NY Jets #57 - Part 2

Mo Lewis #57 (ranked #142)

To give Mo Lewis #57 a tribute higher than simply being the man who inadvertently changed the modern game of football with a single devastating hit on Drew Bledsoe, I think it's important to mention something which should both elevate Lewis to a place of genuine respect and also shed light on a sad truth about the way the franchise has played defense over the past 51 years.

Pro-football-reference.com offers a comprehensive list of the 1000 best players on offense and on defense using the Elo system, "a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games" based on the calculation system for chess ratings made by Arpad Elo. I don't claim to understand it, except that the list is a set of matches, one player against another statistically, in order to determine who is better than whom. The overall list puts Jerry Rice as the best overall offensive player who won the most statistical matchups out of 720 possible players, and Reggie White as the overall best defensive player out of a possible 815. Mo Lewis is at a rather high ranking - #142. Whether any of this has any validity at all is questionable. But putting Lewis there is no fluke, especially when you take into account his high rate of tackles early in his career, forced fumbles and interceptions.

The comparably rated offensive player is Grady Alderman, the longtime Vikings lineman. Above Alderman there are eight offensive players who spent a considerable time with the Jets, notably Curtis Martin (80), Vinny Testaverde (90), Joe Namath (102), Kevin Mawae (114), John Riggins (126), Don Maynard (137), with present-day Jet LaDainian Tomlinson #21 at number 18. Not many, but what can you do? Those ratings are themselves a little absurd. I would put Martin above Riggins, but I would put Riggins above Namath. But the really striking point is that above Mo Lewis there are no Jets defensive players. No one. This point cannot be emphasized enough, and to be honest, I think this is reasonable. It is only very recently that the Jets have been considered a strong defense, though after Sunday's game against Oakland, there is reason to believe that they may be rated lower this year. The Sack Exchange ranks lower (Gastineau at 188, Klecko at 247, Lyons sadly not at all) while Larry Grantham #60 ranks just below Lewis. So there is at least one argument here that Mo Lewis is statistically the best defensive player in New York Jets history. True? False? Perhaps it was appropriate that in 2001 the "best defensive player" in our history helped create a seismic shift in the AFC, for who else could be capable of such a thing? James Farrior #51, whose best statistics have come with the Steelers? Maybe. He is ranked overall at 140.

***

Jim Jerome #57 played special teams for the Jets during the latter part of the 1977 season, when the sky was darkening on an increasingly poor season. After starting the year 2-2, the Jets dropped seven in a row before they managed to barely squeeze past the equally poor New Orleans Saints. When Jerome joined the ride, the season had long lost its momentum, and the young team had probably fallen into the ennui that infects a late failed football season. When a new player enters the locker room he must feel like the new teacher in our disgruntled faculty who tries to save her inspiration for new ideas from the veteran colleague's compulsion to stay attached to old ways, whether tried and true or not. But regardless, when you play a few hours or weeks in the NFL, you are always known as someone who played in the pros. The Watertown Daily Times of Connecticut mentions Jim Jerome as a standout for Syracuse football when their program was at a low and then as a a special teams man for an NFL team on the slide.

Whether the Jets of 1977 (3-11) were really pros in the sense that, say, the 1977 Oakland Raiders (11-3) were is hard to say. The Jets might even have done as well as 7-7 in '77 if you take into account how close the games were that season. Four losses alone were within four or fewer points. But on the last day of what appears to Jim Jerome's career, the Jets fell 27-0 to the Philadelphia Eagles, a team that managed only a 5-9 record.

***

On July 12, 1997, the Seattle Times published the following about John Little #57:

Former NFL lineman John Little died of a heart attack in Hot Coffee, Miss., earlier this week. The two-time All-Big Eight selection at Oklahoma State spent seven years in the NFL, with the New York Jets, Houston Oilers and Buffalo Bills.

Apparently he was born in Tallulah, Louisiana, but he died in Hot Coffee, as rural a community as one could possibly imagine - even rural by the definition of a rural state; according to Wikipedia: "about halfway between Jackson and Hattiesburg ... Hot Coffee isn't a quaint little town; it's not even a town. Instead it's a tiny community of farms, homes, and businesses scattered along two-lane Highway 532...According to local lore, a resident [J.J. Davis] opened an inn in 1870 and sold coffee to passersby. Apparently the drink was the only memorable thing about the place."

The "only thing." Is that all there is? Hot Coffee, Mississippi is a non-census municipality without a zip code. This is where John Little's life came to an end, far from the northern cities where he once played, distanced from suburbs, freeways or malls.

I suppose one of his last games in a uniform was playing for the Buffalo Bills, and probably against the Jets in that middling season of 1977. This was a cold, gray, poorly played December game at Shea that I listened to on the radio with my Dad as we drove around Roosevelt Field, doing Christmas errands. I remember feeling what I felt last week as the Jets fell to Oakland. They can still win. They will, won't they? Is that all there is? Dad suggested that it was. "This is why I gave the season tickets away," he said. They trailed in the fourth quarter 7-3 before Wesley Walker caught a touchdown pass from Richard Todd, raising our expectations for two wins in a row, a feat they hadn't achieved since October. And then the Bills scored, and I slumped across the back of the bench seat, staring at Dad's shoulder and then beyond it, out into the vast, flat cold slate color landscape of the Long Island Expressway. That's all there was.

