NY Jets #51 - Part 3

There were a collection of players drafted by the Jets in 1976 who were integral to the team's growth over the next few years.  Richard Todd was drafted in the first round; Shafer Suggs was drafted second, and Abdul Salaam was drafted seventh.  Greg Buttle #51 was drafted third.  He had the face of a player who was new to me in every way.  He had a little bit of the Dan Haggerty/Grizzly Adams look about him, gazing out upon the new frontier and finding solace in the ursine arms of Gentle Ben.  He was part of the New Way.  The post-Namath Jets - my Jets, not my Dad's - the team that I would watch be rebuilt from scratch, and damn, damn, damn if they didn't just kind of almost pull it off.

No more would I rely on my father's stories of leather-necked men like Al Atkinson, Ralph Baker, Verlon Biggs, Paul Rochester and Jim Hudson.  The Jets would be stocked with nothing but youth.  In terms of average age, the Jets were in 1978 the youngest team in the pros, which is why SI predicted that year they would go 1-15.  They broke even.  By then, Todd, Suggs, Salaam and Buttle were all starters, as were guys drafted in '77.  Buttle played for the Jets his whole career.  He is on the radio for the Jets, and you hear in his voice his North Jersey accent.  Here he offers what I feel is a nice little tribute to Shea Stadium as the Jets' home.  We never got to the game early enough to see what he recalls as throwing footballs into the stands and shaking hands with the fans, but Buttle is right about the closeness to the field.  Fans could get so close that they were right behind the players and couldn't see the game.  Hey, 51.  Move.  And the fact is that fans frequently ran onto the field during the game.  I saw one guy in 1980 run off with a helmet during an impossible Jets loss to the winless New Orleans Saints.

Like his predecessor in number, Greg Buttle came from Penn State, where he was a standout.  My first introduction to him was the home game against New England in his rookie season, which the Jets naturally lost 38-24.  Buttle recovered an Andy Johnson fumble for the first Jets' touchdown of the game, and then intercepted Steve Grogan to set up the second, all in the first half.  Enjoy the harpsichord and Jon Facenda's sonorous voice of God as he speaks at the 5:40 mark.  Facenda quotes Buttle as saying,

"They pay me to practice.  Sunday, I play for nothing."  Facenda adds:  "If all the Jet youngsters hold to that thought, the team will be headed  to the right direction."

Perhaps this is actually the way God looks at us.  If Roche can live up to his resolution to avoid cake in the middle of the day, he should be moving in the right direction.  But I cannot say.  I have no control.  I merely narrate his endeavors at the behest of Ed Sabol as if I can.    

I remember the off-duty cop in front of me turning around and hugging me when Greg Buttle scored that touchdown, his parka smelling like a mixture of cigarette smoke, aftershave, bourbon and leather seats - the smells of postwar men.  I remember his expression when he pulled away, of absolute surprise and delight, a look that I didn't know that a grown man could have.  I suppose I realized then and there what being a fan could do to a person.  The world of men as I had seen it from watching faces as I held my father's hand walking through Queens, was a loud, explosive, mustachioed, grumpy place filled with raspy voices.  My wife says that in the 70's she imagined that her adulthood would be filled with the hairy, grass-smoking people who wore tight white linen shirts and white bell-bottoms, walking along Malibu Beach, listening to Eagles and Carly Simon songs as they played on eight-track.  That's what she saw in her mind's eye as she grew up in Boston.  I imagined the adult world as the off-duty cops who sat in front of my Dad, whose expressions were made dour by the frown of their mustaches.  They were vigilant, dissatisfied, yet hazy all the same.   

I thought it was a world I would have to grow into, but then it never came to me.  It was actually a world in its death throes when I got to it, passing out of existence.  By the time I was an adult, sports was for families and (with the absolute exception of the Lincoln Field in Philadelphia) would no longer tolerate men who smoked cigars in the stands and snuck hard liquor into games.  That was the world of Shea, a place for angry men who waited amid deep sighs and bluster for an instant to turn briefly into children again.  It rarely happened.  But it could happen.  

****

A few years ago I was teaching a star athlete in my Honors English class, which is highly unusual.  Honors English in senior year is usually for the art kids, the kids who take European History and the ones who want to be teachers someday.  Athletes aren't really in that category, but this kid, a lettered track and soccer player, was probably my best student.

Except being the top kid in class wasn't enough for her.  She wanted more.  I don't give out 100% grades on papers, but I do give out A's.  I would give her A's - 93, 94 - but she wanted more.  "What's it going to take for me to get a 96?"  She asked.  "A 97?"

"Look," I told her, "you get good grades.  Why do you need more?"  I know it seemed silly to ask, but these were the highest grades.  She was a senior.  Other students in class were in the slack of spring, uninterested in doing better.  I had to worry about my 11th graders who were failing English in my other class, the ones who cut class and didn't do their homework or were suspended.  I confess I had become acclimated to senioritis in my battle with my juniors.  But not her.

"I need a push.  You have to push me," she said.

"But you already work hard," I said that.  "I recognize that.  I do."

"You don't understand.  You have to push.  You have got to make me give more.  I need to do more."

This is the way athletes are, I realized.  They relied on inspiration from people that mattered to them, and in this case, I was her coach.  I?  A coach?  Since I had never been a successful athlete, I didn't know what that would look like if I tried.  But I had read enough about effective coaches to know what to say next.

