NY Jets #6 - Part 1

Don't be deceived. Through the blur of the heat of a Miami afternoon, you see a #6 dropping back to pass, and you say to yourself, oh yes, that's my quarterback. But then you notice that the Poly-Turf surface is a sign of a different time. You are not hallucinating, nor seeing a mirage of the heat waves from the artificial field. You are not looking at Mark Sanchez. It is 1973. You are looking at Bill Demory. He is dropping back to pass.

There is a special category in New York Jets lore in which Bill Demory #6 fits: quarterbacks who were required to step in when Joe Namath was injured in the early 70's. During the unfortunate 1973 season - a year where the Jets were playing away from home for half the season because the Mets were playing in the postseason - Al Woodall went in for Joe and was then periodically replaced by Bill Demory #6. Quarterbacking is a position that requires so much responsibility, offers so much potential for notoriety, and yet it leaves many well-meaning athletes in the dustbin of history. Covering for Namath in 1973, Demory almost exclusively handed the ball off to Emerson Boozer and John Riggins to earn a 9-7 win, a game that saw him throw the ball seven times, making one completion for all of 11 yards. Then he played fine in a loss against Pittsburgh. Then he beat the Patriots again, this time with a little more command, but then this was the Patriots of the early 70's who were actually a funny team to watch.

Over a period of five games that season, sometimes starting, sometimes in relief for Woodall, he threw 12 for 39 for 159 yards. That doesn't even seem possible. That seems like the below average performance for a single start. So in that action shot above at right, stolen as all things are from the Internet, is the rarest of rare finds: a photograph of Bill Demory passing. The Jets never really had anyone formidable ready to start in Joe's place, so the running game of Boozer and Riggins was its only remaining strength. He did not play in 1974. Thus, travelers, we end our trip down Bill Demory lane, with apologizes to you all for the avoidable pun.

Normally, with exception of high school and pee wee fields, #6 is a backup quarterback's number. Maybe he's a kicker. Maybe he is the quarterback of the team that the hero's squad plays against in football movies. But don't mistake your average Hollywood "Semi-Tough" backup with Bubby Brister. We know that Walter Andrew "Bubby" Brister III was a starting quarterback with Pittsburgh for a while, and he was a backup the rest of his career for the Eagles and then the Jets. But Bubby Brister was feistier than most backups - a shouter, a ranter on the field, a down-home rip-snorter who earns the right to be the winner of the Booth Lustig Award Winner for Downright Goofy Names in the Category of Uniform #6. None of this, though - his guts, his remembered acts of grit, his country-friend nickname - none of this did any earthly good to 3-13 Kotite squad in 1995.

But fortune smiled on Bubby better than it did the Jets. After he left, Bubby Brister became a folk hero on a 1998 Denver Broncos team that nearly went undefeated and eventually beat the Jets in the AFC Championship and then won the Super Bowl. Touche, Bubby Brister. Touche.

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Ah, but we must discuss Doug Brien. Before the end of the 2004 season, he was merely another kicker, a man with the same dream as the one Adam Viniateri once had long ago - to hit the big one to win the playoff game that sends your team on to the next round, and then the next, then the next, like a good luck charm with the golden toe I once told Pat Leahy he had at Hofstra. In retrospect, the 2004 Jets seem as familiar as a cop show, a medical drama, or a courtroom scene. You watch it knowing that the outcome will be resolved in a familiar way. In the end you're a little angry at yourself for watching in the first place. Really, you could have run on the treadmill and watched it on the big screen at the gym with its sound turned down. At 9-3 on December 5, 2004, the Jets went 1-3 the rest of the way, with a 23-7 loss to the Pats. As I say, it was a familiar experience as Decembers went for Jets fans.

They traveled to San Diego, and it was there, after the Jets nearly gave the game away, that Doug Brien hit a field goal to beat the Chargers in the first round of the playoffs. The script picks up from there in Pittsburgh, where the Jets hang tough with the 15-1 Pittsburgh Steelers at heinz Field. Then Doug Brien missed two field goals within the last two minutes, and the Jets lost 20-17.

How could it have happened? One of them glanced the top of the goal post. Each was missed from within the Steelers' 40 yard line. He had made a comparable field goal from 42 yards earlier in the second quarter. I didn't think the 11-6 Jets could win the game in the first place, but Doug Brien's apparent cool under pressure had me thinking off the script, to a world of insane ideas about being in the AFC Championship against Adam Viniateri. Then everything came back down to Earth. Doug Brien missed two field goals. I went to the bathroom and vomited. Doug Brien lost his job.

