THINGS I KNOW ARE TRUE - or I wonder if they're true:


(in no particular order)

• Calvin Pace’s advertisement encouraging people to get tested for HIV is obviously not intended as an encouragement to get tested for drugs specializing in performance-enhancement.

• Vernon Gholsten (remember him?) is a man with a gigantic, heat-inducing magnifying glass above him, held by an equally gigantic kid with a boredam problem, who basically represents… Well, me, maybe. I don’t know.

• Mark Sanchez has managed to appear dumb before even coming to New York. Why must he try to act like Tom Brady before taking a snap? Why must the Mets wear black to look like the Yankees?
  

• Mark Sanchez will start opening day?? Really?? Somebody call Browning Nagle and ask him how his career went as a rookie starter. I know, I know. Matt Ryan. Joe Flacco. Keep intoning. Breathe. Repeat.
  

• Rex Ryan has changed the “culture” at Hofstra – er, Florham Park – er, Cortland. He is apparently OK with players making mistakes. He smiles more than Eric Mangini, but then I do, too, and I suffer from depression. The question is, what will activate the Ryan gene for inexplicable behavior?

• The Jets will lose their first six games of the regular season. This will bring the culture back to normal.

• Real, imagined, fictional, absolutely true, player, entourage – in any event, rape against women surrounds the real culture of American football.

• Plaxico Burress will not sign with the Jets because he’s probably going to serve as much time as Michael Vick (but possibly more than Donte Stallworth?)
  

• Thomas Jones and Leon Washington are both a little hurt, feelings-wise. But Shonn Greene is going to be a better pick than Mark Sanchez. (I know, I know. They play different positions.)

• But, more importantly, will Danny Woodhead still play for us this season? What a movie that would make.

• Kellen Clemens will start for us? Really? Really??

• Nobody is reading this right now.

NY Jets #41 - Part 2

Almost 30 years ago, I came home from school and Mom presented me with Matt Snell's autograph. She had been having lunch that day with Uncle Mike, and he showed her this little momento of an earlier night out. It was written on the base of what looked like a bar tab, not even the size of an index card. Uncle Mike had held Jets season tickets at Shea with my Dad for years, and he certainly recognized Matt Snell's almost perfectly square-jawed face from across the crowded bar. He asked that the autograph be dedicated to the biggest Jets fan Uncle Mike knew. The inscription reads, "To Marty - Go Jets - Matt Snell."

I just moved into my first house since leaving for college 22 years ago. Since that time, I have lived in dorms, in a rooming house in England, in a commune in St. Louis, in five different rented apartments in Philadelphia, and now here, in the East Falls section of the city, I live in my own house. Matt Snell's signature has always come with me wherever I have gone. I can't describe it. It's not something I show to people, and if I do, my little framed companion elicits no more than a slightly bemused, "Well, how about that."

I think I've unpacked everything. Lots of things are still sitting around in the dining room, waiting to be put somewhere. But my little framed detached base of a bar tab has yet to show. It's impossible that it should have gotten lost. I've always had it. I would not have thrown it away, and I know for a fact that my wife would not have either. It doesn't make sense. It simply does not make sense.

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Here is Matt Snell on the cover of a program for a Jets home game at Shea against the Chargers in October 1966, a game Dad and Uncle Mike must have attended. The Jets won 17-16, and the player featured on the program scored the Jets' first touchdown of the game. Matt Snell emerges like a Marvel Comics character from what looks like a large gun, the barrel of which is obviously a gutted out football. Talk about mixed metaphors. Snell himself looks utterly impassive about the wanton destruction he is causing all around him, and without his helmet. And though all around him exists in color, Matt Snell's face is apparently black and white. The artist is renowned sports cartoonist, Murray Olderman.

By this time, Snell was a fixture in the Jets backfield. It's interesting that he was the focus of this particular program, which makes me think it was probably drawn a year or two earlier. By 1966, Joe Namath was already starting quarterback for the team and the franchise player and the League marquee all in the one. Two years earlier, Matt Snell was the first bonus baby of sorts for the Jets. Drafted in the fourth round by the New York Giants out of Ohio State, he was taken in the first round in the 1964 AFL draft by the Jets. This might explain a particular aesthetic choice made by Olderman. It would make more sense for players of AFL teams to be shown being thrown around by Matt Snell emerging from his football/gun, but take a closer look and see that at least one of the sprawling figures looks suspiciously like a member of the New York Giants, right down to the stripes along his leg and on the helmet.

