There are names that scream out for a caricature, especially names that sound like the stuffy rich guys in a Marx Brothers film - a millionaire of self-important privilege whose wife Groucho is going to insult or whose drawing room will be used by Harpo as a stable. Names like Lynwood Alford and Aubrey Beavers.
But then these guys are also actual human beings, with lives, feelings, thoughts, and most importantly histories. Aubrey Beavers #58 ended his career with the Jets in 1996, after playing two seasons with the Dolphins. He had two interceptions in his first season, but then he started only one game in 1995. Promise, then silence. In the epics of antiquity, only men who have been cursed by the gods or who have to be punished for a wrongdoing against nature are sentenced to places where no man can happily survive. Napoleon was eventually banished to a place as inhospitable as St. Helena. And with stomach cancer. But nothing Aubrey Beavers did in his life could have earned him a fate just worse of not playing at all - that is, playing linebacker for the 1996 New York Jets. Real life is much less fair than history or in myth would lead us to believe.
But then consider Lynwood Alford #58, who played linebacker for one game in 1987. That's right. Alford was a replacement player for the 1987 replacement New York Jets. In a poignant article in the Times on October 5, 1987, Alford talks about what it meant to be in uniform and living out a dream he thought had long ago passed him by after graduating from Syracuse in 1985:
''It was a dream come true,'' Alford said about playing in an N.F.L. game. ''It was something that I'll never forget, something that I'll tell my grandchildren. I don't care if I was just on the kickoff return unit. I was in the game.''
Alford played in only one game in 1987, and it was the only game in his whole pro career. He was not even a starter in a loss to the replacement Cowboys.
I was in the game...something that I'll tell my grandchildren.
A paycheck is a paycheck, but I confess I felt slightly humbled by Alford's words, if only because being "in the game" is where so few of us end up. I once had a literary agent for four months, but like a girlfriend who is trying to let you down, she stopped returning my calls. The dream was over. The game was over.
But they will never be able to take that away, any more than they can take the replacement game away from Lynwood Alford. His experience of covering a kickoff, technically, took place in an NFL game. You can look him up on the NFL's website. He's there. No one is taking that away. Replacement or not, he played in what the League construes as an actual game. His one distinction is simply putting on #58, going onto the field, and making a brief contribution. That would be enough for any of us who've never been anywhere that we always wished we were.
The article above about the 1987 strike talks about "Integrity and Dreams" being the replacement players' inspiration during the strike. But there were two particular regular players on the Jets who were scabs that year: Marty Lyons and Mark Gastineau.
"Dreams" belonged to guys like Lynwood Alford. But when he was asked why he was playing during the strike, Marty Lyons invoked the "integrity of the game." That will never sit particularly well with me. Lyons is and always will be a legendary Jet, but I'm a union man, too, and if there was one thing my mother told me when I left home and went off into the world in 1987, when I was 18, it was "to never cross a picket line."
Alford talks about his otherwise impossible dream as something he will be able to talk about to his grandchildren. In the Times article, Lyons invoked something of the same when he said that crossing the picket line was about creating a future for his "little boy." He said that his decision was one that "he will live with for the rest of my life." At least he understood there was a legacy for every decision and action. Both men left a legacy that season, and it's best to say nothing more.
But then remember that Lyons and Gastineau were both drafted for the 1979 season, and they were members of the Sack Exchange. They represented a period of hope of the the team after years of terrible play in the 70's, and that finally came to an end in '87, a year when the Jets played in a division so bad that they might very well have won it had they just one a few more games. But they didn't. Gastineau was a clown, a rube. He says in the article above that playing during the strike made him "uncomfortable," as if that would explain away his decision while Bridgitte Nielsen blew kisses at him from the stands. Lyons was still an anchor (just as he is the Jets' commentating voice on the radio each Sunday) and when he crossed the line that year, he made all my unambiguous devotion to the team change into something else, to be defined later. Being a fan would never really be the same after he did that, and it's probably just as well.