***

Hubert Bobo #57 has the best name for any season. In a new magazine called Sports Illustrated in 1954, he is included in their preview of the upcoming Rose Bowl between Ohio State and USC. SI noted the formidable backfield of the Buckeyes, which included Bobo, Bobby Watkins and "Hopalong" Cassaday. Bobo had been a Ohio high school football star, and at Ohio State, he helped win a National Championship for a team that also included future Hall of Famer Jim Parker. He would then go on to play as a pro in Canada and then eventually begin a professional career in the States with the Los Angeles Chargers, and then at linebacker with the New York Titans for two seasons. His Wikipedia page thoughtfully outlines his statistics as a pro.

But at one time in our history, during Christmas season in 1954, a marvelous moment of synchronicity occurred. In that 1954 issue of SI, Hubert Bobo is mentioned as one of the keys to the Buckeyes' offense, but on page 24, a story can be found on middleweight champion Carl "Bobo" Olsen. In the midst of the holidays, readers were given a Christmas gift of two Bobos. Would that we were so lucky.

NY Jets #52 (Redux) - John Schmitt

During the spring and summer of 1972, my Mom and Dad were expecting my little brother, so they began looking for a house. We lived in a rented apartment in Flushing, a mere long walk from Shea Stadium in the autumn, a subway stop in winter. Up until this time, they had never owned anything except their clothing, their cutlery, their furniture, their books, a TV and a 1967 Volvo. Now we were moving to suburbia, to Long Island, a logical step along the narrow strip of land to Nassau County from Queens. Now they were diving for more. Dad had known a little of the town and country growing up as a small child in middle class Braintree, Massachusetts, but his family soon hit hard times, and he became a city child. Mom had never known anything but the city, in a railroad apartment where she and her siblings slept in the same bed. She wanted my little brother and me to have our own rooms.

I have vague memories of being driven around in the backseat of a Saab by a realtor, looking at houses. I was three and a half, and I recall very few details of the trip around the South Shore neighborhoods. I remember seeing more trees than ever before, and tall ones at that. I saw a car that advertised a product with a plastic German shepherd dog attached to the roof. I wish I could remember what that company sold. It's killing me. What I don't remember is what my parents told me many years later after I became a Jets fan. Among the many houses we saw, we also looked at #52 John Schmitt's house in Hempstead.

Apparently he was moving out. He was Joe Namath's starting center from about 1966-73. Like my Mom, Schmitt was born in Brooklyn. He had already made the move out of New York City to the Island, settling near where he went to college at Hofstra. I always assumed that we were looking at his house back then because he wasn't playing for the Jets anymore, but I see now that he still had another year to play for the Jets when we were there. So where was John Schmitt moving?

I just know that as a boy each time I read about the Jets in Super Bowl III and saw a passing imagine of John Schmitt - his white towel attached to his back belt so Namath could wipe his hands before the snap, the peculiar cleats the offensive line wore with the circle on the heel - I always felt like he had been rendered a little less magical by virtue of knowing him to be a regular person, with a home, cutlery and china, a TV, books, and a car in his garage. Suddenly he was like a member of my extended family, or at least a family friend, for why else would a person allow me into his home? No matter how distant these people were from my devotion, I had to realize too that they had lives, sometimes decorating them with vestiges of the lives of the city they left behind. There was no mass-produced, fixed accounting of personal taste in the 1970's; things were pretty loose, and there was no IKEA. All the accoutrements of real life only served to make the paradox that much more incomprehensible to a little boy: the Jets of the mythical time of 1968 were immortal, but all the same merely human. John Schmitt was the first to be filed in my understanding of the world in just this way.


***

John Schmitt #52, playing with pneumonia

Back in the day when I used to go to work with crippling hangovers, I found a completely distorted inspiration in When Pride Still Mattered, David Marraniss' excellent book on Vince Lombardi. One of the coach's primary lessons was that to be a successful in the game, a player had to live with and accept constant pain. Running back Jim Taylor specifically said that Lombardi taught him the lessons of how to recognize his own limits for pain and to then push through that limit to a new place where the player gave that much more than his opponent. It made the Packers of the 60's fearful from more than a strategic point of view; it made them psychologically impenetrable.

Yet Marraniss also points out that Lombardi's own ability to face pain was constantly at odds with what he demanded from his players. In his own private experience, Lombardi was apparently greatly afraid of physical pain, perhaps as any normal person is. But football is not normal, not the real world, and while Lombardi became the first professional coach to embody lessons that could be apparently applied to the real world, his insistence on his players being intolerant of pain is not part of the normal world. It belongs in the fantasies of football heroism, where it erodes the mind and spirit of many of its players.

In North Dallas Forty, a violent mid-day practice before a key divisional game against a fictional Chicago team ends with a receiver going down with a pulled hamstring. From high above the field in a tower overlooking the whole practice, Coach Strouther speaks evenly through a megaphone to the trainer below. Is the player ready? he asks. The trainer admits he can't tell but he doesn't think so. Wide receiver Phil Elliott, a sometimes sour veteran, a free spirit, not at all to Strouther's taste, is the next man up. Strouther doesn't like Elliott's independence, his immaturity, and Elliott doesn't like how the coach stokes the racial tensions on the team to create a greater hunger on the squad for violence. But they need one another. He calls out from the megaphone for Elliott, and he takes a walk with the receiver. Can you be ready for a whole game? he asks, knowing that Elliott will have to be shot with pain killers to play.

