NY Jets #8 - Part 2

We are in the process of updating all previously discussed numbers up to 61, wherever necessary. We are also revising some of the previous entries themselves, making them, we hope, more palatable. More readable. Less unreadable.

Mark Brunell? (circa 1966)

Craig Morton? (circa 2011)

Apropos of absolutely nothing, has anyone ever seen Craig Morton and Mark Brunell #8 together? If so, are they ever embarrassed? Although Brunell is three inches shorter than Morton, I have an otherwise plausible theory that Mark Brunell is actually Craig Morton having traveled back in time and reestablished a younger clone of himself as a starting quarterback, as he was for Jacksonville in the 90's. The only trouble is that now Brunell (in his present form, as a Morton clone) is about a year younger than I am. So the time jumping Morton has to come up with a new plan.

Maybe it's the other way round. Maybe Craig Morton is actually Mark Brunell who traveled back in time and replaced Don Meredith for the Dallas Cowboys in the mid to late 1960's. In any event, Morton/Brunell played so well against the Bills at the end of the 2010 season in place of Mark Sanchez that I almost hoped he might be able to do something in relief of our starting quarterback toward the end of this past season. But then the statistics show he merely went 6 for 12 for 110 yards in that game. Maybe I'm just hoping that a man born the year after I was born (and the year that his earlier/later self brought the Cowboys to a loss in Super Bowl V) can still lead a team to victory in football. So, now that Brunell nears the age at which Elvis died, where will he go? Mark Sanchez needs more than just fraternal advice; he needs an intervention, which a time traveler may not have time for, figuratively or literally. So whither will the time traveler go?

****

There is a famous photograph taken along the sidelines of a 1974 game against the Buffalo Bills at Shea, where Joe Namath is speaking with his coaches, or maybe his agent. He is caked with mud, and he is about to lead the Jets to a 20-10 win with a touchdown pass to Jerome Barkum. It is one of the most commonly signed of Namath shots, and it depicts one of the last moments of Namath glory (such as it was) complete with the gladiator's parka. It's merely a moment caught, but I've always been alert to the fact that walking behind Joe is #8, the rookie punter, Greg Gantt.

Greg Gantt

I remember going through the PRO magazine at my first Jets game, the 1975 home game against the Colts, and looking through the faces of all the players who listed as starters that day. And there, between Eddie Bell #7 and JJ Jones #11, was the photo you see to the right - of a gap-toothed, mop-topped guy with a mustache, looking more like a Lynard Skynard roadie or a sheriff's deputy than a football player. I don't remember him, but he punted relatively well, five times averaging 42 yards. By comparison, the Colts' David Lee punted six times, though the Colts won 45-28.

But Greg Gantt was a well-known punter in the world of the Iron Bowl, the world of Alabama football. In the early 1970's, Gantt was the Crimson Tide's punter. With under a minute to play against Notre Dame in the 1973 Sugar Bowl, his last game with Alabama, and trailing 24-23, Gantt launched an excellent punt that went over the head of the returner, and Alabama downed it at the Irish 2. In all, Gantt's punt went 69 yards. At 6:19 you see him launch it, but he's also roughed up by Ross Browner, and rather than take a fourth and five for the penalty, Bear Bryant gave the ball to Notre Dame, hoping for his defense to come through. Yet no one would have remembered Gantt's great punt, whether the Bear accepted the penalty or not, for Notre Dame's Tom Clements then made a brilliant pass to Robin Weber along the sideline at the 36, giving the Irish the first down and enough room to run out the clock.



The piece of Alabama lore for which Greg Gantt was actually better known is referred to "Punt, Bama, Punt," a 1972 Iron Bowl game where Bill Newton of Auburn blocked two of Gantt's punts and the Tigers' David Langer scored touchdowns off the blocks each time, helping Auburn to a 17-16 win over the Tide. Afterwards, Bear Bryant apparently said that he would never again have a "3 step punter," which I suppose is what Gantt was. It's difficult to think about Gantt playing another full year under Bryant knowing that he was the last of a kind of punter that the Bear didn't want anymore.

