Feet

The days leading up to Christmas Break in my Modern Literature class have been spent reading Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower, which (and here I don't mean to be disrespectful to a work of literature that powerfully addresses the issues of what is and is not forgivable) is nevertheless about as cheerful in December as a shovel to the groin. So I spent the last day of class in 2010 giving the kids a slideshow of important works of contemporary art that we can compare and contrast to the world we've read. Among other things, we had to take a look at Warhol's soup cans. I mean, why not. They were outraged, just the way Andy would have wanted it. Andy Warhol died in the spring of my senior year of high school, and he was still considered vaguely controversial back then. Hilton Kramer of New Criterion wrote a postmortem that discounted his lasting value. The Times talked about his contribution with its characteristically smug, slightly dismissive air. It's nice to know his soup cans are still pissing people off.

But I was disappointed that among my students his famous line - "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes" - fell on deaf ears. I suppose that when Andy was proported to have said it, the common reaction among people would probably have been "Everybody? Really?" My students reacted to the latter part of it. "Really?" they seemed to ask. "For only fifteen minutes?" In our time, everybody has the potential to be instantly famous for what seems forever, and everyone is watching.

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Did Rex Ryan not know this, or did he not care? Regardless, I confess that don't care, but I had to look anyway.

In our culture, the universal, craven appreciation for the fall of others is matched only by our desire to put everything we have and know on display for all to see. These sometimes paradoxical indulgences are a normal corruption of the freedom of information, and they have both recently preyed upon our head coach. I watched about a whole minute of one of Michelle Ryan's foot fetish videos (the one with her feet dangling out of a parked car) and found it about as offensive as Rex Ryan's use of "fuck" as a noun and a gerund, which is not at all. None other than Darrelle Revis spoke in defense of his coach by stating that Rex is at least appreciating his wife in these videos and not, say, his own dong.

The one I watched was actually humorous in a way that is...well, I don't want to use the word charming, but let's just say that it was naively goofy. Michelle Ryan sits, almost napping on a summer day (presumably in Maryland) with her feet (are they pretty? Allow me here to say that I have feet described as essentially ugly by women throughout time, yet I don't know what makes feet beautiful. Hands, yes. But feet? I don't have the eyes for it) dangling out the driver's side window of what looks like an SUV. The camera approaches feet first and then the owner. The voice behind the camera speaks almost as a member of the law enforcement community, with the suggestion that a parked woman brazenly exposing her feet is committing some kind of foul. The woman apologizes. But then the cameraman replies that it's no trouble at all; in fact, he's enjoying the sight of it. Please feel free, ma'am, to keep 'em right where they are. It's almost as if a cop is having to tell a women that she is not wearing her shirt. Except it's her feet.

The voice, as so many people have pointed out, is obviously Rex's. Except it's a different Rex, one whom we don't hear from all that often. It sounds ridiculous to say that when we are exposed to so much of Rex Ryan; I think he makes so much of himself as a means of concealing his own sense of fear. His bluster is exactly the work of a man ill at ease with his looks, his intelligence, his skills - particularly in a market where there are two football teams and no means of escape. The voice on the video, though, is the ur-Rex. His fascinated state trooper is tinged with the slightest Oklahoma drawl. If one did not know better for plainly obvious reasons, then one could almost mistake it for Rex's daddy. I would never have guessed Rex Ryan had a foot thing, but with his murmuring drawl, his weird, sneering look, one could imagine Buddy Ryan having all kinds of hangups.

It was at that point that I had to stop watching. For one thing, I didn't want to watch all the videos because I felt as though I were watching something made by a friend of mine. These are people I know, I thought to myself. Even if they put this out there, I still don't want to know about this. This doesn't make me a good person, just a vaguely normal one. I'm morbidly curious by nature, but I also don't have to see all of a compromising moment to get enough of all I need to know. The Times can look upon Rex Ryan the way Judge Smells does Al Czervik in Caddyshack, as the uncouth and interloping baboon, but the human need to share one's entire personality with the whole world online is exactly what is destroying newspapers. The Times' granny attitude toward the coach, that he is "dumb," may prove to be accurate in reference to this coach in the long run; backing into the playoffs will enable Rex to keep his job another year, but he has yet to produce the team he loftily, delusionally imagines. But what keeps the Old Gray Lady hurtling toward the abyss is its air of superiority about Andy Warhol's open world, warts, feet and all.

NY Jets #22 - Danny Woodhead's Revenge

I wasn't paying attention when Danny Woodhead was waived in September 2010, probably because I believed too firmly, too calmly in a lot of big things and big ideas. The Jets were picked by their own coach to "lead the league in fucking wins." And to be honest, I don't really remember if he was wearing #22 or #83 by then. I know he wore both; I just never believed that when Rex Ryan said he loved Danny Woodhead as much as he did that he would ever let him go, only to be snapped up by the Jets' biggest rival. Danny Woodhead is exactly the spiritual core the Jets lack as they hurtle toward the abyss in the 2010 season. Before the game with the Steelers in Week 15, I predicted that they would lose every remaining game of the season and that Rex Ryan will be fired by year's end. When they beat the Steelers, I felt a brief measure of relief. But we should have kept Danny Woodhead. As a fairly effective rusher way second on the New England Patriots to Benjarvus Green-Ellis, Danny (I find it difficult to refer to a short man by his last name; that's wrong of me, obviously) will finish the year with the Pats and will appear on their roster next year. He will go to the playoffs; he may win a Super Bowl; he will finish better than Rex Ryan. Though he seems like an awfully nice boy, he will have his revenge.

Danny Woodhead is the talisman the Jets gave away. He's not a premier talent like ones on defense we have given away, like John Abrahams (#'s 94, 56) or James Farrior and Jonathan Vilma (both #51). Imagine a linebacking core like that going against rapist Ben Roethelsberger this weekend. Woodhead is not a shaman. By the looks of it, he is the simple yet talented kid out of Nebraska who tries to sell is own jersey in the big city without a single person recognizing his face. He is exactly what Rex Ryan is not, which is why he might have been magic for a team whose profile has superseded its courage. I talked about his talent when we chatted about #35, which was also one of Danny Woodhead's numbers, just after he was drafted by Mangini, just before he blew out his knee in his first professional training camp. I hadn't been buying the hatred dispensed by New York's snootier outfits this season, with their claims that the Jets' hubris would eventually undo them, but now clearly the haters would appear to have been understating the calamity. Danny Woodhead would never have prevented all of this from happening had he stayed with the Jets; his departure was simply an indication of which the way the wind would blow.

As davidhill points out, though, he left the Jets wearing #27. I have no memory of that, but I believe it. That's how konked out I've been by this season's promises.

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Do you have a brother like Tank Carter? Tyrone Carter does. Though he played for the Jets in #22 during a single season of 2003, Tyrone has been playing for the Steelers since 2004, and as was widely reported after Super Bowl XL, Tank attended his brother's big game instead showing up to serve a prison sentence of six months. Lucky that the Steelers won because once he was apprehended, Tank's sentence was extended four and a half years. So I ask you again. My brother would probably not request that of me. I'm assuming here that I'm the one going to jail.