Of course, says Elliott. "Hell, I ain't afraid of needles," he says, walking away, but not before adding to Strouther, "I guess that's what's called maturity."

Where's the fine between a distorted maturity and pride? When I consider John Schmitt on the day of Super Bowl III, I admit find something admirable in his masochistic determination to compete. Apparently in the New York Daily News back in 2008, John Schmitt admitted that he had played the Super Bowl while seriously ill. Rich Cimini of the Daily News writes: 

"Schmitt...said he played Super Bowl III with pneumonia. By the fourth quarter, he was on the verge of exhaustion. He was so ill that, during the postgame prayer in the locker room, he vomited. Namath, kneeling beside Schmitt, scooted away in a hurry." 

There is Schmitt, hulking over in pain and puking during a solemn moment, and there is  Namath, kneeling at his greatest moment of professional pride and very nearly hit with something that would have been difficult to explain to the reporters amassed around his locker without first trying to use the towel tucked into the posterior end of his center's pants. 

***

Someone mentioned to me today that he was taking comfort at work from remembering to see things as they are, not as he hopes they will be. It's strange because I've been doing the same lately, and finding myself mostly reassured by the results. Keeping your expectations low can wedge you through lean days when it seems as though that what you planned to accomplish in the most rudimentary way will simply not get done. Some people complain endlessly at my job, and it might be because their high expectations are always dashed. It's human for us to hope, to aspire. But should we see things as they are? As a Jets fan, I have been given the unique privilege of practicing a life of low expectations but found myself still bitterly humbled in 1983, in 1999 by things as they truly were.

But consider Rich Cimini's recent article on the miraculous reappearance of John Schmitt's Super Bowl ring. According to the story, in 1971, not long before my parents began following their hopes for a new house, John Schmitt was surfing in Hawaii when the ring that signified his heroic part in one of the most important games in professional football history vanished into the Pacific Ocean. It slipped off his finger and disappeared into the blue. The entire story is circuitous. A lifeguard found it some time later and gave it to his wife, but it became part of a niece's estate. The niece then had it appraised and contacted Schmitt recently to let him know that it still survives, saved from the waters of Waikiki. 

What do you believe you have lost that you still wonder about after all these years? Are you diving beneath the surface, despite your own exhaustion, hoping to find what disappeared into the abyss? Is it recoverable? A perfect love lost to your years of selfishness and dissolution? A friend whom you suspect might wonder about you too? Is it a book you loaned? Words of consolation that you know might have made someone smile, helped remind someone that she was loved, that he was important? As the song goes, you must come to the surface and come to your senses, though it's a very deep sea around your own devices.

But there are times when it seems as though that what we have lost, what we have missed all these years, is retrievable, after all. The remnant of our beautiful, innocent hopes are suddenly glimmering through waves and sand, and someone discerns them, recognizing instantly something of value. Suddenly it seems that nothing is lost, everything is recoverable. Perhaps that's why Cimini felt it worthwhile to add that Schmitt's ring is the stuff of larger legend, a sign for others to begin to imagine hopes just as impossible and miraculous:

When Jets fans read about Schmitt's ring discovery Friday night on the Internet, some began tweeting it's a sign of luck and that the current team is destined for the Super Bowl. They haven't been back since 1969.

When the words "luck" and "destined" are found in the same sentence, you realize that you should come to the surface, you should come to your senses. But it's a very deep sea. It could be down there anywhere.

NY Jets #57 - 9/23/01

The weekend came and went. When we were not in praise and remembrance for the fallen, we were thinking about how much the country has tilted toward oblivion in the past ten years. We are a more divided country, a poorer one, an angrier one, a less important one in the eyes of the world, and yet the terrorists did not win, nor will they ever. Generations to come will wonder what we were thinking during this time, and I suppose we'll wear the same look of bemused frustration that my parents had when I asked them about living through the 60's. It was a strange time, we'll say. Stranger than usual, and it became difficult to see the difference between what was real and what was just our imagination.

I had an argument with a colleague of mine this week about whether or not it would have been better to make the memorials for the fallen in Schwenksville Shanksville and New York more of an affirmation. Why do we need to build holes in the ground to show where the towers were? he asked. Why can't we have something that reaches for the sky? I think sometimes he just enjoys a good argument. My brother narrowly escaped the World Trade Center that day and ran for his life uptown until he reached my cousin's office at Park Avenue. A colleague of mine once dated a fireman from Queens who was lost in the towers' destruction. The stepsister of a friend of mine was a flight attendant on one of the planes that hit the towers. Everyone on the east coast seemed no more than three degrees separated from someone who was witness or victim that day. Ten years later, given what little comfort we can take from our country's present state, it's appropriate that a void be the main symbol of our remembrance.

***

Two days after JFK was assassinated in 1963, my mother went out on a date with a guy to watch the football Giants play the football Cardinals at Yankee Stadium. She met him at his apartment, arriving just in time to see Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live TV. She remembers being unable to take herself away from the networks showing it over and over, like instant replay. Her boyfriend wanted to get to the game, but she couldn't stop watching it. All the while in her mind she kept wondering, What's going on? What's happening?