****

Bryan Cox #51 played for the Jets from 1998-2000 and was specifically brought to the Jets by Bill Parcells, who loved players whom most of the league had written off as washouts.  I always admired this about the coach, and I do feel like it is the only redeeming thing I can find about him remaining in me.  Consider Ottis Anderson, Jumbo Elliott, Vinny Testaverde - guys that Parcells kept going and working collecting a paycheck.  It always seemed as though these players could alternately mentor the younger players and also prove to the boss that they could still play - a matter on which, it seemed, the boss never seemed to appear entirely convinced.  That's the thing.  In the modern era, it takes a psychological artist to compel people to play for him and him alone.  As he moved from team to team, Parcells took these devotees with him.  Keyshawn Johnson, Richie Anderson and Testaverde all went to Dallas with him.  

Cox is now a defensive coach with the Dolphins, Parcells' current managerial home; it is also where Cox began his career in the early nineties.  In only his second year, he became one of the most feared linebackers almost overnight by recording 14 sacks.  He was the first player I ever saw wear that oversized neck protector.  In the context of the times in which he played, with the heated nature of the rivalry between Buffalo and Miami during that time (in which the Jets played only a bit role) Bryan Cox was seen as the man with the target on his back.  He took the field at Rich Stadium rather famously with his middle fingers extended.  It was hard to take his side, but it was enjoyable to see the fans of Buffalo aghast at him.

Were they so innocent?  This is not a conclusive (or speedy) link, but Cox suggested that the racist hate mail he received from Buffalo fans prior to the game so unnerved him that he behaved "like a child."  It might have been around the time Jack McDowell gave his own Yankee fans the bird.  Good times all around.  I remember taking a ride around Buffalo in a crowded car when I was on a business trip as a glorified assistant, and our tour guide referred to the neighborhood passing by as "where the blacks lived."  That was 1997, some five years after Bryan Cox flipped Buffalo off and became known afterwards an "out-of-control player."  When he came to Jets, I worried like the sensitive fan that I am about his "presence in the locker room."  Today he is a defensive coach and possibly moving up the ranks.  There you are.

My favorite story about him comes in two interpretations.  The first is from the time that the Jets were clinching the AFC East in beautiful 1998; Cox comes to his locker and Parcells has left a gift for him:  a gasoline can half-filled with water, with the simple message:  "Merry Christmas."  In a story about Parcells for 60 Minutes, Cox clarifies the gift by saying that the note also asked Cox if he has "any gas left in the can."  Did he have anything left to give?  The coach needed more.

****

I am through with Bill Parcells, but I knew what I needed to say to my student.  I sat down with her and examined several very specific places where her writing needed stylistic improvement and asked her, tentatively handing the paper back, "Is there any gas left?"

"What?" she asked.

"You heard me," I asked.  "Is there anything left?  Can you give me more?"

She narrowed her eyes.  Suddenly she wasn't in English class.  She was on the field, being pushed for more.  She knew I'm no more a coach than Rex Ryan is a professor of absurdist drama, but I was playing a role.  And she got it.

"Yes," she said.  And the next essay she wrote was not just her personal best but also the overall best of the year.  

NY Jets #51 - Part 2

I've been teaching for 11 years in public school in Pennsylvania, and because of the turnover in the profession, I am now one of the oldest men my large department. I'm 42. That's not that old by comparison to my colleagues in their 20's and early 30's, but I'm still "middle aged" by their definition.  I never quite thought I'd ever be middle aged. But there you go.

When I started teaching, I was surrounded by people in my department much older than I. Most of these veterans had witnessed the massive transformations of youth from about 1964 to 1974, back when it felt as if the power to create order within an institution was transferred from the adults to the children. One of these longtime faculty members, an old, tough man born from Pennsylvania Dutch, said that it was as if the children went home at the end of one school year and came back the next autumn, radically transformed. Nothing could hold their attention, and none of them took authority seriously. Nothing had any relevance to them anymore. The Age of Aquarius had belatedly arrived to a working class neighborhood outside Philadelphia. He said teachers had to go with the new wave of being or simply not survive. The school became an open campus.  Students rewrote curriculum.  He used "USSR" (uninterrupted, sustained, silent reading) in which students could simply bring in anything they wanted to read in class. He adapted, but many didn't and found it impossible and left.


****

Ralph Baker #51 played at linebacker for the Jets during 1964-74, those years of transformation, and like Rogers Alexander, he came from Penn State, though when Joe Paterno was only an assistant. He arrived with the Jets the year before Joe Namath was drafted and left a decade later without having to witness the very worst of Joe's last seasons in Flushing. Baker arrived in New York at a time when you could be forgiven for not sensing the cultural shift to come, and left probably knowing that something profound had already happened.

A pair of turnovers among the 21 he netted in his career with the Jets seem like anchors to this story. One is from 1968, the year of our AFL Championship. With 3:16 left in the AFL Title Game against the Raiders, Daryle Lamonica connects successfully with Fred Bilentnikoff and then throws for Warren Wells, who pulls back, catches the pass, is tackled and then hit late by Jim Hudson, whose 15 yard penalty then puts the Raiders half the distance from the goal line.

LSpear76RCN has cleverly reconstructed portions of the game's original NBC audio with Jim Simpson and Al DeRogatis and illustrated it with the NFL Films' recap. What happens next at 3:31 of the clip is that Lamonica inexplicably throws a lateral pass that goes behind Charlie Smith, perhaps because of the Shea wind. The ball falls to the ground but is still considered free since it's behind the line of scrimmage.  Lamonica knows it, though Smith does not appear to. Ralph Baker knows it, too. He picks up the ball and travels with it downfield into the end zone. It was not advanceable, so the Jets simply got the ball back from where Baker recovered. Had Lamonica gotten to the ball, we might still be speaking of Jim Hudson's blunder the way we do of Gastineau's late hit in 1987. Thank you, Ralph Baker. Somewhere in the midst of my embryonic world, I might have felt my mother leap to her feet when you recovered the ball that Lamonica had thrown so carelessly into the Shea swirl.