Matt Snell had a couple of firsts. He is the first running back to gain over 100 yards in a Super Bowl. Throughout Super Bowl III he is seen lowering his head and placing one crushing blow after another on the heads of Colts defenders. Specifically, he knocked cornerback Rick Volk out of the game but apparently sent him flowers the following day, which was a nice gesture. Snell also emerged like a bullet out of a human-sized football/gun in his rookie year when he gained 948 total yards, which is somewhat remarkable by rookie standards. In a 16-game season, he would have gained well over 1,000 yards, which I realize is becoming less and less of a big deal. Successful running games are such a key to so many teams' success even now that many running backs are simply worn down to a nub. And this was true of Matt Snell. He would never approach his rookie yard mark again.

Part of that was the reliance on the passing game, but Snell would also spend most of 1967 out with injuries, and knee problems would keep him from his earlier efficacy for the remainder of his career, though he did go All-Pro in 1969. His last two seasons in the early 70's would simply be spent standing in a uniform. But when I was growing up, my mother constantly reminded me that Matt Snell was always expected to block effectively for Namath, and block he did, like a lineman. I feel this was intended as a lesson in unselfishness and that no important role is too small for anyone. I'm not so certain Matt Snell thought of it that way, but I'm sure it worked on me.

In 1973, a year after he officially retired, Matt Snell was also the first athlete to be featured in a Lite Beer ad. In the history of marketing, this is the equivalent of the first hit of DiMaggio's streak. Lite Beer ads were an institution for anyone watching a sporting event in the 1970's and 80's, and mostly, they were all worth watching every single time, no matter how stale they got. They were a reassuring reminder to me that I was not in school; I was at home on a weekend, watching sports on TV instead of, much to my Dad's dismay, enjoying a beautiful day outside. As we see in a lot of ads today, not every athlete is funny, but Dick Butkus, Billy Martin, Boog Powell, Tom Heinsohn, John Madden, Bubba Smith and, certainly, Marv Throneberry could be almost as funny as Rodney Dangerfield. Yet while Snell's ad may have featured the famous Miller Lite tag line for the first time, it was the only one (other than this one, I suppose) that was not written to be terribly funny. Firsts do not remain famous for long.

NY Jets #41 - Part 1

Charlie Flowers was a casualty of the AFL's earliest years, and because he was the first Titan to wear #41, he is our first point of discussion with regard to the characters from our beloved team to have worn #41. He played at fullback in sunny Los Angeles for the Chargers in 1960, and then in sunny San Diego the following year. He played at the Polo Grounds for the New York Titans the year after that, and his career ended there before he could become a Jet. A couple of hundred yards total. He was originally drafted in 1959 by the Giants, which might have meant he could have been Don Maynard's teammate on the Giants before becoming Don Maynard's teammate on the Titans. But he appears to have never actually played a down for the Blue (Giants' blue, that is). Fate is fickle, odd certainly, perhaps even negligent.

****

Where were you when Matt Snell #41 went across the line for the Jets' first and only touchdown in Super Bowl III?



The founder of the Hare Krishna movement, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada was in Los Angeles, possibly writing a letter dated that day to his controversial protege Kirtanananda Swami about the construction of seven new temples in the United States. On the same day that their first album was released in the U.S., Led Zeppelin was preparing to open a show for Country Joe and the Fish at the Fillmore West. Living in Tehran with her family, Christine Amanpour was celebrating her 11th birthday, possibly thinking about going to school later that year in England. But none of these people probably knew who Matt Snell was.

My father was sitting in his in-laws' living room in Brooklyn, watching his beloved team take the lead in the Super Bowl after an impressive first half drive lead by Joe Namath and mostly Snell. My mother sat with him, watching on her parents' white Zenith black and white, excited no doubt as well; she is the most ferocious sports fan I know (for the Mets, that is). As yet two months from my own birth, I resided comfortably on the other side of conscious existence, perhaps hearing sporadic sounds of excitement, my mother's heartbeat, the bright tenor of my grandfather's voice calling to his wife for a cigar, or my grandmother possibly asking my father if he wanted more to eat. I remained as unaware that the Jets would become a source of obsession throughout most of my life as I probably did about the fact that soon my relative comfort would be rudely interrupted at St. John's Hospital in Woodside. One sensory experience adds to the other, though, and knowing what things transmit by osmosis to an unborn child, it is possible that I registered the audible cheers they gave to Matt Snell's 4-yard touchdown in the manner of a schema, a building block for later learning.

