NY Jets #60 - Part 2

Dennis O'Sullivan #60 played at center for the Jets in 2002, though he was technically in the NFL for about five years, including years on the Jets' bench and with the 49ers. In 2003, he was compelled to testify about an assault on a limo driver that may have also included him, Jason Fabini, Todd Husak, and Jumbo Elliott. Of all the players, Elliott seemed the one most implicated, with the suggestion that "one of the players was drunk and rowdy." Elliott himself was previously involved in a legal case after he apparently injured people in a bar brawl in 2000. Perhaps these and other things O'Sullivan witnessed influenced his retirement decision to become a speaker on the subject of alcohol and drug abuse among athletes.

Apparently he is a vice president for development for the American Athletic Institute, which sounds like a pretty broad name for a group focused primarily on "proactive" issues addressing behavior, sportsmanship, and health among student-athletes. O'Sullivan has spoken at schools and community centers on the subject of drug and alcohol abuse. As a high school teacher, it's almost commonplace for me to have to tell the football players in my class not to talk aloud about the details of their weekends where, no doubt, they were probably hammered. We write referrals to the substance abuse program at the school, but there's no proactive initiative to deal with drinking among athletes, specifically. In this community, it seems that every other year a young person dies from an overdose, though it's rarely an athlete. But our athletes are drunk or high often, sometimes even at school.

That wasn't exactly weird at my high school growing up, either. Every weekend, football players held hibachi parties where everyone knew they were drinking. When I was a junior, I inherited a copy of the Best American Short Stories in my English class from the kid who had it before me, a huge, belching defensive lineman who had scrawled the word "ALCOHOL" on the side of the book. It was no big deal.

My upbringing was sufficiently strict to keep me from drinking in high school. I was also a band kid, a theater kid, a geek about music, old movies and statistics in sports. I was a blogger before there were blogs - someone with only a few friends, all of whom drank cola and ate Doritos while listening to the Big Chill soundtrack at Friday night parties. That's how crazy it got. I didn't start drinking until college. Once there, I was surrounded by Irish-American kids and kegs of beer, and so I joined in. But I will never forget the first high I got from beer. "Where have you been all my life?" it made me wonder. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

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There are plenty of things I remember faintly and unhappily from my drinking life - things like trashing a room, putting my fist through a wall, visiting bars I didn't want to go to just for a drink, dancing with women I didn't want to talk to, laughing at jokes that weren't funny, saying unfunny things just to say anything. I remember blackouts, though obviously not well. I remember lashing out at people for no reason. I remember not doing well at my job and trying to disappear behind my cubicle. I remember only feeling comfortable talking with people socially if I were liquored up enough to chat, and I remember running out of things to say. I remember saying I didn't want to drink anymore and then drinking more. I remember folding myself up in the shower, trying to imagine the hot water washing away the hard wall of misery that came with the morning. I remember wishing I were dead. I remember the planning, the endless planning that came with a night's drinking, and planning it out so that it could be just the right kind of high without going too far, and being despondent the next morning because I always drank myself to sleep, often on a floor.

Drinking was great, though. I've always known it was from the very first drunk. It would be pointless of me to say otherwise. I can't drink anymore, I won't tonight, but after I got sober it always felt false to testify that I hated drinking. I always loved it. It made me happy in the moment when so few things do. The very idea of it made me happy; it still does. Knowing that there's alcohol in the house was a kind of security that comes from believing implicitly there is only one thing that can make you content. Tonight is New Year's Eve. If I were drinking, I wouldn't want champagne, or the champagne of beers. I would want whiskey, and if it were in the house, I would normally want to drink the better part of a quart before bed, before sleep, or whatever it would be called. Then I'd go out the next day and buy another quart.

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Larry Grantham #60 shares a distinction with only three other men we've discussed; along with Curley Johnson, Don Maynard, and Bill Mathis, he is a Super Bowl III starter who also played for the New York Titans. When he retired in 1973, he had been a five-time All Star in the AFL at linebacker and a longtime leader of the Jets' defenses. His deep, dour face, lined with the expression of a herd driver in John Wayne's crew in Red River, reveals a pathos that I always found impressive. He seemed the diametric opposite of the people in Namath's buoyant jock world. Grantham came from Mississippi, which made sense in a way. When I read Best American Short Stories, I imagined that Faulkner's Wash of Yoknapatawpha County looked a lot like Larry Grantham. Or maybe he looked like one of the endless numbers of knuckle-cracking bad guy henchmen that Jim Rockford had to fight off in slacks. He looked quiet and hard.

