NY Jets #31 - Part 2

I take back what I said about #31. Nothing in our history will ever compare with Antonio Cromartie #31. Let us count his legendary ways:

1) For being a prodigious parent. He will always be a living legend for having difficulty in naming all of his children. Several were conceived the same year. Obviously this is not an acceptable circumstance (nine children with eight women in six states) for anyone who is not a monarch of the Mongol Empire, but I think the hype around Cromartie's on-camera struggle with his children's names was overstated. He names them all in due time, you will notice, though with effort. He knows their birthdays.

2) Cromartie stated something that all of us have known about Tom Brady. Maybe Brady deserves his accolades and his status as one of the greatest ever. Granted he has not fathered children with as many different women as Cromartie, but he will be in the Hall when Cromartie, likely, will not. But Tom Brady is a punk.

I am not alone in thinking this, no less so than I am certain there are people out there who also think that Forrest Gump is, in fact, the worst movie ever made. There aren't many of us, but you cannot deny our existence. We don't necessarily deserve to be heard, but we are strong. Heartache to heartache, we stand. Leading up to vanquishing the Pats in the playoffs, he was asked about Brady as a competitor. He said he didn't care about him, the way that so many athletes who face Brady are compelled to say: it doesn't matter, we are going to play him tough. But Cromartie fearlessly added what all of America - outside of you Pahhts fans and wannabees - instinctively feel, though you may not say it. Take away the hair, the twinkle in his eye, the coach, and his beautiful women, and Tom Brady is what everybody now knows Cromartie believes he is: "an asshole." And for no reason at all, for good measure, I suppose, he added (either previous to that statement or after), "Fuck him." I print these words here because it is worthless to try and feel the effect of their basic truth unless they are spelled out plain as day. What's especially wonderful about the Daily News' cover story at right on the matter is that on game day, two punks were put in their place - Tom Brady and Mike Lupica. Thank you, thank you.

3) Antonio Cromartie made himself an accidental stooge for ownership when he tweeted his wish for the NFLPA to get back to the table and make a deal before the Lockout time. Naturally he was told to keep quiet, remarks about Tom Brady notwithstanding, and he subsequently has. One thing we know about Antonio Cromartie is that he obviously acts in every sense of the word without thinking, and thus he works in the manner of his loud, ribald and frankly peculiar coach. This Jets team as of this writing (3/27/11) with its vaguely interesting controversies is honestly mild by comparison to the cocaine-addled Cowboys of the 90's or the Bengals of any given era after Forrest Gregg, but they are lovably strange, and Cromartie is just another cast member in Ryan's carnie.

Obviously his tweet was foolish, but I genuinely choose to believe that he was saying what I feel purely as a fan as well. The Jets could (here I pause and roll my head around in a sign of self-conscious unease) go the Super Bowl next year. Let's not waste time. Let's get a deal done. Let's make my dream come true. The fan cannot help but feel otherwise; the union man in me knows better and will suffer the consequences as I have, as a Jets fan year after year. I know my place in the universe.

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Ray Green #31? Anybody? How many Ray Greens are there in America right now? How many are born Queens? Probably not as many as there used to be. The Ray Green we are thinking of played one season with us - 2005 - and not even a full one. Interestingly, it was also his best season as a pro, with 11 tackles registered in eight games. Then he vanishes and reappears in the Meadowlands in a Giants uniform. He registers a few more tackles in 2003 for Big Blue, then vanishes altogether. Sounds like a strange dream.

Aaron Glenn #31 is and always will be one of my favorite players in a Jets uniform. I suppose it was because like all of us, he had good days and bad. He went to the Pro Bowl twice as a Jet, which is impressive considering our sometimes problematic history with the concept of a secondary. No player that I can recall had such a visible range of good and bad, but with all of the shifting of philosophy that goes on in secondaries - from man-to-man to two-deep and three-deep zones, playing back, playing forward, playing for other guys who are injured in positions who are expected to fill and know completely - it was hard to blame him entirely for the worst it. He has also been a journeyman since leaving us and is still apparently playing, although on injured reserve for the Saints. And - always my favorite detail - Aaron Glenn comes originally from Humble, Texas.