Then in 1974, as the Jets are making their late season surge, they are facing the Buffalo Bills at Shea on what appears to be a warm but wet December spell, where the rain has turned the unmanaged field into a muddy glop. The Jets went ahead late in the fourth quarter on a really desperate throw from Joe Namath to Jerome Barkum.  Then Joe Ferguson throws an interception caught off a deflection by Ralph Baker, who, in his eleventh season, in what can only be described as middle age for a football player, takes it 67 yards downfield for a touchdown. Scroll to 6:09 in the clip. The score clinches the win for the Jets, 20-10. As the oldest player on the defense, Baker is mobbed by his teammates beyond the end zone.

Ralph Baker retired after the '74 season. What came after is something of a mystery to me, and only fascinating for where it places him and me, as high school educators. 

According to Wikipedia (the only name in my students' research) in 1979, Ralph Baker "was hired as Vice Principal of the Chief Logan High School in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. The period marked a time of trouble within the rebellious student body." As it is always a patchwork of information gleaned from a variety of scarcely checked sources, Wikipedia is filled with things like this.  What was this trouble? What had happened?  It doesn't say.

The answer seems to come from an account of Baker's tenure at Chief Logan, originally written in 1994 by someone named Caesar Pink, a musical artist and a '79 graduate of Chief Logan.  He portrays the children of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era as disrupting everything institutional around them for no reason other than to create disorder for its own sake. Enter Ralph Baker:

One of the defining factors in this drama was the faculty's decision at the beginning of my senior year to reestablish order and respect for authority among the students. To achieve this they hired a new principal', X-marine sergeant Thomas Best, and am [sic] X-football player who was a member of the New York Jets when they won the superbowel [sic]; vice-princapal [sic] Ralph Backer [sic].

Pink speaks openly about the rampant drug use among students at Chief Logan, at a time when you could openly confront a Vice Principal on a disciplinary issue, the way he apparently did to Ralph Baker in an art class.  Vice Principal Ralph Baker, whose hair had grown a bit like Joe Namath’s in his last years in the NFL, was nevertheless a part of a reaction that was beginning to rumble throughout the public schools in the late 70's, an effort to end the experimentation with having the inmates run the asylum.  

It sounds like an empty struggle on both sides - an ex-football player acting as an administrator (the way so many of them are), posing as a role model with only his Super Bowl ring as his mark of achievement, facing off against a pothead with drug-addled realizations like this one: 

"... as the teacher droned on I found myself thinking about death. I Thought, 'I know I'm going to die so I might as well get out and enjoy life while I can.' "  

How profound.  Still, Pink adds something truthful to his largely sad account of these generations limply clashing with one another in rural Pennsylvania:

I believe it's true that this nihilism was reflected in the youth of that time. I can tell you firsthand that my classmates didn't have a clue why they acted the way they did. Most of them were strangely unaware of Vietnam or the social revolution. The nihilism was a quiet spirit that snuck in through the unconscious and struck out at society with the giant proclamation of our generation: "So What!"  

It's interesting, but when Christian Fundamentalist parents ask me about my curriculum on back-to-school night, they often mention this word nihilism to me, as if by proximity to  Catcher in the Rye, their children might catch it.  They speak as if it were a disease they fear will return where it once flourished, like polio.  

After 1979 came Ronald Reagan and Morning in America, and the insistence that you could avoid drugs by merely saying No.  Nineteen seventy-nine might have been one of the last years when Chief Logan High School was considered a haven of this kind of creeping nihilism. The high school I went to in the mid-80's had plenty of drug use, but not in class. Kids smoked pot and did pills in the bathroom and wrapped cars around telephone poles when they drove drunk around the tight corners and hills of my small town. But things were changing. By the time I became a public school teacher in 2000, the tide had fully turned toward restoring order in high school.  Suddenly, there were dress codes, behavior referrals, standardized grade books, standardized testing.

Today, if there is attrition among teachers it is largely due to the institution itself and its bureaucratic love of order.  The institution is now rigidly defined by the stupidest law since Prohibition - No Child Left Behind - a law that, in its manifestation in Pennsylvania, makes learning less interesting for everyone - teachers, parents and students. Lesson plans are scripted, teaching to the test is mandatory, teaching content is less important than repetitively teaching skills, and developing new ideas in class is less important than having students clinically dissect literature as if it were a rat preserved in formaldehyde.

Trends among students come and go, but at least one of the hallmarks of Pink's account is that there was a sense among young people - albeit ridiculously stoned adolescents - that any institution truly exists only for the purpose of its own self-preservation. If this was true to a teenager then, shouldn't it be particularly evident to their counterparts today? Would it not be advantageous for kids to demand more from their education? And yet, two useless wars later, amid an economy where jobs were long ago sold away to the Third World, I see none of that gleam of righteous indignation among them. Their world is Wikipedia, a patchwork of ideas, without coherence. It almost makes one sentimental for the days of "rebellion" Pink describes.

Though perhaps not. The students I teach are sometimes without manners or apparent self-consciousness, but it doesn't take long to see that their sense of entitlement comes from a lack of intellectual rigor, not from being spoiled. Mostly they want what apparently the children of the old generation of Aquarius didn't - consistency, predictability, affirmation, and the gentle reminder of order. They are different from those in the past who didn't have to struggle with the pervasive cognitive dissonance of the Internet. The class of 1979 may have done a lot of drugs, but for a lot of people the allure of drugs wears off, while the Internet's rewiring of our children's minds is eternal. I would never trade places with a Vice Principal Ralph Baker, arguing with a stoner about detention and suspension across an art classroom, but I still regret that our students are sometimes unaware of their own powers of independent thought.