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According to the NFL Players Association, the average career of an NFL player is 3.5 years. As far as I know, only a few American careers are comparable in this sense of their raw attrition. Teaching is comparable. Public school teaching has a burnout rate from the front end of about five years. Number 22 Mike Dennis ended his season with the New York Jets in 1984 after the duration of five seasons in the NFL. So your next rational question is what can Mike Dennis' career teach us about the demands of an average American's professional life? Well might you ask. Well. Might. You. Ask. Or are you better off studying the work of #22 Sean Dykes (no relation to #28 Donald Dykes) whose claim to fame was six games in the strike-ridden 1987 season and, according to the Jets database, "selling Mazdas in the off-season, during his time with the Jets," which in itself is a bit of a paradoxical state of being? No.

Or a viciously cruel state of being. When I played Pee Wee football, I played on a team whose record was 0-6-1. When I played AYSO on Long Island, our soccer team won zero games. My two Little League baseball teams each won one game apiece all season. Was it something I did or said? Was my hangdog look infectious? After all, I was the least effectual member of all of these teams, the player whom the coach looked at with the same disgruntled expression I gave to the kid who told me today that she couldn't answer any of the quiz questions on the chapters of Catcher in the Rye that I had read in class yesterday because she hadn't read the two chapters the two days before before them. Why do I fucking bother? Carl Greenwood played in #22 at cornerback for the New York Jets during the 1995 and 1996 seasons, in which the Jets won all of four football games. He might have asked himself the same question, though that's at least a better record than my years in Long Island sports.

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A saga involving #24 spilled over onto #22. Ty Law was once a #24, but then wore #22 for the brief period he was brought in for the 2008 season once Jesse Chatman was deactivated for the away Patriots game. Ty Law was always an on-again-off-again prodigal son for Those Of Whom We Do Not Speak. I don't expect Danny Woodhead to return to the Jets anytime soon, but the fierce rivalry between the two teams had its crescendo in Danny Woodhead getting plenty of playing time in the 2010 Tea Party-sized shellacking the Patriots did of the Jets at Foxboro. Activate a rival's former player before the big showdown with the rival. It worked for Danny Woodhead, but Ty Law's career is now officially done. It didn't work in 2008, but then not much did that year.

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I've been trying to figure out what to say about wide receiver Nick Bruckner, aside from the fact that he was actually from Astoria, Queens. At 5'11", he was a little foreshadowing of Wayne Chrebet, though a little taller. Ah, I know. The reason why we mention him is because he wore #86 in 1983, #83 in 1985 and #22 in 1985 - three numbers in three years. The final change was indicative of a demotion for a wide receiver.

Not unlike Kenny Lewis who, according to the Jets database, wore #24 in 1980 and the #20 in 1981. Then he was #22 in 1983. Is this the fate of special teams, the "Help" of professional football?

My father always told me that Jim Hudson was the most fiery member of the 1968 team. Dad probably got that idea because Hudson got thrown out of the Heidi Game, which must have meant he was a badass because that is one of the most penalized games in AFL history. In the AFL Championship Game, we see him narrowly miss out on an interception, and he pounds the turf so angrily that he looks like an infuriated adolescent unable to control the connection between his still immature frontal lobe and his fist. But most importantly, #22 Jim Hudson got in front of the pass that should have gone to Jimmy Orr but went instead to Jerry Hill in Super Bowl III. This was, perhaps, the most important defensive play of the most important game in New York Jets history.

NY Jets #22 - Burgess Owens' Revenge

In his rookie year, Erik McMillan emerged as that rare thing in Jets' history, a fairly effective defensive back. He played in #22 for the Jets from 1988 to 1993, the meat and potatoes of the Coslet years. His finest year may have been his rookie one, where he went to the Pro Bowl and lead the AFC in interceptions. There is a long feature 1988 article in the Times by Ira Berkow that identifies Erik as the son of Ernie McMillan, longtime St. Louis football Cardinals great. The article is dated from the Sunday of the Jets' 1988 late-game win of the Giants that guaranteed that my friend Major the Giants fan would have to wear my dirty Jets t-shirt all week. The phrase used to describe Erik in the article was "sometimes explosive," whereas he was described in the Times in 1992 as flatly "out of control." Go ahead. Click on his picture. Looks kind of crazy, doesn't he?

But Erik McMillan is used as an object example of how interceptions are misleading. That isn't the case when one changes the shape of the game, but over the course of a season, they are substantially less appealing than the ability to cover your man play after play. According to Deadspin's highly skewed 100 Worst NFL Players of All Time (all time? Think of all the leather-helmeted players who get a free pass), McMillan ranks at #93: "A two-time Pro Bowler with the Jets, McMillan spent most of his time hanging back and waiting for balls to come his way. He was a poor tackler and a worse cover man. Once teams figured that out, he was exposed and, quickly, gone." It's tough to watch other people recognize your own mediocrity after thinking so highly of your skills. To paraphrase the quote misattributed to Euripides, "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising." Another misinterpretation has it as "mad." Both of which might apply to McMillan.

When I was a newly minted New York Jets fan in the mid 1970's and Dad went to Jets games at Shea with his brother-in-law, my mother was busy teaching me the finer points of the game. I loved John Riggins because he played red rover with defensive lines, but Mom maintained that a running back's best attributes could be found in his blocking. She showed me a picture of Matt Snell blocking for Namath with fists clenched. That's right. She had pictures of Matt Snell hanging around. Who doesn't?

Sam Gash or Lorenzo Neal. These are big ass fellas who throw their weight in front of everyone and everything in the path of the guy who gets the ball. Amid being the guy who got the ball in New Orleans to being the guy who blocked for Eddie George, Warrick Dunn, Corey Dillon, and (most importantly) LaDainian Tomlinson, Lorenzo Neal also blocked in #22 for Adrian Murrell on the Jets. Here, again, you can see where the Jets are merely the stopover in the greater career.

Burgess Owens was a first round draft choice in 1973 and played for the Jets until 1979. I always wonder if he became expendable after that last season after he injured Pat Leahy in a routine drill in practice. I doubt it, but it made me wonder when I was a hopeful ten year old kid watching his team go through its first transition in his conscious fandom. Owens, #22, was the last player remaining from the 1974 season, my first as a fan. He still had several good years to go, as I would soon discover when his new team - the dread Oakland Raiders - won Super Bowl XV. I had foolishly hyped myself into thinking the Jets would go to the New Orleans that year. The last laugh was when Owens was all over the field in the Superdome, and I had to see it, realizing he was wearing #44 - twice the man he was at #22. I don't know if I've ever hated the Raiders more.

And Burgess Owens is a Mormon. I'm not supposed to be surprised by that, but I am. Fellow Oakland resident Eldridge Cleaver was, too. I understand the taste of revenge in his going from being a Jet to a Raider, but how odd to convert to a faith that, until recently, didn't really recognize you as an equal citizen in its clergy. But there you go. I know lots of Catholic women who are fine with belonging to a faith that doesn't think they are capable enough of saying Mass. Rooting for a team that wins sporadically makes sense to me, while organized religion leaves me utterly beguiled.