Or was it that he lived the rest of his life in the shadow of the moment from the state's most important game? Let me say first that Gantt actually passed away last October 2011 from heart disease after battling diabetes for many years. (A fine online dedication to him is available at the Southern Heritage Funeral Home web site.) He seems to have lead a good life, a full life. According to the Times obituary, Gantt's sister says that her brother worried for many years that the blocked punts would be what people would know him for most of all. Almost as if to guarantee it, the obituary actually begins with the following:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Greg Gantt, a former punter for the University of Alabama and the Jets, who might be best known for having two punts blocked in a 17-16 loss to Auburn in 1972, died on Wednesday. He was 59. 

Well, there you have it, New York Times. You made Greg Gantt's worry come true. The obituary fails to mention that Gantt also led the Southeastern Conference in punting three seasons in a row and held records for punting at Alabama for many years. Gantt returned back to Birmingham after his last season with the Jets in 1975, to his home, to a world where the past is the most important time frame. Past resentments, past slights and memories held in place determine the present in Alabama, and the past repeats again and again with a melancholy redolence. I've often said that I haven't got much appreciation for college football, even if it is the feeding line for the pros. Everything I've seen here in Pennsylvania in reaction to the decline and death of Joe Paterno suggests that, in general, the game fosters sentimentalities in people that defy common sense. And in Alabama, where the state flag features the bars of the St. George's Cross in blood red, the Iron War are very likely deeper than just the sides of a football game. It's awful to feel as though you are the reason why your team lost, but remember that Gantt's blocked punts were also a failure of the offensive line. Right? Doesn't that make sense? Yet Bear Bryant said he didn't need a three-step punter anymore.

The moment in memory has also come down to three men - Gantt, Newton and Langer - the punter, the blocker, and the recoverer. As late as 2004, the moment was being discussed. Newton says at the link that people still approach him with pictures of one of the blocked punts for him to autograph, with the players carefully labeled on the picture. They tell him of how "they'd passed down the story of the game to their kids." Mike DuBose, former head coach and Bryant player is quoted as saying of the Iron Bowl in A War in Dixie: "It's the kind of game I didn't enjoy playing in. The game is never over. You kept repeating it and repeating it and repeating it. ... It's never over until you play it again next year."

We imagine that by being a fan we are encouraging our heroes to mark their time on the field as the time of their lives, as if we are doing them a favor. You get the sense that Newton is "humbled," as he says at the link above, when fans approach him with a picture to sign from a game played in 1972, but he also seems beguiled. DuBose speaks of the game as not at all enjoyable, and why would you enjoy something that actually has the potential to mark itself not just in your memory forever but also in the consciousness of the entire people who occupy the only place you can ever be able to return to and call home. Was it a relief for Greg Gantt to live in New York, where probably no one mentioned "Punt, Bama, Punt?" He came home to Alabama when all was done, regardless, had two daughters, and worked in the recycling business. He was beset by illness, and apparently had his left leg amputated (though not his kicking leg) within a few years of his death as a result of his struggles with diabetes. He came home to a place where people don't appear to forget anything.

At the end of the obituary, there is a piece of Modernist poetry. Of the '72 game, Gantt's sister is quoted as saying, "He got over it; that’s what most people remembered most." That Faulknerian semi-colon sits in the middle of two truths, one about the efforts of the individual and the other about the insatiable collective memory of home.

NY Jets #7 - Part 2

We are in the process of updating all previously discussed numbers up to 61, wherever necessary. We are also revising some of the previous entries themselves, making them, we hope, more palatable. More readable. Less unreadable.

Kevin O'Connell #7 was Mark Sanchez's backup in 2011 after doing such services behind Tom Brady in New England and then playing for the Jets (and suiting up for the Lions and Dolphins) after that. Altogether, the Jets cut him in 2010, brought him back at the beginning of the 2011 camp, then cut him again, then brought him back after Greg McElroy (of the now famous "culture of corruption" quote) dislocated his thumb. O'Connell was this year's third stringer, and he threw three fewer passes than Jeremy Kurley #11 and one less than Ladanian Tomlinson, who threw one.

Which reminds me of another tall guy with an Irish name...

****

When I first started the then-unnamed Infinite Jets project in 2007, I went through the numbers pretty quickly, thinking that this would be something to do briefly in my spare time. It has developed into a largely unread obsession which takes up big chunks of my free life. It is mostly a hobby, but it is also an outlet for a frustrated fan of a football team and therefore, by definition, a labor of love.