But what if he had made both of the kicks? Let's go back to 2004. Let's imagine that, like Al Pacino's character Arthur Kirkland in ...And Justice for All, Doug Brien managed to do something off the usual script. Let's say he makes those two field goals, ones that he would have been able to make at any other point in the season, and the Jets win 23-20. They move on and improbably beat the soon-to-be champion Patriots in the AFC Championship. I experience joy.

But really, what happens to me, living as I do in Philadelphia? The Jets play in the Super Bowl against the Philadelphia Eagles, and whatever animus has been set aside by my fellow Philadelphians against their native New Yorker friend evaporates entirely. My claim to their affections has always been that I am not a Giants fan, and that is all that they need to know. One of my colleagues at work suggested that their shared futility makes the Jets and Eagles a kind of cousin to one another, like the King of England and the Czar of Russia. I have relied upon this good faith comradery for years now, and I don't know how in January 2005 I would have recovered from a win over the Eagles in the Super Bowl or a loss, for that matter, knowing that my friends would never really look at me the same ever again, nor I them.

We will never have to worry about it (we never really should even have entertained the thought in the first place) because of Doug Brien, and there is a dull fragment of satisfaction in that for me.

NY Jets #49 - Part 1

Number 49 exists in a purgatorial state. Sometimes a running back, sometimes a linebacker, sometimes a tight end, occasionally a corner, he is rarely the star. He is an opportunist, awaiting his next chance, but only a few minutes away from the cut. Therefore, the list for #49 is a curious mix of players who made little distinction in the pros and, on the average, only about a season and a half with the Jets. It is the most notable list in that sense only; those that came did not stay long.

At cornerback in 1980, Steve Carpenter #49 played pro about as long as the average player in the NFL - two seasons. Originally from the southern Illinois town of Staunton, he attended Western Illinois, was undrafted, played a year for the Jets, then returned to where he more or less came from, and played for the St. Louis football Cardinals for the 1981 season.

There was once a time in my life where you could name any part of the areas in and around St. Louis, and I could tell you what zip code you had. It was a requirement for my job. I was a volunteer coordinator for an adult literacy program, and I had to match volunteers with students. I had a big map at my desk outlined into zip codes, and if you were an adult literacy student in Jennings, MO (63135), I cold find you a volunteer tutor. If you lived in what used to be the old Gaslight district (63108) maybe I could get somebody from Clayton (63105) to lend a hand. But it was harder going in Staunton, Illinois (62088). It was on my map, but I never got any calls from there. And that's my story.

Ten years later, Travis Curtis #49 started as a safety in 1990. He nabbed five interceptions in 1987, his rookie season, with the Cardinals. That was their last year before moving to Phoenix. I remember people telling me while I was in St. Louis in the early 90's, after Bill Bidwell moved his team out west, that people were there at Lambert Airport to jeer them off to Arizona. I could never comprehend that a group of fans would let their team go happily, willingly and, according to reports, joyfully. I just didn't get it. Bidwell moved them from Chicago to St. Louis in 1960, and nobody I ever met in the Mound City ever said they went to a game or even thought about how much fun they were.

In Jonathan Franzen's early novel The Twenty-Seventh City - which near as I remember is a ridiculous story of an Indian (Hindu) woman's takeover of the St. Louis police department - there is a moment when fans are at a Cardinals football game at Busch Stadium when, I think, the scoreboard begins reading gibberish and the entire building catches fire. It's as awkwardly imagined and embarrassing to read as Cardinals football was to watch (at least that's what the natives used to say). In his 1988 review of the novel, Michiko Kakutani wrote that, "Though Mr. Franzen uses language and an adept puzzle-making ability to create a clever narrative of Pynchonesque intricacy, he has a tendency to manufacture complications for the sheer sake of complexity." Did a fan of Cardinals football have any choice but go for broke and light the stadium on fire?

