NY Jets #52 - Part 1

There is nothing quite like the name that sounds incomplete, or whose surname sounds like a name for short. Tommy John, Billy Joe, Billy Joel, Nicholle Tom, Adam Bob #52. That's right. Adam. Bob. He played linebacker for a single season with the Jets in 1989. Drafted out of Texas A&M that year, he is listed as suiting up for five games at linebacker for the Jets, without apparent distinction. We find him again in 1992 playing for the Montreal Machine of the World League of American Football (WLAF), a league which later became NFL Europe once its North American teams like the Machine folded, which the Machine did the year Adam Bob joined them. Montreal improved their fortunes, though; they got their Alouettes back into the CFL when the CFL Baltimore Stallions failed to revive the spirit of the NFL Colts and moved back north. 

Is Adam Bob this comedian? Only Adam Bob knows.

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Are you this angry?  

Never burn bridges. Always make a friend. Cal Dixon #52 did in 2001 when he was brought in to play for the Orlando Rage, one of the franchises belonging to the mercifully brief XFL. You remember the Rage's logo (left), don't you? No?  Well, it's worth a look.

After all, don't you have days like this? "All the time?" you say. No, no, really, take a look at that face. You're not angry all the time like that. No one could be. You'd die. Maybe that's one of the reasons, among many, many others, that the XFL failed. The logo represents a cartoonish rage that even the angriest of us have to admit is unapproachable, except of course if it is feigned in an equally cartoonish bit of combat, like professional wrestling, the XFL's cousin. Did Cal Dixon look at the logo on his teammates' helmets after coming back to the huddle and say to himself, "You know? I'm just not that angry."

Dixon played center and guard in #52 for the Jets from 1992-95, and then for the Dolphins from 1996-97, retiring with back problems. Galen Hall, Head Coach and Director of Operations for the Orlando Rage, actually coached Dixon at the University of Florida and then brought him out of retirement years later. Hall had been Head Coach at Florida in the late 1980's, and he remembered Dixon fondly from Dixon's college days. The circle gets even smaller between these two men and their relationship to the Jets. Our all-too-brief study of the curse of #17 made mention that Galen Hall wore #17 for the Jets in 1963. Hall played behind Dick Wood and threw three touchdowns and nine interceptions in two starts during that season. After he was let go by Florida as a coach, Hall had second a chance in yet another  struggling league, as a Head Coach with the Rhein Fire in NFL Europe, and then of course with Vince McMahon's XFL. So then he gave Cal Dixon the same second chance.  And then the league folded the year Cal Dixon joined them.  Today, Galen Hall coaches the offense at Penn State.  Where is Cal Dixon? 

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Follow this link to a 2007 JetsInsider forum on Onzy Elam #52, linebacker for the Jets from 1987-88. To a certain degree, the content is pretty much what you'd expect.  The source of the discussion is the question plaguing one man: "Jets S Abram Elam related to ONZY Elam?" I'll bury the lead here by telling you that the issue is never resolved. Abram Elam #27, of course, is the controversial defensive back who currently plays for Cleveland and who started out in the NFL with with the Jets. Onzy Elam might have been Abram's Dad if only because he was old enough (17) to father Abram, and both men were born in Florida, but that's still not enough evidence, even for people who only limit their searches to one or two web sites (I'm looking at you, man in the mirror). The forum includes a few discussions about how Onzy Elam was a highly touted draft "sleeper" who essentially "busted." I don't remember Onzy Elam; I can't be held responsible for remembering the promising draft picks of 1987 when I was in the middle of a series of late adolescent crises, some of which wouldn't even seem manageable to me today. However, I've learned now to permanently redirect and channel my emotional anxieties toward the ups and downs of my football team. That's what it means to grow up.

Jack Elam 1918-2003

My favorite contribution to the forum, however, is from "Badniss," who says, "By the way, NO posting of Close-UP PICTURES of JACK ELAM please! I KNOW he aint related!!!!!" Maybe I judge the participants in forums harshly, as the same kind of people whose comments at the bottom of news stories on the web make us wonder whether humanity is worthy of its dominion over Earth.  I mean, how many of us are willing to reference a longtime actor in Westerns who played mostly villains and sidekicks? Very, very few.

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On the books, Jim Eliopulos #52 played linebacker for the New York Jets from 1984-85. He was drafted by the Cowboys but played his first year for the football Cardinals of St. Louis. His head shot from his Cardinal days is a bit more dashing than Jack Elam's. He is looking into your soul, whereas one of Elam's eye is looking at the wall.  What's funny is when you search for a former player on the internets, and you discover that a retired player has a Facebook page. And Jim Eliopulos has a Facebook page, just like I do. It's like we're in the phone book together. "Where's Jim Eliopulos? Well, I'll just look him up in the phone book." Remember how thumbed the phone book was? Remember the phone book? I'm always hesitant to "friend" any of these guys because I'm a fan, and fans don't run with the team. Look what happens when they do. So, Jim Eliopulos will continue to exist as part of the mythical memory, although I have to say I don't remember anything about him.  So much for myth.  

