And Here I Re-Publish the NY Times: "Jets In Certain Loss Until the Second Half"

by Vince Graylady, Sports Columnist for the New York Times

The unkempt hordes were treated to something akin to a complete victory when the Jets beat the New England Patriots Sunday 28-14. There were smiles of relief on the faces on fans departing the stadium Jets fans are compelled to share with New York's older, more storied franchise. But Serious Questions regarding the injuries to Darrelle Revis, Nick Mangold, Jason Taylor remain, as do concerns over the very existence of a team that a better class of New Yorkers regard as one would the development of a neck goiter.

The New York Jets were very nearly the same team that lost to the Baltimore Ravens last week - unimaginative, incoherent, bloated, loutish, confused, disoriented, and profane - yet somehow, through the mystical works of a universe guided by what appeared to be chance, the defense continued its relentless pressure against Tom Brady in almost the same way that the better-known New York franchise did two Super Bowls ago. Whether or not the Jets' defense would have been distracted by the presence of either of the women with whom Brady has produced children is uncertain. The verdict still remains on the attention span of such a Jets team, and thankfully Bill Belichick presented his detested rival with merely the Patriots' expected lineup. In this sense, one cannot entirely see the Jets' two-touchdown win as a complete victory over a vastly superior Patriots club.

Randy Moss scored his 150th touchdown, a stellar catch made with one hand - gesture that seemed destined to rank among the best of his Hall of Fame career. Meanwhile, the Jets did some things right. They completed passes, their offseason acquisition gained 76 yards on the ground, and the secondary appeared to be in the right places at the right times. That the Patriots did not score the entire second half signified that either the Patriots were doing poorly or that the Jets did well. Jets fans - corpulent, uneducated and rough - may have regarded it as a victory. Less partisan onlookers were prone to scratch it up to an unfortunate stroke of good fortune.

"When Moss got behind Revis to make a one-handed catch for a 34-yard touchdown," wrote George Vescey of this same publication, "the Jets had seemed to be in big trouble in their new home, with their own glib words coming back to haunt them." But even Vescey was forced to agree that the Jets had the game in hand by the fourth quarter. And to do it, "they didn’t need the reality-show language and bluster they exhibited on the television show Hard Knocks....The Jets did not need to make a spectacle of themselves, either on television or in their own locker room," he added, shaking his head in disappointment at the Jets' apparent victory.

The behavior of their coach, their assistants, and players in the presence of Ines Sainz continues to haunt the team. Even avid fans like Martin Roche, whose Jets blog has changed names too many times for the Times to count, has spoken out against the organized harassment of Sainz: "This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder why football itself is of more importance to me than issues of sanitation in the Third World."

The Times spends a great deal on its football coverage itself when its award-winning columnist Nicholas Kristoff is practically earning a Nobel Prize for Peace, and it makes the men who cover the Jets feel a crisp sense of shame that a good showing over the Patriots cannot help quell. In fact, Jets victories only seem to make it worse. The question is not so much whether or not the Jets can sustain their success without Darrelle Revis (a question they were wondering during training camp anyway) but whether or not the success the Jets have will force to compel a reader of the Times to imagine the distinctly unpleasant possibility witnessing a victory parade down Broadway filled with heavy men in Broadway Joe shirts.

Fortunately history tells us that the Jets won't get that far. Nevertheless, Times sources inside the Bloomberg government indicate that the current state of the city's economy would prohibit such a celebration.

Unless, of course, the Yankees repeat.

NY Jets #43 - Part 1

On April 23, 2005, Mike Brim #43, who played cornerback for the Jets from 1991-92, was murdered by another man outside his home in Virginia. At present, the only thing I can find about his death is that it was the result of an "argument over a woman." When people die young, there is always a question of a suicide, an overdose, an accident, or a murder. His violent death is familiar considering how many athletes who, through their own fault or someone else's, go well before their time. Last year Steve McNair was killed by a woman, while Mike Brim was killed "over a woman," reminding us once again that a crime of passion is more likely to involve a mere injury any other society where owning a gun is not perceived to be an inalienable right endowed by one's creator. I was shaken by McNair's murder last year, but the event has already entered into our consciousness as just another unfortunate event with nothing to do with our society's pathological love of bearing arms. It enters into our minds with the same bland acceptance as massacres at schools.