So many players got a short shrift here early on, especially Ken O'Brien #7. I remember writing about number 7, for example, while sitting in a student desk, monitoring the hallways during a final exam period. Instead of grading my own student exams, I wrote about O'Brien:

This man is a New York Jets legend, mostly because he was not Dan Marino. The Jets could have picked Dan Marino in the draft - many teams could have - but they chose Ken O'Brien instead. Do I need to discuss the ramifications of this? Do I need to talk any further about it?... O'Brien was good when he was good and terrible when he was bad; basically, he was just like you and me. Average. He was not Dan Marino, but then neither are you - literally or metaphorically. After a while, he started to look small in his uniform. He was a good quarterback in the best days of 1986 - the first half of the season - when we went 10-1. But then we also lost the last five games of the season. When Pat Ryan pulled his groin (his own) in the playoffs against Cleveland, Kenny came off the benching he received and attempted an ill-fated QB sneak. He threw a winning touchdown to Al Toon to keep the Giants out of the playoffs in 1988.  Then he starts to fade away. The more Dan Marino won, the more we knew Ken O'Brien himself would never live up to being Ken O'Brien. It's just Jets logic, and it works every time.

Blunt to the point of being glib, I said all I could about Ken O'Brien, knowing there was a lot more to say. "Do I need to talk any further about this?" I realize that this is the same question I ask near the end of every entry on every player on this site. And the answer is yes, always yes. There is always more to say. And if any player epitomizes the Jets fan's brief joys and relative misery, then it's Ken O'Brien, this devotion's patron saint. So let's try again.

First of all, as of a year and a half ago, Ken O'Brien seems to have been doing quite well. He was a quarterbacks coach for Carson Palmer and Matt Cassel at USC. He says the best parts of being in the game were the relationships he forged with fellow Jets teammates. He speaks at the link above with malice toward none, even if he's aware that the central question he'll be invariably asked will involve Dan Marino. Recall that both Todd Blackledge (Chiefs' pick) and Tony Eason (Patriots) were picked before him and that Marino was available to both those teams as well.

You have to admire the absolutely enormous gamble the Jets made in picking a Division II star quarterback whose arm would soon give out instead of the man who would become the greatest quarterback of his time (of all time?). It was not entirely clear what the outcomes would be, but maybe it was a little clear. A little. And hindsight, though useless, tells us that picking O'Brien was not so much an informed decision (remember that the Jets - and several other teams - were worried about Marino's IQ) as it was a collective death wish. With O'Brien's gradual decline, the Jets' organization - ever the second banana of New York - would become a non-entity for years.

It was not his fault. Ken O'Brien wasn't a bad quarterback. In fact, statistically, for almost two seasons, he was every bit as good as Marino. He had an extraordinary passer rating in 1985, going to the Pro Bowl that season, as well as to the playoffs. For most of 1986, he was excellent, but then after week 12 the Jets played like the worst team in the NFL, and O'Brien went into a mysterious funk. That season, one of the most vividly horrifying of my entire fandom, took a briefly better turn in the Wild Card Game, when the Jets beat Kansas City 35-15. Joe Walton started Pat Ryan (the patron saint of Jets' backups; remember that, Kevin O'Connell) in place of O'Brien. Paul Zimmerman's article on the game in SI spends a curious amount of time on the arm fatigue of Ken O'Brien, who stood on the sidelines:

O'Brien had come into camp during the summer and thrown five days a week. When he wasn't practicing on the field during the season, he was throwing on the sideline, always throwing. When the weather turned cold, the equipment man would give him a thermal shirt to wear under his jersey, but he turned it down. He was young and strong, and his arm had lightning in it. Then his arm got tired.


He was young and strong. The Jets lived and died on the long arm of O'Brien. Injuries ensued in 1986, and the defense couldn't keep the others side from scoring less than the Jets did. The object was to outscore the opponent, and with receivers like Wesley Walker and Al Toon, the Jets could do it, just so long as O'Brien could throw as far as they could run. When I think about the team's seeming inability or unwillingness to let Mark Sanchez unload the ball downfield this past season, I'm struck by the fact that, long ago, all the Jets did was throw deep.