Still, the game was played, and she went. So did approximately 63,000 other fans. Richard Rothschild wrote in the Chicago Tribune that he attended the game and remembers no music, no extra sound effects, no halftime bands, nothing extraneous being done and that the crowd in attendance was solemnly focused on the game, with cigarette and cigar smoke wafting everywhere in the late autumn sun. There are legendary (and possibly inaccurate stories) of the tomb-like silence of the big stadium that day, so much so that people claim they could hear the whistles clearly from the upper seats. Bob Shepperd Sheppard called for a moment of silence at the game's start.

The news of Oswald's death buzzed around the stadium. Most people who were at the game got there too early to see it happen on TV as Mom did. They missed an event that would shape their country to come - a man's murder, caught live, witnessed by millions of people who had already been stitched to their TVs in a effort to comprehend the incomprehensible. As for the Giants, they were upset by the Cardinals 24-17, playing poorly throughout. Pete Rozelle later said the Sunday games should never have been allowed to go on, though apparently he had been given permission from the Kennedy family to let them play.

In his article above, Rothschild gives the sense that for the Giants' fans the game was entirely separate from the events of the weekend. They all comprehended that something terrible had happened, but the game itself was an honest distraction in the meantime. Football was a game. Kennedy and Oswald were real life. What separated those two worlds of reality was a void of knowledge, an absence of the intrusive media that we have today, though it could be said that the events of that weekend in 1963 ensured that such a void would not remain for long.

But even today, the world may change, but the games stay the same. You might have voted for one candidate three years ago and are now already following a fashionable wave of indifference toward him today, but three bad seasons for your football team mean nothing to you. If they do, then you're not really a loyal fan, you're an enthusiast. And that's fine; you might be healthier that way. Once the commemorative ceremonies ended, there was still the Jets-Cowboys season opener to play, a game very like one played ten years ago or even forty-nine years ago, and Tony Romo still gave the game away with turnovers, just as Tony Romo often does.

***

Rothschild's article was written exactly ten years ago today, perhaps to give some perspective on why the NFL was reluctant to repeat Rozelle's mistake; they skipped a week after 9/11 and returned to action on September 23, 2001. The Jets played the Patriots at Foxboro in a game intended to unite the two teams, their fanbases, and the entire football community in one knitted brow of sorrow and determination. One sign in the Foxboro stands read, "GO PATS. GO JETS." Both the Jets and Patriots played listlessly, just the Giants did back in the day, just as one imagines two teams would at a time of massive grief.

But this Jets-Patriots game represents a different ten-year milestone - a pivotal moment that signaled a radical change in the history of the two clubs. This was the night that Mo Lewis #57 knocked out Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. There were little more than five minutes left, and the Jets were ahead 10-3. Bledsoe scrambled for the sidelines and was nearly there when he was blindsided by Lewis and hurled to the ground. You may be able to hear the hit in the video below; many people on the field claimed it was the hardest hit anyone had ever heard. A blood vessel burst in Bledsoe's chest, and he was unable to get up. Backup quarterback Tom Brady went in for him, and the rest is, as they say....

In order for a truly great rivalry to develop, one team has to be preeminent and the other the spoiler, the underdog. Since that night, the Patriots and the Jets have been repeating a pattern built by the consequences of that hit. They were already trading coaches and players, but as soon as one of them became a Super Bowl champion later that year, the war of words and gestures that followed developed into one of the great spitting rivalries in the game. Until September 23, 2001, the Jets and the Patriots shared similar spaces near the bottom floors of the five-team AFC East, occasionally seeing one another take a trip to the penthouse, only then to end up in the same space again. After 2001, the format changed, and both teams have been consistently more competitive than Buffalo and Miami, but in the end we all know who's really better, and we all know why.

So the question begs: what if Lewis had pulled up? It's hardly right to blame him for not doing so. Though an excessive hit, it was a legitimate one, and the quarterback is fair game. In a quiet, defensive struggle, Lewis was simply doing his job; he had a fine career with several poor to underachieving Jet clubs, and it is unfair to spend this entire entry talking about him solely in the context of this one moment. But it did make a difference. It's a moment that haunts Jets fans because they're always inclined to believe that Fate works directly against them and in favor of the Patriots, and in this case Fate made a visit on the night football was supposed to return to normalcy.

Let's say Bledsoe stays as starter, and Brady goes somewhere else in the NFL. It's difficult to imagine a Belichick team excelling without Tom Brady, though you could say that 2008 was as close as an example of that as we will find. Where would Brady have played, if not for the Patriots? Would he have ended up a good quarterback on struggling teams, as Matt Cassel, Kevin Kolb or Matt Shaub have? Was he special all along, with or without Belichick?

Drew Bledsoe can be forgiven for not anticipating any of this. As he lay in pain on the Patriots' sideline, he certainly knew his night was done, but he probably never entertained the possibility that his career with the Patriots was over, too. Nor could he have known he would be replaced by the greatest quarterback in football history. We can all be forgiven for being unable to see the Hand of Fate in the form of Mo Lewis.

NY Jets #50 - (Redux II)

This is my exciting night life: I return home from work, walk the dog, wait for my wife to come from work, I make dinner, we trade work stories, then we eat in front of the television, which I think every marriage counselor would advise a couple not to do. TV can always be detrimental human interaction, but I am brain dead anyway after a day where I've had to assign and reassign a place for a 17 year-old to sit in my class (which is insane) and it doesn't really matter what we watch. TV is merely a conversation piece, enabling us to talk with one another when we're dead tired. In Hard Day's Night, George disparages a "trend-setter" to her creator by saying that "the lads frequently sit round the television and watch her for a giggle. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things." Though the real Beatles did not end well, at least Richard Lester's Beatles bonded over watching TV and mocking it.