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Where were you when Apollo 11 landed on the moon?

I was a little over four months old when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, so just as with Matt Snell's touchdown, there's nothing actually there about it in my memory. In fact, for many years as a child, there would little or nothing so joyful in the world at large (or in Jets' history) to make my mind take that snapshot. Instead, I remember having a sense that Richard Nixon was in trouble because I watched Mom do her ironing in front of the Senate's Watergate Hearings on TV, but I don't even remember his resignation the following year. I remember staring at a cover of the Daily News when I was eight years old the morning after Elvis died. I remember delivering Newsday's the morning after the Son of Sam had been caught. I remember when I heard that John Lennon died in 1980 and when the Pope was shot a year later. I remember when I heard about Columbine. I even think I will forever recall the moment I heard that the King of Pop was dead.

I remember both where I was and who gave me the news about the planes hitting the Twin Towers, an event that instantly went from the cosmic to the personal in its horror because my brother worked across the street from the World Trade Center. He made it out, and ran for his life, like everyone else who had the opportunity. Thank God.

I suppose it has been a long time since we've heard about moments of happy, glaringly joyful achievement, like the moon landing - an event so monumental that NASA and its international equivalents would be hard-pressed to do it today, to even know how to do it today, or how to pay for it. Excluding the ending of our various wars, I cannot think of another historical moment of happiness that can be equivalent to Apollo 11; maybe the U.S. Hockey Team's victory in 1980 over the Soviets at the Lake Placid Olympics.

Sports are good like that. Sports provide records of small and slightly larger individual achievement that can shield us from remembering that our society has lurched forward without a singular mark of great achievement like the one three Americans made (with their government behind them) in July 1969. Most of the snapshot memories I mention above are marked by death and destruction. Consequently, I've grown up with the notion that I missed out on something even more than a moon landing or a Super Bowl. In 1969, my family had the distinct pleasure of knowing that their football and baseball teams were the champions of their respective sports, and that, yes, their beloved nation had also conquered the moon. The amount of overtime work done to clean up the refuse thrown from buildings in celebration during that year must have been staggering for New York City's sanitation department. Their life in New York was swelled with justified pride. Sports and life coalesced in a singular time of joy.

Such are my delusions. I forget that Mom and Dad were probably most of all happy that they had a child. How like me to feel as though that by being born in a momentous year I was therefore born unlucky. It should be comforting for a Jets fan to remember that one's life is marked by the individual experiences we have with family, with work and people, and not necessarily with a historically troubled football team. Yet it's always been a challenge for a fanatical fan born in the year of his team's greatest triumph; I missed a moment by which I could mark time, and since my childhood, I have used my football team’s subsequent history as one way gauge my own.

And that's why this entry on #41 finishes before barely even mentioning Matt Snell. We freeze the mental snapshot at a single moment from a single game, snapshots Matt Snell is asked to sign all the time. I will return to him at my site. His touchdown has an immortal place in sports history, in American football history, in Jets history, and in my own. Such is the nature of being a fan. It passes the time, but it allows a lens through which, for better or for worse, you measure time's passage.

NY Jets #40 - Part 2

But there are some questions you cannot answer, no matter how many trips you make to Wikipedia or to its equivalents on the Internet's AM dial. Like what happened to Hank Bjoklund? How many people could possibly be named "Hank Bjorklund" outside of the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota? We know that on Long Island someone by the same name, a person listed as "retired," made a contribution to the Barack Obama Presidential campaign last fall. Is this the same Princeton grad #40 Hank Bjorklund, who was a running back for the Jets from 1972 to 1974? It doesn't really matter. (Did I actually say that?) What matters is that he is not the Bjorklund who made an identical contribution to the campaign of that lunatic Michelle Bachmann, Republican from Minnesota, whose theories on the census have even made cretins like Glenn Beck shake their heads.

If you rooted for the Jets between the years 1978 and 1985, then you know who #40 Bobby Jackson is. These were my most formative years as a Jets fan and as a human being. Therefore, Bobby Jackson remains a key player on a series of teams that nearly drove my barely developing brain into a cavernous oblivion of despair. It was the first time since the 60's that the Jets were actually winning almost as often as they were losing (sometimes more often). But they couldn't help themselves often enough. Above, you see him in his rookie season, being asked to cover future Hall of Famer and future Republican Congressman from Oklahoma Steve Largent in a frustrating 24-17 loss to the Seahawks. This game typified the Jets of that era. The Jets won the first two games of that season, then lost the two that followed the Seattle loss.