NY Jets #51 - Part 1

Rogers Alexander #51 was drafted in the fourth round by the Jets as a linebacker - as all #51's are - in 1986. He came from Penn State, a school that has produced linebackers the way that USC produces running backs, the way Tibet produces sherpas, Kenyans marathoners, and Romanians gymnasts. His career in the pros was a spare number of games started for the Jets and then the Patriots in 1987. Rogers Alexander and I took the same journey from New York to New England, from one stage of learning to another - me from high school, he from one professional team to another.  I discovered New England for the first time. No matter where I went, there were people who talked about Buckner's blunder, Bobby Orr, or Havlicek's steal. They asked, like half of Glasgow, if anyone could understand their struggles against a great adversary - against the Lakers, against the Canadiens, against the dread Mets and Yankees. But no one talked about the Patriots. Why would you?

The Celtics were trying to eke out one more good season from Bird, Parrish, Pudge and McHale, while Cam Neeley played for the Boston Bruins. When I moved to Rhode Island, and Alexander played for New England, the Patriots were an embarrassment, an afterthought.  The Patriots were a ruin, as we hope, God willing, they will be again someday. Alexander is still alive and well, and his Facebook page features his devotion to his alma mater, Penn State.

Tuineau Alipate #51 was not a dictator of a Francophile nation, but rather a linebacker for the Jets in 1994. This Times article from that year reveals his true lineage is as the nephew of the then Queen of Tonga. Yes. He recovered a fumble that season and, as Eskanazi writes, he rented place with his wife and children at Point Lookout, a Nassau County Long Island beach where my family would go sometimes go when we lived 15 minutes away. The tone of the article is exactly the kind you find mid-season, usually when the team isn't doing well, and the reporter has some space to fill. Nobody did that better than Eskanazi.  Alipate played another year in the NFL with the Vikings and, near as I can tell, he currently works in real estate in Minneapolis. How can a man from Tonga, located in an archipelago in the beautiful South Pacific Ocean, be happy settled in the frozen place where Roger Staubach's wild throw reached Drew Pearson on the day Fran Tarkenton's father died? I understand nothing.


(Slimbo makes reference below a link to the AFL Title Game and to the Jets' '74 season review I have moved above in #51 - Part 2)

The Booth Lusteg Award - Part 2

It's been almost three long years since we named new winners for the Booth Lusteg Award, commemorating the New York Jets with the funniest-sounding names in franchise history. Here we don't mean to be cruel so much as we do obvious. Many of the people mentioned have already been told that they have a funny sounding name at some point in their lives, probably with the rhetorical question, "Hey, anybody ever tell you you got a funny name?" But if we don't acknowledge the names as funny, then we're not doing our job, and by "our," I mean "my," and by "job," I mean "put off work in my real life that needs to get done."

We had to continue this installment because the first Booth Lusteg Award has been the most clicked entry on our site and, not coincidentally, the most spam-inundated entry at our blog. What is it? An egghead might be able to explain why Russian investors want to sell me property near Chernobyl or why Manhattan escorts are available for me right now - all just because I'm intrigued by names like Don Odegard - but no one's bothered to elaborate. God only knows.

If you have followed us before, there are essential rules to this process. I will merely cut and paste them from the previous awards because it's easier for me to do so than rewrite them or remember them from three years ago:

"You have to take several factors into account while deciding whether a name is funny or not, and even then, it can appear arbitrary. Certain tasteful restrictions do apply, though. A name should not be considered funny because it sounds, as Mario Cuomo used to say, "ethnic..." So you shouldn't say a name is "funny" just because it sounds different to a largely Western, Judeo-Christian ear; I suppose I will be violating that rule.


I also said in the last round: 


"Brett Favre" doesn't sound funny, does it? Ah, but it should. It did once. Admit it. Even if it were pronounced correctly, it would still seem funny. Or French."

The name "Brett Favre" at the period at which I originally wrote in 2008 signified a potentially funny name whose humor was negated by its proliferation throughout American culture, making it automatically not funny in and of itself. But now of course Brett Favre falls under the category of the Browning Nagle Eligibility because his name automatically conjures feelings of shame, defeat and self-recrimination among Jets fans, whereas for a brief period of time, it signified team salvation. No doubt the Vikings have a similar consideration. Now it sounds funny when you say it, and by "funny," I don't mean Ha-ha funny, but rather, Hmmm, how ironic funny. Which is never really all that funny at all.

Anyway, here we are, let's bring them on, from #50 to roughly #25:


#50 - Vernon Gholsten
#49 - George Hoey
#45 - Corky Tharp
#44 - Bert Rechicar
#43 - Jazz Jackson
#42 - Ronnie Lott
#39 - Jehuu Caulcrick
#37 - Skip Lane
#35 - Billy Joe
#33 - Curley Johnson*
#32 - Emerson Boozer*
#31 - Jeremy LaSeur
#30 - Nuu Faaola
#29 - Bill Shockley (honorary)
#26 - Dewey Bohling
#25 - Reggie Tongue
#22 - Danny Woodhead


Two are Browning Nagle choices, one seems like a misprint, one a draft choice gone awry, the rest just sound funny to my ear. *The asterisk signifies an abrupt change in the rules that originally placed Super Bowl III veterans in the exclusionary zone for consideration, much the way, at one time, a gentleman's agreement among city planners in Philadelphia forbid a single building to be constructed higher than the statue of Billy Penn atop City Hall. Things change, though. Sometimes you have to go past simple decorum and demand something better.

First, we're going to violate the ethnic clause. Some names are born tongue-twisters, and that makes them funny. Jehuu Caulcrick #39 has a name that voice and diction teachers dream of. Vowels, consonants intertwined in a romance born of the English language and its attachment to Hebrew. It's a triumph for the tongue. (Number 25's last name is Tongue). "Jehuu" means "Yahweh is he," which doesn't mean that his family in Liberia believed their son was God, but Jets fans were at least hoping that the former Spartan would be a monster in the backfield with Shonn Greene. Current whereabouts are in Buffalo. Is the name funny? Not inherently, but get a person you're flirting with to say it unrehearsed, and you might get a laugh. Running back Nuu Faaola #30 was always reliable for a gain of five yards on a play in the mid-80's, and fans rewarded it with a cry of "Nuu!" from the stands of Giants Stadium. We would like to do the same. His name is a triumph for the tongue-less vowel, with more syllables than "Jehuu Caulcrick."