Anyway, the other night, we came upon North Dallas Forty, the film adaptation of Peter Gent's novel based on his time playing for the 1960's Dallas Cowboys. A really generous critic would suggest that the 1973 novel did for football what Catch-22 did for war, by demythologizing it and painting it as an expression of human avarice. I've yet to read the novel, but the 1979 movie is about the best football film ever made, which may not sound like much considering how many really bad football movies there are. Nick Nolte plays hard-living wide receiver Phil Elliott, the Peter Gent character, while Mac Davis effectively plays the bleakly humorous quarterback Seth Maxwell, a thinly veiled version of Don Meredith. I'll watch anything with Nick Nolte in it because although he's played a wide variety of characters - an oily lawyer, an American Nazi, an obsessed painter, Thomas Jefferson - he's still always Nolte, and like Humphrey Bogart he's a flawed malcontent, a powder keg, which is OK, and you buy into him every time.

A comparable film today would study steroids and head injuries in the NFL. North Dallas Forty is about pain killers. BA Strother (GD Spradlin), the head coach who spouts scripture and consults computers for insight into his players' capacity for output, is the slightly veiled version of Tom Landry. Strother manipulates his players like chess pieces, sometimes turning them against one another in order to get better results. Nolte's Elliott is out of shape, he smokes grass and Tiparillos, he drinks Budweiser while lackadaisically lifting weights, and he has fallen out of Strother's favor. The key to his performance are pain killers that he takes ritually, culminating in massive injections he gets just before a game. In one scene, he stretches his body in agony before going to bed, and we hear all his joints crack, one by one. When Strother needs him for a full game, it means that he needs Elliott numbed up enough to take the pain, and Elliott is only happy to oblige.

The real issue of both the novel and film appears to be about whether or not there is life for a professional football player other than football. When Elliott falls in love with a woman who doesn't understand the game at all (and is portrayed as having no sense of humor, either) it means that he's really struggling to find a way out. What else is there? That's a question that fans wonder about when their devotions leave them numb, but it's also what I've been curious to discover about the infinite Jets. Is that all there is? If the football player in my senior high school English is smart enough to work hard but still wants to waste my time by arguing that he should be able to sit next to the pretty girl that he's just going to distract from classwork, I think it's because he's gotten the message that there is nothing in life more rewarding than the game. If only that were true.

***

It took a minute longer than usual to find John Sullivan #50. He's not the John Sullivan who plays for the Minnesota Vikings at center. He is not Vincent John Sullivan who's been robbing banks in Montana wearing a Mark Sanchez jersey. He is John Patrick Sullivan, former linebacker who attended University of Illinois (apparently recruited by alumnus Dick Butkus) was drafted by the Chicago Bears, and then played for the Jets for two seasons. With the Bears he never made it out of preseason. Apparently he got absolutely crushed in a 1979 preseason game against the Jets in which he otherwise played very well. I remember this game, most especially because I got violently ill after a spaghetti meal at the house of a family we were visiting, and I lay down on a couch, watching the game. (Normally I don't have an encyclopedic memory of all my childhood adventures with vomiting, but there are some vivid moments I can still use for effect. I recently had to tell a longtime family friend to stop putting my mother on a Tea Party e-mailing list, and when she refused, I told her that understood why she was doing it. I hurled on her baby blue living room rug when I was about four years old, and I told her that she was probably taking revenge against us for it by vomiting her right-wing propaganda on my Mom. She stopped.)

Sullivan was so badly injured in that Jets-Bears preseason game that he never got to live out the dream of being a new Bears middle linebacker. Instead the Jets, who had seen him play, picked him up and used him in special teams and suicide squads, which the new kickoff rules have recently made somewhat obsolete. Accustomed to being a middle linebacker, the Jets put him on the outside where he could not perform as well. His story is here. You can find out how he was screamed at by Buddy Ryan, how he intercepted Richard Todd and was fired by Walt Michaels.

When football was done with him, he eventually moved to California and turned to yoga. The link above shows a barely aged man with the sinewy build of a yoga master. I'm inclined to an easy cynicism when I see yoga instructors posing on a mountain rock in bare feet, or when they call themselves ministers of something called the "Diamond Approach Community," but John Sullivan seems to have discovered a world for himself after football by making a long journey through the connections between the mind and body. Reading his story made me wonder about Phil Elliott making the break from the game at the end of his season and about his future beyond the world of the game. It took some time, Sullivan says, before he reached a sense of peace of mind. He first had to abandon what he calls the "football mask." Once the Jets let him go, he said:

The phone just stops ringing. I wore the “football mask” for many years after though; I lived with the players, I stayed friends with many of my former teammates, I was part of the fraternity. I felt I was still was part of the team even though I wasn't collecting a check. I was renting a room from one of the guys on the team; I worked at one of his bars for a while as a bartender. I was still running in that circle, so it was very hard to let go.