O'Brien's Wikipedia page is a fascinating apologia, the profile of a man who was, for a brief period of time, untouchable. There is a conspicuous information suggesting that he really was as good as Marino, Montana, and Elway for that brief period time. There is a list of games on the page in which each opposing quarterback threw for 400 or more yards, and there you'll find O'Brien's greatest hour, the 51-45 victory over Marino and Miami, a game I remember well. O'Brien tied up the game on a last-second touchdown to Wesley Walker and then reached Walker on a bomb in overtime.

That game's highlights and a praising montage O'Brien, courtesy of AmazingQB is here:

(I love that one commenter says, "Can we lose the shitty music, please?" But that would mean we'd lose the whole ambiance that accompanies such videos. It's heavy-handed, crass, obvious - all the things that make up Jet fandom, and that's why it's appropriate. We can't lose that shitty music.)

O'Brien went to the Pro Bowl in 1991, but then no more, and he gradually faded. He ended up with the Eagles in 1994 and then his career ended. A more full and vivid appraisal of him is by Phil Rippa at Veteren Presence. Rippa is a genuine fan whose love for O'Brien's heroics speaks better than anything I can say here. His essay ends with the inevitable words that Jets fans have muttered under their breath each time they remember that every one of their division rivals has been to the Super Bowl several times since 1969, while we have not: "I suck."

Not we. "I." There is no "I" in team, but neither is there one in "fan," and while a player can always have his teammates to draw upon for solace, the fan usually has only himself and maybe his fellow fans. Players can at least acknowledge to one another that they tried their best and that no one else would be able to try as they did. No fan can really do anything to help his team win or lose. Fandom is the ultimate passive experience. There is literally nothing you can do to keep your team from losing, and even then, they don't usually win. They suck; I suck. It's an equation you learn early on in school while your classmates are talking about how they love what seem to be only the winning teams in sports and you are unable to feel disloyal to a team that never wins. It seems to suggest something horrifying - that you care about this more than anyone else does.

No wonder then that Rippa became so upset in his above piece when he discovered that Wikipedia identifies Dan Marino as the winner of NBC 's 1991 EA Quarterback Challenge when Rippa thought O'Brien had won it (O'Brien won it the year before). And here endeth the lesson in personalizing fandom. The worse your team is, the more you will yearn for validation, even in the most absurd of places, like the EA Quarterback Challenge, an event that hasn't been on TV for a long time simply because it was obviously so silly. Did Dolphin fans need to know that Dan Marino won the challenge two years in a row? Did it matter at all to them? I would think not. For Rippa, every little thing counts to someone who cares about the Jets. It mattered the whole world to me that Wesley Walker made the 1978 Pro Bowl. It mattered to me that the Sack Exchange was a nationally recognized nickname. It meant something to hear Al Michaels' incredulous voice say that the Jets would move on to the second round of the playoffs against New England a little over a year ago. It meant we meant something. And I felt validated.

So enjoy this little moment below, again from AmazingQB, just as you must, as a Jets fan, enjoy all the little things in life as they come. Enjoy the shitty music. Just aim for the bullseye. But remember that, as always, it moves:

NY Jets #6 - Part 2 (cont'd)

 

We are in the process of updating all previously discussed numbers up to 61. We are also revising some of the previous entries themselves, making them, we hope, more palatable. More readable. Less unreadable.

How things change. Only last year, I was bemoaning the moral lapses in Mark Sanchez #6 when he was associating with a 17 year-old, either romantically or socially. Now I see that my rather heavy-handed lecture from a year ago was not even worth the time reading. Now I seem to have found more important considerations - that he is not a great quarterback and, quite possibly, not even a good one.

Jets fans have been debating internally and externally about the possibility of picking up yet another over-the-hill quarterback like Peyton Manning ever since the season ended, and it's absurd. Nothing good comes from bringing old veterans to our team, and I'm certain that Manning is not considering the possibility himself. Sanchez is, according to some reports, not a serious leader of the offense, and he apparently lacks a work ethic. I don't know. This culture of "corruption" of which Sanchez's backup spoke at season's end is such a cauldron of poor planning and bombast, and the problem is neither Sanchez nor his unhappy former co-captain Santonio Holmes. The problem is that Rex Ryan is a very good defensive coordinator but not a great Head Coach and is almost completely devoid of offensive vision.

