NY Titans #55 - Part 5

Robert "Bob" Marques #55 joined the newly created New York Titans and apparently played linebacker.  There isn't much to go on in terms of the stories of his career. He is mentioned, however, in The Coffin Corner, an ongoing history of professional football. This issue from 1999 includes "Fantastic Finishes: Three Weeks with the New York Titans." Here Bob Marques shows up in a mention of the Boston Patriots game against the Titans of New York at the Polo Grounds, 1960. Early in the game, the Titans lead, 17-7. William Ryczek writes:

Titan middle linebacker Bob Marques was enjoying himself tremendously at this point. A graduate of Boston University, Marques was well-acquainted with Boston assistant coach Mike Holovak, the former Boston College star and coach, and Alan Miller, the Patriot fullback who had also played at BC. Marques shouted a number of uncharitable remarks across the field to Holovak as the Titans built their sizable lead and was quite vocal about the poor performance of the Patriots. During one Boston drive, on fourth down and one, Marques blitzed and tackled Miller in the backfield. He laid on top of him after the whistle, holding Miller down and forcing the cursing fullback to wrestle himself free.

Marques had gone to Boston College while Holovak had coached at BU. Why not razz him? We can imagine history repeating itself, can't we? Shaun Ellis getting a hold of Shonn Greene and having a few words for Rex Ryan? I remember going to the old Spectrum in Philadelphia during an ill-fated bachelor party many years ago when the Celtics were in town. Eric Williams was playing for the Celtics at the time and was going up and down the court against the hapless Sixers. We had courtside seats, and when one of the guys in the party found out that Williams went to my alma mater, he insisted that I come up with something with which could heckle him. I told him which dorm Williams lived in at my school, so he started yelling, "Hey Williams, go back to Stephens' Hall!" It worked, sort of. Williams stopped in the middle of a fast break and bent over, laughing. The Sixers still lost.

If we had only known how Eric Williams would someday aspire to a career as a porn film director and recruit his wife's friends for nude scenes - and would throw a drink in his wife's face on Basketball Wives - well, just imagine what we could have said to him at courtside. By the way, Bob Marques' heckling went for naught. The Patriots ended up beating the Titans 28-24 at the Polo Grounds in 1960. It was the first meeting between the two franchises.

Pasquale Lamberti #55 played for the Titans in 1961, but he was known as "Pat." Though no real bits of information seem available, Lamberti has the following write up on yet another site where they also care about who played in what number and where - "Denver Broncos Greats By the Numbers" at Mile High Report. According to them, Pat...

Was drafted 146th overall in the 1959 draft by the Chicago Cardinals. Pat never played for them, instead choosing to wait two years so he could jump into the fledgling AFL in 1961, where he played twelve games for two teams without starting a game. In his seven games with Denver he intercepted one pass and ran five yards with it.

His seven games with the Broncos were preceded by five games with the Titans. After that, Pat Lamberti is nowhere to be found. He clearly played alongside Larry Grantham at linebacker. He was from Woodbridge, NJ, and he played football for the Richmond Spiders in college. And he died on December 19, 2007.

With or without football, I'm usually in an autumn Sunday malaise that doesn't start wearing off until later in the week, roughly Thursday night. But last autumn I was at least guaranteed a TV lineup that distracted my Sunday ennui even before it had a chance to settle in. The 1:00 pm game was very likely the Jets game, or at least an Eagles game in Philadelphia, which was typically operatic. (No team has bigger expectations this year than the Eagles, so no team will disappoint in quite the Wagnerian way that the Eagles will in 2011, and you will be able to thank Andy Reid for it.) Then comes the hysterical buildup to Hockey Night in Canada on NBC, with a very, very awkward pregame program, followed by the Sunday night game itself.

Then, I would switch over to AMC later in the evening, and there was the brilliant but canceled Rubicon, which I agree was convoluted, but then so are most good things. And then I would be able to end the night with Mad Men, which has become so popular now that its mere reference in a blog is as obnoxious as mentioning Stephens Hall to Eric Williams. But I did back then, so I will now right now. So far, Mad Men has covered the years 1960-65. My mother worked in Manhattan at the time the show takes place, and like Peggy Olsen, she was an impressionable, smart, well-meaning, astute, conscientious, hard-working Irish-Catholic young woman surrounded by barely functioning alcoholic executives who believed most of the time that they were geniuses. Granted, Peggy's no angel, but my mother worked as a secretary for the same firm for 13 years, and she knew how to handle people.

But if you're really interested in the history of the advertising agencies of the 60's, apart from the Lucky Strikes and the Rob Roys, then consider the New York Titans center and linebacker Alex Kroll #55.