He also discusses football's compulsion to build only the muscles and strength in players that it needs, leaving other muscles vulnerable to injury, which he feels is ultimately what happened to him. There is a remarkable moment in North Dallas Forty when we see players in the weight room; their repetitions make their bodies seem cruelly melded to the weight machines themselves. They are conditioned and shaped by the industrial power of the team's owner, and they are a part of his chemical company empire. They are not machines; they are only small cogs in a vast machinery, and they are all disposable and replaceable. Sullivan's tale made me envious of what he was able to accomplish by reclaiming his body from the machine.

***

Born in Teaneck, NJ, Dan Murray #50 might, for all we know, have grown up rooting for the New York Jets. After graduating from little East Stroudsburg University in rural Pennsylvania - a college that has seen only five players drafted all-time in the NFL (and all in the 1980's) he began his professional career at linebacker with the Indianapolis Colts and then came to the New York Jets in 1990, where his career ended. There is so much more to be said but so else little to add, and that is the nature of life.

***

Final bid at auction: $1,220. Number of bids: 0

Michael Taylor #50 was an All-American out of Michigan, an exceptional college linebacker drafted in the first round by the Jets in 1972. He played two years for the Jets and then jumped to the WFL and the Detroit Wheels, who didn't even finish their only season in 1974. Taylor was one of several Jets who left for the new league, including Gerry Philbin, Bob Parrish, Steve Thompson, and John Elliott. A truly comprehensive WFL site offers a surprisingly detailed discussion of the Wheels, a team described as "the most forgettable of W.F.L. teams," which is sort of like being last in England's Fourth Division in 1974 (Stockport County). It's rough stuff. The above link on the Wheels includes a couple of good pictures of Taylor. He might have briefly entertained the notion of returning to Michigan as a hometown hero, albeit near Ann Arbor, in Ypsilanti, where the Wheels shared a stadium with Eastern Michigan University.

The team was bankrupt even before the midway point of the year. After their loss to the New York Stars at Downing Stadium, the Stars themselves were immediately sold to Charlotte, NC and the Wheels were sold to no one. They landed back home to no one waiting for them at the airport and no one to watch them any longer. According to Jim Cusano's fine write-up, the Wheels were the first of the WFL teams to die. Their final record was 1-13. Michael Taylor went in the subsequent dispersal draft to the Shreveport Steamer. The league itself did not last through the 1975 season. If I'm not mistaken, this was also the end of Mike Taylor's professional career. The game-worn helmet at auction above is a relic of a time when style reigned over substance, a time when, arguably, the very best designed logos and uniforms in football history were wasted on teams with little or nothing else left over in the bank to spend. In our own contemporary society today, where 1% of our people own a quarter of American wealth, we must all sometimes feel like WFL franchises. So let's hear it for the the Stars, the Hawaiians, the Sun, and the Wheels. Let us all carry on the doomed tradition.

NY Jets #50 - (Redux)

This is an entry on #50 that should have been completed months ago. I inadvertently omitted mention of seven whole human beings in this discussion of #50. I am forced to locate my own error - a labor with which better read contemporaries don't have to worry themselves - and am now correcting it. My apologies, phantom reader. Let me continue. 

S, M, L, XL (XXL not yet available)

Carl McAdams #50 was an All-American linebacker coming out of the University of Oklahoma in 1967. He was drafted by the Jets and played for two more seasons after that, which included Super Bowl III. He is the big guy at extreme right in this Daily News photograph just after the team had gotten its Super Bowl rings on July 14, 1969, two days before the launch of Apollo 11. You see from left to right Emerson Boozer, Curley Johnson, John Elliott, and Carl McAdams - a big guy, even by today's XXL standards. He technically played for the Jets at both linebacker and defensive tackle, which seems funny to think of now. He would definitely fit in with today's linebackers because of his documented speed, but on defensive lines that are too big to fail, McAdams would have been a little out of place.

Just after the Super Bowl between the Saints and Colts, McAdams was interviewed by a local Oklahoma station about his role in the game of games. He shows off the ring that he received in the photograph above. I think it's interesting that he also confesses to what Mike Curtis and Bill Curry say about Super Bowl III in the NFL Network's story on the 1970 Colts - that on any other day, the 1968 Colts would almost certainly have beaten the 1968 Jets. Today, McAdams sells real estate, and if you're interested in obtaining life, home or auto insurance from someone in the general vicinity of Antlers, OK, you might be able to speak with a veteran of the most important Super Bowl of them all.

***

Mike Mock #50 has a tough name. It sounds tough to carry around too. On an alphabetical list, it appears as "Mock, Michael," which must have been a little trying, after countless first days of classes at school, being asked by teachers "Do people mock, Michael?" or saying, "I don't think you should be mocked, Michael." Maybe I'm investing too much humor in the lives and work of teachers in the places where where Mock grew up. But the truth is that Mock was born in Trondheim, Norway, a harbor town located on the Nidelva River, so I guess his teachers didn't do that. The Internet tells me that "spotte" is Norwegian for "mock," but how long did he live there? He was drafted by the Jets out of Texas Tech, so maybe his parents were just passing through. "Mock" is not, that I know of, a Norwegian name, though being a linebacker means you can be named anything - Lipshitz, Sukoff. It's all in the attitude you carry with it, and if anything, a player can live up to the name of "mock" by being irreverent and droll. In any event, Mike Mock wore #50 on the sidelines for the 1978 season and doesn't seem to have an NFL record beyond that, which is why I bothered to fret about his name.