Emerson Boozer #32 has a great name. He knows it. We know it. I'm not going to deny it, nor belabor the point. I love the man. He played with painful corns and bunions all of his career, or so the Random House Books on Pro Football I read as a kid always told me. I know people who have bought his jersey just to have his last name on the back. Adam Sandler wears it in Big Daddy. But his first name is Emerson, like the man who once wrote, "To be great is to be misunderstood," so if we misunderstand Emerson Boozer, it means he is great. And he is. Curley Johnson #33 wins the award for the same reason Dick Wood #19 did last round.  Moving right along.

Ronnie Lott #42 wins because you look at his name and say, "Ronnie Lott? The Jets? Really?" the same way you say "Tony Dorsett? The Broncos? Really?"

George Hoey #49 played about seven games for us in 1976, but he has a great name, and so does number 35 Billy Joe because the man's last name actually is "Joe." Jeremy LaSeur #31 sounds like a character James Bond is assigned to tail.

Both Danny Woodhead (#22, 35) and Vernon Gholsten #50 fall under the Browning Nagle Eligibility, though for different reasons, obviously. Gholsten is a draft washout, so his name is grimly funny, with a familiarity Jets fans know from our history with the draft. As it happens, I actually thought his name sounded funny when we drafted him, and now we all know it's funny because it reminds us of our misplaced hopes. If he had played well, we'd all wear "Gholsten" on our backs and think nothing of it. Life just works that way.

"Woodhead" was originally funny to anyone outside a select area of Nebraska, where the man's name conjured a monolithic sense of greatness. I really believed in Danny Woodhead, and I have the evidence to prove it. Originally a Jets' walk-on, he now elicits a kind of whimpered guffaw that a fan usually utters in the presence of his team's failures. To laugh best is to ultimately laugh at oneself, and when Danny Woodhead gained an overall 115 yards against the Jets in last year's 45-3 thrashing at the hands of the Patriots, we laughed bitterly, tearfully, and shamefully at ourselves.

Number 43 Jazz Jackson sounds like a guy Popeye Doyle needs to shakedown on the gritty, grimy streets of heroin-riddled New York, whereas Skip Lane #37 and Corky Tharp #45 of the Titans sound like two of Chip's friends on My Three Sons.

Bert Rechicar #44, who played briefly for the Titans, once held the record for the longest placekick for years until Tom Dempsey broke it in 1970. We celebrate the name "Rechicar" because it sounds great no matter how you pronounce the ch in the middle of his surname. Another Titan Bill Shockley #29 gets honorable mention for his poignant story and proximity to our award's namesake. Simply put, after years of being out of the game, the Steelers tried him out in 1968 as a kicker, only to cut him soon after in favor of Booth Lusteg himself, our founder, our redeemer, our guide.

Dewey Bohling? We do. But only when no one is watching.

Halfway There

This project of naming all the names and numbers of Jets present and past is evolving, changing, and frankly never complete. New players are being cut and added each year, and since I've got a day job teaching high school, I am often negligent in my duty to keep up with the addition of free agents, the departure of unfortunates. But regardless, my friends, this project, launched on August 31, 2007, is now at its nominal midway point. Fifty numbers done.  Forty-nine to go.

Whom will we meet along the way? Perhaps you'd like a sneak preview? An unexpected tour through the house of the man with whose buttocks Joe Namath frequently made contact? A Choctaw chief and middle linebacker? An interview with a former Bonner boy? And how many players have switched their number to 56, and why is this significant (hint:  it's not)?

Can anyone tell the difference between Dan Alexander and Dave Alexander? I'll have to. What do Winston Hill and Joe Klecko have in common? Did Dave Herman actually have an "accident?" Do both Greg Buttle and Gerry Philbin have New York accents?  What kind of law does Marvin Powell practice? Who is Larry Faulk?  Who was his replacement? What Jet ended up with a Super Bowl ring with the 49ers?  

And the receivers.  It's going to be fun to write about them.  Lammons, Barkum, Caster, Walker, Gaffney, Lam Jones, Burkett, Ward, Moss, Coles.  Wayne Chrebet, George Sauer, and Al Toon will each get their own entries.  Historically, the Jets have always been an exciting team through the air, whether the ball ended up where it should have or not.

Then obviously there's Lyons, Gastineau, Dennis Byrd, and a full game of what if's that includes the All-Pro linebackers we let get away, and imagining Warren Sapp and Reggie White wearing Jets uniforms.

It will be here, bit by bit, whether you're reading it or not (let's face it; that hasn't stopped me yet).  It may take a year, two, or four, but it will be done.  I am a man of my word.

Wahoo.

NY Jets #50 - Part 2

Pop - my grandfather - was the chief engineer in a paint factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and he was the only one who had to be alert on Christmas in case the works started freezing up.  My mother would drive him down to the factory and wait in the car, looking up at it, while inside the building Pop got its guts moving and pumping to keep them warm and alive. She stared at the factory long enough to recognize it again right away when she went back just last year to see how much Greenpoint had changed.  Today, Greenpoint is just another regentrified Brooklyn neighborhood where you need to be a millionaire to buy an apartment with even the slightest hint of Manhattan's view across the East River.  She found the old factory right away, though of course it had been converted into lofts.