Alex Kroll's 1963 card (he did not 
play for the Jets)

According to Jimmy Wales' free site, Kroll was accepted to Yale in 1955 but was thrown out in his first year. "He played on Yale’s varsity football team," it says "but a physical argument with a young associate professor got Kroll expelled during his sophomore year."

He punched a young professor? Now I was intrigued by Alex Kroll. He then went into the Military Police. My Uncle Mike was an MP in the early 50's, and I have never quite understood how he made it in there considering that the average height for an MP was roughly Kroll's, at six foot-plus; in order to put soldiers in the clink you needed a height and weight advantage. My Uncle Mike is only about 5'7", and he believes he was made one because Michael Patrick Colahan signed his name "M.P. Colahan," which I'm not going to argue over one way or the other. After the army stint, Alex Kroll went to Rutgers and became an All-American at center.

He played in 1962 for the New York Titans, and rather than work at Sears in the off-season, he became a trainee at Young and Rubicam, the famed advertising agency in New York. The company was responsible for developing a variety of campaigns that helped shift the industry into a contemporary aesthetic. Today, their clients are Land Rover, Gap, VH1, the Red Cross. In the 60's, they were the first to do TV advertisements in color.

A BBC program from 1967 shows Young and Rubicam creative director Steve Frankfurt as the focus of a documentary about the typical United States ad man, about how he balances work, creativity, change, family and so on. It's a vanity project, very much like the one the good people at Sterling (Cooper?) Draper Pryce try to get Don Draper to do, though he refuses at first because he's not actually Don Draper. He's Dick Whitman. While Steve Frankfurt would be out of Y&R by 1970, he would also create posters for some of the most memorable films of the next decades. His poster for Rosemary's Baby proclaimed, "Pray for Rosemary's Baby" when really people should have prayed for Rosemary, but then that was the point. And yes, Frankfurt later came up with "In Space, No Can One Hear You Scream," which haunts people who market movies to this day.

But when Frankfurt was let go of Young and Rubicam he was replaced as creative director by Alex Kroll, former Titan, former trainee turned advertising superstar, and apparently Kroll lead the company in new and profitable directions, eventually becoming CEO in 1985 and then stepping down in 1994. Here's his somewhat cloudy Horatio Alger tribute, complete with a cheesy medal around his neck. To his credit, he apparently tried to lead an exploratory committee to help Bill Bradley run for President in 2000. 

If you are as intrigued as I am by the tough rooms filled with smoke and spirits that execs encountered at ad agencies in the 1960's, take a look at the last part of the BBC segment on Steve Frankfurt below and you'll see Frankfurt leading a discussion in Creative about the agency's plan to get Spalding to sell golf clubs to women. As one of the two women in the room point out (there's only one at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, mind you) most middle class women had the luxury of playing golf all day, whereas men could only play on weekends (in 1967, at least). Women needed golf clubs, too.

But the most vocal proponent in the tough room for the idea is Alex Kroll, the then up and coming man at Y&R. Compare the football card above with the assertive man with glasses who is sitting down in the video below, and tell me if they don't match.

"Women," he says in the video, "comprise 20% of the market, and the market's growing as fast as you want it to." Then the camera focuses on Kroll, so much so that you wonder if it's been staged. "Nobody's ever done any advertising to this particular segment of market; as a matter of fact, it's the fastest growing part of the whole market. And there's like seven million golfers. A million two hundred thousand of them...," he hesitates for a moment, almost catching himself, and reverts back to locker room talk, "...are broads."

Still, he insists a few minutes later, again to both Frankfurt and the camera:  "There are a million two hundred thousand women in this market," he says, "and nobody's paying any attention to them."

I certainly know even less about advertising than I do about the New York Titans, but I do know that the great success of advertising in the United States after 1967 grew out of a recognition that women were consumers of something more than just household goods during the week. To draw broad conclusions based on one or two moments in a carefully staged film would be silly, but Alex Kroll would eventually become a CEO at a time when more and more women would be in higher places on the corporate ladder, which meant that more women would definitely be playing golf.

NY Jets #44 - Part 3

When John Riggins left the New York Jets as free agent at the end of the 1975 season, there was no one really left on the team who possessed his qualities of speed and power at running back. Clark Gaines was speedy, certainly, and had several good seasons with the Jets. No one else would come close again until Freeman McNeil was drafted in 1982. Before then, at the very least, Tom Newton replaced John Riggins in uniform #44, from 1977-82.