But you know, outside of that, the Jets are actually still not that bad a team, and Mark Sanchez, if he can improve even vaguely, might yet lead the offense to the playoffs again. That might seem like a bold statement considering how deeply felt everyone's funeral songs were for the Jets' future at season's end.

But Mark Sanchez is close to being a good quarterback, if not a great one. His statistics show a QB whose rating has incrementally improved in three years. He threw 26 touchdowns in 2011, which was an improvement, though against 18 interceptions, which was at least two less than he threw his first year. His passing yardage has increased each year. One of the most telling pieces of information is that he was fifth in the NFL this year in being sacked (39 times). That was a steady growth from the season before, and we all knew how bad the Jets front line was this season as early as the Ravens' game. Take with this that Sanchez was saddled with the underperforming Brian Shottenheimer offense, and you can actually argue that the problem is not his alone.

But he isn't on any lists of top statistical performances from last year. In overall stats, Ryan Fitzpatrick had a better season than he, and so did Carson Palmer, technically. I admit I actually believed he'd throw for 4,000 yards this season, so I'm as ridiculous as anyone else who, conversely, thinks that the only answer is Peyton Manning. I don't see how things can get markedly better for the Jets' offense, even with Tony Sporano as offensive coordinator, and the team has made personnel decisions that are just terrible. So what real good will a modest improvement in Sanchez's performance really bring, anyway?

Maybe he still might be a good quarterback, or even a very good one, but it will be if only the gods will be kinder to our club next year. Of course, I don't recall many instances where the gods have been so generous with us over the years since Super Bowl III, and perhaps they are only now reminding us that the confident, almost oblivious young Californian who took the field to lead the Jets over the Patriots in the playoffs more than a year ago should have counted his blessings while he still had them going his way.

NY Jets #4 - Part 2

We are in the process of updating all previously discussed numbers up to 61. We are also revising some of the previous entries themselves, making them, we hope, more palatable. More readable. Less unreadable.

TJ Conley: a busy man

On the last day of August last year, TJ Conley #4 was named the starting punter for the Jets, replacing Steve Weatherford, which made him a busy man in 2011. He ranked in the top three for punts attempted, which is not a particularly inspiring statistic for a team, though it shows that Conley had plenty of experience. His punts were mostly on average with other punters in the league, so it will be interesting to see whether or not the Jets will start him again in 2012. Punters tend to stay. Or someone picks them up pretty soon after they're cut.

Take Steve Weatherford, for example. After we foolishly chose not to re-sign him, Weatherford, the man Conley replaced, signed with the Giants, and in the Super Bowl proved how valuable a great punter can be. Weatherford pinned the Patriots a few yards in front of their own end zone twice and nearly did it a third time. He was the closest I've ever seen in my feeble memory of a punter who deserved the Super Bowl MVP. 

Quarterbacks don't stay quarterbacks for long unless there's something special about them. Witness Kellen Clemens. What's interesting about Conley is that he was a starting quarterback in high school and transitioned to punter at the University of Idaho after he broke his leg. Unlike the starting quarterback, the punter or kicker appears befriended by no one on the sideline because he participates in another sport entirely, one made for smaller, skinnier men; it must have been a strange transition for TJ Conley.

In a way, as it was suggested at camp, Conley is still learning on the job. In the link, Mike Westhoff suggests that a good punt is about the drop, just as the serve in tennis is about the toss. In football as in life there are plenty of chances to do a better job to make up for the last mistake you made. But punters and kickers rely on the best decisions of a single moment. That moment embodies the precarious nature of their work. The only men to use their feet in football are only as good as their last attempt. Other players will always have another shot on the next play, but so many factors - the wind, the oncoming rush - can unsettle the precision of the drop or the snap. Perhaps kicking is like heart surgery, as Nick Folk suggested.

Kickers and punters aren't drafted high up (Mike Nugent excepted) and they usually come to the club by word of mouth or as vagabonds just strolling onto camp, looking for someone to snap the ball to them or offer to hold. At Florham Park, you can see the placekicker and punter stand to the side, mostly keeping each other company, mostly snapping to one another and sharing in the peculiar solitude of their professions, whether they like it or not. They look like the kids whom no one wants to play with.

