The Strong Island

After free agency, the next modern development in my life was Disco. Someone decided that the Hustle would be good exercise for gym class in the third grade. Conjure the sight of 50 small children in their gym clothes doing the modified two-step in rigid syncopation.
From somewhere out there on the seedy streets of the distant city, a Disco inferno began consuming the decent homes and families of the South Shore, and people weren't happy about it.

My friend Jake Walsh convinced Terry Corriccio and me to perform the Disco Robot to “Jive Talkin,’” for a school talent show (we had first seen it done on Dance Fever, hosted by the great Danny Terreo). We placed third. This was still innocuous until Jake underestimated the community’s resistance to the changing times when he and his fellow scouts performed “YMCA” in full regalia of the Village People during the den’s “Gong Show.”
They were immediately gonged by the Den Father.

“Sorry about that, boys,” said the corpulent man in a plaid shirt. “That song's about fairies meeting at the Y.” He returned to his seat. “That’s not what the scouts are about.”

So it seemed. Being manly was important on the South Shore, and there was anxiety everywhere about not being manly enough. Even Mom was beginning to worry about me, what with my obsessive love of football players. My parents talked about that over dinner. My father tried to be sensible with her. Mom tried to be discreet.

"You don't think he's G-A-Y, do you?" she asked.

"What?" Dad asked. "He's...what? Are you asking if he's happy? Ask him."

"No, you know." She made some kind of hand gesture.

“Don’t be silly,” I overheard Dad say about me, “I say to myself that he can’t be G-A-Y because he loves football.” They gave me enough credit to think I was already forming attachments, but wouldn't I at least have known how to spell a three letter word?

“Well, when Rosey Grier says it‘s alright to cry, I start top wonder about Rosey Grier myself,” my mother suggested.

“Roosevelt Grier?” my father corrected. Rosey was a staple of everyday American life at that time. Dad remembered Rosey from early precocious days as a Giants fan, in the days when men were men. "Rosey was crying? Why was he crying? What happened?”

"What do you mean what happened?"

"Well,...are we talking about Rosey Grier who played for the Giants?"

“I know who Rosey Grier is, Charles. I used to go to Giants games with Carl Smith before you and I got married.”

There was a pause. “You went to Giants games with Carl Smith?”

She nodded. “I didn’t like him,” she explained. “I was just being polite.” This was still not enough information. After a moment, she said, “He had very dirty fingernails.”

"Carl or Rosey?"

"Carl!"

The New York football Giants always activated a little jealousy in Dad. He had come to associate their uniforms with the Episcopalian Blue Bloods who owned the company for which he worked. What did Carl Smith have that Dad didn’t? Dirty fingernails, apparently.

He changed the subject. “So what’s Rosey crying about?”

Mom made a dismissive sound. “He wasn’t crying. 'It‘s Alright to Cry’ is a song he sang on Free to Be You and Me. You’re not a mother. You don't know about these things.”

This was OK, then. “Well, Rosey Grier’s not g-a-y, though,” Dad insisted.

“OK, fine, he’s not g-a-y, Charles,” she said impatiently. “After all, he played for the Giants.”

Machismo was going through some redefinitions in the late 1970's that made male identity a bit...hmm, complicated.
But still, surreptitiously spelled words were not the fashion outside house. Things were a bit more cut and dry on the surface on Long Island. You were a fag, a homo, a sissy when you expressed yourself. Homophobia wasn't special to the Island, but the virile competitiveness throughout its culture was special in it own way. There were fights among boys that likely had their origins in the struggle among parents to accumulate the largest televisions, boats and cars - anything that expressed class superiority in a strictly middle class world. Nassau County was filled with people staying right where they were.

No wonder the boys at recess always tried to kill one another. They were learning to be fierce residents of the Strong Island. This certainly made my life more complicated, and manliness was already complicated by the fact that the very same people who sang "Macho Man" were also flamboyantly gay. If this is not proof that no one in the world who can make you gay, then I don't know what to tell you.