Recently, Lyons talked about his 1987 decision in light of the most recent lockout, contextualizing it as a matter of how Gene Upshaw and the NFLPA did not take into account the money needed for players down the road, past retirement. After this year's lockout, we have still a long way to go before players start thinking about the money they won't have later, as opposed to the money they get now, so it's at least good to see Lyons speaking up for retired players and the pension fund. Lyons is also the head of the Marty Lyons Foundation and has a long track record of philanthropy.
Bobby Bell #58 was a replacement player in 1987, too, although for the Chicago Bears. Prior to that, he started a handful of games for the Jets in 1984 at linebacker. He came from the University of Missouri and was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, which makes sense because his father was also Bobby Bell, the Hall of Famer who played for the Kansas City Chiefs and went to the University of Minnesota. Bell the younger must have played with heavy expectations, though if you're going to have a father who leaves a legacy, let it be Bobby Bell, the elder.
Tampilkan postingan dengan label 1987 NFL Strike. Tampilkan semua postingan
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Sabtu, 22 Oktober 2011
Senin, 29 Maret 2010
NY Jets #42 - Part 4
We're finally getting through #42. But not before we talk about Maurice Turner.
He wore #42 for one game in 1987. Having said that, the first thing that should pop into your head is "replacement player." And that he was. He played a season and a half with the Vikings and was traded near the end of 1985 to the Green Bay Packers. Then, two years later, Maurice Turner played one game for cash in a strike season. He was a replacement player, easily replaceable.
Why do we include replacement players in our roundup of all the players who've ever played in a Jets uniform? Aren't we just rewarding corporate fraud? Mom always told me as a kid to never to cross a picket line. Aren't we just suggesting that all of us are replacements in this life, with replacements of our own waiting for us, as the fictional Langley Collyer suggests in E.L. Doctorow's recent novel, Homer and Langley?
About Langley's "theory of replacements," Homer tells us:
...I remember thinking there as something collegiate about it.
I have a theory, he said to me. Everything in life gets replaced. We are our parents' replacements just as they were replacements of the previous generation...
I said, Langley, people aren't all the same like dumb bison, we are each a person. A genius like Beethoven can't be replaced.
But you see, Homer, Beethoven was a genius for his time. We have the notations of his genius, but he is not our genius...Besides, it's not what any of them achieve but how they stand in relation to the rest of us. Who is your favorite baseballer? he said.
Walter Johnson, I said.
And what is he but a replacement for Cannonball Titcomb? One of the constructions is for us to have athletes to admire, to create ourselves as an audience of admirers for baseballers. This seems to be a means of cultural communizing that creates great social satisfaction and possibly ritualizes, what with our baseball teams of different towns, our tendency to murder one another. There will always be in America for as long as baseball is played someone who serves the youth still to be born as Walter Johnson serves you.
The notion is chilling, especially when we think about how replaceable all athletes are, from the Walter Johnsons of our time (LeBron for Jordan) to the monstrously nameless multitude - the rest of us - who play out our positions and our roles ever without distinction, and fade away from the cosmic memory. When one considers the great numbers of college football and basketball players who will never graduate, let alone play a professional sport, you begin to appreciate why Doctorow uses sports figures as object examples to illustrate Langley's theory. You begin to comprehend reasoning like Langley's. The fact that one man wears a departed player's number simply reinforces this lugubrious train of thought all the more.
But everything depends on the view one brings to things, and though blind, Homer Collyer also recognizes in Langley's voice that his brother is probably making up his theory as he goes along. Homer also comes to suspect that the Theory of Replacements is merely a product of Langley's "bitterness of life or despair of it."
