NY Jets By the Numbers - #35 (Part 1)

The first time I ever heard of someone almost dying was when I was about eight. I had heard that my cousin had fallen to the ground, had punctured his tongue with his teeth and nearly bled to death. Actually, I don't know if he was in any grave danger, but he had to be given stitches in his tongue, which was as close to death as an eight year-old could imagine. Clearly he had been to the edge and back. He had experienced something formidable that I had not, and from thence forward, despite being the same age as I, he always seemed somehow braver and wiser for having experienced something that apparently brushed him so close with mortality.

The second time I ever heard of someone almost dying was when it happened to #35 Mike Augustyniak, who's not a cousin nor a contemporary. He ran in the Jets' backfield from 1981 to 1983, was a graduate of Purdue and only a little taller than Bruce Harper, though only a little shorter than I am now. He was playing well in his rookie year, much to the surprise and delight of everyone green, but Mike Augustyniak also broke two ribs in two separate games. He had been a walk-on in camp and had been given the same kind of platitudes fans would later give to Wayne Chrebet - "hard-nosed," "gutsy," "plucky," "hard-working." Certainly looks it in his picture, doesn't he? The first rib was broken in preseason - no sooner was he on the team than he had broken a rib. No problem. But against the Pats in the regular season, he broke another that punctured a vital organ such that he nearly bled to death internally. He lived and played well later on the year, but I remember my reaction to his near fate, and it spelled the change in my overall worldview from eight year old to twelve: that's what happens when you're plucky and hard-working. You almost die. Hard work will almost kill you.

BJ Askew is not your current #35. He was signed by Tampa Bay just before the beginning of last season, and though I was filled with foreboding about it, and though the Bucs paid him an extraordinary amount of money last year, he gained little more than a neck injury on the ground. Again, football leads you to place where you wish for the injury to another. That, as anyone in any sane, humane spiritual tradition will tell you, is just plain wrong. Nevertheless, I offer here an ironic photo of Askew in dejection, with another famous castoff kneeling near him, lost in his own thoughts. How the wheels of Fate do grind.

Bob Brooks is the second #35 in franchise history, and that, literally, is all I'm going to be able to say about him. Sometimes that's all we have.

As I understand it, the league will very likely go to 18 games in a few seasons, but some men have gone that distance before. Dexter Carter #35 may have had the longest and strangest season of any player, certainly any player in 1995. He went from suiting up for the defending champion San Francisco 49ers for seven games to playing 10 games for the New York Jets. As I recall, Carter preferred playing more of an active role in the backfield with a team that needed him than in a secondary role on a team with plenty of talent. But then a year later, Carter returned to the Niners. Something always told me he was a saucy lad, but I don't know if that's even really relevant. I just remember the 1995 Jets' season as a long, horrible hangover awaiting a worse bender - and I do not necessarily mean that in a literal sense. Back in the safety of San Francisco for the final year of his career in 1996, we assume that Dexter Carter learned his lesson. Don't leave the f@#$ing boat.

Do you know Roger Donnahoo? Does he know you? He is the first #35 in franchise history. He played a single season - the Titans' first - in the number, and as far as the eye can see, this is all he contributed to professional football. He looks in his football card like he has a successful career in defense awaiting him, and possibly even a Senatorial run. The flame burned briefly but brightly for him. He returned an interception and a fumble for touchdowns in 1960. These are the kinds of plays that turn the momentum of the crowd right around, but without a crowd at the Polo Grounds, how would anyone have known that Roger Donnahoo, much less the Titans or their opponents, were doing anything? Was that what kept Roger Donnahoo away from the game he loved? Was it Harry Wismer's bouncing checks? Whither you, Roger Donnahoo?

On November 14, 1976, at Shea Stadium the Jets outright pummeled the famously inept Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who would absolutely have exceeded Detroit's extraordinary 0-16 mark had they been given the opportunity to play 36 games in a season. I've discussed my attendance at this game before and the brief, illusory sense of joy it gave - the kind that a child always needs every once in a while - the ice cream cone before the mumps shot. Just before the end of the first half, with the score 17-0 the Jets' Steve Davis #35 scored a 5-yard touchdown that I recall because it seemed from my vantage somewhere in the Loge that he just barely made it. The ball just appeared to cross the threshold of the end zone. The Jets had taken a 24-0 lead even before the half. There was something in his just barely making it that made it all the more potent to my seven-year old brain. Anything seemed possible in that sweet, terrifying moment - even a seemingly phantom touchdown. I howled at the top of my lungs with abandoned joy at something concrete and real for probably the first time in my life. Steve Davis did that. That's what being a fan is - remembering moments like that. It was the second-to-last touchdown of a career that ended that season. Wherever you are, Steve, thanks.