But back to Bobby Jackson. He intercepted five passes at left cornerback in his rookie year, something he repeated in 1982, a year when the Jets went to the AFC Championship. The only difference is that the latter year was a strike season of only nine games, making Bobby Jackson tied atop the interception leaders for the AFC in that category. And yet, did he go to the Pro Bowl? No.

He also scored two touchdowns that year, both in the same game against the Minnesota Vikings in a 42-14 Jets win. Three weeks before, Dad had taken Charlie and me to Shea to see the Jets rout Baltimore 37-0, but it wasn't until the Vikings game that I knew for certain that my team - my freaking beloved football team - was actually bunch of blood-hungry marauders out of Polanski's version of Macbeth. Bobby Jackson blocked a field goal and ran it back 80 yards for a TD, and then beat the Vikings with their own dismembered arm when he intercepted Tommy Kramer for a 77-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter. I remember the sense of being 13, powerless to everything an emotional adolescent boy in his freshman year of high school is meant to experience, seeing Bobby Jackson's touchdowns as proof positive that being a fan could in fact satisfy a person's desire to be empowered on a molecular level. Then the Jets would lose to the hapless Kansas City Chiefs 37-13 the following week. Of course.




But then perhaps even Bobby Jackson had aspirations (if not perspirations) well beyond his own understanding, too. Or ours for that matter.

(Gatorade is thirst-aid! For that deep-down-body thirst!)



Well, anyway, I know Dad had a Bobby Jackson-moment-against-the Vikings, only it was a Mike-Battle-against-the-Giants moment. It is difficult to do this moment justice without providing actual video evidence, which can be seen on the NY Jets Historical DVD, but I will try. The facts are these. Forty years ago, while Woodstock was happening in upstate New York, the New York Jets and Giants played one another for an exhibition game at the Yale Bowl. The game is more important to us than it is to them because it was when New York fans were finally exposed to the uncomfortable - albeit brief - truth, that the New York Jets were the better football team in the Tri-State area - something rumored to be true but only feared as such since January 1969, six months earlier, when the Jets won the Super Bowl. Dad went to the game with his off-duty cop ticket holders and sat in the blazing sun as row after row of drunken fans from both sides fought in uproarious brawls that tumbled down the length of the bowl itself. It was a hootenanny, a donnybrook, a scrum, both on and off the field.

But the Jets never really were behind, in some measure because of an outstanding opening kickoff return for a touchdown by #40 Mike Battle. Here, you see that Battle's legs are in a blur of speed as he races down the center of the field for the Jets' first score in a 37-14 win. But it was the manner in which he took the ball at first and then leaped several feet in the air over the first Giants defender with a dancer's awesome sense of grace, and then went untouched, that stays with many fans even today. The first time I saw it - on DVD, no less - I gasped audibly, just as I did when I saw John Riggins score the knockout touchdown against Miami in Super Bowl XVI, or saw Michael Owen score against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup. You are breathless, in awe. Dad's reaction was sort of the same, but the game itself gave him that sense of empowerment I mentioned above. This is my team, and they kick everyone's ass. Like Henry at Agincourt, and just as short-lived.

NY Jets #40 - Part 1

All historical discussion of the New York Jets might well begin with the New York Titans, and if that is so then our discussion of #40 must likely begin with Joe Paglei, the first Titan in #40. There is no statistical data to prove it, though. We must move on.

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I did not play organized football beyond the fourth grade, and like a lot fans, I compensate for my limited experiences in sports with an almost childlike obsession as a spectator. I did play a sport in high school during my freshman year, and I was pretty good at it. I was a varsity letter cross-country runner. It did not pull the honeys.

The point of mentioning this, though, is that while trudging back from yet another five-mile practice run with the team, I would spy the high school football squad going through the motions. Their football coach was a towering, lugubrious looking figure with a cold, sneering, cruel face, yet with an accent just short of sounding like one of the Three Stooges. To add to it, he had a fu manchu mustache more appropriate to Ming the Merciless than Joseph William Namath. His team did not like him.