I'm not sure how many games in 2005 Jeremy LeSueur played for us while wearing #31 and playing cornerback. I know that he had quite a bright career at Michigan, though. What amazed me, was the remarkable discussion forum on the web one finds immediately while searching his name. For Paddy Chayefsky, television was democracy at its ugliest, but I argue that this was only because internet discussion boards about women dating professional athletes weren't available yet. This discussion, entitled, "Does Jeremy LeSueur have a girlfriend? Is he dating someone? Is he married? Would you date him? Did you date him?" proves there are worse things than the redundancies of TV. Ladies, as one anonymous person apparently puts it, "I know everyone is laid off but damm (sic), it has to be something we can do besides this lol!!" Girl, you know it's true. Remember what people say about Antonio.

Finally, there's #31, Bill Mathis, one of four original New York Titans to play in Super Bowl III. It must have been a complicated business for a pioneer AFL player like Mathis - who had been the team's best runner in 1961 - to discover himself playing as a supporting player for a more profitable AFL later in the decade. But Bill Mathis did play regularly and effectively behind Emerson Boozer and Matt Snell in 1968. Mathis was known for a toughness made obvious when he broke his collarbone in 1961 with the Titans, for he played on with a broken collarbone regardless. (I love how Wikipedia puts it: "He played in the next game, and in fact in all the remaining games of the season." That quote had to have been written by a storyteller.) When a player's livelihood - even in the form of Harry Wismer's bouncing checks - depended on his playing, he played with a broken collarbone. Can you imagine such a player today?

NY Jets #49 - Part 3

As I said earlier, there is something about the #49 - or about any number on the cusp of turning over to another tenth - that it does not attract a great many players, nor many players who stay long. I wonder if, when he is given this number, a player says, "Oh. I see how it is." Look at #'s 19, 29, 39, and you'll find some of the least notable Jets players among a franchise roster that doesn't count many legends.

But in each, there are notable exceptions. Keyshawn Johnson #19. Bake Turner and Leon Washington in #29. Johnny Johnson #39. Here we acknowledge Tony Paige, who played for the Jets in #49 from 1984-1986. During the Jets very best showing, Paige was a steady presence in the backfield alongside the more prominent running machine, Freeman McNeil. After the sad, sad end to the 1986 season, he then played for the Lions and, more crucially, the Dolphins. I remember how sore it always felt to see people like Woody Bennett and Tony Paige in the backfield for the dread Fish. Paige played the way fellows like him are expected to. He ran short yardage, he blocked for McNeil, he took short passes. He made 469 yards in receptions for the Dolphins in his second-to-last season for them, 1991.

He is currently a sports agent - which I'm surprised more former player's aren't - in this case for Perennial Sports Management. He is the agent for Kris Jenkins #77, and apparently the organization itself claims it has signed Cam Newton for representation, which is a little like Diaghilev signing Nijinsky, only without all the homoeroticism. This is a bizarre time to represent football players and agents obviously, due to the Lockout that will likely negate the entire season (a circumstance for which I am obviously in denial, as I never, ever write about it; why write about something that you don't want to happen? It's why I actually couldn't be a journalist). Plus Jenkins was released by the Jets a month ago, after a heartbreaking injury to his ACL toward the beginning of last season. Altogether, the Lockout is a weird place to be for Tony Paige. Agents tend to rebound regardless, probably more easily than do players. Kris Jenkins was quoted as saying that "Tony has always been with me, every step of the way. If it wasn’t for Tony then I probably wouldn’t be in the game at this point." One would hope Tony will still be with him now.