****
Rashad Washington played in #42 for the Jets from 2004-07. I try not to be lazy about these things, but if you really want a beat on Washington's career with the Jets - which encompasses his NFL career - then take a look at his page on the all-time roster, which features all sorts of unmoored statistics on his work in special teams. The basics are these: injured at the end of 2004, he saw frequent action in 2005, and then some in 2006. Then less in 2007. There are few statistics that really give dramatic worth to the role of special teams player, but Washington's lends a hand with phrases like "special teams tackle," which are "recorded," "tallied" or "notched" (always curious synonyms for "made"). One of Randy Lange's articles on the Jets' web site from the beginning of the truly disappointing 2007 season concerned Washington's ability to roll with change and, implicitly, disappointment. He did not finish 2007, and though he recorded 24 tackles the year before, he managed only four the following year. Either the competition to which Rashad Washington alludes in Lange's article got to be too much or he was simply out of gas. The numbers don't lie, but they don't tell very good stories, either.
But what I want to know is Clyde Washington's story. This #42 played at defensive back from 1963-65. According to his page on the Jets' all-time roster, he had come from the Patriots to the newly revised Gotham Football Club and "pleasantly surprised" Weeb Ewbank. The last detail on him from the 1964 New York Jets Yearbook indicates that "still single, the 26-year-old Washington lives in Carlisle, PA," a rural college town. Still available, ladies of 1965, and very much interested in a long-term commitment.
But after that, there's the little one line paragraph that follows:
"Clyde passed away Dec. 28, 1974."
That was the same year my grandfather died, but he was 76. Clyde Washington was all of 36 years old when he died. Three days on either side of Christmas and the New Year, how and why did Clyde Washington die?
I've looked and found nothing so far. We become so accustomed to the notion that the Interwebs will reveal everything we need in order to sate our desire for something, anything we want in the moment (usually it's something morbid, like the reason for people's deaths) that we assume there isn't anything we can't know. But the truth is that no matter how powerful it becomes, the Web can only scratch the surface of human meaning. It loves facile things that are destined to be replaced out of memory by newer yet equally facile things. Its existence is the product of desires that belong to a people with low expectations for human knowledge. And no matter where I look, I can't find anything about Clyde Washington's death. There is a town called Clyde in Washington State, though.
This has been bothering me for weeks. What happened to Clyde Washington? If anyone knows, I'd be grateful to find out. This is more than just a passing whim or a moribund itch. If we go by the number itself, Randy Beverly was eventually the replacement for Clyde Washington, sort of like Johnson for Titcomb. Looking at him there in his 1964 Topps card, he stands steady on his feet and hunched ever so slightly in the manner of the defensive back who is ready to move backward at the snap of the ball. But the more I look at it, the more I notice that he also looks strangely undecided, as if he feels like the play isn't really going to get off. Clyde Washington appears vaguely prepared for whatever is next, just as we all imagine ourselves to be in our life's work. But he also stands as a solitary figure against the yellow void, suddenly looking vulnerable, reminding us that in the end all men die alone, destined to be replaced.
He wore #42 for one game in 1987. Having said that, the first thing that should pop into your head is "replacement player." And that he was. He played a season and a half with the Vikings and was traded near the end of 1985 to the Green Bay Packers. Then, two years later, Maurice Turner played one game for cash in a strike season. He was a replacement player, easily replaceable.
Why do we include replacement players in our roundup of all the players who've ever played in a Jets uniform? Aren't we just rewarding corporate fraud? Mom always told me as a kid to never to cross a picket line. Aren't we just suggesting that all of us are replacements in this life, with replacements of our own waiting for us, as the fictional Langley Collyer suggests in E.L. Doctorow's recent novel, Homer and Langley?
About Langley's "theory of replacements," Homer tells us:
...I remember thinking there as something collegiate about it.
I have a theory, he said to me. Everything in life gets replaced. We are our parents' replacements just as they were replacements of the previous generation...
I said, Langley, people aren't all the same like dumb bison, we are each a person. A genius like Beethoven can't be replaced.
But you see, Homer, Beethoven was a genius for his time. We have the notations of his genius, but he is not our genius...Besides, it's not what any of them achieve but how they stand in relation to the rest of us. Who is your favorite baseballer? he said.
Walter Johnson, I said.
And what is he but a replacement for Cannonball Titcomb? One of the constructions is for us to have athletes to admire, to create ourselves as an audience of admirers for baseballers. This seems to be a means of cultural communizing that creates great social satisfaction and possibly ritualizes, what with our baseball teams of different towns, our tendency to murder one another. There will always be in America for as long as baseball is played someone who serves the youth still to be born as Walter Johnson serves you.