Scottie Graham #35 was born in Long Beach, Long Island, two days after I was, and two months after the Jets' Super Bowl triumph. He was drafted out of Ohio State by the Steelers, picked up by the Jets, allowed to play two games and then sent to Minnesota for an average runner's career of 1,000-plus total career yards and more than five seasons. Whereas drafted out of the University of Minnesota and raised in the wild, abandoned weedlands of East St. Louis, IL, #35 Kerry Glenn nabbed four interceptions for the Jets in his rookie season of 1985. This raised many expectations for his career, yet he lost out on the next season with a foot injury. Isn't this often the way? He did manage a respectable career with both the Jets and the Fish, but he would never again post such numbers.

"He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot... But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever."

NY Jets By the Numbers - #34

Who weeps for #34?

It's not the most distinguished number in football. Alright, there's Sweetness, Walter Payton. But it's a tough sell from there. The first name for #34 that pops into my head is the Buffalo Bills' Jim Braxton, the tough fullback who went in all the directions OJ Simpson would not go and who blocked for OJ in the 70's. Braxton did not live to see OJ's murderous path to disgrace because big Jim died prematurely of lung cancer in 1986.

Johnny Hector

Undistinguished? More like less appreciated. More like one man in the path of the faster man. Johnny Hector played Jim Braxton to Freeman McNeil's OJ Simpson. He lasted longer in #34 than any other Jet listed here. It's difficult to appreciate it now that I'm a day away from 40 years old, but throughout the 1980's, the Jets had a formidably consistent backfield that carried the team's offense through some pretty erratic years. From 1984 to 1988, Johnny Hector finished second in rushing to McNeil. But in 1989, Hector took the top spot. Both men were effectively replaced the following year (with nowhere near the same efficacy) by Blair Thomas and Brad Baxter in the McNeil-Hector roles, respectively. Above all, Johnny Hector was the Jets' durable Jim Braxton every Jets season from my earliest adolescence into my early 20's. This is why he is special to me.

LaMont Jordan

On the other hand, LaMont Jordan was the Jim Braxton for Curtis Martin. He has not gained as many yards as Johnny Hector just yet. After playing second fiddle to the greatest runner in New York Jets history, LaMont then packed his bags for the Oakland Raiders, where he went from being a Jets supporting character to a Raiders' 1,000 yard star (as opposed to thousand-yard stare, which Oakland fans have been wearing behind their makeup now for several years). Jordan was the one bright spot in the bleakest consecutive seasons that Al Davis' skeletal remains have been forced to witness from the comfort of his airtight, oxygen-rich, cell-regenerative compression chamber in Alameda Coliseum. Now, after briefly serving the devil in New England, Jordan is someone else's tertiary fiddle for the Denver Broncos.

Walt Michaels, circa 1958

Did someone mention Al Davis? Slowly I turn, step by step.... How many terrible nights has Walt Michaels awakened, drenched with sweat at the memory of his mistaking the voice of a drunken carouser in Queens for the one belonging to Al Davis? The entire story is found here and is ever-present in Jets lore. Maybe it's a sore spot, or maybe it's just simply a piece of pain that makes the survivor stronger in the presence of Fate's unkind face. Maybe he didn't care when the Jets fired him. Maybe he just needed to get away from the Jets. Still, Joe Walton did only a shade better than his predecessor and mentor, and I still think of the 80's Jets as Walt Michaels' team - one that he nurtured almost intact out of its callow youth in 1977 into a club that was a mere plastic tarp away from the Super Bowl in 1983. We should all have so good a ride. Oh, and Walt Michaels wore #34 for the Jets in 1963, his last year as a pro player. According to the Gods of Wiki, he played one game that year and then became defensive coordinator under Weeb - a position he held onto for a decade. He took it up again in 1976 and stayed on with the franchise until the demons of burdensome competition became too much for this crusty son of the Pennsylvania mines.