So where do these men go when there's no other place to turn, when they need someone to teach them to become better at their job? One person he can turn to is Louie Aguiar #4, who punted for the Jets from 1990-93. If you want to be a better kicker, you can attend his Aguiar Kicking Academy in Missouri. Aguiar played well for the Shottenheimer Chiefs after playing reasonably well as a Jet in the early 90's. Like a lot of punters, Aguiar looks less like a football player than a public school principal.

***

Glenn Foley, QB

In the dark days of the mid-1990's Glenn Foley #4 was a very distant hope for the future. A New Jersey native, Foley was the Jets fan's ideal underdog. During the miserable 1995 season, the Jets got their second of three wins when they played the Dolphins at home. Bubby Brister threw two short touchdown passes to Johnny Mitchell and Wayne Chrebet. The final was 17-16, and it might have felt good since the Jets had lost to Miami at home the year before in the Faked Spike game. I don't remember. Through the crackling AM broadcast of the game that I was barely able to pick up in my little apartment in Philadelphia, I do recall that the crowd was chanting the last name of their recently drafted quarterback from Boston College: Fo-ley, Fo-ley.

A drafted quarterback is always a piece of mythical promise, and Jets fans can sometimes be the most gullible people on Earth. We are, by definition, believers in ridiculous promises: Lam Jones, Blair Thomas, Browning Nagle; Leon Hess believed he could win the Super Bowl with Richie Kotite. The most important bet in sports history cost $427,000 in the person of Joe Namath, and it might not have paid off anywhere other than the gate had he not beaten the Colts in Super Bowl III. This gamble is the Jets' legacy to organized sports, but it has cursed Jets fans into believing that it will magically happen again, and for a little while, we believed Glenn Foley could make it happen. The good day came for Glenn Foley when the Jets played the Patriots at home in 1997. Neil O'Donnell was taken out of the game by an unhappy Bill Parcells, and Foley was put in.

An old friend of mine, Johnny, had come back into Philly for a visit that day. He and I had been in grad school together, and he had gotten his PhD and moved with his newlywed wife to the Midwest where they had both gotten jobs teaching at a cloistered liberal arts college.

My wife has always asserted that I had a "man crush" on Johnny, and I realize she is essentially correct. Tall, striking, resembling a cowboy version of a 1985 Michael Stipe, Johnny was a constant source of attention from passersby whenever we went out for a night of bar hopping. By comparison, I looked like his food taster, his manservant, the guy who carried his saddle around from rodeo to rodeo. I realize now that we bore an uncanny resemblance to Joe and Ratso walking down the street in Midnight Cowboy. When we were at the bar together, strange women would come up to him and ask if they had ever met before. I basked in the glow of his company; I never knew what it felt like to make people feel this way.

If he was a cowboy, then he was an intellectual cowboy. He could sing a few Hank Williams songs with a warble and then talk about Jacques Derrida, whom no one understands. Not even Derrida. Probably not even Johnny. Now a full-time professor, he nevertheless decided to come back to Philly for a visit. I gleaned that things weren't going well for him at the college, and I was worried. Maybe he was looking for some consolation, some kind of reminder of a more innocent time, when we were both graduate students, when he didn't have a mortgage, a marriage and, likely soon, a baby on the way.

My concerns were a little less material. The Jets were playing Parcells' old team, the defending AFC Champion Patriots, and although we're talking about 1997, we might as well imagine ourselves speaking about a earlier age of communication. Today I can check the score on my computer, on an iPhone, or I'll tune in to the score of the game through online radio. Back then, the Jets had rarely been considered good enough to be shown on the local NBC affiliate, and the only way of following them was to try, like some Soviet listener of Radio Free Europe, and carefully tune in the New York WFAN AM station, turning the dial ever so carefully until I heard Dave Jennings' voice, or maybe I would find some sports bar that showed the game on one of dozens of TV's. The Jets were that bad. I might as well have been a guy with a broken radio in 1947 looking for news about the World Series.

Johnny refused to go to a sports bar. I asked him if he would, but he gave me a look as if I had asked if he wanted a punch in the face. He and I hadn't sat down together in months; the Jets were on every week. I got it. But they were also 4-3. They hadn't been over .500 since the Faked Spike game. We went to a wine bar.