He re-emerged in the news over the past few years because an ongoing battle with cancer had drained his finances, and in 2009, he was thinking about pawning his Super Bowl ring to pay some of his bills. Bassett writes eloquently about Grantham's importance in Jets history, but he also mentions how a Star-Ledger article about Grantham's financial plight brought thousands donations in so that he could keep the ring. Bassett suggests that this was karma. Dave Anderson wrote a year before that Grantham is known for his generosity, in being the regular coordinator of '68 alumni events, but most of all because he has been the key fundraiser for a New Jersey drug and alcohol recovery center called Freedom House.

According to Anderson in 2008, Grantham had been sober for decades, and Freedom House has become the main focus of his interest. One of his good friends from the defensive front line in 1968 was Paul Rochester, who hadn't had a drink in 37 years at the time of the article. Rochester describes the struggles in retirement of his other teammates from that famous squad, like Verlon Biggs #86 and Sam Walton #72, and the role Grantham had in trying to help:

“Larry and I spoke at Verlon’s funeral in Mississippi,” Rochester said. “Sam was a sad situation. Larry heard that Sam was living on the streets in Memphis and tried to find him to help him. One time, Larry even spotted him, but Sam took off; I guess he was too embarrassed. When Larry heard that Sam died in an abandoned house, he arranged for a proper burial for him. That’s Larry.”

Grantham is the player who grabbed the ball at the very end of Super Bowl III and ran off the field with it. He runs off like a fan who has invaded the pitch, stolen the ball, and needs to be chased down by security. Grantham looks not at all like the stoic leatherface I once imagined him to be. He leaps into the air with the joy of a kid; he is carrying the ball that Johnny Unitas has just thrown on the very last play. He is ecstatic in a way that a football player is not supposed to be, or maybe he looks like a young high schooler whose team has just beaten the state champ. Braylon Edwards' end-over-end leap at the end of the playoff game against the Pats last year was like that too, and as I've said before, that was one of those moments where, for a fan, anything seemed possible.

When I watch the Super Bowl III game tape - which I do more often than I'd like to admit - I see Larry Grantham standing alongside his other defensive players and looking considerably smaller. He was light and short for a defensive player at any position, even back then. He is as tall as I am. As a recovered alcoholic, he knows what it is to be his own enemy. Dave Anderson says that in truth, Grantham's "greatest asset really was and is himself."

Obviously, it was beautiful that others were there for Grantham when he needed them and that he was able to hold onto his ring. The ring has meant more to other people than perhaps it even meant to him. It signified that an unlikely win against an indomitable foe was not out of the question. It suggested that an effervescent childhood innocence could be conjured out of a grown man such that he would leapfrog jump across a football field. It meant that a hopeless drunk or junkie could experience freedom from the sole obsession that occupies the addicted mind. In more than one article about Grantham's quandary, a Freedom House resident is quoted as saying that Grantham would regularly take the ring off his finger and place it into the resident's hand, suggesting that if Larry Grantham could get clean, then the resident could too, and that anything is possible.

NY Jets #60 - Part 1

On Christmas Eve, my wife and I drove to another commonwealth, where my parents live. Somehow, though moving away from the New York-New Jersey area, we were able to pick up the Jets-Giants game on the radio all the way down. Needless to say, what began as a promising matchup turned out to be no matchup at all. It was an awful experience, listening helplessly. You sensed the momentum shift after Victor Cruz's 99-yard touchdown. Antonio Cromartie forced two returns when he should have taken the touchback. Penalties abounded. The Jets were a team forced by a mediocre Giants club to see themselves for what they really are, fueled by symbolism, fortune, hubris, energy, hot air, but little else. Even the announcers craved a Sanchez pass way downfield to Burress, Holmes, or Keller - to somebody, anybody - but it didn't come. Or maybe if they just ran the ball more.