But then ask John Galvin #52 linebacker for the Jets in 1988 and in 1990-91, and he'll tell you about myth.  His name also doesn't ring a bell with me, but that's irrelevant. His Wiki is intriguing for the part I will quote below. Galvin was born in Lowell, Massachussetts, the place where Jack Keruoac was born and where Kerouac died. Galvin went to Lowell High, he went to Boston College, was drafted by the Jets, then played for the Vikings and returned to the Jets when they lacked an outside linebacker. Remember the days when the Jets had massive holes in their defense? As is noted, he got the game ball in a 1990 game against the Patriots, at a time when I might just as well have been taking a civics class on Mars as watch a Jets football game. It was the lost years.

Just before meeting the Patriots in 1988, though, someone from the Times quoted Galvin on the twilight of his great leader from Boston College, Doug Flutie, a small man for whom so many Homeric tales have been written. Today when the Jets and Patriots face off against one another on a national stage, they conjure moments from Thucydides, where fate and hubris are usually the undoing of one side or another. Back in the Walton and Coslet years (1984-93) both teams were scrambling rather half-heartedly (and not as mortal enemies, as they are today) for the scraps the Buffalo Bills left behind.  Usually both teams stayed home for the holidays to see the Bills lose in the postseason. About Doug Flutie, Galvin is quoted as saying:

He's not the player he was in college...He took over a game in college. Sometimes I didn't even know if he needed the rest of the team.

When I was in high school, that's the way I felt about Jack Kerouac - he carried a game all by himself.  Then I went to college, and I read Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Forster and Morrison and Fitzgerald and Chaucer and Ellison, and I suddenly understood what Truman Capote meant when he said that On the Road wasn't so much writing as it was typing. I still love Kerouac. For a moment in time, when American literary culture was threatened to be devoured by the very commercialism and militarism that the Beats despised, Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg conjured the transcendentally mythological, and though Homeric odes about sports figures are also easy to type, and even easier to lampoon, you cannot help but long for the mythological when you watch your favorites succeed; that transcendence is so patently missing from our world of reality television, where everyone is performing in a vast, cruel carnie show.  "The rich," as Leonard Cohen says, "have their channels in the bedrooms of the poor."  There was a time in my youth when it felt like Kerouac, a standout football player at Columbia, could carry the weight of our need to understand this world all by himself.  As Kerouac himself says, "Praised be delusion, the ripple..."

N.Y. Jets #17 - The Curse

In the graveyard of career-ending seasons at quarterback with the New York Jets, Bob Avellini's came to close after he was traded mid-season from the Chicago Bears - where he had been spending a career handing off to Walter Payton - to his hometown of Queens, NY, where the Jets were playing their last season at Shea. He did not play a single game. It was his last season as a pro. He wore the #17.

In more recent years, Quincy Carter is in the category of backup quarterbacks who came and made the kind of impression in preseason that made people think that if Chad got injured then maybe, just maybe, we weren't entirely screwed. (We are always screwed.) Well, yes, but then Carter - say it together - finished his career with the Jets in that strange twilight season of 2004, when nothing and everything seemed possible. Quincy Carter threw in relief of Chad when #10 injured his rotator cuff (cue ominous music) and the Jets crawled to nearly negligible wins against the Cardinals and the Browns. Then Chad came back, they crawled to the playoffs and the rest is an exciting history as far as a Jets fan knows it.

Do you remember Tim Dwight running his ass off for the Falcons in Super Bowl XXXXXXIIIIII, the kickoff return against the Broncos? It was practically the only bright spot for Atlanta in a game already blemished by Eugene Robinson's solicitation of a Miami hooker on the night before the game. My goodness, that was a long time ago, wasn't it? Eliot Spitzer spent $40,000 on his escort. Robinson offered only $40! Tim Dwight wore #17 for a little while for us, but that was only the harbinger for things to come. Yes, his career ended with the Jets.