Dwight Lowery #34

Respect is hard to come by in this game. Take the case of our current #34, Dwight Lowery. I've noticed that basketball and baseball are trying to find their statistical whiz kids in the manner of baseball's Bill James. KC Joyner is one such writer, and his Blindsided is on my summer reading list. Here he applies some of his statistical geekdom to the New York Jets secondary, most specifically, to the underrated performance of Dwight Lowery. But even so, football statistics will never truly rival the burdensome temptation baseball creates among geeks to analyze, analyze, analyze. Perhaps in this way, we are all a little better off in football. Mr. Lowery's incompletes and yards allowed make him look good and, as one commentator points out, they certainly make the Jets' secondary look more formidable. Just don't start keeping track of his fake-to-take ratios. I mean, I don't even know what that means. Actually, I just made that up.

Bernie Parmalee

Do you remember Bernie Parmalee? I remember how funny the name sounded when I first heard it - when he first started playing for the Dolphins in 1992. But then I think I might also have been confusing him with Eric Bieniemy, who was a star at the University of Colorado in 1990. I don't know what it is about their names (they played at the same position), but for the longest time, I thought that the Dolphins' running back was the Colorado standout who had helped deprive Notre Dame of a National Championship (this was still in the days when I still cared how Notre Dame did - their great years, of course). Bernie Parmalee played two quiet seasons with the Jets and finished his career in 2000. He wore #34 for us. He is not Eric Bieniemy.

Nor is Kenyon Rasheed. Actually, if you want to know about Rasheed, you might do best to read his article on life after the pros, with all of its psychological and professional challenges. That he is currently the CEO of something called Rasheed & Associates makes me a little skeptical, but when I look elsewhere, I see he is also a restauranteur and the founder of a sports consulting firm. So, who am I to say? This is a man who had to endure his last pro year in #34 during the abysmal 1995 season.

Finally, Lee White wore #34 from 1968 to 1970, putting him squarely on the roster when the Jets won the championship. However, I've never seen a clip of him on the field. This does not mean he was not there. It just means that Ed Sabol's team on the ground didn't bother with him. White then moved onto the Los Angeles Rams in 1971, but the Wiki says rather cryptically that "At the Rams he played several games, but found it hard to settle into the area." Huh. The year after that, he played a single season for the Chargers of San Diego. What was it about LA? The smog? the traffic? the women? The uncomfortable slacks in the noonday sun? Will we ever know?

Just End The Blog

Well, probably not. But really, the gloomy time between March and June - the time between coaching and free agency changes and minicamp - the period also known as "Spring" - is already feeling like the heavy weight of Plymouth rock on Giles Corey's chest. No mas. No more. No more weight.

My wife and I are focused on buying a house right now. I realize that the house I want is not out there just yet - affordable, the right size for two people and the dog we're going to get someday, not falling apart. It's a dream. At the risk of sounding like tens of thousands of people in my generation, I imagined that everyone eventually got a house the size and style of the Bradys, with an astro-turf backyard and a dog named Tiger. But even then I knew it was too much to ask for Joe Namath to show up and play catch with my son Bobby.

****

Actually, I bleed for spring. When I was little, I was always sad to see winter go. It meant summer was coming, and I would submit willingly to its exercises. Summer: swimming lessons, little league and all the other things that made my crazy, neurotic brain spin around with anxiety. Why did all the old people want to move to Florida, where every day meant swimming lessons in unheated pools? Why would you do that? In truth, the more winters you experience the more you realize you'd rather have a root canal than go through another day under the impenetrably gray skies of the long, cold season, football or no football. So, really, my mind has changed. I'm joyously happy to see buds on the trees. Spring at last.

And lately I've had very little desire to examine the revamped Jets. I'm taking a hiatus from the draft this year. Last year, I spent weeks and weeks trying to make sense of something that culminated in the drafting of Vernon Gholsten. So I'll just skip it this year.

And the numbers? Well, I think there's even less interest in the numbers than ever. People have told me that they don't read my Jets By the Numbers because it's all so focused on specifics of players and names that have almost all been completely neglected by time and history. But I guess that this is why it pleases me. It's a vast momento mori. Which isn't terribly entertaining. But my mother encouraged me to continue, as mothers must. "You promised you'd do this," she said. "So now you have to do it." Yes, I must.

Day in the Life of a Jets Fan - 10/27/77 - Part 2

After walking around midtown, it was time to return to the downtown of my parents' memories, to Greenwich Village. For about five or so years before she got married, my mother lived on W. 12 St between 6th and 7th Avenues, and my father would often meet her in the Village on the weekend for a date. They came and went in the Village at a time when it still existed in a warm glow. By 1977, it was a vast needle park, a hook-up rendezvous, a large bath house. So much had changed so quickly. I suppose the Village was now just something else for someone else, as Bohemia often must be, but my parents didn't recognize it any more. They drove down the avenues and streets pointing out places that had disappeared, gone shuttered or dilapidated. "Oh my God," they whispered from time to time, wondering how a decade could have turned their former haunt on its head, and out onto the gutter.