Maybe Franzen wasn't a fan of Cardinals football; I confess I have never been a fan of his writing. I always feel like reading his fiction is like taking a forced march through SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. Instead, he is tiresome. As I recall, in the novel, the nefarious Police Chief S. Jammu wants to unite together the city (i.e., 63103) and the suburban county (i.e., 63115), which would be deeply troubling to anyone, say, like Franzen who has previously waxed in a characteristically defensive manner about the beauty of growing up in the fortunate suburb of Webster Groves (63119). And just in case you were still paying attention, Travis Curtis played a nearly full season for the Jets in the oblivions of Bruce Coslet's 1990 Jets squad, and I have nothing to show for it, except a memory of sweating my way through that particular football season, trying to keep a doomed relationship alive, wondering where I was going to work after college graduation. The answer was St. Louis, apparently then America's 27th largest city. If Jammu had gotten her way, who knows what could have happened? Today St. Louis now our nation's 52nd city. Poor, poor Gateway. I was hoping, for the sake of verisimilitude, that it would be the 49th.

It was a bigger city than #27 in 1971 when George Hoey was drafted by the Cardinals as a defensive back, and in his rookie year, he ran back a kickoff for a touchdown against the Philadelphia Eagles at Busch Stadium. By 1975, white flight had St. Louis in a downward population spiral, and George Hoey was given #49 to wear for five games in the hapless Jets season of 1975, his last in the NFL.

Postcards from the Other Side

I get comments. Quite an impressive number of them for a blog that no one really reads. I get encouraging thoughts and observations. Slimbo helps out a lot, and I love his art work, his observations about his life and obsessions. But other people, people whom I don't know, will check in and tell me they like what I do. That's great. Even my Mom comments in an encouraging fashion from time to time, posing as Anonymous, but I can recognize her voice through the vast series of tubes comprising the Internet. I can't tell you how often I feel like chucking this in, and someone out there will say something interesting or, even better, offer a correction concerning a Jets player about whom I've written.

I get other kinds of commenting - spam, of course. Great stuff, really. Sometimes it's in Chinese, Russian or German. Not long after I wrote about Rex Ryan's love for his lovely wife's feet, I received a comment that began with the following:

"Willkommen im Sex-Community...."

I am absolutely certain that a foreign language porn film from the 70's that, as a teenager, I managed to see through the static of primitive parental controls on our cable box, began with that very line. Welcome to the Sex Community. Germany's such a sexy culture. Kind of.

Or how about this one that starts with:

I sit in the car for about 30minutes when I see my wife and her girlfriend come out...

Stop right there. It's a revenge tragedy. It's an episode of "Red Shoes Diary." It's an old college friend's drunken fantasy designed to enliven his marriage. It's a case of mistaken identity. I love it. I see it going directly to DVD.

I know it's spam when it starts with this:

I love edlsjets.blogspot.com! Here I always find a lot of helpful information for myself.

Ah! Caught you! No you don't. I know you don't. I am absolutely certain that nothing that I offer here is even remotely helpful to you. That is not the point of this blog. Other blogs offer constructive, guiding, redeeming advice and discourse on a number of relevant topics. Again, that is not the purpose of what we do here.

I hit the mother lode of spam back in 2008 when we did the piece on the Booth Lusteg Winners for Funniest-Sounding names. It might be because I cut and pasted the word "hayseed" from dictionary.com, or maybe my lucky number just came up, but I received 37 comments (one or two is more the norm, and one of them is usually me replying) - all spam - offering everything under the sun. Someday, after global warming has its way with us, after the Big Melt, they'll wonder what preoccupied Western culture in its last days. This list of comments gives us some insight: references to free online movies, mail order drugs, Christian lesbian pen pals, something from Vooptomesog, hot Rolex watches, "britney spears butt flash at starbucks," blood for cash, cash for female breast hormones, how to eat selfish (sic) without fear of allergies, penis enlargement (of course), and an enticement for soliciting a New York City escort: "Coming out of the worldly tensions and monotony is just possible with the gracious presence of the New York escort services girls." It's just possible.

There was plenty more, though. Something from a guy named "Marshall," who just thought he'd give a reach-out. There were plenty of offers for online gambling. There was interesting minutiae related to the Man United kit through the years that somehow made its way to this blog, like an errant piece of information heard through shortwave radio. Lots of reminders to play online bingo. And though a guy named "Roland" wasn't sure whether or not the mystery product he believes in is available outside Australia, he just can't get the sound out of his head, and apparently he made out "like a bandit." Would that we all could.