As it was, I had already decided to be honorably loyal to a losing cause. I was a Jets fan. This was a much graver vulnerability, and who the hell respected that? Not Jake Walsh.

No friend better represented Long Island than Jake. We were the same height and build, about as bright in school, and both in love with football. But while I saw a friend in Jake, he saw a competitor in me. He could have chosen anyone else, but he chose me perhaps because I was there. I felt the sting of this one autumn afternoon when he tripped me, and I fell onto the scaly, uneven sidewalk of Merrick Avenue. I was 8 now, on my way with Terry Corriccio, Eddie O’Fallon and Jake to the delicatessen to buy the latest round of football cards. Suddenly, I was on the ground, bleeding through the knee patch my mother had ironed over the hole in my Toughskins.

“You’re a loser,” Jake said, looking down. Terry laughed obligingly.


Rosie Grier had size and muscle. No matter what his assurances to the contrary, it was already inadvisable for boys in middle childhood to cry. I had cried after getting hurt once in front of Jake Walsh’s dad, who told me that “Girls cry, Marty.” Terry Corriccio’s dad was a fireman, so I assumed that Terry and his dad didn’t cry either. I held back as long as I could, but it was the trickery and mockery that hurt, so the font opened up. I had never experienced ambushes from mean older siblings the way Jake, Terry and Eddie might have, so there was no preparation. It got the sad out of you.

My tears only delighted Terry and Jake even more; each of them with their matching freckled faces looked like a pair of Dennis the Menaces. Then they marched together to the deli. Eddie O’Fallon quietly helped me up, and we slowly entered the store. The deli clerk observed my knee and asked if I needed help. Looking at Jake, I realized what to say.

“I’m OK,” I said.

We didn’t wait long to open the cards outside. It was too important. It had been two weeks since the last batch when I had gotten the Redskins’ Chris Hamburger, the Bills’ Reggie MacKenzie, and St. Louis’ Mel Gray. This time, while Jake got a Roger Staubach, Eddie got a Franco Harris (and an Ed Podolak), Terry got (crème de la crème) Walter Payton, I managed only a Ray Easterling, a Rufus Mayes (I had doubles of him already, and his 1973 card of him) a John James, a John Hill, a Bob Kowalkowski, an Eric Torkelson, and a Horst Muhlmann.

You might find some of those names in the sampling below. But who remembers Bob Kowalkowski today? Probably a lonely grown man who is reexaming his childhood, his love of his football team and the Detroit Lions of the late 1970's. Someone who keeps an obsessively detailed and verbose blog on growing up a Lions fan. Someone who associates Bob Kowalkowski with some trauma from his childhood. But with little boys, it's the big names that carry real currency.
I was mocked, again. Not only was I clumsy when pushed to the ground, but I hadn’t even managed a single All-Pro player. What was I supposed to do? What could I do? Trade an Easterling, a Mayes (Eddie had doubles of him already, too) and a Torkelson for a Staubach? Somehow I sensed it was my own fault.

Jake spat it out with a laugh: “You got shit.”

On the way back home, Eddie offered a consoling hand on my shoulder. “Thorry,” he said, lisping between the space left from his perennially missing front teeth, “Even if I had had doubleth of Payton, I would’ve kept him.” Eddie understood the value of football cards as currency.

But I was always inclined to take these things to the extreme. When I finally got Walter Payton weeks later, I put his card in the cubby space beneath my desk in class for safe keeping. Even in the third grade, I was already showing the signs of my compulsiveness through a hording problem. Where other compulsives may look at their world with the idea that everything has its specific place, mine was already developing into a world organized among infinite piles. Nothing fit easily in the cubby under my school desk because I had already jammed everything in there. Yet the compulsive’s piles can develop into vortexes where objects are transported into an entirely new dimension. Thus, I lost Walter Payton.