I remember a moment where two men were walking on the sidewalk to our right, and my Dad hit a puddle with the car that accidentally sent a stream of water onto the walkers. As we drove past, Dad sheepishly looked in his rear view mirror and asked me if he had doused them. Yup, I replied. He shook his head in embarrassment and quietly cursed at himself. I looked out the back window and saw that one of the walking men was taller and blonder than the other. The smaller one was the offended, and he wore a handlebar mustache and a gray coat not made for the splash. The two men stared at the man's stained jacket with astonishment. Then they looked up at my disappearing face out the back window. The taller man mouthed something and the slighter one raised his hand high enough for us to see, and before we could turn the corner, he flipped us the bird.

We went to Monte's for dinner, on MacDougal Street. I don't remember anything other than it being Italian food and, importantly, a walk of stairs down from the street. I loved the idea of underground things. I loved the idea of disappearing from the threatening world above to a safer, warmer world below, a place to hide from the world.

"When I live in New York City," I said to my parents, "I want to live underground."

"What?" Dad asked. "You mean, like, a basement?"

"Without windows?" Mom asked.

I nodded my head.

"It might be the only safe place in the city," Dad said.

"It's certainly not on the subway," Mom added.

By this time, I had already followed the drama of the Jets game. Traveling and eating on Sundays in the autumns and winters of my childhood were always complicated experiences in powerlessness. All that stood between me and knowing the fate of my football team was usually an AM radio in the car or maybe a transistor radio Dad carried in his coat pocket and selectively decide to leave on. As we got out and back into the car, visiting this place and that, I got snippets of things. (photo courtesy of Corbis) The Steelers missed a point after, the Jets tied the game twice in the first half. Perhaps measuring out hope in little bits and pieces was easier on me. I probably missed the little detail that Matt Robinson had to replace Richard Todd in the game, or that the Jets might have drawn closer had they not committed six turnovers.

As we got out of and back into the car over the course of our visit, I learned that the Jets were managing to stay within a touchdown of the Steelers at halftime and that they would draw within three by the end. It would stay that way, though - 23-20. The Jets lost their ninth game of the season.

All I could think about while we ate was that at the very least the Jets had been within three of a powerful AFC team, just as they had nearly beaten the defending champion Raiders a few weeks before, just as they had actually beaten the defending AFC East champions the week before that. The reality was that the Jets were never really in the game. Everything in my walled-in world was characterized by almosts and if onlys, where hope could remain unharmed and, more cynically, harmless.

****

When we got home, I saw that NBC was showing the animated version of The Hobbit which, until Guillermo del Toro puts out his version in 2012, is the only cinematic version of it there is. I still don't think I understand or appreciate the Ring series. My avidly Christian students prefer Narnia to to Middle Earth. I tell them that I spent time at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where C.S. Lewis and JRRRRRR Tolkein frequently had lunch, and my students act the way I might have had someone told me that they had gone on a tour of Abbey Road studios. The truth is I got drunk there a couple of times, which didn't help my memory of the place.

I must have been watching it with Dad. Hobbits live happily in their warm little coves and huts, or whatever they called them, though Bilbo journeys outside the Shire and becomes entranced by the world beyond. I loved the hobbit's life - secure, safe, away from the world.

Then somewhere near the time I was supposed to go to bed the character of the Gollum appeared, in his deep, dark, wet cave that didn't look unlike the underground dark, sparsely lit and forbidding lines approaching the last stop at Grand Central Station.

At this point, Bilbo has already found Gollum's ring in the mud of the cave, and he approaches him. I asked Dad what he thought Gollum was referring to when he spoke of "my precious," and not knowing anything about Tolkein, he answered, "Maybe it's his stomach." It sounded logical since Gollum wanted to eat Bilbo.

His "precious" was the ring, of course. It ruled his thoughts. It consumed his every motivation to the point where poor Gollum, who was once a kind of hobbit, had become perverted and deformed into a creature unwilling to see the light of day. He was addicted to its power, to a beauty that no one outside of its influence could possibly grasp. To be honest, I still find most of the Middle Earth saga hard to digest, let alone pronounce. But I'm still drawn to the misshapen creature whom Bilbo tricks and upon whom he also takes pity - Smeagol, the Gollum - a creature so obsessed with his Precious that he cannot live in the world. Normal and beloved before he came in contact with the ring, he had now haplessly devolved into a creature wholly accustomed to darkness and solitude. I was fascinated by his sickness, and I left The Hobbit and went up to bed once Bilbo ran past Gollum at the cave entrance, and the greenish ghoul wailed away in hatred.