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It's not often, but every once in a while, we'll get mail in the Infinite Jets bag that comes from the other side of the playing fields of my memory - mail from real people and not just figments of my imagination. Often these are written on behalf of someone I've discussed in the Numbers and Names, the New York Jets By the Numbers, or whatever I'm calling it these days.

Of course, of course, of course I realize that each and every human being who wore a Jets uniform had a life after they left the Jets, and sometimes, if I can get information on such things, I'll include it. After all, these men are human beings, and if there is one thing I have tried to communicate on this blog it's just how brief their careers in football are, if not with the Jets. But I only know about as much as my limited attention span and my day job can afford me, and often that's simply not enough. When people write in with additional information, it's fantastic.

For example, when I wrote about Jim Richards #26 in the nearly endless list of 26's, I got a helpful comment alerting me to his service in the army and his eventual success as an engineer. Whether it was written by Richards himself or a friend or family member, I don't know. We sometimes picture these players in some kind of purgatorial place where young men are always players and somehow their dreams were lost to the winds of Fate. But it's not true. That's nonsense, and I know it. I appreciate it when people fill in the gaps. After all, the web's information is long-lasting. Although no one reads my cave scrawlings, they will nevertheless survive through a great deal of time, perhaps even past the Big Melt, provided that a post-apocalyptic Earth has at least dial-up somewhere.

Or there was the time that, in response to my query to the universe about Dainard Paulson #40, I received the comment that he was living in Seattle and that the commenter had been a happy guest in his home "several years ago." And I found that comforting. It was a simple, clear statement without much color, but it gives you the sense of someone real and decent.

And then the other day, a commenter, saying that he was Michael Marvaso, son of #47 Tommy Marvaso, wrote quite declaratively, that I was a "joke." I had, again, with the limited means with which I work alone in my cave, written only about Marvaso's exploits with the Jets in terms of a single play I was able to find online - a YouTube clip of him getting beat for a pass against the Redksins in 1976. Marvaso the Younger wrote:

"You scour the internet to find one pass of him getting beat and decide to put your two cents in on his entire career? Go look harder and you will find his tackling Walter Peyton, OJ Simpson, making John Riggins fumble. Let me tell you something about why Tommy Marvaso was only in the league for 2 years, Chief. He knew that he was not going to live the rest of his live on the money they were making back then. So he went back to school got like 5 degrees and became an executive at Bell Atlantic then continuing to Work for the second largest engineering company in the world . Now he lives the life you dream about and non of it came from football."

I want to make something abundantly clear; although I did not mean to write critically about Mr. Marvaso's father, he certainly construed it that way, and I understand why he's angry. Let me tell you something. If some punk kid wrote online about my father's career in terms of one decision he made, one gaffe, one wrong turn, I would probably be pissed, too. I happen to believe my father is one of the best people alive, so I too would reply to someone who even appeared to suggest otherwise. I might not necessarily make reference to other things that Michael Marvaso makes reference to (yeesh), but I would want to set the record straight. So, I appreciate it, Michael. Thank you.

One thing he took particular exception to was my saying "Gone for good, Tommy." Again, I get why he's mad, but I really didn't mean to suggest something disrespectful to his dad. I was suggesting that gone for good is a feeling, a notion of what it means to be a Jets fan. That didn't get through. Much of this is often an exercise in writing, in thinking aloud, but I realize Tommy Marvaso had a life after football, and now I know it was obviously a successful one. Jesus, I would hope so. But that sense of something being gone for good is what being a Jets fan is, and it appeared a good phrase to use. I'm sorry that it didn't seem that way.

And history is not fair. As he points out, we don't get to see his dad play as well as he really did; I only found a fragment of something online that came in passing. That's not fair at all.

But to reply to the comment in full - no, I never really wanted to be a jock growing up. I never was. I never fit in with athletes but never felt like a loser because of it. I write here about the names and numbers as only as they exist to me in my memory, like the Tramalfadorians in Billy Pilgrim's head. They are the way I gauge the passage of time, the past, the present. But yes, fortunately, I do have a life. I am not a legend that I know of, but if I were, I would think I would probably be one to someone other than my own mother (a very loving mother, nonetheless). And I have a rather happy life, actually. This list of Jets goes on, with or without knowing what happened when the names eventually got separated from the numbers. But that's because as a fan, most players have only the value of what they offered in their uniform. However, I do know these names represent people who are worth far more to their friends and family, and I always appreciate it when someone reminds me of that.