitarian of industries in modern American commerce, so spectatorship has become a competition unto itself, rooted in class differences. Aside from the corporately-owned luxury boxes, it seems that player autographs and team practices are additional ways of drawing the line between haves and have-nots, even when the latter group usually produces the more informed and loyal of fans. There is no other way to operate. It’s a shame you cannot issue mandatory tests to fans with the best seats.


Yet what are the rewards? Heated luxury boxes actually have the effect of physically removing the fan from the full experience of spectatorship, anyway. When the Jets actually win the Super Bowl in the future (moment of silence, all, please) it will not matter whether I witness it live from the 50 yard-line or on a TV in my neighbor's basement. We true fans are often in distant proximity to our beloved teams anyway, and we live in this reality with a combination of grudging acceptance and good cheer. It would do no good to complain about the cost of being a fan, for it is viewed as naïve and sentimental to do so. Teams know that they can charge the most indifferent and wealthy bidder whatever they like for tickets, and we, the rabble, will still spend money somewhere.
I oblige the Jets franchise by purchasing cheap things from their catalogue that somehow embody the complete depth of my loyalty. Only a true fan would eat his nachos out of a plastic Jets helmet, for example. I understand that everything has its price and its buyer. However, I can testify that in 1978 an autograph from your favorite player at training camp cost absolutely nothing.

Mom suggested I bring a friend to the scrimmage, and instead of the usual choice of Jake, I chose Eddie O’Fallon. We were given a small program as we entered the Jets’ training camp, yet Eddie and I quickly forwent the opportunity of naming the Jets’ best prospects and sought to get players to come off the bench and sign autographs. It must have been tiresome for them - urchins swarming around the fencing between the benches and stands, calling out their names, hoping they’d respond. Already, I noticed that most kids didn't recognize any of the players and were just looking for a cheap thrill.

Who’s that? What’s the name on the back of his uniform? Oh, "Todd."

"Hey Todd! Todd! Todd!"

Charlatans. They didn’t even know the starting quarterback when they saw him. I held back for a while until the crowd dispersed a bit, and added a decided Mister when I called out to him. With that, Richard Todd turned around and glared in my direction. He was a gangly-looking Southerner with golden locks, an angular nose, and a wide mouth with which he scowled. He stated emphatically:

“After we’re done tonight.” He pointed to the players’ exit area.

Actual contact!

We got the same results as the night wore on with Joe Klecko, Greg Buttle, and Lawrence Pillars. But wide receiver Wesley Walker rose to the occasion. He was further down the sideline and already signing autographs. Before he went back on offense, I managed to get his signature with his “#85” advertised as well. The night was a success.

But I wasn’t entirely won over to him yet; this was before Wesley’s dramatic first-drive touchdown catch of the ’78 season opener against the Dolphins; before he caught a 68 yard bomb from Matt Robinson to secure a staggering comeback over the Denver Broncos in week nine of 1978; before I learned he was blind in one eye - a staggering liability for a receiver that still boggles my mind. So I snuck over with Eddie to the sideline again and asked for yet another autograph.

“We shouldn’t do thith,” whispered Eddie, as we prepared the request. “He’ll get mad.”

I suspected not. “I want to try.”
“Why?”

I called out to Walker again. He was nearing the water table. “I got you already,” he said to me.

It came out of me: “Not me. Not yet.”

He nodded, took a drink of water, walked over to the fence and without looking said, “You sure? You’re not mistaking me for someone else?”

He took the pen from me; he may even have noticed the previous signature on the same sheet.

“Awrighty,” he said. “There you go.” He calmly did the same for Eddie. “You guys take it easy now.”


He turned back to the bench, leaving us strangely awed. Children understand the magnitude of small acts of kindness. It was a matter of karma. Wesley Walker quickly took John Riggins’ place on my wall simply because he didn’t need to prove us wrong. (Yes, that is Herman Edwards covering Wes in the picture).

Before we left that night, I got a little carried away. Richard Todd wasn’t lying. At the players’ exit, we were permitted to swarm them and get autograph after autograph. We touched their sleeves. They were massive, quiet men. The slightest among many was Pat Leahy, the place kicker whose errant point-after had cost the Jets the Oakland game in 1977. His slight frame within his large shoulder pads made him like an accountant wearing a football uniform to an office Halloween party. Perhaps because he seemed so small compared to the others, I shamelessly flattered him as he signed an autograph for me.


“You’ve got a golden toe, Pat,” I said.

He looked wryly at the page he was signing for me. “Really? A golden toe? I could use one of those.” He shook his head and handed his autograph. “Keep it coming, kid.”