To his credit (although this is probably the kind of spin that modern agents are expected to use), Tony Paige does say on the Perennial website that in the world outside of football that:

"...The problem is, your career as an athlete won’t last forever...the average NFL career is about three and a half seasons and in the NBA, the average player is around for less than four years.

Because of this, athletes need to be smart about the money they make during their short active years. They need to save, invest well, start companies and foundations and begin making inroads to a post-sports career."

This is something that I've tried to consistently make note of - the disposibility of professional football players. Perhaps Tony Paige is exactly the kind to guide men like Jenkins in this sense.

Did I just say that about an agent?

*

On an entirely different subject, Tony Paige plays a part in an adolescent, subconscious experience (in other words, a dream) that I still recall vividly to this day.

It was February 1987. I was 17. The Giants had beaten the Broncos in Super Bowl XXI 39-20 maybe a week or so before. I had watched the game with friends, thinking about how my Jets had been just weeks away from the very same game. No pain will leave you like the first great betrayal of your life, and Mark Gastineau's late hit on Bernie Kosar in the 1987 AFC Divisional Playoffs is a pain that will be with me long after I have been left as an friendless, miserable old man in a nursing home. I will still be crying "NO! NO! A FLAG! SHIT! OH SHIT!" and the nursing home attendants will ignore me with the disdain that they reserve for the facility's most incontinent, deranged old fools.

Anyway, I had a dream some nights after Super Bowl XXI that the Jets beat the Bears in the very same Super Bowl. (Ironically, both the Bears and the Jets had lost earlier on the playoffs the same weekend to the Redskins and the Browns, respectively - the two teams that the Giants and the Broncos would then beat in their conference championships.) The dream goes like this: it is midway through the fourth quarter. The Jets are up by one over the Bears. Night has fallen on Pasadena. Our quarterback takes the snap somewhere in Bear territory. He is neither Pat Ryan nor Ken O'Brien, but John Rogan. Yes. You don't know who he is, except that he played for Yale in the early 80's and was apparently signed (briefly) or was a walk-on for the Jets in 1982 right after his graduation. I don't think he took a snap for the Jets, but he apparently he played for the Montreal Alouettes from 1982 to '83. Somewhere, around 1982 (this is still reality now), I think I must have read some kind of article in Newsday or the Times when I was maybe about 12 or 13 about John Rogan trying out for the Jets when he was a rookie. This article chiseled itself profoundly into my memory, waiting for a moment when my mind needed a mythology to condole me (as mythologies do) and it provided a fine, unconscious antidote to reality.

Back in the dream, John Rogan, quarterbacking the Jets in Pasadena for the Lombardi Trophy, hands the ball off to Johnny Hector who then laterals it to Tony Paige #49, who then throws the ball accurately back to Rogan, who is now streaking down the sideline - a kind of play that John Elway used to sometimes run - with only a barely recovered Dave Duerson or Gary Fencik for the Bears coming too late to tackle him. The Jets win the Super Bowl by eight. Maybe they tag on a field goal, too. Who knows.

In real life, John Rogan does still exist. Today he works for a group that, near as I can tell, recruits "high-level senior associates for corporate clients," which sounds like finding matches among high-level executives, board members and corporations. Perhaps he and Tony Paige could trade notes on millionaires.

I woke from my dream filled with a nervous joy that quickly dissipated when I realized that it wasn't real; but unlike other such dreams, the vivid feeling of happiness it gave me has remained with me even to this day. I can still see it happen through my mind's eye. It wasn't real, but it felt real. They didn't win, but somewhere in the cosmic infinite of one human subconsciousness, they did. John Rogan was a hero. And so was Tony Paige.

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Tony Richardson #49 blocked for Marcus Allen and Priest Homes in Kansas City; he blocked for Adrian Peterson in Minnesota and then for Thomas Jones and Shonn Greene in New York. An article in SI from last year gives some sense of how valuable yet expendable men like him really are. Though at pressing 40, the man can hardly complain. He's made good work of it, and he is the offensive equivalent of a mensch. He's a guy who's job is to be in front of you while you run for daylight. This is a man who shouldn't worry about having a future career beyond football because he's probably got a plan. Most men who block for stars do. At least that's my conjecture, but I assume he knows something that a lot of other players don't.