Clyde "Lee" Grosscup is unquestionably the man we have been looking for in our efforts to revive the Booth Lustig Award for Funny Name. The man's name is Grosscup. I'm sure it's pronounced "Groskip," but in the world of the New York Titans, anything remotely peculiar just seems apropos. Sort of like the way "Marv Throneberry" is for the 1962 Mets. But where Throneberry's future was found in Lite Beer ads proclaiming, "I don't know what I'm doing in this ad," Lee Grosscup actually went on to have a brief career as both a TV reporter and a columnist for Sport magazine. His 1967 article on cheating in sports puts some perspective on Belichick's nonsense last year, for better or for worse. He for threw passes for the 1962 Titans, and though he's not wearing it in this football card, he sported #17 for the ol' mustard and blue. Oh, and he ended his football career with the franchise that year.

Was Galen Hall the first New York Jets quarterback? Either him or Al Dorow. He's the first Jetskin if nothing else, having come over from DC the year before. He threw three touchdowns and nine interceptions for our side. Oh, and he ended his football career with the Jets that year. He was a star at Penn State, and he's now an assistant coach there, and he coached Florida for five seasons. Are you ready to move on now? Well, he also coached the Rhein Fire of the now defunct NFL Europe to two World Bowl championships. Isn't it ironic that something called the World Bowl doesn't exist anymore?

Albert Johnson? you ask. Isn't he the same Albert Johnson III who was the CFL Rookie of the Year, playing for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers? And did he not end his career with the Jets the year he joined them? Why yes, he did.

John Kidd punted for us in 1998. Here he is in 1994 pulling a Larry Seiple for the Miami Dolphins against Buffalo. And did he not end his career in the very season he joined the New York Jets? Why yes. Yes he did. Are we finally seeing a pattern here?

Number 17 David Norrie was a "replacement" quarterback who was himself replaced by Walter Briggs during 1987. Apparently he is an ESPN college football analyst today. And...he ended his career with the New York Jets organization in the very same replacement season in which he started, if not with with the actual New York Jets team.

Which means he at least has something in common with an actual, full-time professional football player Tommy Parks, who punted for the New York Jets in 2001. Like Norrie, he began and ended his football career with the Jets. (Now, it's just getting weird.) Unlike Norrie, Parks became a pitcher for the minor league Newark Bears in 2003.

Finally, the curse finds some exceptions, the first in Matt Robinson. For two years in the late 1970's, Matt Robinson seemed to offer the difference between an underachieving Jets club and one bound for the playoffs. I will never forget as long as I live (and isn't that pathetic?) the phrase "Robinson is No. 1 QB" blazing across the headlines of the Newsdays I delivered during the late summer months of 1979. Number 17 Matt Robinson had replaced the heir apparent Richard Todd as starting QB. It would not last for long. According to Gerald Eskanzi, Robinson would end up hiding an injury from Walt Michaels, and the coach - a man not known for a mindful response to anything - responded by benching Matt, re-promoting Todd and shipping Robinson to Denver where he languished until the end of his career. Thus while Matt Robinson did not end his career in New York, it effectively ended with the Jets.

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Fortunately, there are exceptions to the curse, compelling us to wonder whether there was even a curse to begin with.

The former Virginia Tech Hokie David Clowney is still playing football, but he might have broken the curse for himself if only because he stopped wearing #17 on the Jets. After wearing #17 for several seasons, Clowney replaced Laverneus Coles in #87. He has been on practice squads, cut, brought back, cut again, brought back agin when Danny Woodhead was waived, and recently cut for good, and now in #87 for the Carolina Panthers as of the start of the 2011 training camp. His biggest day for the Jets featured 4 catches for 79 yards, including a 35-yard touchdown catch to add to the romp against the Raiders in 2009. But behold: David Clowney, preseason against the helpless Rams in '09 - you can be the judge as to whether or not a man has the right to do the Wu-Tang when he's absurdly wide open for a preseason pass from Erik Ainge. It's still his top highlight on YouTube.

And then there's Mike Taliaferro #17:

We begin with a book called The Long Pass by Lou Sahadi that as a lifetime Jets fan I've owned since I was eight. I believe that its reading level is about at the high school (or at the high school level of a student in the 1970's), and I read it about three times by the time I was ten. It taught me about Jet history. In it, I discovered that Mike Taliaferro began the 1965 season - Namath's first - at quarterback. There is a terrific composite of images inside unique to anything else I've ever seen where both Namath (in a Jets jacket, no shoulder pads) and John Huarte (in a suit) are chatting on the sideline phones while Mike Taliaferro is on the field. You see that Mike Taliaferro will not be quarterbacking for long. He wore 17.

Mike Taliaferro

He is a primary exception to the #17 curse because his career began with the Jets and ended with the Bills in 1972, but not before an interesting stint with the Boston Patriots. Here's a trivia question: how many TD passes did Joe Namath throw in 1969, his last playoff season? Nineteen. Who tied him for that? Boston's Mike Taliaferro. Coincidence? I think so.