I lost Walter Payton. When I get to the afterlife, I will probably be handed objects irreparably lost to me in this life – that great mix tape stolen out of my car during grad school, a turtleneck sweater left behind after a drunken night at Madison Square Garden, and certainly the 1977 All-Pro Topps of Walter Payton that vanished in the pile under my desk in third grade. Sweetness himself may hand it to me with his characteristic smile. What the hell were you thinking? he’ll ask.

Colts 20 Jets 0 - 1976

I still wasn’t anywhere near ready to face the truth of how bad the Jets were. While waiting for the school bus to take us home, I was standing next to an older boy from the fourth grade, admiring his beautiful teal jacket with the orange snap-on buttons and the Miami Dolphins’ insignia on it. I wasn’t subtle. The boy caught me staring and asked testily, “What are you looking at?”

I shook my head. “Wow.”
“Wow what?”
“Are you from Florida?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was out of my mind. “No. Stupid.”

I was struck. Not that he had insulted me. I was hit by the implications of what this meant. The depth of betrayal.

How…how?

“How come it doesn’t say Jets?” I asked. “Aren’t you a Jets fan?” I asked him as if I were talking about something as fundamental as the rules of subtraction.

He contorted his face into a look of horror, like I had accused him of wetting his bed or something. His jacket would certainly have protected him. It really was a nice jacket. “Because, you jackass,” he said, taken aback, “the Jets are terrible. They suck.”

Then he looked at the other kids on line, then back again at me. “Don’t you know anything?” he asked. Then, for good measure he added, “You’re fucking stupid.”

I didn’t get it. Maybe he was so aghast because the Dolphins had beaten the Jets at Shea 43-0 in 1975. But that didn’t matter. Miami had just gotten lucky, I figured. Forty-three points luckier. Right?

And still, the 1976 season was the Jets’ second disgraceful season in a row. By week 12, they were 2-9.
Both victories came against the then hapless Buffalo Bills. Mom and Dad went to the first of these, at Shea. Pat Leahy won it for the Jets on a last-second field goal.

Mom bruised her hand from clapping against her coiled wedding ring. Future star of Hill Street Blues Ed Marinaro, in his only season with the Jets, rushed brilliantly all day.

After the game, Mom called Mrs. Walsh, a neighbor who had been minding me that day, and I was brought in from the backyard to receive the good news. Mrs. Walsh’s son Jake had just sucker-punched me, and I had a bloody lip. The final was 17-14. I felt so happy I could even have punched Mrs. Walsh when she looked derisively at my lip and said, “You’re not a very good fighter, are you, Marty?” Such things passed for sympathy on Long Island.

The second win against the Bills in 1976 fell on a Halloween Saturday. I was supposed to trick-or-treat with a couple of friends whom I eventually left behind so that I could find a place to watch the game. I had not even wanted to go out on Halloween in the first place, and I may have been the only kid in North Merrick who felt this way. I wanted to watch the game.

When I had discussed it with Mom, she didn’t take me seriously. “You’ll be angry with me someday that I didn’t make you go,” she said. “I don’t want you on some analyst’s couch someday telling him I didn’t make you go out on Halloween and enjoy yourself. You have that astronaut’s costume from last year. It’ll fit you. Put it on!”

She was wrong. It didn't really fit. It was my old GI Joe astronaut costume. You didn't know GI Joe went into space? GI Joe went everywhere. Cardboard box containers, space, Vietnam.

Here he is on the moon - checking himself, evidently.

She was also wrong because the Jets game was far important than Halloween, even if football came more than 14 weeks a season and Halloween only once a year. I knew I had to find somewhere other than home to watch it because Mom would only have sent me back out to find my friends.

Finally, though, I found the perfect sanctuary. I quietly tip-toed into the sitting room of the Sacred Heart Church rectory where elderly Father Sheridan was fast asleep in his La-Z-Boy chair in front of the Jets game. It was a warm Halloween that year, so the priests had left the front door open and the screen door unlocked. A bowl with candy lay untouched on the table next to him (who went trick-or-treating to a rectory, anyway?). I walked in quietly and sat down on the carpet next to his chair. Occasionally, I looked over at him. Save for the vanilla pallor, his occasional, rising snort in mid-breath was the only indication that he was still alive. And when he did finally wake up late in the game, he startled me almost as much as I did him. I was still dressed for Halloween.