I knew we'd have to return to the subject of the Lockout. Historically, Richardson is a member of the NFLPA's board, and his article in the Huffington Post doesn't have anything new to say from the point of view of players facing the Lockout: football is popular, fans are being cheated by the Lockout, owners won't open up their books, players are already giving up enough as it is. But we all know that players will ultimately be blamed for the the absence of football this season. Eventually, players are expected to give in, despite how grotesquely wealthy and cynically bloated the ownership really is. Remember what Tony Paige said: players "need to save, invest well, start companies and foundations and begin making inroads to a post-sports career." They are the expendables, whether they like it or not. The owners are not, only because they have actual control over the comfort of their fans, as well as more long-term cash.

In the end, the unionized worker can certainly expect that he will eventually be asked by a mostly underpaid, non-unionized public, "What makes you so special? How come you're different from everybody else?" In our culture, we always take it for granted that it's perfectly normal that there should be rich men who make enormous contributions to political campaigns, who gouge prices, who move their businesses where the labor is cheapest, and imagine with a hubris characteristic of Gaddafi that their money is their ultimate self-justification. For some reason in America these persons are seen as more worthy of the wealth they possess than the unionized workers whose labor fills their coffers.

As a teacher, a person sometimes told that I don't have a "real" job because I have part of the year off, I can honestly sympathize with grossly paid football players whose season lasts from September to January. I know (as I've learned in Wisconsin recently) that when push comes to shove, management will spin it to make it look like union labor is taking advantage of low-wage non-union people in hard times. And that is garbage.

So here's to you, Tony Richardson. I honestly don't mind how much you make. Yes, it's a bucketload more than I earn. I'll continue to root for football players who are "overpaid" throughout the darkening months each year because they're work is what makes football what it is. Football is not Jerry Jones, not Bud Adams, not Bill Bidwill, not the Irsays, not former owner Art Modell, not Mike Brown, not Pat Bowlen, Daniel Snyder, nor even the Rooneys or Woody Johnson. They call their teams their "product." When I am bereft of happiness on Sundays next season, I'll know it was the owners' fault that the Lockout was put in place. Money speaks for money just as the devil speaks for his own.

NY Jets #49 - Part 2

There are no real NFL statistics on the game by game career of Troy Johnson #49 who played for the Jets from 1990-91. Of course, if the Jets web site is to be believed, then he wore #49 for a period of time, but the pro football database reminds us he was eventually given his #95, the number he also wore for the Chicago Bears, who drafted him in 1987. According to PFD, he registered a sack with the Bears and four with the Jets in 1990. Aside from that, we will have to wait until #95 to offer anything more than just this short video compilation from theGoodMagneto of his play at Oklahoma, at a time when the Sooners were King. If a compilation of my play at college were offered on YouTube, it would include segments with me sitting in my apartment, eating pasta in my underwear and scratching my head with a fork.

And there's college again, staring at us in the face. For the exceptional athlete, college is in an inversely proportionate relationship to the rest of us. Were you the captain of your team in college? No. Do you call yourself a Conference Champion? No. Forgive me for speaking for you, but no. Eric Kattus #49 did and does. Frankly I wish the standard Wikipedia entry (on which I rely too often) on a former NFL player would be better if it told more about the lives and times of players after they played (I would get a lot less angry commentary if this were so). The truth is (and here I paraphrase Our Master), Kattus then started on and off for the Cincinnati Bengals from 1986-91, the Bengals' last, great glory years ("Child, please..."). Recall that Bruce Coslet was hired on the basis of his work with the Bengals during that time. Oddly, Wikiwonka has no more than this to say in Kattus' work with the Bengals of 1988:

"The Bengal playoff run that season was best remembered for the Ickey Shuffle."