The above link from Bassett, and the comment that follow, both speak of Mike Brim's fine play. His best years were as a Jet; other than a Jet lifer, who else can we say that about that we've looked at so far? His best season was 1992, especially with a touchdown (on one of his six interceptions that season) against his former team, the Detroit Lions. His career from 1988 to 1995, with five different teams, seems parabolic. Football is not like life; in life, moments of joy may be sparse, but they're distributed over a broader spectrum than a football career provides. For a football player, life is Hobbesian - nasty, brutish and short. Joy is always a peak on the graph.

****

Why do I read the marriage announcements in the New York Times in the Sunday Styles section? Even I don't know. Who do I think I am, some kind of old Dutch family squire? And what am I looking for? I saw one person that I graduated high school with who ended up there about fifteen years ago, but that's it. It's a Sunday habit. I also go copiously through my college bulletins to see what's happening to the people of my graduating classes (there's not much, actually). I've stopped looking to see who's gotten married, and now I'm on to seeing who's having their third kid. I have two ex-girlfriends who are published writers, so I'm always curious to read about their exploits even though I have no intention of contacting them. I do not imagine that I will end up in anything they write. Which is good, believe me.

But pretty soon I'll be looking there to see who's died. I'll become one of those people who look at the obituaries every day. We're all just perennial browsers, making note of all the recorded ceremonies of birth, school, work and death - marking time in the family of humanity.

The only trouble is my family and my friends are spread out in many places, and there's very little sense of community that I have with anyone out there, largely due to my own introversion. I am a quintessential kind of American, a lone soul successfully disconnected from the points of community, who's actually not as self-reliant as he'd like to believe. I shop at all the same stores as everyone else. I eat the same food as you. I watch TV when I could read, and when I read, I read things that you're probably reading. I drive when I should walk. With the exception that I refuse to do Facebook, I am principally average.

John Dockery

On Valentine's Day this past year, I saw in the Styles section the notice for the marriage of a Ryan Kaple and Ciara Dockery, and I wondered aloud, "I wonder if that's John Dockery's daughter?" And by God, it was. If you watched a football game between the late 1980's and the 1990's, it's very likely that you saw John Dockery #43 on the sideline of a college football game, usually reporting for CBS or NBC . But John Dockery was also part of the crew that ran around with Joe Namath back in the day and played cornerback for us from 1968-71. I believe he still reports from the sidelines for Westwood One on Monday Nights.

Dockery graduated from Harvard and was on his way to studying Urban Planning at Columbia, according to the Jets' 1971 Yearbook. But clearly he had a view that football glamor led at least to some speaking parts on the margins, so that career in building things fell aside. He had a big season with the Jets in 1969, with a team-high five interceptions and had a single shot at playing both ways with one rushing attempt for seven yards in a loss against Denver. It must have been a great time to be a Jet, waltzing into Bachelor's III with the man himself. When Dockery started doing TV with Bill Mazer (on Channel 5?) in New York when I was little, I remember my parents independently pointing him out to me as a relic of a Jets' past that I had just missed. It was sometimes hard to imagine someone as a Jet if he wasn't standing right there, in front of you, in the green and white. I was jealous of their memories of a time when the Jets were good, when life was good for the Jets and John Dockery's name was called at games. If the Jake Gyllenhaal biopic of Namath ever happens - and I'm starting to doubt it will - then who will play John Dockery? He and the man himself currently run a football camp that shares their name. All things total, it has not been a bad life for John.

So when I saw his daughter's marriage listed, I reacted as the perpetual loner living in his imaginary village, half-heartedly search for community. I thought, How great for John Dockery. I'm happy for him. What an auspicious match! I wonder why I wasn't invited. This is why being a fan is an essential part of being a human being. Simply by assigning our loyalty to a club, we are suddenly a member of a community that can exist to whatever degree we like within our imagination. As if being a Jets fan is, in some ways, a network of belonging that defies logic, opening doors to belonging the way that being an actual Jet did for John Dockery. If it hadn't, then perhaps he would have been an architect.