Here comes Damien
Robinson's helmet

Sure, you remember Kyle Turley throwing somebody's helmet across the field in 2001. Maybe you remember that it was a Jets helmet. But did you know the helmet belonged to #22 Damien Robinson, who was holding onto Saints' quarterback Aaron Brooks' facemask like it was a subway strap? Is this thing on?

Of all the New York Titans, only four started Super Bowl III as Jets - Don Maynard, Bill Mathis, Larry Grantham and Curley Johnson. Who were the other 149 Titans? Well, Leon Riley and Rick Sapienza were two of them - the only Titans who wore #22.

By the way, has anybody seen Jesse Chatman lately - the brief bearer of the #22 for in 2008? As we've discussed previously, Chatman was suspended for violating the NFL's substance policy, but his suspension is up by now (11/15/08). I wouldn't bother asking, except he ran like an artificially enhanced performer all over the Eagles in preseason, and in the 2008 away game against the Pats, Ty Law reappeared #22 instead. Then, Danny Woodhead. I would guess that a even less enhanced Jesse Chatman might be useful at the very least somewhere. Jesse? Jesse?

Three players drafted in the first round of the 1971 NFL draft today have brozne busts in Canton. Can you name them? One of them was drafted by the New York Jets. But we're here to talk about one drafted in the 11th round - a receiver who caught passes at Mississippi thrown from first round draft choice, Archie Manning. We speak of Vern Studdard who played half a season for the Jets in #22 with absolutely no record of his actually playing in any those games.

Eric Thomas and Willie West. Two men at the same position, from different eras in the NFL. West was an AFL All-Star in 1963 for Buffalo and in 1966 for the fledgling Dolphins. Thomas was an All-Pro in 1988. Neither made such appearances for the Jets, although each played in #22 for our team.

There. Number 22. One for the books.

Our 300th Post - Patriots 45 Jets 3

While the Jets were being pummeled by the Patriots in the first half of the Monday Night game, I felt a bit like the drunken washout I resembled when the Jets fell to the AFC Champion-to-be Raiders in the January 2003 playoffs, about five months before I dried out. It was an awful feeling, having nothing else but inebriation to shield me from feelings of cavernous loss. I wouldn’t have cared if the world had caved in. My disappointment was at least tempered by the fact that I eventually had no sense of, well, anything at all. There was no other consolation.

So what was my consolation tonight? Oddly, I found myself listening to the Beatles. From their newly published catalogue on iTunes, I downloaded everything essential gone that's gone missing and stolen over the years, especially Revolver and Hard Day’s Night. The latter became suddenly important to me as the Patriots tagged on a 21-point lead going into halftime. I found Richard Lester’s film A Hard Day’s Night on YouTube and watched it while psychologically checking out of a humiliating blowout. The game played on in the background. We may play in the playoffs and have a revenge, but more than one fellow fan has wondered to me if the Jets will even win another game this year. Ah well. They will finish with a winning record for sure, but I knew the Jets shouldn't have given Danny Woodhead away.

But meanwhile, what came up in the foreground of my view were the Beatles. I first listened to them through my Mom’s stereo as a little kid. She owned A Hard Day’s Night, Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper’s, and Abbey Road, her least favorite, a gift from her drugged-out brother-in-law. Each Sunday, while living in Queens and later in North Merrick, my parents would return from Mass, cook breakfast, eat, open the Sunday Times, and listen to two albums – Eileen Farrell’s Puccini Arias and A Hard Day’s Night. The music emanated companionably, twining together like an odd couple not unlike Mom and Dad, themselves – one part classical, one part modern. They insisted on liking both, refusing to choose either at a time when the classical and the modern were entirely separating.

Both albums were recorded before I was born, each a remnant of the early 60’s, back when my parents first fell in love. Though she was more partial to Sinatra than opera, Mom loved Farrell singing “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Gianni Schicci, which I would later hear in the Merchant Ivory film A Room With a View. Dad preferred opera almost exclusively, just as he considered himself a Rockefeller Republican until he met Mom. But in 1964 he found himself voting for Lyndon Johnson and going with Mom to see A Hard Day’s Night in a hot Manhattan theater so crowded with screaming girls as to prohibit a clear sense of exactly what was going on in the movie. But my parents went back again, and despite the fact that they had both skipped over Elvis in their adolescence, they suddenly discovered there and then for themselves the four British men who were already changing the world.

One night, when I was a little boy, and Channel 5 was showing Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, my parents pulled the RCA black and white into the kitchen for us to watch in its entirety while we ate at the table. I was about six. I may not have been aware of it, but Mom claims that while the music in the film came on, I bounced up and down as I ate. It's an infectious response to the Beatles that I’ve seen in my nieces and my friends’ kids – they’ll all perk up at the sound of Harrison’s Rickenbacker, Starkey’s drums, Lennon’s ooo I need your love, babe and Paul’s Hofner. It's a simple human language of love.

There was once a time when my brother and I could practically do the film from start to finish. Richard Lester presents a colorless picture of an England that I grew up desperately wanting to see for myself someday. When I went to England, I found that The Beatles weren't of anyone's interest, any more than someone on a Memphis street had something to say about Elvis to a Japanese tourist. The Beatles are more an American obsession, but Lester's England was there in England for me to find in its colorless towns and the natives' cheekiness. The movie is more English than the group themselves. The Beatles were already reaching well beyond the simple English trains they run in and out of in A Hard Day's Night, away from the screaming girls from the provincial towns where they play. What makes the movie special is Lester's dialogue.

There are so many great scenes from A Hard Day's Night. In one sequence the film turns toward Ringo’s private sojourn. Having been talked into it by Paul’s Irish grandfather (“a king mixer,” Paul says) Ringo decides to leave the group and go “parading before it’s too late." He's going to find himself as an artist, taking photos of the bleak scenes he encounters. While he walks along a dingy riverside, he collides with a little boy's rolling car tire. The boy is Charlie, aged “10 and two-thirds,” whose face is lashed with dirt. He doesn’t know who Richard Starkey is. To him, Ringo’s just another guy. Charlie says he doesn’t want the tire anymore.

Why? asks Ringo.

“Ah, you can have it. I’m packing it in. It depresses me. It gets on my wick.”

“That’s lovely talk, that is,” says Ringo. “Why aren’t you at school?”

“I’m a deserter.”

“Are you now?

“Yeah, I’ve flung school out.”

“Just you?”

“No. Ginger, Eddie Fallon, and Ding-Dong.”

“Ah,” Ringo says, taking off his camera strap. “Ding-Dong Bell, eh?”

“Yeah, that's right,” Charlie says, nonplussed.

When Charlie asks Ringo why he isn’t at work, the world’s most famous drummer says he’s a deserter, too. Just another dropout.

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The Jets’ travesty sped its way into the fourth quarter.

I know full well that the Beatles' melodies have kept me aloft through most of my depressing episodes of the past, some real, some imagined. Things like losing at Foxboro 41-7 in 1976, or 55-14 at Foxboro in 1978, or 56-3 in 1979. Or when the first place 10-1 Jets met the Miami Dolphins for a Monday Night Game almost exactly 24 years ago in 1986 and lost 45-3 - and then never won another game during the regular season.