***

Kelvin Moses, LB

Drafted out of Wake Forest, Kelvin Moses #50 is as tall as I am (six feet even) and, when he played for the Jets, he weighed about 50 pounds more than I do (185) now. Fifty pounds of muscle, no doubt. I would have liked to have said the same about myself, but I had the distinct displeasure of looking at myself in the mirror this morning, and I saw a sagging, prematurely aged middle aged man with what looks like a layer flab at his midsection that his skin is holding back with less and less enthusiasm. I imagine anyone performing my autopsy would say this was a layer of fat sadly reminiscent of most grown, sedentary men - men who spend most of their time hunched over, writing, all the while remaining staunchly attached to the notion that they are physically about as healthy as a person half their age. If you are out there, Kelvin Moses, beware. Like Phlebus, whose dead body decayed in the water while turning in the gyre of the whirlpool, I can only act as a warning now to you, who are still young, but older, and who may be holding onto that weight you carried back in 2001-02 when you played predominantly special teams for the Jets. We see him in the attached photograph above in one of his last regular season games, a happy occasion, when the Jets beat the Patriots 30-17 and put themselves in a position to win the division, which they did. It's the last division title they've won.

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.*

***

Wayne Mulligan #50 was another former Cardinal that Charley Winner brought over from St. Louis when he replaced his father-in-law Weeb Ewbank as Head Coach of the Jets in 1974. Mulligan was the center who handed off to Joe Namath in the two games I saw with my Dad in 1975, games that resonate in my mind like personal myths. Where did we sit? How many off-duty cops were there sitting in front if us? What did Dad get me to eat? I still hold that the greatest piece of mystery is how my mind was able to not see the Mets' infield and home plate that remained left over in the Jets' season at Shea. I don't recall it at all, though I do recall the disappointment I felt when I noticed it in 1978, when Dad took me to the Jets-Dolphins' season opener at Shea. Did my brain not actually see the infield in 1975 because I wasn't expecting to see it? Was it like the apocryphal story of the natives who could not see Columbus' ships on the horizon because they had no prior basis for understanding something like that could exist?

Mulligan appears to have retired after the 1975 season. He was replaced by rookie Joe Fields, who would snap the ball to Joe Namath, Richard Todd, Pat Ryan, Matt Robinson, and Ken O'Brien. And Phil Simms in 1988, when he became a Giant for one season. Centers act as the keystone to the line, the transitional arc from one side of the line to the other, with their posteriors pointed toward the most important man on the field. It's such an odd place for anyone to find himself, and I suppose centers, whom you rarely hear about, have to have as good a sense of humor about themselves as Mike Mock does about his name. Do we never hear about the center because we are too embarrassed to admit that the game we love requires a man to have the ball fed to him between another man's legs? Anyone not already acclimated to the absurdities of this great game would likely be suspicious. "You construct intricate rituals," Barbara Kruger once said in one of her works, "which allow you to touch the skin of other men."

Regardless, Wayne Mulligan was the transitional point in the arc between John Schmitt #52 (1966-73) and Joe Fields #65 (1976-87). That's a total of 22 seasons among three men at one position. Only at the quietly devout position of center (and placekicker) is something like that even remotely possible.

NY Jets #56 - Part 4

John Abraham in 2005

Am I wrong, or does John Abraham have really long arms? I keep staring at this picture, amazed at what I'm seeing. When I stand up straight, my full palm goes past my waist. His elbow almost meets his waist. When I was a little boy I drew pictures of football players with one physical aspect usually out of proportion with the whole - a giant head, giant feet, or arms as inordinately long as John Abraham's. So we can think of this not as a deformity but as an abstraction of the human form, an aesthetic improvement over the norm, certainly for a linebacker.

This Life photo is, as Jets fans know, taken from 2005, the one season Abraham wore #56, a gesture that always seemed derivative of another famous player with that number from another New York-based team. Normally, Abraham wore #94 for the Jets, and he now wears #55 with Atlanta. That he could not be kept on the Jets is one of the greatest frustrations of my recent fandom, alongside the departure of James Farrior and Jonathan Vilma. The Jets never really made good draft choices before the first decade of the 21st century, so I guess it would have been too much to expect them to keep all the great ones they made afterwards.

His #56 in 2005 was a tribute to Lawrence Taylor, I think. I guess for a Jets fan that's a bit like seeing the Mets wear black hats, which still smacks too much of trying to be like the Yankees. You have colors already, I keep saying every time I see David Knight in those black shirts that make them look like they're Auto Zone attendants. Be who you are, not who they are. But even more, by wearing #56, John Abraham seemed like he was expressing a need to appear like something that he couldn't be, that no one could be. To offer a tribute to LT is as understandable as it was for the Greeks to make alms to the gods of Olympus, but it's kind of obvious, too, isn't it? Don't all men want to be gods? All linebackers in some sense want to be like the man who redefined their position, so wearing his number is just being redundant. Of course you want to be LT, I wanted to say. Just be grateful you're not a criminal offender the way he is. Be yourself. You have a number. Be that number. You don't have to be anyone but yourself. So John Abraham became a Falcon and then gave up #56. I should have been more specific.