Christmas came. My nephew got an Ahmad Bradshaw jersey and a kid's sized Giants helmet that reminded me of the Jets one I had when lived on Long Island. He and I played catch out back, and he talked about all the players from Big Blue that he loved. He talked about playing the game himself against all sorts of NFL players, and I realized that he was talking about Madden 11. He's light on his feet, tall for his age, curious and thoughtful, most of all. Perhaps I had moaned once too often about how remote the chance of even backing into the playoffs seemed to be for the Jets, and he said, looking through his Giants' face mask, "Don't worry, Uncle Marty. The Jets are still a good team." It was nice of him to say. He pitied me.

Is this the end of the current era of winning for the Jets? The 49ers are back to being dominant, which is a condition that cosmologically necessitates that the Jets do poorly. Was it worth it? Did we learn anything during this time? Is that all there is? Over the years 1997-present, which represented the 49ers descent into mediocrity, we've gone to the playoffs seven times, which is as many times as the Jets managed in their entire history before then.


D'Brickashaw Ferguson #60 is a character representation of the best of these years. At tackle, he was drafted #1 in 2006, has made the Pro Bowl three out of the six years in the NFL and is regularly considered to be among the better offensive linemen in the game. True to an offensive lineman's nature, he does not appear to be boastful or particularly nasty to anyone, and he heads charitable work outside the game. He is, in other words, not really an ideal character in a Rex Ryan drama. His tweets are quite innocuous, polite, thoughtful, and not at all the confessional work of today's players. Aside from appearing to have arms as long as his legs, he is the sort of fellow that I would hope my nephew would grow up to be.

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Casey Wiegmann #60 should win an award for surviving. He is 38 years old, has played for six clubs (one twice over, and that one being Kansas City), actually married a contestant on Survivor, his house in his childhood town was destroyed by a tornado, he played for the 1996 New York Jets, got to go to the Pro Bowl for first time in 2008, and currently has the longest starting streak at his position of any player in the NFL. If you are wondering, he plays center, the most unrewarded and unrewarding of positions in the game, and he is from Iowa - a stoic, virtuous Midwestern state that may, for all I know, produce many a remarkable number of centers. It is a position that must demand a self-sustaining sense of humility and humor, for the center must have his fanny touched on every play. He endures. He survives.

NY Jets #59

For Jets fans, this season has been a little disappointing. For old fans like me, this has been a trip down a memory lane that's about as enjoyable as a hangover to a drunk. For young fans, it's like showing up at the popular hamburger joint you've enjoyed every weekend that's suddenly run out of beef and shutting down for good in a few weeks. I'm not sure if that makes sense. When you know that this season won't be as well off as the last, nothing feels as good, and the words come slowly, meaninglessly. The Jets lost a month ago on a Sunday night when our biggest rival suddenly found their passing game. Then they lost the following Thursday night to a team that literally doesn't have a passing game. This seems like old times.

But I also live in Philadelphia, and for once the Eagles are failing even more impossibly than the Jets, despite all their apparent talent. Here it is a time for self-recrimination, regret, the placing of blame, cynicism, and general bitterness - the business of the soul's dark night, the hour best suited to the people of this fair city. Unreasonably euphoric when the Birds when four in a row, Philadelphians find a groove of misery when the Iggs disappoint, and they will stay there with a masochistic relish for as a long as possible. Losing, I find, brings out metaphors and similies in this town.

"Disappointment is a dish best served with Cheese Whiz on a soft roll," one of my co-workers said to me when I told him I was sorry to see the Eagles lose to the Pats the way they did. "Slather it," he said.

"It was like watching a chicken getting eaten by a snake," another fan, my next door neighbor said after the Eagles lost so entirely to an inferior Seahawks team, "you keep watching, thinking that the chicken's got to be able to get away. But he doesn't."

Sometimes failure, so common to people in hard times, so omnipresent to most football fans is familiar and warm. "As familiar as your father's plaid Christmas pants," another Eagles fan said to me when I extended my condolences toward after their bizarre. "You wish it weren't there, but you remember it, you got through the sight of it before, so you know you can survive it." Perhaps that's why I feel so comfortable here. Losing brings out the wordsmith in the denizens of this place, and it's consoling to me too. It may even last through the game the Jets and Eagles will play in a few weeks.