Glenn Foley, 10/19/97

It was not a game to miss. This was one of Glenn Foley's two great performances as a Jets quarterback. He threw 17 for 23, 200 yards and two touchdowns. The Jets won, 24-19. The Jets were 5-3, decisively over .500. To me, this game represents  the beginning of the new, contemporary era of the Jets franchise - a time when we were allowed to have higher expectations for the team, year after year. Though we have frequently seen the Jets disappoint, I have seen them on the local NBC often enough without having to resort to buying into the NFL Network. They have been in more playoff games in the past 14 years than they were in all their 37 years of history previous to that day in October 1997. So there's some consolation.

It was also the last day of my friendship with Johnny. Maybe, now that I think of it, Johnny wanted me to act like a grownup and forgo the juvenile compulsion to be a fan because he wanted me to to be more adult. But it didn't even work for him. With a few glasses of merlot in him, he suddenly insisted we drive to his old neighborhood and take a look at the loft where he first met his wife. We drove to Northern Liberties, a part of the city going through regentrification, which he tsk-tsked. He liked it better when it was poor, more dangerous, a real neighborhood to him. When we got there, he stared up at an old biscuit factory that had been turned into cold water apartments when he lived there. He stared at its red brick exterior, maybe wondering how it all happened, or rather what had happened him. I asked him if everything was OK. Sure, he said, with a twang. Everything's fahn.

We sat in the car as the overcast day ended. We tuned in the news radio sports report, and I caught the score of the game after it was over. He must have seen a little of my disappointment about missing the game. Maybe I should have hidden it; this was an old friend, and I should have been paying more attention to him. That's true. But that's not what bothered him.

"You need to give up on this damn team," he said.

Not even thinking him serious, I said, "Oh?"

"It's Parcells," he said.

I shrugged.

"He's a fascist, a bully," Johnny said. "How could you be so careless as to root for a team he coaches? Honestly."

"You're joking," I said. "Careless."

He shook his head. He was sincere. "He'll just swing his purse somewhere else when he's done with the Jets. Come on, Marty. Be smart for second."

The scales fell from my eyes. What had I been doing in a wine bar? Johnny had been friends with me through Coslet and Carroll and, most of all, Kotite. He had always admired me as a loyalist to a losing cause. But Glenn Foley had pushed the Jets two games over the winning mark that day.

Johnny was right about Parcells, of course. This year Parcells is being inducted into Canton, and he deserves it. He was and is an aggressive, corporate winner, but he also resembles an abusive father who tells his son on the way back to the car how disappointed he is in him, and he would indeed dump us after three seasons, just as Johnny predicted. Part of me knew that, but it didn't matter, for there were no conditions in my loyalty to the team, ever. There weren't any at 1-15; how could there be at 5-3?

"You need to root for a publicly-owned franchise like Green Bay," he said. "Try being a more progressive fan."

Need to? I could see he was serious. He was suggesting that I abandon my team out of principle.

"Well," I laughed awkwardly, "I don't think that's going to happen."

He shook his head. "That's disappointing, Marty."

I have a good memory of Glenn Foley, even if that was also the last time I saw Johnny. Afterwards there were a few e-mails back and forth to him, and then there were none. I think of this conversation now, and I wonder what Johnny really wanted. He must have been torn about what he wanted for himself; did he want to be the loyalist to a losing cause, left to make his own hot water in his own home, or did he want to accept the new realities, to forget the past and move on? I suppose it doesn't matter now, and that I'll never know. It had nothing to do with my team.

A year later, when the Niners played the Jets in the opener, Foley threw for 415 yards in an overtime loss. Steve Young made sure to give Foley extra words of encouragement when the two men met at midfield at the end of the game. But by week three of the 1998 season, Glenn was replaced by Vinny Testeverde for good. He went to Seattle before retiring. But his victory over the Patriots in 1997 made me realize how hungry I had been as a Jets fan, having endured three seasons previous over which the Jets had won a total of ten games. Now I was no longer a fan of a perennial loser, nor a victim of the circumstances of the times. I was the fan of a team that went to the playoffs half the time, more often than not being lead by a cartoonish coach. I was a Jets fan. Some things were just too important for friendship to spoil.