“JAIIISUS!!” he cried out in terror. “What the - …. Gah! What the hell are ye?!”

I never looked back. Like a cat with suddenly somewhere to go, I darted out the screen door. Jets were up, 16-14 in the fourth quarter. They would win by five.

Eventually, Dad and I went to the 1976 home game against the Baltimore Colts. The drizzle and cold were an appropriate setting. The Jets were shut out, 20-0. All I could see was that big kid in the Dolphins jacket, sneering at me. I felt sick. Late in the game, Namath took a tremendous hit from Baltimore’s Fred Cook. He fell on his back, clutched his helmet in pain and lay there in that position for a while.

He had been in worse positions before. He'd look worse later. But there was no way round it; no matter what the attempt now, Namath’s best days were behind him. He was given absolutely no time from his blockers to throw the ball, and each time he dropped back to pass, the fans leapt to their feet in morbid wondering if this was finally the hit that would end his career. Why else would you pay to sit and watch a Jets game at Shea? As Joe would go down again and again, the cops in our section would collectively gasp, Jesus Christ! His knees. His knees!! Please!! Don’t kill him!!And now, their fears seemed justified.

“Oh my God, Dad,” I said, tugging at my father in horror. We stared at the motionless Joe. “They really did it! They killed Joe!”

My father shook his head with only a shred of irony. “Looks like it.”

A terrible hush fell across the stadium. He was done for the day. I suddenly became aware of the brutality of this exercise – on Joe Willie, yes, but also on me and on my own sense of optimism.
Was this how Rastafarians felt when Salassie was overthrown in Ethiopia?

Without any adequate real model, I simply went from fanatical convert to sullen believer. The following week, I took an ironic inspiration from the fact that Cook’s hit on Joe Willie was featured in a Sports Illustrated article about injuries to quarterbacks. There, in the photograph, was Joe holding his head, with Fred Cook lording over him.
A Jet in SI! The last time that had happened, it had been a 1972 cover story referring to the Jets as "jittery."

I felt so proud, the way a parent who is so desperate for recognition might take cheerful notice of his child in the police blotter. That’s my quarterback who’s crying out in agony, I thought to myself. It was the only mention the Jets would get in the magazine all that year; in fact it would be the only mention any Jet player would get in Sports Illustrated until 1978, when it was said that Wesley Walker “no longer has boards for hands.” Who said mediocrity went without reward?

Dear John - 1975

Dad took Mom to the last home game of the 1975 season, a loss to eventual NFC Champion Dallas Cowboys. They left us with my grandmother in Brooklyn and then shivered in the frigid chill of Shea Stadium in December, probably wondering why they had wasted a perfectly good evening on a lost cause in Queens when they could have gone to their favorite restaurant in Greenwich Village.

“What a disgrace,” my father said upon his return. All Mom and Dad talked about was the cold wind off Flushing Bay. Apparently, on their way to the game, Dad had told Mom that she was going to see a great quarterback, by which he meant Roger Staubach, not Joe Namath. However, they saw Clint Longley; Staubach didn’t even start the game for the Cowboys so that he might rest for the playoffs.

Mom looked beautiful, wearing a mink hat that was already behind the fashion. She had always looked great in her hats, but the 70’s were evolving into a time where such things were less preferable to plainer, more functional styles.

“Even with gloves on, Marty, look,” Dad said, taking them off. “Look. You see?” He revealed how raw his hands had gotten during the game, like the color of ground chuck. He felt I needed evidence of something miserable.

Things were changing for Dad. His world of possibilities had already begun to lose its mythical dimensions. He had kept on faithfully climbing up the ladder, but ever since he moved to the suburbs, his beloved team had failed to follow him along. I see now that the Cowboys game was the one that started him reconsidering his season tickets. He didn’t want another humiliating night like that again. He must have known that the Jets were going to get worse before they got better. He would give them one last chance, one final season, but if they showed no clear improvement, they would be let go like a doomed employee.