The notion is chilling, especially when we think about how replaceable all athletes are, from the Walter Johnsons of our time (LeBron for Jordan) to the monstrously nameless multitude - the rest of us - who play out our positions and our roles ever without distinction, and fade away from the cosmic memory. When one considers the great numbers of college football and basketball players who will never graduate, let alone play a professional sport, you begin to appreciate why Doctorow uses sports figures as object examples to illustrate Langley's theory. You begin to comprehend reasoning like Langley's. The fact that one man wears a departed player's number simply reinforces this lugubrious train of thought all the more.
But everything depends on the view one brings to things, and though blind, Homer Collyer also recognizes in Langley's voice that his brother is probably making up his theory as he goes along. Homer also comes to suspect that the Theory of Replacements is merely a product of Langley's "bitterness of life or despair of it."
****
Rashad Washington played in #42 for the Jets from 2004-07. I try not to be lazy about these things, but if you really want a beat on Washington's career with the Jets - which encompasses his NFL career - then take a look at his page on the all-time roster, which features all sorts of unmoored statistics on his work in special teams. The basics are these: injured at the end of 2004, he saw frequent action in 2005, and then some in 2006. Then less in 2007. There are few statistics that really give dramatic worth to the role of special teams player, but Washington's lends a hand with phrases like "special teams tackle," which are "recorded," "tallied" or "notched" (always curious synonyms for "made"). One of Randy Lange's articles on the Jets' web site from the beginning of the truly disappointing 2007 season concerned Washington's ability to roll with change and, implicitly, disappointment. He did not finish 2007, and though he recorded 24 tackles the year before, he managed only four the following year. Either the competition to which Rashad Washington alludes in Lange's article got to be too much or he was simply out of gas. The numbers don't lie, but they don't tell very good stories, either.
But what I want to know is Clyde Washington's story. This #42 played at defensive back from 1963-65. According to his page on the Jets' all-time roster, he had come from the Patriots to the newly revised Gotham Football Club and "pleasantly surprised" Weeb Ewbank. The last detail on him from the 1964 New York Jets Yearbook indicates that "still single, the 26-year-old Washington lives in Carlisle, PA," a rural college town. Still available, ladies of 1965, and very much interested in a long-term commitment.But after that, there's the little one line paragraph that follows:
"Clyde passed away Dec. 28, 1974."
That was the same year my grandfather died, but he was 76. Clyde Washington was all of 36 years old when he died. Three days on either side of Christmas and the New Year, how and why did Clyde Washington die?
I've looked and found nothing so far. We become so accustomed to the notion that the Interwebs will reveal everything we need in order to sate our desire for something, anything we want in the moment (usually it's something morbid, like the reason for people's deaths) that we assume there isn't anything we can't know. But the truth is that no matter how powerful it becomes, the Web can only scratch the surface of human meaning. It loves facile things that are destined to be replaced out of memory by newer yet equally facile things. Its existence is the product of desires that belong to a people with low expectations for human knowledge. And no matter where I look, I can't find anything about Clyde Washington's death. There is a town called Clyde in Washington State, though.
This has been bothering me for weeks. What happened to Clyde Washington? If anyone knows, I'd be grateful to find out. This is more than just a passing whim or a moribund itch. If we go by the number itself, Randy Beverly was eventually the replacement for Clyde Washington, sort of like Johnson for Titcomb. Looking at him there in his 1964 Topps card, he stands steady on his feet and hunched ever so slightly in the manner of the defensive back who is ready to move backward at the snap of the ball. But the more I look at it, the more I notice that he also looks strangely undecided, as if he feels like the play isn't really going to get off. Clyde Washington appears vaguely prepared for whatever is next, just as we all imagine ourselves to be in our life's work. But he also stands as a solitary figure against the yellow void, suddenly looking vulnerable, reminding us that in the end all men die alone, destined to be replaced.
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