Really? That's all? Not Sam Wyche's no-huddle offense? Not Anthony Munoz, James Brooks, or Eddie Brown? Not Tim Krumrie's flapping leg? (yeush). Not even Turk Schonert? The Ickey Shuffle. Boomer Esaison can take small comfort from that. I was once able to perform the Ickey Shuffle for my wife in front of our car while she sat bored in the driver's seat and I was waiting for the gas pump to finish. She was vaguely entertained.

Then, when time was running out on his career, Kattus was called up by the Jets in 1992 when tight end Johnny Mitchell, and all the hopes that accompanied him, was injured. Kattus' NFL career ended when Mitchell came back. Would that Eric had stayed, frankly.

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Ed Marinaro, 1976

When John Riggins left the Jets at the end of 1975, there was no one to replace him in the backfield. For years Riggins and Emerson Boozer had carried the Jets' offense when Namath's aerial attack either went awry or was on the sideline. The beginning of the post-Riggins era was Ed Marinaro #49, and his time with us didn't last past 1976. He scored two touchdowns that season and rushed for 332 yards, with about 100 yards receiving. Mom and Dad went to see him play against the Bills at Shea, and Mom came back saying he was the star that day. In fact, he scored the first touchdown of the game and rushed for 119 yards in a 17-14 win. I must not have really thought about it, but somehow I must have known that Ed Marinaro was no more John Riggins than “Leo, Bo's friend from the Merchant Marines” was “Mitch Hendon, a threatening presence in Springfield who rightly suspicious of his wife Ramona’s relationship with her personal assistant.” Figure that one out and you’ve got a prize.

But let's not be too obscure. Like Namath, John Dockery, and even little Mike Adamle, Ed Marinaro had a successful showbiz career after the Jets - a legitimate acting career, one might say. There was a point where I actually started seeing him on TV and would think, "There's TV's Ed Marinaro," not "There's former Jet Ed Marinaro." First, he began as a little-known downstairs character from Laverne and Shirley after the Milwaukee pair jumped the shark and moved out to Hollywood. Then he was Joe Coffey, the flatfoot cop on Hill Street Blues, who died at the end of season one but was apparently so popular that they brought him back for season two.

If you go to Ebay, you can find a combination SI cover/head shot for Ed Marinaro, signed. He disappeared altogether by season six. Ah, the 80's. You never really knew if your death was temporary, just Victoria Principal's dream, or perhaps the snow globe figment of an autistic child's imagination.

Lest we forget, he came to the NFL a year after Riggins, and recall that Marinaro was a very close runner-up to Auburn's Pat Sullivan for the 1971 Heisman Trophy. We know that Riggins' signature goes for much more, but does Riggins' head shot fetch as much as Marinaro's?

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But why didn't Emerson Boozer ever had an acting career.Why? It keeps me awake at night.

NY Jets #6 - Part 2

Until recently, the most important #6 in New York Jets history was Ray Lucas, and for half a season - the ill-fated one in 1999 - he was the Jets' starter. He was the greatest overachiever at a position that is traditionally mixed with promise, hope, misery and disappointment for the Jets. When all of us had so many big dreams for that season, starting quarterback Vinny Testaverde went down in the opener with a snapped Achilles tendon, and there was literally no one ready to take his place. You can blame Bill Parcells for both those situations. Right before the season opener, he ordered the grass they were planning to use be replaced by an artificial turf that caught Vinny's foot in the hot sun and helped snap his tendon. You can blame Parcells for not having any decent backup. I still do.

By the bye week, the leaderless Jets played themselves out of the playoffs. But then Ray Lucas took over and lead the Jets to a .500 finish. Parcells called it (at the time) his finest achievement in coaching. I prefer to thank Ray Lucas. He became a Dolphin in 2000 and then fell off the high wire, but for eight games in 1999, Ray Lucas was one of the the most successful QB's in the AFC. Today, if I wanted to say anything bad about Mark Sanchez (and it's going to be a half-hearted effort below to do so, let me say) then I would wear Ray Lucas' jersey to a Jets game.