Well, anyway. Whatever the degree to which they are a little too legendary, looming too large in our legend, to turn a phrase from the movie, The Beatles have always existed well beyond the grasp of my own self-inflicted misery and are therefore always a consolation. They sit behind Mom and Dad, and the Jets, right behind Catholicism in the list of the longest looming influences of my childhood. And I’m a little like Charlie tonight. In the film, Ringo eventually abandons his sojourn and gets back with the group in time enough to go onstage for the live show in the film. But what happens to little Charlie? Does he stay a deserter? He throws the tire aside.

It depresses me. It gets on my wick.

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Where are Ding-Dong Bell and Eddie Fallon. And Ginger?

“Ginger’s mad,” Charlie says. “He says things all the time.”

What things? I wonder.

NY Jets #36 - Part 2

Safety Jim Leonhard took a pay cut to move from Baltimore to the Jets and to play for Rex Ryan at the end of the 2008 season. He said that "We decided this was the best situation for me."

A pay cut? The best situation? The Jets? When I first read this, I simply appreciated anyone saying that we are the best situation. I felt a little like the experienced teacher who looks with winsome despair at the new recruit who is full of naivete and idealism. Sure, you say that now. A long line starts right there, kid. After all, we are Jets fans. We are never the best situation. But Jim Leonhard has played since then like his is the best situation, and in a matter of a season and a half, he has made people around the NFL believe that he is right. As of this writing, the Jets are tied for first place with New England at 9-2 and are playing for that undisputed place in an upcoming Monday Night game in Foxboro.

But Fate works mysteriously, ironically, cruelly. With days to go to the game, Leonhard broke his leg in a "freak thing" during what was, according to Rex Ryan, the best practice of the week. Eric Smith will replace him, and while Smith is tough, Jim Leonhard is a leader. Symbolically, he represents the heretofore pathos-free hubris of Rex Ryan. He is the man you see depicted above, the small, confident, fearless figure who faces the opposition without concern for either his team's history of failure in December or his opposition's superiority. This is the mental strategy of winners.

And now, as we await a recharged version of the clinical Patriots offense against a derailed Jets defense, I feel happy to at least have come this far. Ryan's reaction to Leonhard's injury was to say, "I feel sorry for Jim, but not for us." That's the attitude I'm talking about. But I've been around too long to believe him. With Jim Leonhard or not, I know the rest of this story, or this one, or this one. If the Jets win this week, it will mark a dramatic change in the narrative I have known for so long. If they beat the Patriots, I will teach all Tuesday in my Namath jersey. And who knows? Maybe I should believe in something bigger than a loser's narcissistic sense of perennial despair. I should try an alternative to that. Maybe I'll try the mental of strategy of winners someday. Meanwhile, I suspect I will not need the Namath jersey.

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A while ago, you could, for $5 on Ebay, purchase a signed photograph of University of Hawaii Assistant Coach Rich Miano (above) fighting with some unknown persons on the sideline of a recent game. An article on Miano's career (mostly with the Eagles) makes the photo seem even funnier: "He had to fight for a roster spot; he had to fight for playing time. He had to fight for respect. And after the fight was over... Miano raised his arm in victory." OK. Fair enough. Miano is still at Hawaii, but I don't know how much this photo goes for.

But I remember Rich Miano playing defensive back in #36 for the Jets in the 1980's. You can also spend the same amount of money on a signed 1985 photograph of Miano in a 19-6 losing effort against the soon-to-be Super Bowl Champion Bears. Now this I might just buy because it was taken on the day of my first car accident. I was 16 and Christmas shopping; it was freezing but clear and beautiful, and while trying to pull into a parking lot, another 16 year-old Christmas shopper rear-ended me. My parents had just installed an FM radio in my Dad's Chevy - mostly for my benefit - and I was so scared they would think that they had made a mistake in buying it for me because 1) they would assume that I wasn't paying attention to the road because I was trying to turn the dial to just the right place and 2) they would find out that I had been listening to the Jets-Bears game on AM and wonder what the point was of buying the FM radio (with its promises of rock, friends listening to rock in car, friends hooking me up with a girl with whom I could listen to rock in the car so as to shield my mortifying social skills) if I were still listening to AM. What Rich Miano knew about life I also knew about FM radio. I had fought for that thing. Sometimes it feels like you've got to fight for everything. All was well, though. Because I was 16 I underestimated my parents' capacity for understanding. We never did get that dent repaired, though. Or did we? Oh well. I can't remember everything.

You can't say much about #36 Joe Fishback's five-game career with the New York Jets, but you can say two things about him. First, he ended his career in Atlanta (where he began) playing in the Georgia Dome for the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl Somthingorother against the Bills. This obviously means that he ended his career with a Super Bowl ring; not since I wrote about #24 Johnny Sample have I mentioned a Jet who ended his career with a ring. Secondly, he is the winner of the Booth Lusteg Award Winner for Funniest Sounding Name among the #36s. My apologies to Buddy Crutchfield.

NY Jets #36 - Part 1

As the away game against San Diego began during the Brett Favre season, #36 David Barrett picked off a Philip Rivers pass and brought it back 25 yards for a touchdown - the only touchdown of his career. It was the Jets' first score of the game, and it seemed as though we were beginning the game in exactly the way we needed. However, it was a mirage. The Jets lost the game by more than two touchdowns, and though it was wonderful to see the normally bellicose Rivers seem flustered by Barrett's pickoff, the fact is that the badder guy won in the end. Brett Favre's energetic high fives for the defense as they came off the field were a mirage, too. Brett never bonded with us; he never really cared for anyone other than Jenn Sterger and some assorted Jets employees who were repulsed by his advances. David Barrett was injured for most of the remainder of the 2008 season and was released even before Rex Ryan was brought in to coach. He had a fairly good five seasons with us and that, my friends, is all I'm going to say.

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Wellington Nathaniel Crutchfield, III goes by "Buddy," and he was a Jetskin, having come over from Washington to the Jets from 1998 to 1999. According to the less than meticulous records of professional football, he made one tackle in his one season with the Jets in #36. In an entirely unrelated piece of information, I once saw blues piano player Jimmy Crutchfield, a local St. Louis legend, and his band play a concert for a group of East St. Louis, IL transitional high school students whose school resembled something out of a third world shanty. After playing for an hour, Crutchfield, a thin, angular man whispered, "One more, one more. Then let's get the hell out of here." I recall that it was rather amusing.



It's not often that I include hijacked snapshots of our Jets Among Men in uniforms other than the green and white. But in this case, from Corbis comes this remarkable 1973 picture (above) of #36 Bob Gresham - who played behind several other Jets running backs in 1975 and '76 - facing insurmountable odds. Playing for the Houston Oilers at the time, Gresham is about to be hit on both sides by the old and new Monsters of Midway - Dick Butkus and Wally Chambers, respectively. In other words, he is about to be plowed. He knows it, surely. In a moment, his vision will be blurred not just by the heavy blue-black of home uniforms but by the shattering, almost noiseless explosion that will take place in his head after these two linebackers hit him. Who knows - maybe even Butkus and Chambers will have some fragment of the experience too, so powerful and terminal do the impending hits seem in this frozen moment of portent.