I didn’t know that he felt this way. He didn’t mention anything about it at the time. I just assumed that the Jets would always be a part of all our lives. But Dad had used the word disgrace.

Of course, in the world of the Gang Green, as the Jets are commonly called, the word disgrace is simply part of the vernacular. It is a verb fit for self-pity: This fucking team has disgraced me long enough, or an adjective used for self-loathing: It's a disgrace that I root for this fucking team. One of the off-duty cops in the Loge had said this very thing within earshot at the Colts game earlier in the season, and now Dad invoked it, albeit less profanely.

While researching Jets history from the 1970’s, I discovered that immediately after that loss to the Cowboys, the Jets’ owners stood around the locker room asking for complementary autographs rather than discussing the loss with their players. The Jets finished the season at their worst record to date, 3-11. The team was in disarray. Free agent John Riggins, with 1,005 season yards, was now likely to sign a better contract with a more competitive franchise.

I thought John Riggins would always be with the Jets, so you can imagine my absolute shock and dismay when, before the 1976 season, he signed with the Washington Redskins.


Riggins’ departure from the Jets taught me the valuable lesson that the market dictates everything of value. As a boy, I never entertained the notion that playing for the Jets was anything other than hugely fun, but then it probably was not, especially when they lost so often and when so few good players (except the aging Namath) were paid competitive salaries.

This was a new concept to me, but I wasn’t exactly alone. We take for granted today that a player could leave a franchise as quickly as he arrives, but during the 70’s, when free agency was only beginning to change all of American sports, no one could adequately explain to me why Riggins was leaving. I suppose that even the most observant of fans had yet to fully grasp the breadth of free agency’s power. You played for a team, you stayed with a team - right? Free agency’s impact was certainly beyond Dad’s experience. When my father had been a boy, DiMaggio had played his whole career as a Yankee; both Ted Williams and Bill Russell had played all their years in Boston, a city that both athletes disliked.

John Unitas roamed a little when he was a rookie until he made a very long career in Baltimore, spending one short season in San Diego only when the Colts themselves finally let him go.

But Riggins was still at the beginning of his great career when he left the Jets. How could this arrangement with New York have failed? Whose fault was this?

At first, neither my corporate father nor my religious mother could adequately pin blame on one culprit. They simply chalked it up to life’s unfairness. But that wasn’t good enough for me. Danny Hennessey from down the street could pull down my pants in front of the neighborhood girls – our older neighbor Billy Vitale might have tried to run me down with his Corvette while I rode my bike. Sure. Life was already unfair. I got that.

But John Riggins going to Washington? I needed something better than “Life’s not fair.”

So my parents ruminated, and each of them identified separate guilty parties:

"They didn’t pay him enough money," Mom said when I came home from school. She had dwelled on it all day for me. "If Dad were offered a job with more money," she said, he would probably take it."

"He asked for too much money," Dad said, as he took off his trench coat and removed his pork pie Stetson. "He thinks he’s more important than God."

Say what you will, but these people were preparing me for the debate that rages among fans to this day – who’s responsible for fucking up American sports the way it is – the owners or the players? I have insisted that all throughout my life, the Jets have been an integral part of my understanding of the world, and this is an example of what I’m saying: John Riggins taught me that where there are no easy answers, the clearest, most acceptable motive in American life seems to be self-interest. As I learned more about his release from the Jets, I realized that Riggins’ pay raise with the Redskins was not substantially greater; it seemed he didn’t want to play for the Jets anymore, too. He was going to be happier working somewhere else, and apparently my own happiness had absolutely nothing to do with his.

He felt the Jets didn’t deserve him, and what’s worse, he felt that my devotion to him was not worth staying for. This was a quality of life issue for him - a matter of self-interest.