NY Jets #42 - Part 3

I was in Memphis, visiting my parents when I saw the news that Ronnie Lott #42 was joining the New York Jets. This would be summer of 1993, after my horrific first year of graduate school that saw at least one major anxiety attack and certainly one nervous breakdown. Some things just look like good decisions from the start, and even though most of my professors thought I was wholly unprepared to do what I was trying to do, I was deluded into thinking they were wrong. I'm not sure that has anything to do with Ronnie Lott, but I was similarly deluded into thinking that when we signed Lott, Leonard Marshall and Art Monk, the Jets were trying to do something that other people thought they couldn't either, like make the playoffs.

And it didn't work out. Neither did grad school. Well, that's not entirely true; I got my degree, so technically it worked out. The Jets? Not so much. That's been the story of my life, I suppose. My life has more or less worked out so far, though I've spent an awful lot of time unconsciously wishing for my team's success, even to the point of half-willing away my own happiness. As the poet says, "May no fate willfully misunderstand me/And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/Not to return. Earth's the right place for love."

Anyway, instead of being like the 1990 San Francisco 49ers, the Jets ended up looking more like the 1962 New York Mets, gathering future Hall of Famers - and NFL All-Time Team members, I think - like Monk and Lott who were at the tail end of their efficacy. As I recall, upon being signed, Lott said something to the effect that he hoped other talented NFL players would take the offers of the Jets' free agency cash. Ah, I always liked Ronnie Lott. Maybe he thought the Jets would make the playoffs in 1993. But younger, talented players around the league demurred. He pulled an average year in 1993 and started 15 games in 1994, a legendary season among Jets' collapses. Duke Snider is in the Hall of Fame as a Dodger, Richie Ashburn as a Phillie, neither of course as a Met, despite (or because of) their sporadic appearances in the 1962 lineup. Lott is in Canton as a Niner. Monk is there as a Redskin.

****

There was once a time when the New York Times allowed you to read any of their articles online for free so long as you were a member. Obviously those days are over, and I half convinced myself that a downloading binge I went on two years ago was responsible. "There's some idiot in Philadelphia who's pulling up every article on the New York Jets' seasons in the 1970's, and we're not seeing anything in return!" Obviously that's not the case, but I'm a serious person. When I was 13 and apparently friendless, or at least certainly without the possibility of anything resembling a girlfriend, I spent most of my free time in my high school library, trolling through spool after spool of Time magazine on microfilm, reading back issues going back at least 20 years. It was as if I had returned to consciousness after a two-decades long coma, trying to find out about all I had missed. More likely I was what I was - a baffled child in the Reagan years of nationalist sleepwalking when all the country was ignoring the wake of cultural revolutions that were making it seasick. I'm not sure Time really helped clarify all that, but, again, I was 13. And there was no Interwebs.

Anyway, I just paid the New York Times $4.50 to double-check some information on Cliff McClain #42, Jets' running back from 1970-73. Maybe it's an extravagance when for the same amount of money I can buy myself an afternoon's on-street parking in Center City Philadelphia, sure, but bear with me. Cliff McClain might have been part of a moment that could have changed the course of professional football history. As with anything else, it all rests with the little things.

Cliff McClain

You see him here in a small photo courtesy of WireImage against the Cincinnati Bengals in the last game of the 1971 season. The Jets won it, 35-21, but more importantly, Cliff McClain scored one of his two career touchdowns in it, a 63-yard run. I suppose this was his highlight as a pro. Otherwise, Cliff McClain had a fairly ordinary football career; at the risk of offending the subject himself, one might even go so far as to say his career was not particularly successful and that he probably saw little play time. He gained around 400 yards over four seasons, and he retired a Jet.

On November 19, 1972, the Jets traveled to the Orange Bowl to play the undefeated Miami Dolphins. By this time the Jets were 6-3 while the Dolphins needed only one more win to clinch the AFC East. The Jets had been a split-personality team in 1972 - a "jittery" one, as Sports Illustrated called them. The truth is that they were almost a good team, certainly not a great one, playing what most people believe (not me) was the greatest team of them all. And by the start of the fourth quarter, the Jets were winning, 24-21. One of the hallmarks of the Dolphins that season is that when they went down, they always came back, and they did come back and win that game, 28-24, clinching it on a Mercury Morris touchdown. No surprise.