I feel like Bob Gresham. It's not just my usual paranoia. Sometimes it just feels like the walls are closing in and you're about to be hit by two enormous men who are trained to knock people out of the game, and you're just little Bob Gresham. You come to work, you work hard, you gain your little 400-500 yards in a good season, running off of 2nd and 5, usually. But now you are about to meet one of the hits that will shorten your career and maybe even set you back a little. Here it comes.

****

"Most people believe 1972 was Steve Harkey 's best year." I love when I go to sites like armchairgm.com and encounter such appraisals. It was his best year, especially because running back Steve Harkey #36 gained 129 yards for the Jets that year, 67 more than he gained the previous one. If you look at how running backs start out, I guess you could say that Harkey was on his way to becoming another Bob Gresham, destined to someday be pummeled by a Hall of Fame linebacker or two. But instead, Harkey's career stops after '72, the rest is silence, and all that there is to find in the Jets' Yearbook is the following achievement: "Paved the way for a pair of George Nock TD runs in Week 3 14-10 win over MIA." Paved the way for George Nock. If that's all that you can leave behind, then so be it. You can meet George in #37.

NY Jets #45 - Part 4

It's hard to walk around with a name that everyone either associates with the most dread of household inspects or with a joint that has gone nearly past its usability among many hands and mouths. But like most of the blemishes of one's life, you get used to it, especially past the age of 12, when most kids are done pestering you about the obvious things that make a person ugly - your face, your walk, your voice, your name. Then you enter the adult world, where it's different. Grown people make quiet note of the blemishes God gave you, without needing to turn it into a soul-shattering verbal refrain that, as a child, you'd have to steel yourself for on the lunch line, day in and damned day out. Adults save such cruelties for their own private amusements, waiting for just the right moment to bat you back into mortal place.

I'd still rather be an adult. If today someone makes a reference to how I must get high a lot, or to Franz Kafka, or to being the only one who will be able to survive a nuclear attack, I can always say, "Oh. Yeah. Right. God. I've never heard that before."

But what about Tony Stargell, who played in #45 for the Jets from 1990-91? When I was a little boy in Pleasantville, NY, and Tony was 13 and growing up playing football in LaGrange, Georgia, Willie Stargell shared SI's Sportsman of the Year with Terry Bradshaw.

Willie Stargell
(1940-2001)

Willie Stargell was "Pops," the most recognizable baseball player of his day outside of Reggie Jackson and a fine example of a human athlete as well. Willie Stargell's power so obviously came from a frame unenhanced by performance enhancement, that in his near middle age he had a beer-gut. He preferred a good time to a statistical high, and he still won the NL MVP in 1979 at the ripe old age of 39.

I was a Mets fan, but I rooted for the Pirates in the 1979 World Series because they were National League, because they were the underdog, and because they were "Family," with Pops at the head of the table. Grown men of Tony Stargell's age still know who Pops was; he was larger-than-life, but he is gone now, long dead and gone by more years than I can believe. It seems like only yesterday that I was imitating Wilver Stargell's batting stance in my cousin's backyard, trying to capture his strange lilting action of the bat as readied for a pitch. Men of a certain age - my age and Tony Stargell's - know who Pops was. He was exactly the model of what sports isn't now. Sports is not really about fun, and to paraphrase an axiom of Wilver himself, the man yells play ball, not work ball. He doesn't yell "moneyball," either.

It seems awfully trite to say something like that nowadays, but the shift in priorities is infectious throughout our culture. The pay scale for baseball players is based on their statistics. The man who was recently elected to become the new governor of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth is imitating the fat man who governs New Jersey in the belief that public school teacher pay should be linked with the statistical data of student testing. Nothing can remove the love of learning any more than moneyball can ruin a love for baseball; people will still be taught by creative-minded teachers and will also still be watching baseball when these narrow-minded governors are dead and forgotten, save for being mere names on occasional bits of state park property. But both teaching and baseball are a whole lot less fun when they're purely the property of statistical content. And since moneyball became the way of America's Game, Willie Stargell's Pirates haven't been to the postseason, either. His statue stands a lot larger outside their park than Willie Stargell himself once stood, but for men of a certain age - mine and Tony's - that's pretty damned tall.

Tony Stargell
(no apparent relation)

Why must I go on like this? The truth is I actually don't have much to say. Tony Stargell started his career with the New York Jets at defensive back after being drafted by them in 1990. The Jets could have taken Ricky Proehl; they could have taken Neil O'Donnell, Bobby Houston or Anthony Pleasant (all of whom would go on to play for us eventually, anyway); more importantly, they could have taken Larry Centers or maybe even Fred Barnett, though lots of Eagles fans might argue otherwise. Tony Stargell was picked out of Tennessee State and played two seasons with us before going west to Indianapolis. Linebackers stay a while, receivers are needed even when they're not wanted, but the secondary seems so expendable. Tony Stargell is another name gone in and out of our franchise's defensive backfield, and his statistics make no more than a ripple than those belonging to Torin Dorn or Le-Lo Lang, both of whom were also drafted by as defensive backs NFL teams in 1990.

Torin Dorn's a funny name when you say it (didn't his parents say it to themselves beforehand?), though obviously Le-Lo takes the cake. Many men must carry such burdens, and they grow up and out of them. But Tony Stargell probably had to carry the burden of being perpetually asked if he was related to Pops, and when you're an athlete being compared to a legend with your name, you inevitably fall short, regardless of whether or not people understand that you're not related. And no, Tony Stargell was apparently not related to Willie. All of us make mistakes, but when Tony Stargell did for the Jets, the Colts, the Bucs, the Chiefs and the Bears, some smartass in the crowd, on the sidelines or even in zebras probably uttered the phrase, "Sonuvabitch should have stuck to baseball." And that's not fair.

****

Corky Tharp #45 is far right.

Thomas "Corky" Tharp was drafted by the LA Rams in 1955 after having a stellar career rushing at the University of Alabama. Five years later, he shows up wearing #45 as defensive back, playing most of the 1960 season for the New York Titans before retiring that year. Above, courtesy of Corbis, you see him in action, to the right, trying to tackle Houston Oilers rookie Billy Cannon. Corky's ride in football, which took him from Alabama to Canada with the Argonauts of Toronto and finally the Titans, is about to come to an end. Billy Cannon's ride in pro football will last another decade, during which he will be turned into an unused tight end for the Raiders and the Chiefs. In the image above, Corky seems already to be shying away from Cannon and the life that football has provided. It's fading time. It will come for Billy, too.

And if you can't tell it from that picture, try the two images below, a before and after. The one on the left is Corky Tharp, the young student who gained just over 2,000 career yards for the Crimson Tide, staring off into a seemingly limitless horizon. The second looks more like After - the smirking, knowing expression of an experienced grown man who has been converted several times over to the most dispensable of positions, playing on an AFL team that can barely break even.

Corky (before)

Corky (after)

Finally, we come to Earlie Thomas, #45 for the Jets from 1970 to 1974. Did he also start his career in the Canadian pipeline? It's an interesting question because apparently his NFL career began with the Jets at the age of 25.