Let them hate; so long as they fear. This is the essence of Machiavelli's rule of leadership, I suppose. We have not evolved far enough as a species to really produce leaders of a pure moral essence, so Jean-Luc Picard wasn't exactly my high school's football coach. Neither was he particularly self-conscious. I find that tyrants are often not. A very talented player on his team went to the trouble of producing a very good likeness of the coach dressed as Darth Vader, wielding a light saber, and hung it outside his office. When I asked the coach - callow kid of 14 that I was - why he didn't take the picture down, he replied, "Because I want the bastard who did this to feel ashamed of himself for what he did." Somehow, even so young, I knew that coach's plan wasn't going to work. Displaying his work under any pretext will only embolden your average artist, and so I had my first real taste of dramatic irony.

The real point of mentioning this, though, was that (as I began earlier before Truth broke in with all her matter-of-fact) as I fumbled back into the locker room at high school, I passed by football practice one day and saw the coach blistering three players on the sidelines for sitting on their helmets. "I told you idiots once, I told you a million times I don't want to see that."

But why? If it was OK for John Riggins, then why not for the chubby boys of my high school? Did they seriously weigh that much? Was the coach worried about replacing equipment that would go cracked under a lineman's buttocks? Could he actually have been worried for their brains' fragile cages? Was this just a peeve? A peeve, probably. One that #40 James Hasty evidently would have had no problem deflecting. Hasty and Russell Carter are two secondary players I was sorely unhappy to the Jets let go.

Sometimes I play a little game with myself in which I imagine what if.... There's so much in Jets history from which to choose. There are too many examples. Suffice: what if James Hasty had not left the Jets secondary to join the Chiefs in 1994? If he had stayed a Jet, he would have endured Kotite and then Parcells' grinding mill. How would a high profile defensive player have been received by the Tuna Overlord? I mean, Otis Smith, Ray Mickens, and Aaron Glenn all played for the '96 squad and then for Parcells, so maybe Hasty would have been able to play for the Great Manipulator. He might not immediately have been painted as a prima donna. For the Chiefs, Hasty earned Pro Bowl seasons from 1997 to 1999. Had he been on the Jets during that time, would Parcells have told him to get up off his hemlet? I believe not, though it might still be a good idea for my old high school coach and Parcells to be in group therapy.

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Henry King

According to Mark Kriegal's biography of Namath, the Franchise's best pal, Ray Abruzzese #25, was cut in 1967 to make room for a defensive back rookie who lead the nation with 11 interceptions the year before at Utah State. This meant nothing to Namath, whose bodyguard, manservant, pal and general wing man was now sent off to play actual football somewhere else. Namath bemoans this move in the book, noting that Henry King #40, Ray's replacement, was just "some rich rookie," which two years before was how people described Joe Willie. Irony abounds in this entry, I guess. Even when he was nearsighted on such issues, Namath appears prescient. Randy Beverly #42 eventually took King's place by the end of 1967 and was instrumental in nailing down the Jets Super Bowl Championship with some key defensive plays. Henry King left football at the end of '67 and was never heard from in the NFL again. I still say that you cut Ray Abruzzese, though.

It certainly looks as though Dainard Paulson #40 wants us to say something about him, doesn't it? And why not. There's a little surprise here for some of you unfamiliar with the early history of your beloved club. King replaced Dainard Paulson in #40 in 1967. Originally a New York Titan, Paulson came out of Oregon State and eventually caught 12 interceptions in 1964 as a Jet, a statistic placing him not only in the AFL All-Star Game but in the all-time annals of the game itself - tied at #5 for all-time single season interception records. Paul Krause did the same in the NFL for the Redskins in '64. The only person afterwards to approach this single-season record was Lester Hayes in 1980 for the Oakland Raiders, but remember that Hayes did it in a 16-game season. Dainard Paulson was just two seasons away from having the same distinction as Bill Mathis, Larry Grantham, Curley Johnson and Don Maynard - as both Titans and Jets in Super Bowl III - but Paulson's career ends without statistical distinction at the end of 1966. The rest is silence.

If Dainard Paulson was that good - and he was - where did he go? To vanish irrevocably from the game must have been traumatic for him. Or was it, all the same, just a boy's game and not a man's endeavor to him? Maybe it was just time to return to his childhood home in California, to begin his life as a surfer, to discover bliss in the warm ocean and under God's sunshine. These are the mysteries that keep me awake at night.