Joe Prokop #6 is found in many of longtime Jets' placekicker Pat Leahy's best photographs because Prokop was the holder on Leahy's kicks during the 1990 season, the year Leahy was voted team MVP. Prokop was also the Jets' punter from 1988-90. He would be our Booth Lustig Award winner if not for a man named Bubby Brister. That's distinction in the world of the Gang Green for you. But on one very dull afternoon in another one of Bruce Coslet's (er, Joe Walton) unfortunate seasons (1989) Joe Prokop apparently took the ball at the snap of a Pat Leahy field goal and ran it in for a 17 yard touchdown in a losing effort against the Patriots. This must have been the design of the play. The well-traveled handler and punter was given his moment, and he took it. Life is worth living for a host of reasons that may seem mundane to anyone not looking very closely, the way one never really notices the man holding the ball for the placekicker. Doing your job well and dependably is its own reward, and I hope I don't sound too much like a high school teacher when I say that such things make life worth living. But who in the world would sneeze at the chance to run it past the point of things as they are? Who wouldn't consider such an opportunity even more worthwhile?

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Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes I make dumb mistakes. In this case, I called Reggie Hodges #6 "Russell" Hodges in my last update and was properly corrected by davidill (as seen below). Now that I have failed to even so much as get his name right, I owe it to this man to paraphrase the very best of the mere tip of the iceberg that the web invariably offers - and who knows, maybe even more. How could I have lost the opportunity to talk about this man? Where to begin?

1) You can follow him on Twitter, and when you do, you will see a man who is happy with life, or at least happy in the way that Twitter presents all of us, in 140 characters or less. Reggie exists in a spectrum of experience by which I am fascinated. He believes in Jesus as an active, living presence in his life. I grew up Roman Catholic, and though there are many ways of believing in Christianity as a Catholic, I confess I never wrote or thought about Jesus in quite the way that a believer like Reggie Hodges does. I often wished that I could as a child, but always He seemed distant and mysterious, talking of love and the end of time all on the same page. Thinking about Jesus truly appears to make him happy (Twitter happy, maybe, but I believe it's the real thing in this case). For me, as a Catholic, Jesus always reminded me (without meaning to, no doubt) of my deep limitations as a human being (Jesus wouldn't have called Reggie Russell, for example, nor vice versa). He was always an example of what we should try to imitate, and He still is. There are people who talk about a personal relationship with Him. I know they're not crazy, but that's not what I have felt. My loss, I guess.

But theology classes never helped cure my sense of alienation from Him. Never mind how extraordinarily diverse the character of Jesus is when you start looking at Him historically. Read Bart Ehrman on the subject (Misquoting Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet) and you are shaken. Jesus has been many things to many people throughout time, but who he actually was historically is a subject of debate. Who He is to a believer like Reggie Hodges, a person of faith, is a matter entirely different. To Hodges, He is as real now as He was then. Hodges says, "I am a servant of God disguised as a punter." That's real stuff. I have always felt that the disguise I wear is just one that sits over another and another and another, to the point where who I am depends on whom I'm talking to. I suppose that this is often what life is like. I always imagine people like Reggie Hodges to be exactly who they say they are to every person to whom they speak, and I suppose that they may be happier than I.

2) There is something poignant to the punter's life. Unless he's Ray Guy, the punter going to be shuttled around as needed. He is not a glorified personage. His #6 is not as desired as, say, Mark Sanchez's. In six seasons, Hodges has officially played for eight teams, though he is signed with the Browns through 2012. His player's biography resembles that of a picaresque's nomadic hero. The Jets signed him when Ben Graham's punts kept falling short and sent him off the following spring. Signed by the Titans the following Fall, he was cut a month later. And though he didn't do it as a Jet, Hodges did something that ranks as a remarkable act among punters. He took a fake for 68 yards, the longest run for a punter in NFL history, and - if it is to be believed - the longest run from scrimmage for the Browns all through the 2010 season. And there you are. God works in mysterious ways.