Still, I continued to resent John Riggins as the years went on (despite looking up his statistics with the Redskins week after week) because I knew more than ever that my own happiness lay in rooting for a really bad football team. And I needed to somehow express this. Mom had written monthly letters to President Richard Nixon in the early 70's, demanding that he resign, so I decided to take her cue and write to John Riggins. I felt that if Mom could bring down the Nixon Administration, I might have some effect on Riggins’ mind.

I remember telling John that even though he was leaving, I was still staying with the Jets, and so should he. I never heard back. I consoled myself with the idea that my feelings must have had some impact on him, and though I never really believed in Santa Claus as a child, I did believe for many years that John Riggins kept my heartbreaking, crayon missive with him throughout the remainder of his Hall of Fame career.

I was a lot older than I’d like to admit when I finally realized the naïveté of such an idea. When Keyshawn Johnson left the Jets in 2000 for Tampa Bay, I blamed him for being selfish. I had to pull myself together and recall the lesson I first learned with John Riggins: I should really know better than to hold any player in the modern era responsible for feeling something as irrational as my own passionate love for my team.

But it's all I have. As a child presently operating the bodysuit of a man, I suppose that mine will always be, at its core, a child’s love for the Jets - one that constantly holds the basic laws of supply and demand in vague suspicion. True, the fanatic can offer his team nothing more than his own unconditional love and devotion (and his money) but it still feels good to say that I have stayed true to what I believe in, even if the only thing I consistently believe in happens to be a football team.

Steelers 20 Jets 7 - 11/16/75

Even now, on the rare occasion when a man is smoking a cigar on a street corner near the expensive cigar shop where he has bought it, the odor is reminiscent of the aroma of old Jets’ fans at Shea who were chomping, spitting, drinking and swearing into the winter air. The brand of cigar is probably a bit more expensive than the cigars I recall.

Dad and I went together to see the Jets play the defending champion Pittsburgh Steelers of 1975. The Jets wore their whites against the black-clad Steel Curtain. We were in the presence of greatness, and none of it was evidenced on the Jets' side.

The Shea Stadium football field was turning to rusty sand on this unusually warm November afternoon, and the swirling winds of Flushing whipped the dirt into little cyclones that flew out of control beyond the barriers of the building. The Jets managed only a touchdown pass to Eddie Bell. Steelers 20 Jets 7.

Dad was right, I thought. They stank. They stunk it up. They sucked.

They were total shit.

My football team was for shit.

As we left with the sullen masses down the concrete steps of the stadium, I asked him something, more out of curiosity than of concern. "Are they ever going to win?"

He took that for a crack in my wall of happiness. Technically, I already sensed that the question was off limits. You couldn't just root for winners like Pittsburgh because they won regularly. Could you? That seemed for chickens, for sissies - for kids that didn’t take football seriously.

"Had enough?” he asked hopefully.

That was not at all what I was suggesting. I looked at him as if he had suggested eating my brother for dinner.

“Fine, fine,” he said, dejected. “I guess I'm renewing season tickets for next year. Jesus.”

His tone kept me awake on the sleepy ride back home to North Merrick. However, the question of whether or not it was worth spending a winter’s Sundays at Shea Stadium began to make sense when I saw how my classmates at school reacted to my transformation into fanatical Jets fan.

Suffice to say there was ruthless haranguing - the kind found most particularly on Long Island. Schoolboys favored only the football teams that won – the Steelers, Dallas Cowboys, Oakland Raiders, Miami Dolphins, and Minnesota Vikings. They did not seem capable of accepting the high price of loyalty in the face of adversity. They seemed to appreciate its spiritual value about as much as the lions did the value of early Christians' faith. Dinner, in other words, was served.

For most little boys, it made more sense to enjoy survival and go with the crowd. You admitted neither weakness nor fear. If you rooted for a losing football team, you were likely to get an emotional and physical pounding from the boys on the recess ground, which was apparently what you deserved. And this is what I got for being a Jets fan. Even boys whom I suspected had no interest in sports at all – boys who would probably someday cheer loudest for Cher or Liza Minnelli – would spit the Merrick Raspberry at me and insist that they were loyal Dallas Cowboys fans.