On a humid day at Harvard Stadium in 1970, Earlie Thomas, a rookie out of Colorado State, intercepted a pass by Mike Taliaferro and ran it back for a 36-yard touchdown, giving the Jets a 28-7 third quarter lead. As they have been wont to do in my history with them, the Jets nearly gave away what was left of the game, managing to hold onto a 31-21 win. I find it interesting, by the way, that in 1968 the Patriots played at Fenway but then at Boston College's Alumni Stadium in 1969, and then at Harvard a year later. After that, they became the New England Patriots of Foxboro that we all know and love so well.

Master's or PhD?

Earlie Thomas' interception was just a little more than enough to keep Namath's offense ahead (Joe went 9-for-20 that day). It was am early start to his career; some men are aptly named after all.  Earlie never ran one back again in his entire career. He would pick one more off that season and make four more interceptions his remaining career, ending up in Denver in 1975. Some things come early to those who wait, but then are gone for good.
Some information on him from the 1974 Jets yearbook, apparently Earlie Thomas earned his Master's degree in something related to agriculture, for his dissertation (which speaks to a PhD) "ison aweevil parasite" (sic). At least he's doing some good somewhere, one presumes.

NY Jets #45 - Part 3

First, running back Eddie Hunter #45 may not have been a replacement player, even though he only played one season with the Jets, in the strike year of 1987. He scored two touchdowns that year, but I may have been too drunk or boring at college to have even known about it at the time. All that can be gleaned from the record is that he had a two-year NFL career with the Jets and then the Bucs. Both his touchdowns came on passing plays in his rookie year.

****

Speaking of the undergraduate, there are players who operate in the collegiate world like gods - men who are legends to a population at the height of their capacity for enthusiasm. Such is the college star. And the person who makes the best cult recruit is also the biggest and loudest fan in the stands - the college student. I remember having an irrational, deep, cosmic attachment to my college's basketball team while I was there, and I don't even like basketball all that much. I remember seeing our star point guard at a college party and being introduced to him by friends as simply "Money." Something tingled at the base of my neck when I clasped his hand. I remember screaming my lungs out when they won the tournament championship about three years after I graduated from college. Was it the truest happiness a person could feel? I nearly had a mental collapse when my alma mater went into triple overtime in the Elite 8 of the NCAA tournament 12 years ago. Following college sports prepares you for one thing and one thing only - to be a Moonie.

But what eventually happens to these immortal college stars, these cult idols? Tim Tebow scored his first professional touchdown against the Jets, but will he ever be any more than just another star made humble by the unsentimental world of crass professionalism? If the Christian Coalition has anything to do with it, then he will absolutely run for Governor of Florida someday. But think of John Huarte, Pat Sullivan, Brian Dowling, Ed Marinaro (we'll get to him), John Rogan, Pete Beban, Billy Cannon or Gavin Grey. Sure, Tebow can run for President, but what has happened to the rest?

Iacavazzi in a Princeton
Jets uniform

What ever happened to Cosmo Iacavazzi? He graduated from the last undefeated Princeton team in 1964 and was eventually drafted by the Jets for the 1965 season. In the crucial final game of the season against Yale, tied at halftime (Princeton had never been down all season) Iacavazzi then went on score on runs of 39 and 45 yards in the second half. At the moment when his team needed him most, he came through, as the great ones always do. He must have appeared to the Princeton loyal as the most blessed human on Earth, and Princeton ran away with the Ivy Title. He was a runner-up to John Huarte for the Heisman, well ahead of Joe Namath. The Jets then got all three of those guys that year - Iacavazzi, Huarte, and Namath. Huarte never took a snap. Namath changed the course of American sports, and Cosmo Iacavazzi is said to have suited up for two games, without any note of yardage gained.

He must have been thought of as something special by the good people of Topps because here is a 1965 rookie football card as a Jet. He's clearly still wearing his #32 Princeton jersey with the tell-tale Tiger-striped sleeves which have been rendered by the artist into the Jets' green and white. Unlike Tim Tebow, Cosmo Iacavazzi was given a new number as a pro - in this case #45 - with the Jets, starring as nothing more than a backup. The card reveals him metaphorically and literally. He runs toward us out of that unpleasantly yellow background of 1965 Topps, colored a Jet, yet still frozen in his Princeton life.

As the link above shows, he has lived a life of restless pursuits since graduation, including being the mayor of Hillsborough, NJ. That's better than being an orthodontist/forger like Billy Cannon. But is any kind of life good enough for a man who has been the most recognized person on campus?

Jets

Patriots

Jets

Patriots

Speaking of a restless life, what about Otis Smith's, in #45? He is one of my all-time favorites. Otis Smith began his career as rookie free agent with the Philadelphia Eagles at the ripe old age of 26 in 1991. He wore #30 when he began with the Eagles and #23 for the Lions when he retired. Above is a display courtesy of pro-football reference.com, which takes the time to show the numbers that a player wears and also how his uniform evolves, whether playing for one team or for dozens over time. In between the beginning and the end of his career, Smith wore the #45's you see above. From left to right they represent the Jets, the Patriots, the Jets, and then the Patriots again, all between 1995-2002.

The green 45 with the black outline represents the years of Richie Kotite's reign of error, but then Smith was traded mid-season 1996 to Bill Parcells' Super Bowl-bound Patriots, who are represented by the light blue and red 45. The green-outlined 45 represents the point at which Parcells took Otis Smith with him back to the Jets.

The last 45 on the right is for the dark blue and red Patriots of Bill Belichick, who took himself, Otis Smith, and much of my desire to live with him back to Foxboro. It was during Smith's second Super Bowl in New Orleans with the Patriots that he made the most crucial play of the organization's history. Adam Vinatieri's field goal to beat the Rams in the Super Bowl was set up by Otis Smith's interception of a Kurt Warner pass.

Otis in the right place during the
1999 AFC Divisional Playoffs

Otis Smith blew a lot of coverages for the Jets. Somehow I remember that. But he made big plays - I know that, too. I don't recall any of these any more memorably than I do my own college days, or my childhood, or the endless numbered autumn Sundays I have spent staring at the TV over the years, worrying about both the Jets and the working week to come. Otis Smith is seventh on the all-time list of career interceptions for touchdowns with eight, seven of which were with the Jets. It's the most exciting play in football. And the fact that Otis Smith had the potential to bring into being the most explosive change of a game's course meant that he had a special magic that could transcend a Sunday's bland, mundane depression. That's why he's one of my favorites.  I will hear no debate.

NY Jets #45 - Part 2

I remember 1983 as bleak. I remember getting in trouble. I remember being 14 and unable to focus on homework. I just talked to girls, walking around the hallways, hoping to get some attention. I was also on the cross-country team and on my way to a varsity season as a freshman, but I loathed it. Most people approach their day of competition with a zombified dread, the kind #45 Dwayne Crutchfield described in Sports Illustrated as a college senior running back at Iowa State in 1981. You just feel like one of Sartre's characters in No Exit, thinking that this may be the day that you die, or maybe it's not. I would throw up before meets and spend most of my time on the bus thinking that if I didn't die, it might just be the day I crap myself in fear. Literally.