No surprise either also that the Morris touchdown was enabled by a Jets turnover in Miami territory, in this case, on what is reported to be a muffed handoff between Namath and Cliff McClain with the Jets ahead. It's the little things. We are free to place blame all around if we like. I'm sure there are ways of finding out what happened, but it's true that this particular turnover midway through the fourth was the start of what eventually sent the Jets to the showers. Instead of placing blame, let us suggest instead that Cliff McClain was simply witness to a piece of history, a crucial turning point. Once the Dolphins rallied, they would then go on to win every remaining game of the season handily and saunter into the playoffs. The Jets were their last real challenge before the postseason.

Now, imagine if the handoff had actually gone well, and then a variety of almost reasonably fortunate circumstances eventually led to a remotely possible Jets score - let's say, even another Namath touchdown pass, maybe to Rich Caster or Don Maynard. I know this is unlikely, but work with me. History is filled with options and possibilities that, reason tells us, could have happened. It is the responsibility of historians to find those turning points in history and see how much really rests on them. It's also the responsibility of a loyal fan of a traditionally losing franchise to waste countless hours of his thought conjuring all such similar moments, especially when such things provide an assurance that it's not just Fate, but luck - and bad luck, of course - that has traditionally kept your club from its appointment in your lifetime with destiny.

Thus, a Jets touchdown later in the game would have meant that the Dolphins would have had to have mounted an even greater comeback- which, in all likelihood, they would have - in order to win. According to what I know, there was enough time.

But imagine if they hadn't succeeded. The possibility is remote, I grant you. The Dolphins' third touchdown earlier in the game is indicative of how remote it would have been. This was scored by Earl Morrall, on a 31-yard bootleg. Morrall was 38 years old by that point, which means he was older than the number of yards he scampered on the play. According to Al Harvin's article in the Times the following day, Morrall said, "I think that must the longest run of my career," adding, "I think I ran 25 yards in college once." If Earl Morrall could find that kind of hole, how much more would the Jets have given up to a rallying Miami offense late in the game? So again, I grant you.

But consider the possibility of Cliff McClain not fumbling and suddenly you are taken down one circuitous route of conjecture after another: the Jets might have held on to win at the Orange Bowl, and then the 1972 Miami Dolphins would today be simply regarded as a great team but second to the 1985 Chicago Bears (whom I feel reign supreme) as the greatest ever, and they would never have held the one true record that has eluded the Patriots and the Colts in our era - that of complete perfection from September to February. The mind reels. Just as in high school, the mind evidently has nothing better to do.

Always fascinating to see how the printed media (albeit online) in New York covers the Jets.

The Jets are traditionally a kind of muse for Newsday, the paper whose beat is the sprawl of the Island so many Jets fans historically call home. On page one, you will find a thoughtful piece on what Dr. King would say to President Obama, as well as a nice juicy slab of business about a young couple passed out in the middle of day (near the start of the Saints game, no less) in Suffolk County while their 3 year-old wandered the streets of Brentwood. Newsday has always walked the fine line; I recall delivering them for a neighbor while he was on vacation during the summer they finally apprehended Son of Sam, though I'm not sure I was savvy enough to notice their high- and lowbrow takes on the matter. At the top of the page, though, is a banner with the essential information about what you really want to know about: Jets vs. Colts. We know what you want.

The Times remains staid about it. There's too much going on in the world. Of course, the Old Gray Lady is correct, as she always is (well, except about initally supporting the Iraq War; oh, and about calling for Clinton's resignation; and oh, well, its plagiarism cases). My beloved team cannot compare with the catastrophe of Haiti, nor with the suicide bombings in Kabul. (By the way, a student last week tried speaking for Pat Robertson's sickeningly stupid claim about the quake being God's will; I wish that I had known that it was actually the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault that runs parallel to Port-au-Prince that caused it, as I would have told her, although she certainly would have claimed that God put that fault there. God can do anything.) However, I was grateful that the Lady was kind enough to make the Jets the top story in the Sports section way down the page, especially when the Jets' win over Cincinnati last week fell second to the NFC playoff game that same day.

The Daily News puts the Jets atop their "Hot Topics," right ahead of the Golden Globes and the earthquake, which posts an impressive third place.

The Post puts the Jets first and foremost, while secondly speaking of machete-wielding gangs roaming Port-au-Prince. It claims that NYPD have also been silencing Duane Reade security guards in the Port Authority over reporting an increase in thefts, while they do their able best in the service of Rupert Murdoch by criticizing Governor Paterson for going out on a date.