When he was young, Pop lost his beloved younger sister when she choked to death at the dinner table. His own father, a patriotic immigrant from County Wexford, broke his back and lost his own factory job the very next day. Pop came from a world without even a shade of guarantees, when the possibility of ruin lingered around the corner. It must have shaped him, I suppose, this way of being that I've been told is the peculiar property of people who have been displaced, rejected, persecuted - Jews, Africans, Armenians, Irish - a sense of humor that arises from an ingrained sense of doom. He was a happy man at parties but he worried himself to morbidity when one of his own children caught a cold.

I say all this because it reveals the contradictions of the lives of people like Pop; they relished with pride where they had come from, but he never thought anyone should leave the neighborhood for the big, bad world outside. He loved Knute Rockne and Frank Leahy's Notre Dame football because it was Irish-America's Harvard, a school for people like him, but when his oldest son, my Uncle Chris, a real, live, certified genius, wanted to leave Brooklyn and study chemistry at Notre Dame, Pop didn't speak with him for months. Why would you leave the neighborhood? Why would you leave me? But leave home Uncle Chris did, and he never looked back. And in doing so, he inspired my Mom and Uncle Mike to do the same.

In some way, therefore, Notre Dame became for us what it is for a lot of Irish-American families throughout the country - the cultural stamp of success. I wanted to go there when I was a kid because Uncle Chris went there, and of course being the middling high school student I was, I was promptly rejected. I knew I never had a chance. But before and after, I rooted for Notre Dame like they were some kind of family legacy.  Their 38-10 Cotton Bowl upset of Texas in 1978 made up for the disappointment of the Jets' 1977 season. I followed the Forty-Niners in the early 80's because I couldn't believe Notre Dame could produce someone as brilliant as Joe Montana, the man previously resurrected in the 1979 Cotton Bowl by chicken soup.

Pop might have rooted against the Jets in the Heidi Game right there in the living room, sitting next to my Dad because the Raiders were quarterbacked to victory that day by former Notre Dame star Daryle (he pronounced it Daree-al) Lamonica.  Perhaps Pop never liked the Jets much because so very few Notre Dame players really went through the Jets' system. John Huarte came and went and never got a number. There were Jim Carroll LB #55 (1969), Robert Farmer #25 RB (1989), Joe Katcick #77 DT (1960), Lance Legree #70 DT (2005), Bob O'Neil LB #62 (1961), Paul Seiler #79 T-C (1967), and Pat Terrell #27 S (1994). Whether this is typical throughout the league or not I cannot say, but I find it interesting that all of the above lasted no more than a year with the Jets.

Except for Bob Crable #50 who played his entire 1982-87 career with the Jets at linebacker.  When Crable came to the Jets, I was ecstatic.  In 1979, when he was a sophomore in #43, I watched him block a last second Michigan field goal to save an Irish win.  The kick was pretty low but would have been blocked had it been sent straight skyward because Crable got the kind of height that basketball players dream of (though he might have climbed on someone's back).  It looks impossible in the picture because it was.  But at least they beat Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Bob Crable's pro career didn't possess the legend that he found at Notre Dame, and once again we must all simply agree that this is the norm.  That's the way it is.  College glory and pro fame are just two different species.  He was drafted in the first round.  Knee injuries hampered him.  He accumulated 10 sacks in his career overall, which is going to be an important point below.  He did play a full 16-game season in 1986 when the team found the momentum to go to the second round of the playoffs.  I include a picture from Corbis taken on that exquisitely painful day of January 3, 1987, when the Jets blew a 10-point lead against the Browns with 4:14 left and lost the Divisional Playoff.  Whether he imagined his hard work over that season would finally yield something greater in this game - the furthest in the NFL playoffs he had been since his rookie year - I don't know.  Today, he is as a college linebackers coach.

No matter what the lead, no matter how far ahead the Irish were, my Pop paced the floors listening to Notre Dame games on the radio with his characteristically pervasive dread.  No lead was safe, just as no guarantees existed in this life.  Your boys could blow it at any minute.  As I grew into my teenage years, I began to discover my extended families' assortment of ticks and traits programmed into my own, and I saw Pop's characteristic fears and anxieties in myself.  I had inherited his sense of life.  The world was filled with unexpected ruin.  On January 3, 1987, Bob Crable's last playoff game, I felt a justification for this worldview. 

****

There are many ways that ruin has come to the Jets.  Football's two football strikes - 1982 and 1987 - did wreck us.  They each followed an impressive playoff show for the Jets the year before (and it looks like it's going to happen again) and each time, the strike in some way broke their flow for years.  The draft, too, has a notoriously gruesome past for the Jets; whereas some teams make mistakes in the draft that just make a paper cut, the Jets have historically made mistakes that actually hurt them for years.  It's well documented. 

But one could argue that the Jets have made very good draft choices since the beginning of the millennium.  The lone, really brilliant choice in the 1990's was James Farrior, but in 2000, we chose Jon Abraham #56, Shaun Ellis #92 and Chad Pennington #10.  Then there's 2001, with Santana Moss #83. In 2002, we picked Bryan Thomas #58, Jon McGraw #38; in 2004, we picked Jonathan Vilma #51 and Jerricho Cotchery #89.  In 2005, there was Kerry Rhodes #25.  The motherload was 2006:  D'Brickashaw Ferguson #60, Nick Mangold #74, Eric Smith #33, Brad Smith #16, and Leon Washington #29.  In 2007, Darrelle Revis #24 and David Harris #52.  In 2009, Mark Sanchez #6 and Shonn Greene #23.  There are some notable absences above from the team that went to the AFC Championship, and James Farrior was on the winning side of that game, but look at it.  For the most part the team we brought was the team we drafted.  It's amazing.  Life is not all about blue ruin.

