Needless Drama

I'm in the middle of looking for a house, and a friend of mine recently reminded me that while lawyers are often considered the most morally remiss of persons, realtors are generally more corrupt. When you're looking for a house, you try to find a realtor who, though basically dishonest, would refrain from, say, selling your grandmother to a brothel. You're hopeful, but not naive. In the same way, one surmises that an athlete hopes that both the agent negotiating his contract and the team's general manager will not, in the process, sell the athlete's sister off to work in a Burmese sweat shop. In the middle of his struggle to renegotiate his contract - a struggle getting increasingly futile - one senses that TE Chris Baker would prefer right now to simply buy a house.

I never know who to believe in contract disputes, and I frankly never care enough. I mean, it's not my money. However, Baker has recently been quoted saying that last year's dispute among Pete Kendall, Eric Mangini and management over Kendall's contract "tanked" last year's season - a season that indeed tanked badly. If you will recall, Kendall agreed to train his rookie colleagues at the offensive front line during 2006 in exchange for a new contract in 2007. For me, this conflict was best illustrated when my wife and I went to Hofstra last summer and saw the physical distance Kendall took from his teammates on the sidelines. (photo mine) No one could deny how real the fissure seemed from the hot bleachers in Hempstead, and it eventually lead Kendall to become a Jetskin. He was a leader on offense and the Jets' union rep, so perhaps his conflict had an emotional resonance with a group of players otherwise predisposed to protect their own interests.

Was it true or was Kendall just bluffing? Is Baker doing the same by resurrecting memories of Kendall's dispute? Is Chris Baker exploiting Jets fans' fears of another washout season? (photo from New York Times) Even if he's telling the truth, is that an effective approach? Jets fans are used to losing, and they are usually not so affluent that they can empathize with a modern player's contract dispute. It's a little like asking a GM worker to pay attention to a board member's stock option negotiations. Plus, if the dispute really did ruin the Jets' season last year, then shouldn't Baker have been more careful about getting guarantees of renegotiation from Jets' management in writing? I mean, that's what I'm always told to do if I'm buying a house. Does Baker therefore have the right to act like a drama queen and disrupt the flow of camp? It's hard to take his side here, I'll admit.

Rooting for this team is hard enough. The fact that the front office, the players and the coach are potentially dishonest isn't that big an issue for the fan who just wants his team to break even this year. And while Baker may have a grievance, the Jets now possess both an old and new tight end, and it will not be that much of a loss when Baker becomes the next Jetskin (wouldn't that just about make Dan Snyder's day, if not mine). Before the 1967 season, Vince Lombardi cynically refused to renegotiate a contract with his Hall of Fame running back Jim Taylor. The coach sent off the legendary player without so much as a fond farewell, and really Taylor never forgave him. It's a rough business. I may be an overly sentimental fan, but I get it.

However, the Jets have a long history of bad business dealings and unhappy personnel squabbles that ruined the team for years, going all the way back to Weeb. If what Baker says about the season going down the tubes is true, it wouldn't be the first time. Labor disputes in 1975 and 1987 caused internal player conflicts that spread out off and on the field and left the team in psychological tatters for several years afterwards.

I have no idea how to coach a modern player. Oh hell, I don't know how to coach football. I teach high school English, where students often remind me that not only are they not interested in what we're doing but that what we're doing seems in no way to relate to their lives. Older teachers with whom I speak often sound like older, enshrined NFL coaches who cannot imagine a player needing an incentive to do well. But even modern kids are still kids at heart, and modern players, I would suppose, are still players at heart. Players wish to be lead, just as students wish to be told what to do, no matter how many of them want to follow Jeremy Shockey, Terrell Owens or Chad Johnson into the literal or figurative tattoo parlor. A teacher gains advantage over his charges by being quietly intimidating and by distancing himself from them ever so much, and they learn to follow, i.e., I don't need you, you need me. It's fine if they ultimately fear him just a little or feel as if they don't have his number yet. He gives them strange, silent, quizzical expressions to which they do not yet have a trained eye. (photo from San Diego Chargers' official website) The same goes for coaches, I guess. You don't have to be a Vince Lombardi or a Bobby Knight; instead you could just settle for being a little bit of, say, Don Coryell.

But a consistent lack of trust between leader and led can be lethal, and with the current Jets, there is such a lack of trust, as well as an issue of a coach's entire pattern of obfuscation. There are plenty of instances in David Marraniss' book When Pride Still Mattered where Vince Lombardi nickles and dimes his players in negotiations, and part of his advantage was that players back then had no sense that they possessed any negotiating leverage. Baker may be blowing smoke; Kendall might have been, too. But the silence behind Mangini's strange sense for the truth is troubling to me. It smacks of his mentor Belichick and, by extension, Belichick's mentor Bill Parcells. Each of them has formal and informal blemishes on their devotion to the truth.

Specifically, Eric Mangini keeps his players silent about injuries when it's been informally shown that he should be protecting some of his players from further injury. He relies on physicians who are vague about the long-term effects of head injuries. He opens his training camps up to these dramas with notable players, filled with long, drawn-out silences, acted out in front of the press and his own distracted players. And I think I'm getting sick of it. I always tell my students that I am not their friend, that I already have friends, and that my role is to be their authority figure. But I try to be direct and consistent, and I protect them. It's never to my detriment to appear to put their well-being before my need to appear powerful. I know there's a big difference between a classroom and a pro football training camp, but I'm really starting to wonder if Mangini's approach is working at all.