****

The next day, at school, we were asked in my third grade class to write a piece about what we did over the weekend. I wrote about and reported to the class that the Jets almost beat the Steelers but lost. And yes, I took a trip with my family. One of the girls in class wrote about having a fight over the weekend with another of our classmates, but they made up and were happy now. The two laughed about it. The class smiled. I looked over at Jake Walsh with whom, as I mentioned before, I had experienced some kind of conflagration a few days before. Just like us, I smiled at him. He looked back at me, grimly, scowled and shook his head. You just don't get it, he seemed to say.

Day in the Life of a Jets Fan - 10/27/77 - Part 1

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, when I was eight years old, my parents took Charlie and me to New York City to see the wicker angels and the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, to walk through St. Patrick's across the street, and see if any of the stores on Fifth Avenue still put up their ornate window displays for the impending solstice. This is a ritual pilgrimage of many a Gentile at the holidays, and the mixture of these elements - sacred and secular - are the foreground to the dark, gothic city of my childhood's memory - a city covered in a grime now long since vanished.

It was a mild, overcast day. All of our visits to the city round the holidays back then are thrown together in my mind, so there is nothing unique I recall about the tourist ring in midtown that day. In St. Pat's I had already learned to look up for the Cardinal's red, tasseled caps hung from far above the High Altar. I was trained as a Jets fan to think about things that weren't there any more, like Cardinals, like wins. In a photo, Charlie looks at the giant tree from Dad's shoulders. All the windows from Bergdorf's and Altman's and Gimbel's are today gone because Bergdorf's, Altman's, and Gimbel's are themselves long gone. But their windows were once busy with an old miniatures and figures running on nothing more than gear boxes and ball bearings. Even without the contemporary urge to dazzle with digital effects, a motorized display of the "Night Before Christmas," with its decades-old fat, nighttime intruder being discovered by the poet still possessed a simultaneous ability to dazzle and make one feel uneasy. Such are the holidays.

Naturally, I do remember the day more specifically for what developed over its course - something more sacred to a fanatical boy. The Jets were hosting the Pittsburgh Steelers at Shea for an early afternoon game. The Curtain, Bradshaw, Lynn Swann, John Stallworth, Franco, Rocky, Mel Blount, Ham and Lambert. The whole bag of hammers. This football season had been a first lesson in acceptance, most specifically because Dad had given up the season tickets the year before. I know he's tired of hearing about that; it has been 32 years now. At eight, I was a little angry at not seeing the Steelers ingest my team. I mean, I had seen the Steelers do it two years before, but there was nothing that could replace seeing my hapless 2-8 team, no matter how many times you saw them. They needed me. They needed every witness to their destruction.

Something else must have been amiss in me. The day before I had some kind of terrible argument with Jake Walsh, my neighborhood nemesis. I was always a little too slow, a little less big and formidable compared with Jake, yet he clearly thought that I was the person he needed to push to the limit of his senses. Who knows what lurked in his mind. I must have been an itch to feverishly scratch. I was an agitated, self-conscious, obsessive-compulsive. For an ambitious, pampered and competitive child, Jake must have seen me like a hobby. Like Albee's George and Martha, Jake and I beat up and taunted one another, and I usually came up on the losing end. I simply could not compete. Jake had variety bag of favorite football teams, depending on their record. I had one team, one focus and fascination. The purity of such an attachment to a losing cause must have made me as vulnerable to him as the newly awakened Gregor Samsa on his back, twitching and aching in vain to turn himself onto his little six legs. It smelled of weakness.

Of course, the season had been like that for my real doppelganger. The Jets may have beaten the Patriots at home on a last second Pat Leahy kick, but there were just too many problems for an acutely young team with many longtime veterans of many losing seasons. Things would get better, but not this year. It's just the way things are. I looked at the walls and windows of buildings in New York that were beaten by time and decay, and asked why things looked so bad. Dad said, "Just the way things are, Marty." There were lots of reasons, but no matter how you looked at it, Dad wasn't lying. Things are the way they are. Never mind the way they ought to be. What was was. All you could change was yourself.

So it looked that way as the game began. It wouldn't change by its end, but then one brief glimmer can cast a long-lasting spell. Such would this day proceed....

(To be continued)