But we must admit that one of the players for whom we all felt the highest expectation didn't pan out at all - Vernon Gholston #50 - the furiously talented Ohio State linebacker who was going to terrorize quarterbacks, just as he did in the Big 10.  For years after he was drafted, they would speak of his growth, his potential.  It happens.  Players take time in the NFL.  In Hard Knocks, Rex Ryan made several references to Gholston's performance in training camp this past season - most specifically, indicating something to the effect that "they really dropped today."  If you are a male or are familiar with the anatomical behaviors of male farm animals, then you have some idea of what Rex was talking about, as only Rex can.  But he was talking about Vernon Gholston.

But earlier this year, Gholston was finally cut, having made a handful of tackles in three years and (as noted so often) no sacks.  He is the kind of draft bust that people wrote about mockingly in terms of the Jets for years, but now he is the exception to the rule (we did draft Dustin Keller #81 that season, too).  He is a top draft choice that didn't work out.  The same might be said for Mike Nugent #1 in 2005, as well as the entire 2004 draft, which includes not a single active player.  And our 2010 draft did not seem to produce much (I'm still imagining Joe McKnight doing something).  It's tricky when you play well the year before.  But still, the Jets now officially draft slightly above the average for success.  But not Vernon.

Perhaps it was the hype that surrounded him as a defensive player, the sense of possibility we have never felt for, say, Kyle Wilson, drafted first round last year at defensive back.  Maybe it's being a linebacker, the man at a position with the capacity to change the flow of a game just like that; can you imagine last year's team with a Farrior, or a Vilma, or an Abraham still on staff?  I do when I'm daydreaming.  Perhaps it's because we let so many great linebackers go over the years that we put so much hope - too much perhaps - on Vernon Gholston, so his departure feels poignant.

And so it is, Vernon, we say farewell:

NY Jets #50 - Part 1

Eric Barton

Memory is not kind. Many of us go through days and nights of hard work, only to be remembered for slipping on a banana peel. We dedicate ourselves to endeavors that require years of preparation and practice with the focus on a single goal that others would have abandoned long ago, but suddenly we are pointed to the stray piece of toilet paper that has adhered to our shoe. Tommy Marvaso's son eviscerated me for pointing out, in #37, a brief moment where his Dad got beat on a pass in 1976. He rightly pointed out that I ignored his Dad's fine play in other games, all for the purpose of blogging droll comments about this and that.

This brings us to Eric Barton #50, linebacker for the Jets from 2004-08. Like several players from the Mangini era, Barton followed the squat coach to Cleveland and was released this year. First, I will do him justice. Eric Barton had a good career in the NFL. I quote the Wiki: "He has played in 120 career Regular Season games with 85 starts and has recorded 680 tackles, 18.5 sacks, four INTs, 18 pass [sic] deflected, six forced fumbles and four fumble recovery [sic] in his career. So far he has posted four seasons with 100 or more total tackles." As we shall see in a later entry, these statistics make plain that Eric Barton was worth the number he wore, whatever that means. Others, as we shall in our later installment for #50, may not have been.

It’s ironic, therefore, that we recall the 2005 Wild Card Game against the San Diego Chargers. He played well in the game so far as I can recall, but let’s go straight where we need to. Now, I mean no animus toward Barton here, but I watched the Wild Card Game from the edge of my sofa, where I had spent the great bulk of what was a second season of not drinking during football games. This was my first playoff game since my adolescence without a drink, and frankly it was more difficult than I expected. The Jets lead 17-7 well into the third quarter, but San Diego was driving with less than a minute left at 17-10. On what was essentially the last down (or maybe the third down) inside the red zone, Philip Rivers (no, Drew Brees) threw an incomplete pass, and by some terrible stroke of bad luck or poor judgment, Eric Barton hit Rivers (actually, Brees) late, a flag was thrown, and an automatic first down was granted to the Chargers, resulting in an Antonio Gates touchdown.


(Here by the way, was a slightly humorous - if I do say so myself - riff on how much I dislike Philip Rivers. However, as was pointed out to me by a kind reader, Philip Rivers was on the bench at the time as a rookie and Drew Brees was quarterbacking. How I could make that mistake is, well, inexplicable. So from here on in I correct myself. But still, as I said before, "even with his extraordinary numbers, Philip Rivers is a trash-talking, big-game choke artist. He is an obnoxious rube in a sport that thrives on the knuckle-dragging exploits of its Magillas. And that’s coming from a Jets fan." I feel like that that still needed to remain)

Brees or Rivers, I understand what Barton did; he was doing his job. He was showing up a little late for it, but there we are.

But in that moment, and in the context of my life as a fan, I experienced what I can only describe as a meltdown. First, I had a flashback, taking me some 22 years in the past, when a late hit by Mark Gastineau on Bernie Kosar kept a Cleveland Browns drive going against the Jets in the 1987 Divisional Playoff - a game that should have ended with the Jets winning. No doubt fueled by this, when the flag was thrown at Eric Barton, I went catatonic, then outwardly crazy. I became silent in a way that only a child does before it begins wailing cosmically, and then without a single word, I horrified my wife by hurling the remote control across the room so that it struck the exposed brick of our railroad apartment. The remote shattered into pieces and fell to the ground the way the lights of the Knights Stadium explode into the air as Roy Hobbs rounds the bases at the end of The Natural.

I'm not sure I remember what happened next. I think I stood up and started yelling something to the effect of this being The Last Jets Game I Would Ever Watch; this was The Last Time I Would Ever Waste Another Minute Of My Worthless Life On This Fucking Team. And so on.

My wife told me to go away and let her watch the rest of the game alone because I was an idiot. I said something like, fine, fine, root for this stupid team if you want to, I'm going to my room. The room in question, of course, was our room - my wife's and mine - but I think it's telling that I had completely regressed to the status of my childhood. I'm going to my room. This team is stupid. This game is stupid. I'm taking my shit, and I'm going home.