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I remember sitting at a wedding once next to an older woman who claimed that she had spent some time in her early 20's in Miami during the weeks leading up to Super Bowl III with Joe Namath. She never said in what capacity this time was spent. When you read about Namath's record of liaisons in Mark Kriegal's biography, it is remarkable. Any man who dated Suzy Storm alone is a star. He had poise.

Mark Sanchez #6 might someday get his own entry on our gloriously unread blog. At first, the funniest part of Mark Sanchez's fame was his overstated attribute of "poise." Deadspin used Sanchez as a poster boy for sports media's absolute dearth of original thought in its profligate use of the word. Because poise was all we were looking for in him, our expectations of his rookie year at the starting position were minimal. What else could we expect from a young, overpaid underwear model? Neil O'Donnell had poise, too, and it didn't do us much good, but he was an old man by football's standards when he was a Jet.

What we've discovered is that Mark Sanchez is intelligent on the field, with a manner of being that is Namath incarnate, the manner of champions who use their own self-confidence to deflect away the fear of failure. I suppose that's what poise is, isn't it? He played like Namath in his first season because he threw more interceptions than touchdowns, though made very good decisions in the postseason in January 2010 which did not involve red, green, and yellow colors on his sleeve, or even handing off to Shonn Greene.

Then in 2010, his numbers improved. He reversed his touchdown to interception ratio, with a QB rating that moved from 63.0 to 75.3. The Jets did their December dive, but they rebounded. When they took the field against the seemingly unbeatable Patriots in Foxboro, I noticed that Sanchez ran out of the tunnel with a calm, blinding confidence in his own happiness that Colisseum spectators must surely have seen in an occasional defenseless Christian who was about to be fed to the beasts. I suppose I would have still remembered that expression even if the Jets had lost. But they didn't. He is our quarterback.

But in case you haven't noticed, people in the field of athletics are twisted. They post very easily found videos about their wives' feet. They father children with different women with the speed of Genghis Khan. They accidentally shoot themselves. They also rape women in the bathrooms of bars, or possibly (well, "possibly" in Sanchez's case) even on college campuses. They send photographs of their penises to women who give them only the vaguest sign of professional interest. Then it all ends up on Deadspin.

Mark Sanchez's possibly/possibly not heated romantic relationship with a 17 year-old fits somewhat squarely into this paradigm - one that befits a person who has grown up believing, through community and educational reinforcement, that he is above the moral law. When people have razzed me about Sanchez's rendezvous with Eliza Kruger, I have caught myself nearly saying the same thing that Eliza said to Mark about her being legal in New York. How can I possibly defend it? I cannot. I certainly know the difference between an adolescent and an adult, but a 24 year-old man should, too. It's not exactly trapping a woman in a bathroom, but it's still morally wrong.

And what's remarkable is that, like Joe Namath in his time, Mark Sanchez could have any woman in any borough of America's largest and most culturally diverse city. But instead he texted a 17 year-old girl from Connecticut. This is also an aspect of the successful athlete's experience. His pampered life cloisters him from the real experiences of failure and success that the rest of us had to have with romance. Apparently the key to a great athlete's psychological growth is his ability to "forgive" himself when he fails on the field. I'm not always so sure that such failures are acceptable off it. This isn't a rationalization, but it is a psychological explanation for why men who take the field against an unbeatable team with the smile of a winner can also appear completely unable to grasp that a sober, intelligent grown woman might be interest in him for something other than his own vanity.

More likely, Mark Sanchez was not interested in conversation, but in exactly the kind of ephemeral, superficial adoration that a 17 year-old girl bestows on the high school's hottest football player. One senses that he needs to join the adult world, not just as an athlete, but as a human being.