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What makes a man a "good guy?" Is he a mensch, someone who's there when you need him? Is he someone who is actively good, going above and beyond what people expect of him? Or is he just a guy that doesn't give you trouble? He does his homework, he doesn't give the teacher problems in class, he nods at his jokes. In high school, I recall that girls didn't date good guys. They dated bad guys. When you ask a woman about the man her friend is marrying and she says, "He's a good guy," you somehow know that there's something disappointing in what she's saying, though you don't know what it is.

The Jets' yearly "Good Guy Award" is named for linebacker Kyle Clifton #59, who might recall some familiar losing seasons with the Jets. To anyone who has followed the Jets for the past 30 years, you might recognize his name as longtime veteran of an absurd era (1984-96). Thirteen seasons, four coaches, two winning campaigns. Through most of it, Clifton was a good player on some poorly performing teams. His best year was 1990, when he caught three interceptions and made 199 tackles, an extraordinary statistic in and of itself. He led the NFL that year, but that number of tackles would correspond with the top number in several of the past seasons in the current NFL. Whether or not this meant that no one else was making tackles on the Jets in 1990 is irrelevant; someone had to do it, and in almost 200 instances, Kyle Clifton did.

The Kyle Clifton Good Guy Award is explained in German here. Brad Smith received it in 2007, and on his Wikipedia page, it's described as recognizing a player with "consistent willingness, cooperation and professionalism in everyday dealings with various departments in organization." And I wonder about this. Was this Eric Mangini's description of the award that year? He cooperated, he didn't give us problems, he didn't ask us for anything big. Sounds like the kind of thing Mangini valued in his players. And indeed this year Brad Smith went out the door like a good guy when the Jets picked up Plaxico Burress and made a contract with Santonio Holmes.

"Good guy." It sounds corporate. When Kyle Clifton made 199 tackles in 1990, he was not so much valuable in his everyday dealings with the organization but valuable where it counts, as a player in the field doing his job above and beyond expectations (and he should have gone to the Pro Bowl). The award was first given out in 1996, and to him, and it may have been a way for the organization, as it were, to say goodbye, especially after he had been slotted to be replaced by Marvin Jones for so long. But still, it feels clinical, flat, a kind gesture toward the door, with nice parting gifts. He may not have taken it that way; I certainly hope he didn't. But sometimes "good guy" doesn't feel like a compliment.

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In 1974, Howard Kindig #59 was brought in to play his last year with the Jets after being a longtime AFL guy with the Chargers and Bills. He played in 1972 for the perfect Dolphins. His career ended with the Jets, which may have been exactly as it should have been. Had he played with the Jets the following year, he might well have given up on the integrity of the game altogether. The Bills have a more thorough background on its "alumni," and here is Kindig's story, including his sense that the AFL had two distinct times - the early era, when teams were playing for financial survival, and the period after the merger, when bonus babies like Joe Namath and OJ Simpson redefined the AFL player. Kindig, on the other hand, seems a relic of the older version. As the link makes clear, Kindig even forsook balmy San Diego to play with his buddies in Buffalo, which to me is an almost unthinkable transition. I don't have anything interesting on his year with the Jets, but here are the details of the case the United States made against him in 1988. I presume he weathered it. 

Linebacker Bob Martin #59 replaced Kindig in number for the Jets. He played from 1976-78 before playing briefly with the 49ers. He started all of 1978, netting two interceptions that season and today he works for a Nebraska-based corporation that sells industrial-based equipment. The company's name is, curiously enough, Valmont. I'm certain that they didn't intend to name their company after one of literature's greatest rogues, but who knows? Aren't there Lotharios in Lincoln and Omaha? Aren't there aimless young aristocrats hanging around the halls of prairie mammon, hoping to corrupt a guileless young debutante? Perhaps there is a correlation between the sale of industrial equipment and sexual seduction. What do I know?

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Rob Spicer #59, linebacker for the Jets in 1973, may have been a junior in high school the year the Indiana Hoosiers went to the 1968 Rose Bowl. He may have thought that they would return again when he enrolled there as a freshman in 1969, but they haven't been back since. I don't need to tell you that's a little bit longer than we've been waiting for a conference championship. I remember how my college's basketball team went to the Final Four the year before I enrolled there, and they haven't been there since, either. We're all waiting for something, though most of us don't really know what it is half the time. But at least, as fans, we have discernible needs, wishes and wants. We know what we want. We're just waiting for it to happen.