I hate competition. I still pale in the face of it. In cross-country, I competed against myself. As you leave the aural mayhem of the starting line and endure the near panic of the first mile, you enter into a meditative place of solitude with pain. Your adversaries disappear in and around your peripheral, the gentle quiet of the long course becomes your background and you don't pay attention to anything but your own breathing and your constant dialogue with the desire to give up. I ran fast and well, but I know I didn't run competitively, which didn't bother the coach at the time because I was simply a promising young runner. When I quit right before the next year, he was furious. I don't blame him, but I felt liberated from having to endure pain for no other reason other than endure it. I didn't want to win any more than I was afraid to lose. And I am a Jets fan. I wasn't afraid to lose.

If Dwayne Crutchfield had known about losing any more than winning, perhaps he would have been ready for a career that was typically short for the NFL. Observe how often in the SI article it's mentioned that, as a promising draft choice for the following year he had a low "center of gravity." Today a running back needs to be powerful but short, explosive, compact. He needs to be a Honda Accord that drives through walls. Your adversaries do not disappear. They envelope and collapse around you. Or so it certainly seems. The model for such people is still LaDanian Tomlinson, although he is a senior citizen at the position for the Jets. In 1981, Earl Campbell was still the model, with a low center of gravity and huge thighs, which are also a weirdly mentioned attribute in Dwayne Crutchfield, as if he were a piece of livestock.


(The photo comes by way of "Steve K" on UniWatch - the ridiculously, beautifully obsessive website. Steve "was watching some old NFL footage and spotted Jets FB Dwayne Crutchfield wearing a non-standard NOB font." In other words, his name is sewn on with a different typeset than, say, Marvin Powell or Scott Dierking next to him. If you were a uniform geek, you'd know what that mean, too. When I was a kid, I noticed these things. Now I know I am not alone.)


The game chews you up at the core of the line and spits you out. After a promising rookie season where he ran for 577 yards, Dwayne Crutchfield then gained almost an identical amount in 11 games in the middle of 1983 but was immediately traded to Earl Campbell's Houston Oilers. He would have one more year with the Rams. Earl Campbell followed Bum Phillips to New Orleans, where he played little longer, while Houson went to the air with Warren Moon. Because of his low center of gravity, Earl Campbell is today sometimes wheelchair bound at the age of 55. Perhaps Dwayne Crutchfield was fortunate enough to carry the ball much less than Earl. Don't be afraid to lose sometimes. It hurts much less.

And don't be afraid to be wrong. When I first wrote about #39, which was only six numbers and a year and a half ago, I noted that safety Harry Howard played one year for the Jets in 1976, and even then, apparently only one game. You can still find the write-up on the all-time roster here, though it mistakenly offers #45 Louie Giammona's information instead. Harry Howard remains a mystery. The Jets' site, more focused on the exciting Now, has little time to offer anything of interest about the past; the all-time roster is temporarily inaccessible beyond just giving names and numbers. Maybe because they need to clean up the errors. Maybe because they just don't care about the past anymore. Jets aren't losers (the Past). Jets are winners (the Present). No mistakes.

In Louie Giammona's write-up on Harry Howard's page, Lou Holtz is quoted in 1976 as saying, "when you list height, weight, speed, statistics and the intangibles without a name, there is no difference between Louie and Archie Griffin." Guess which player won the Heisman twice? When you think about it, the quote says more about Lou Holtz's one year of professional football coaching than it does about Giammona's potential. Lou Holtz was wrong, but then all of us have intangibles without a name. These may not make us stars, but they will pay off somehow.

(Giammona is here seen playing against the Patriots in a 1976 loss at Shea, which was the last game Dad and I attended while on his season tickets. Though I think I remember it being was too cold for short sleeves, the database tells me that Giammona gained 26 yards that day, while there are no actual statistics for him in 1977, the only other year he was technically a Jet.)

The note about his induction into the Utah State Hall of Fame mentions that after he joined the Philadelphia Eagles in 1978, Giacomma eventually became the Team Captain for an Eagles squad that won more often than they lost and went to the Super Bowl in January 1981. At 5'9", his good luck may simply been those intangibles: he was plucky (that word again) and tough in the way that Dick Vermeil obviously liked (see Mark Wahlberg in Invincible), and he also came from the same town in California as Vermeil. In this sense, there can still can be distinction born from mere attitude and origin. The Jets all-time roster, its full information indefinitely on hold, was wrong about Harry Hamilton, but maybe Lou Holtz was right about Louie Giacomma without really knowing why.

Take a Picture

It's important for any man to remember that when he sends a picture of his own sexual organ to, well, anyone, he's bound to be become a social pariah, but I think it's incumbent upon me to remind no one in particular that Braylon Edwards' DUI drew a mere quarter punishment. And that is wrong.

Was there ever a time when it was OK for man to send a woman a photo of his member? I'm beyond the age and station where it is even appropriate for me to ask a female friend this question (I'm as old as Brett Favre, of course). But I suspect that the answer would be no. A man receiving a comparable photograph from a woman might well be lead to think he's won the lottery, but even the most eager of men might be compelled to wonder whether or not the female in question (whom he knows about as well as Jenn Sterger personally knew Brett Favre in 2008) has been snorting cocaine. My own wife says that she would go to a friend and ask what was wrong with me if I took pictures of my dong and sent them to her. It sounds unfair, but as I'm writing this, I guess it would be bizarre, wouldn't it? "But honey, I'm love crazy?"

But if there was ever time when it was OK, it was only so because a Polaroid picture taken in 1979 could never have been shared among hundreds of millions of people at once, unless its existence went by way of urban legend. I choose 1979 because that was the last time the Jets played Minnesota at home on Monday Night. (I don't think Tommy Kramer sent any Polaroids of his alter ego that year.) I'd also like to take this moment to add something to the record of #37 Tim Moresco, who recovered a fumble in the Jets' 14-7 victory over the Vikings that year. He also set up a Kevin Long touchdown for the Jets against the Cleveland Browns in 1978 by stripping a fumble on a kickoff. I never mentioned that in Moresco's original entry.

How do I know this? I wish I could claim to remember what happened that late December when I was nine and heartbroken, but I can't. I remember watching that Browns game and hearing Spencer Ross and Sam DeLuca on WCBS radio saying how cold it was in Cleveland. But the proliferation of old games on YouTube has become absolutely indispensable for a football dork like me who enjoys, as my wife puts it, "used sports." I mean, look at Norm Snead. Just look at him. He looks like a man who has been pulled from the Franklin Field crowd to fill in for the Eagles at quarterback. For every unwanted dong on the Internet, there's a 1975 Monday Night Football matchup between the Steelers and the Rams. So there's progress.

Finally, it's October in Philadelphia, and for the fourth year in a row, the Phillies are in the playoffs, and everybody in this bipolar city wants to play the Yankees in the World Series. As much as this has been a special series with the Reds, the Phils must hit more than they have been in order to support their extraordinary pitching staff if they're going to beat the Giants. Secondly....no. Just no. What kind of hubris drives a host of fans who normally support a franchise that once let Norm Snead run around in the cold with just his football uniform think it's OK to invoke the Fates to weave something especially bad for them? Why wish for the Yankees? Everyone I speak to here seems to think they're Leonidas' Spartans. If the Jets managed to make it to the Super Bowl this year and were matched against residents of the Grace Presbyterian Village senior center in Dallas and won handily, I would still jump up and down with the same euphoria I would feel if they defeated the Saints. A championship is a championship.