Except that I was home. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I stared down at the wood floor, reflecting on what my life would now be like since I would no longer be a Jets fan, which seemed a certainty at that moment. What was that going to be like? This team is dead to me. Did I actually mean it, any more than I had actually meant that I wouldn't drink during football games? Would this be a one game at a time thing? Would I have to adjust mindfully to my autumns and winters, without the Jets, without caring? Would I root for the Eagles? What?

My wife is a good person. A kind and loving spouse. I had closed the door, but she kept letting me know the details of the rest of the game. Yes, the Chargers tied it up, but Nate Kaeding missed a field goal in overtime, and now the Jets were driving downfield. Slowly, slowly, I discovered what I already knew somehow deep inside - that my will to give up was worthless. I knew who I was. I was a Jets fan, and if Doug Brien was going to screw up a game-winning field goal for the Jets in the Wild Game overtime, then I would die a Jets fan there and then, anyway. So I came out of the bedroom, and watched Brien line up for the kick. It was good. And then Doug Brien fucked it up the following week in the Divisional Playoff. But hell. What are you going to do?

But let's get back to Eric Barton. I believe he made as many as nine tackles in the Wild Card game, which apparently he also did in about seven games during that season. He was a good player in as much as any player who works hard and plays hard and often is. His only real mistake in that game was making a split-second error that he knew better than to make. This happens to all of us (Gastineau, notwithstanding). For me (and maybe for an assortment of Jets fans throughout North Jersey, the Island, and South Connecticut) it just came at the wrong time, both in terms of the game's clock and in our life clocks as fans. But it didn't change anything permanently. It never does.

****

Glenn Cadrez #50 played linebacker for the Jets from 1992-95. Then he went on to win two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos in the latter part of the decade. My recollection of his play is dim. Technically, he is noted as playing only one game of the 1995 season before moving to Denver; the Jets would win four games over 1995-96 and be the laughingstock of the NFL. In Cadrez's best season - 1999 - he himself registered statistically somewhere in the middle of all defensive players, which won't get you to the Pro Bowl or Canton, but it will make you a respectable player. We can't all be Ray Lewis, and if we were, we would all be insane.

It made him enough of a football player that he ended up with the kind of life that a really good high school football player imagines when he first recognizes the potential for the road ahead. After football, he happily married a Playboy model, has been on sports radio and has co-started his own horror film production company.

But what if you don't want to stop playing football after the NFL? Tim Cofield #50 played his last season in the league as a linebacker for the Jets in 1989. But then he went to Canada. I recall that during the 1982 Football Strike, NBC showed CFL games in the hopes of recuperating some of their losses. It must not have worked (could 1987 really have been any better?) though it was our first introduction to Warren Moon, quarterback for the Edmonton Eskimos. I wouldn't sneeze at CFL games this winter, though it won't compare, obviously. Am I an Argonaut or an Alouette?

In his years in Canada, Cofield was an Argonaut, a Stampeder, a Mad-Dog, and most importantly, a Tiger Cat. If you can name all the cities associated with these entities, you win a prize (one of them was in the US). I say most importantly as a Tiger Cat because it is here, in his - I don't know what you call it – Tiger Cat tribute page that you see Tim Cofield saluted as a hero not just to the profession of linebacking but to the very existence of Canadian football itself. In what is called the CFL Scrapbook, a former opponent named Chris Shultz describes Cofield as, "a nightmare experienced in real time" and that "I retired because my body told me to in a very direct way named Tim Cofield."

I'm not even quite sure I understand what that means, but I love how the statistic-heavy NFL is in such stark contrast to the narrative-laden heritage of our brothers to the North. The CFL doesn't keep track of the individual stats of its players as minutely as the NFL does; perhaps they see their players more mythologically, as through the veil of legend. "He may have only spent parts of 6 seasons in Canadian Football," the site says, "but Tim Cofield left a path of destruction that rivals that of the top defenders in league history. Tim Cofield as a defensive force deserves to be remembered." A path of destruction.

Tim Cofield - we who are about to go without football this year salute you. Would that I could conjure a memory of you as a Jet with a tone as Homeric as the one with which your Canadian fans remember you.

So who's up for some British Columbia Lions this year? Some Blue Bombers? Some Roughriders?

****
Behold the journeymen's life - eight teams in eight seasons. Drafted originally by the Raiders, linebacker Ron Holmberg #50 suited up for nine games for the Jets in 1998, and then was sent to Indianapolis later that season. Even his collegiate years were disparate, as he played for both Navy and Penn State, which seems as much a jump in setting from Minnesota to New England, or from Green Bay to Carolina, as seen below. But you get to see the country that way, and if there's a better way for a vagabond to pick up a paycheck, I would like to know what it is:

57 50 59 51 50 56 47 58

The Chants

I recently read Elif Batuman's article on the Istanbul soccer team Besiktas, and I find at least one commonality between Turkey's most passionate fans and our own.

Besiktas' fanbase is known as Carsi; their chant lead by the chief cheerleader, Armenian Alen:



and a more familiar one, by Fireman Ed:



Apparently Besiktas supporters broke the record for a decibel level when their beloveds recently beat Liverpool. Admittedly, when you read Batuman's article, you realize that their fans have it way over football fans in this country in every way. They sing love songs to their club ("I remember when we first met. It was raining. You were wearing stripes...") and announce to their Istanbul opponents Fener that they will renounce profanity, but not before requesting that Fener perform a sexual act upon them. I can't think of an American fan base that is as lyrical, but then as of Batuman's article, Alen is laid up in bed, nursing a gunshot wound he received from a rival Carsi faction member. Fireman Ed is less inclined to take a clip from some guy who lives in Mineola.