Linebacker Godwin Turk #56 does not have arms as long as John Abraham's, but I'm certain most people don't, not even Lawrence Taylor. Turk was drafted by the Jets in 1974, and I probably saw him play the following season when he started every game. He then went on to play mostly special teams for the Denver Broncos for three seasons (1976-78) and like John Abraham, he traded #56 for #55. He played for the AFC Champion Broncos of 1977, the Orange Crush. Turk is also apparently "infamous" for separating his shoulder after spiking the football in celebration of a fumble recovery. I don't know for whom he played at the time it happened. According to his database record, he suited for almost every game in each of his seasons of play, save for one or two. He recovered fumbles in 1975 and 1978, so did he do it at the end of one of those seasons? It would be horrible to think of him doing it at the end of his career. Maybe it happened in the 1974 preseason? The card below lists him as "injured" that year.

Your mystery Jet? Jerome Barkum or Winston Hill

As has been pointed out before, it's unfair to identify a player's career with a single foible in the field, and considering how popular it was to spike the ball in the 1970's, you could hardly blame him. It was a sign of the new, exuberant football of Billy "White Shoes" Johnson. It seems innocuous compared with hiding a cell phone in the padding of a goal post. Godwin Turk was celebrating what a defensive man always wants for himself - to be in on the play that will turn the game around. A Denver Post laundry list of worse "freak injuries" is here, and Turk's spike is on it. Some of these are acts of God, others are acts of ignorance, and others are just a matter of someone being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I can't attribute any of that to Godwin Turk. All he hurt was himself, and his sin was one of exuberance. The back of his card is all we really have to go on. It calls him a "lusty hitter," which also sounds exuberant, though I don't think anyone would call a player that today, probably because it sounds like something Don Meredith would have made fun of Howard Cosell for saying.

****

Craig Powell #56 played linebacker at Ohio State and then in a pro career that originally saw him as one of the players who moved with the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore. He returned from knee injury briefly to play in 1998 with the Jets, but he wrecked his knee again and was finished in the NFL. He returned in 2001 to play for the San Francisco Demons of the XFL. His write-up on the Demons' page says that at Ohio State, he was "touted as one of the fastest linebackers in college football, always arrived at the ball in a hurry and in a nasty frame of mind."

It seemed that one of the failures of the XFL was its insistence that what Americans wanted was not a better game, but a nastier game, a game played with a manufactured sense of violence. I suppose you could say that all of this began with the spike, which suggested that the game was also a spectacle of a player's attitude, his sense of himself. The spike was a threat to the game's traditionalists; as late as the 1980's Tom Landry didn't want his players to spike the football. The NFL is named the No Fun League for a reason, but part of its conservatism is legitimate - too much exuberance in a violent game can sometimes lead to uncontrollable violence. Consider the brawl in 1983 that started with Jackie Slater attacking Mark Gastineau for his sack dance and that eventually lead to the NFL banning the dance.

The XFL struggled because it wanted to cast real people in a narrative that had the nature of fiction but was also an actual game. Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo would never have made it in the XFL, probably because they were friends in real life as well as teammates in an unscripted drama. They were also real people played by Billy Dee Williams and James Caan in a motion picture film based on a real story, the polar opposite of the kind of drama Vince McMahon wanted. Brian's Song would have been deemed "pantywaist" entertainment by McMahon (one of his favorite words), probably because it transcended notions of what football was all about and attributed a sensitive nature to men.

Excessive celebration is also an element of professional wrestling, but you can feign the bluster of a professional wrestler because the professional wrestling is not real. Most importantly, wrestling's violence is controlled and scripted. I remember feeling true unease when the XFL was first planned because Vince McMahon seemed to want to compound the level of violence in a game with enough unscripted violence as it was. Perhaps because it was such uncharted territory for him, he failed. I just kept seeing the excesses of a growing fascistic state being stirred by the nearly mortal violence of its favorite sport. What I was really seeing in my mind was Rollerball, another good James Caan film that, like Brian's Song, was made into a terrible remake.

Anthony Schlegel #56 came from Ohio State a decade later and was drafted by the Jets in 2006. He is out of the NFL today and is apparently a strength coach for Ohio State. His web site is an advertisement of sorts for his services in building strength in the weight room. On the other hand, it is also laced with references to Biblical scripture, offering what seems to be his philosophy behind "strength building." It's also a window into a part of the United States that I don't really think I understand, offering a conflation of things like football, guns, God, and hunting that could only come out of Texas. My sausages for tonight's grilling came from the market. Schlegel started hog hunting when he was 16.

He says that today when he hunts he comes back with meat that he will then clean and offer to homeless shelters, an altruistic gesture that most hunters probably don't even think of. So there's that. But sometimes when I look at the Red States I see another country, one that is also the core inspiration for the game I love, so it's disorienting. I feel like I'm unable to communicate with that part of the world. A queasiness comes over me, I shake it off, I move on. The games must be played and watched. The German poet Friedrich von Schlegel (no relation to Anthony that anyone knows of) once said that it was "peculiar of mankind to transcend mankind," which I think is especially true in reference to football. Whatever Brian's Song might have suggested.

***

Chris Wing #56 came out of Boise State and suited up for two wholly non-statistical games at linebacker for the Jets in 2007 and that was that. Vernon Gholston came out of Ohio State, was drafted #1 in 2008, he briefly wore #56, suited up for three seasons with the Jets, producing virtually the same results. Who could have seen it coming? "The historian, says von Schlegel, "is a prophet looking backwards." So, no one.