NY Jets #45 - Part 1

There both is a Kern River and a Carson Falls, each located in Southern California, which is utterly unrelated, except by name and general location to Kern Carson, graduate of San Diego State University and running back for both the San Diego Chargers in the early 60's and for the New York Jets in 1965. For the Jets, he wore #45.

He also passed away in 2002. The only other bit of information I found about him is that he was born in 1942 in Hope, Arkansas. So, in the moments of his infant life, did he ever once see the passing carriage of a little boy named Billy Blythe, whose momma later married Roger Clinton of Hot Springs? Who knows? I'm certain that I probably walked the same grocery aisles with my own mother that Debbie Gibson did as a child in Merrick, NY. So, there you are. Brushes with greatness.

****

A man named Oliver Celestin must certainly come from New Orleans. The name Oliver has a resonance in the city. His first seasons were as an undrafted free agent at #45 with the Jets, and his best season was with us, with 25 tackles in 2005, which then saw him on his way to Seattle the next year, hot on the heels of the Seahawks' dubious loss to Big Ben in the Super Bowl. Then he played for the Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl two years later. Oliver Celestin has been closer to the big game more often than most New York Jets can ever claim, and yet his career was forced to end with the UFL's New York team, the Sentinels.

That's right. Don't act like you didn't know that New York had a UFL team for nine weeks. They played at Shuart Stadium at Hofstra, where I used to go see the Jets play scrimmages during training camp in the 70's while trying to weasel extra autographs from the likes of Wesley Walker.

You didn't you even know the New York Sentinels existed? Well, me neither. Seriously. Here, I'll show you their uniforms:


Except, this doesn't do you much good, does it? Because after winning nary a game in 2009, the New York Sentinels promptly packed their bags and moved to -

wait for it....

That's right! Hartford! Very good. They are now the Colonials of Hartford, as of this year. And their uniforms look like this:

It's hard to get excited about a team that basically looks like the football equivalent of the Milwaukee Brewers. According to Wikipedia: "Colonials was not one of the four names voters could choose from, but was said to become an 'overwhelming favorite' among the fan suggested names," which means that no one in Hartford cared to vote in the first place. And if the UFL weren't a doomed enterprise, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything, imagine for a moment what could have been. Instead of just being a tax write-off, imagine a Lamar Hunt or an Al Davis wiping that corn-fed smile off of Roger Goodell's face, explanding a market that could compete with America's flagship league.

Ah, well. Business as usual. They don't make entrepreneurs like they used to. The Hartford team does not play Oliver Celestin now, but then the Colonials don't play even close to capacity at UConn's Renschler Field, either. The league and its people will be a distant memory in no time, less bloated than the USFL, with uniforms much less cool than than the WFL. So who weeps for Oliver Celestin, with his NFC Championship ring? Not I.

****

Were I to travel the short distance from my home in East Falls to Chester, Pennsylvania, I would be near the haunts of Dick Christy #45, a running back whose time and place in our history is as forgotten as the relative blue collar success of Chester itself, whose Ford auto plant closed in 1961, the same year Dick Christy joined the New York Titans. Today Chester is a little piece of rust belt outside of Philadelphia, a region notorious for crime and poverty since the 60's. They have a racetrack there, which is the usual gesture of a hopeless community, although in an act of unique creativity, the Philadelphia Union MLS club chose to build their soccer-only stadium there. And that's cool.

But Dick Christy himself is gone for good. After playing for both the Titans and the Jets (1961, 63) he was then killed on July 8, 1966 in a single auto accident back home in Philadelphia. There is little to clarify anything more than that. What happened?

But when you were once a star for an unlikely ACC championship team like North Carolina State in 1958, the alumni memorializes you accordingly. Though he may have traveled far from home when he attended NC State, Dick Christy chose the Wolfpack because they were the only school that would allow him to play on the squad and marry his Chester sweetheart.

But Dick's not to be confused with Earl Christy, the man who replaced him in #45. My wife wondered somewhat cynically if they simply replaced one Christy at #45 for another. I imagine that Sonny Werblin's budget was more expansive than that. Earl Christy played defensive back for the Jets from 1966-68, and was also a return man. Dick Christy seemed to have been the rough-hewn, straight-jawed boy from an industrial town. Earl Christy, on the other hand, seems like a visitor from outer space. First, he is not to be mistaken for the prolific magazine illustrator. In fact, Earl Christy the Jet has the distinction of playing the proverbial bookend to the nadir and zenith of the Jets' moments against their most hated 1968 rival, the Oakland Raiders.

First, there's the Heidi Game, the extraordinary watershed moment in the history of TV's coverage of professional football. The histrionics of the game itself are well-known: fights, penalties, ejections, then a little girl trapsing through the Alps. We know this already. With the Raiders ahead with 1:05 to go, their kickoff went to Earl Christy (move to 1:25 in the link), who fumbled it at the 10, with the Raiders recovering in the end zone. Raiders 43 Jets 32. This was the nadir.

Then, leap ahead a few weeks later, to Shea Stadium and the AFL Championship against Oakland. After the Raiders scored in the fourth quarter to take the lead at 23-20, Christy takes the kickoff and runs it back 32 yards to set up a Namath pass to Sauer, followed by Namath's wild throw to Don Maynard, which then set up the clinching touchdown. This is what athletes must do. They must shake off the goat. It is what we all must do.

But Earl Christy, Super Bowl champion, is quite an active fellow. He is an apparent spokesman for any and every anti-aging medicinal made from deer antler velvet. Yep. And sure, he gives motivational speeches to Jets fans in Tampa Bay, who appear to be under the big tent for nothing else other than the buffalo wings. But the man is clearly on fire. Are you?

But Earl Christy also promotes Chi Machine International, an apparently international organization geared around, well, the Chi Machine. If it sounds vaguely Scientological, that's because it involves a 110 volt machine, your spinal alignment, and your personal life force energy flow. I will let you, gentle reader, peruse the information and judge for yourself.

But what's most compelling about Earl Christy - the omega of the Heidi Game and the alpha of the drive that put the Jets into the Super Bowl - is what his bio for the Chi Machine International reveals to us. He is apparently an:

"Outstanding athlete, football coach, broadcaster for over 30 years, team member of Harlem Wizards exhibition show basketball team, elementary school teacher of the year, Chief of nine villages in Ghana, motivational speaker and founder of Athletes For Education Association (AFEA)."

Let's see: Harlem Wizards basketball team? Check. A teacher of the year - well, I think that's pretty incredible. And, ah, broadcaster. Sure. Football coach, no surprise there.  And....lessee...he's...

"Chief of nine villages in Ghana."

Really? I mean, wh-...really? How? I mean, I know #54 Wahoo McDaniel was an actual Choctow-Chickasaw Native American, but he isn't even so much as a greeter at the Chocktaw casino in Durant, Oklahoma. Has Earl Christy has been reading too much Heart of Darkness or something? I mean, are the nine villages in Ghana aware that their property taxes go to Earl Christy? I certainly hope so.