I remember him most vividly from the 1978-79 teams, and I wasn't sure why until I looked at his statistics from 1979. He gained 145 total yards rushing but scored six touchdowns, which must mean he was regularly brought in for short yardage situations close to the goal line. As the Jets' talented backfield coach, the late Bob Ledbetter put it in the Jets' 1980 Yearbook, Tom Newton had "that old knack of smelling the money at the end of the line," which, really, sounds like a line from a pulp novel. It obviously meant he was also a regular blocker, too.

It's hard to recall these things clearly, but I must be thinking of him fondly, as I sit here, writing. Pavlov would obviously see the combination of elements at work here. Newton scored touchdowns in three of the eight precious wins the injury-ridden, confused squad had in 1979. And he scored a 51 yard touchdown in one of the worst losses I remember from that season, the 46-31 loss in Buffalo, a game that revealed that we were much worse that we thought and that Buffalo was much better; they would ultimately win the division. For years Buffalo had been a reliable win for us, even through the 9-33 seasons from 1975-77.

But the worm turned at the halftime of that game. In the first half, Tom Newton took a breakaway touchdown, and then followed it with a one-yard run, giving us a 17-6 lead. Anything seemed possible. Yes, this most definitely must have left its mark somewhere in the abandoned rooms of my childhood museum. And he wore #44. How can I not feel instinctively good about Tom Newton?

But then the Jets buckled in the second half, and Tom Newton and the Jets became human again. Perhaps as the understandably human inheritor of the #44 - the number that had previously belonged to a peerless, grunting mass of offensive power - Tom Newton embodies the pain that comes when the belief that our illusions will live on forever finally dies.

****

That's right: Bert Rechichar #44. The first of his number, playing for the New York Titans in 1961.

Here he is in his glory days, looking as if he's steadying himself against a possible tremor. Back when men were men and they drank Ballantine because it's made with Brewer's Gold. Actually, until Tom Dempsey kicked a 63 yard field goal with half a foot in 1970, Bert Rechichar set the record with 56 yards for the longest placekick in 1953 while with the Baltimore Colts. Kicking was obviously an imperfect science back then, even with all of one foot, usually requiring a simple head-on doink to the ball. There was probably more to it than that, but it became so much more complicated with the arrival of Pete Gogolak and Jan Stenarud, and men named Raul. Doink was all that was required. Linemen could be kickers, running backs could be kickers. Men were men, women were women, but anyone could be a kicker. It was the 50's one public allowance for promiscuity.

Moving on, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, I would like to congratulate Bert Rechichar with having a last name that's funny for sounding like something you should never do.

But we're also fortunate to have this testimony by way of Alex Hawkins, a 1950's and 60's Baltimore Colt of impeccably eccentric character with his assessment of Bert Rechichar:

Bert carried all his money with him, leading the other players to call him the "First National Bank of Rechichar." No one knew where he lived. When Coach Weeb Ewbank finally released him, Bert asked Hawkins to give him a lift to pick up his belongings. Alex jumped at the chance to finally learn where Bert lived. Instead, Rechichar directed him to half a dozen back alleys and side streets where he picked up a pair of pants in this building, a jacket in that one, a couple of shirts here, a pair of shoes there. After an hour of this, Bert said, "O.K., that's it." Hawkins concludes: "Would you say that Bert Rechichar was a totally sane man?"

No. But is that a problem? Again, no. The New York Titans had him for one season. Obviously, it seemed like a role he had been waiting to play all his life. A man who keeps his pants in odd places should play for a man like Harry Wismer who couldn't cover his checks.

Finally, there's Lonnie Young, the Grover Cleveland of #44. He played for Bruce Coslet from 1991 to 1993 and then returned to the Jets again for the Kotite years of 1995-96. What on earth did he do to deserve that? His better years with the Jets were in #31 when he recorded 102 tackles in 1992, but when he returned, he was given #44 and recorded 32 total tackles over two seasons, with one interception. I won't even bother to find out where and when it happened. Do any of us really want to relive 1996, and I mean for any reason? Think about it. Honestly.

But here again, I must turn to the wild and the wacky. I confess I know nothing about video games, and it seems as though this Wikipedia entry is talking about something older than dirt in the gaming world, but it makes for great reading anyway. Here goes:

Lonnie Young appears on the Phoenix Cardinals roster in Tecmo Super Bowl for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nobody knows exactly why, but he has the highest running speed attribute of any player. Robo Lonnie Young is an Ultra Beast.^{[citation needed]} Some believe his elite starting speed is due to a programming error or glitch. It has been a mystery to Tecmo fans since 1991, when the game was originally released.

All of us should be so lucky as to have our best abilities, even in the simulated world, be as a result of a glitch. My glitch is depression. So what's the deal? Why did the Glitch Fates pick Robo Lonnie Young to be so fast? Why was he made an Ultra Beast? Why can't I be an Ultra Beast?