Religion, however, gave me relief, and even a sense of purpose. If they curse you and beat you all because of me, Jesus' Sermon went, then know that I am with you through it all.

Christianity implied to me that self-sacrifice was a way to justify oneself in salvation. The Catholic Church in predominantly Roman Catholic Nassau County Long Island told us that it was a noble thing to be tormented as the Fathers of the Church had been for their faith. It was just like Mom had told me - one must always take the long way round, the hard way out, not the easy way.

Because the Jets meant so much to me so quickly, like a newfound faith, a spiritual parallel between both faith in God and faith in the Jets made sense. The stronger I was in enduring the barbs of my classmates for rooting for a losing team, the stronger my devotion. As a conscientious servant to my faith, even through the darkness, I believed would be redeemed and rewarded with the Jets' second Super Bowl Championship, and this time I figured I would be around to see it. And certainly in my formative years. Oh, certainly. Yes.

Be Here Now

I have been waxing about the past so much I have neglected to mention how excited I am to go to Hofstra this summer. Camp starts July 27, and tomorrow there will be word of more dates. I will probably go in August, and probably more than once. The trip from Philly is about two hours, maybe a little more, and it's always a pleasure. It's always remarkable how little of North Merrick has changed since I lived there. That may or may not be of comfort to people who live there, but to a wannabe memoirist, it is a priceless character trait.

It's quiet in the online world of football, but it's an unsettling quiet before the storm. My wife and I are seasonally affected people who get more depressed as it gets colder, but we also have the good fortune of being football fans, which means that as the sun shines less and less, there are mountains of football games coming. Peace, my heart says. Be still. Be here now.

Colts 35 Jets 20 - 10/12/75

Dad found a parking spot in a lot near the number 7 line. It was a chilly, overcast mid-October day, and Flushing looked its usual ashen gray. We boarded the subway. All about were the smells of smoky middle-aged men who had probably started drinking before noon. Fans wore the popular Jets woolen hats with the flap, green peak and white pom-pom.

I looked across the subway car and saw another father and son tandem. These two were respectively older than my companion and I. The father stared off into the Sunday gloom, while the son stared at me, looking knowledgeable. He wore a blue and white wool hat. From either Queens or Long Island, the boy was my first introduction to a traitor – a Baltimore Colts fan from New York. He bared his front teeth at me like Jack from Lord of the Flies, stuck his tongue out, and ran his index finger along his throat.

I stayed close to Dad as we got off the train. New York subways in the 1970’s were far more forbidding places than today. Once apparently clean and safe, the subways were now covered in the graffiti that could now be found everywhere in a city that had been left for dead by the Federal Government.

Back then, New York felt, even to a six year-old, like a dam holding the floods of chaos to its breaking point. The tunnel from the subway reverberated with wild noises. There was some pushing among the crowds. I held onto his hand with the sense that if I let go, a palm would would reach up from beneath the subway grates and bring down to a circle of Hell.

Then I saw Shea Stadium. It wasn’t painted the terrible royal blue that it is today; rather, it was all gray and adorned with corrugated blue and orange aluminum shingles.

Outside the stadium, the smells of cigars, pretzels, chestnuts, warm beer, and hot breath were everywhere.

Inside, the mass evened out a bit. Shea was in a particularly neglected state in the mid-70’s, as was most of New York. Drainpipes leaked in the passageways, and the upper level walkways smelled of urine and were stained with the running rust of concrete cable.

The Jets would not fill up the stadium that day, as they had already turned fans off by week 10. They had matched the 1974 week 10 record of 2-7. Still, I ignored Dad’s warning that, “The Jets'll get killed today. Baltimore is at the top of the division.” The Colts were on their way to the playoffs in 1975 with a final 10-4 record. Dad knew whereof he spoke, but I chose to tell him it didn’t matter. It didn’t.

He shared a section of seats at Shea with a group of off-duty New York police officers in a level called the Loge, a purgatorial area between the box seats and the upper sections. At kickoff in the Colts game, a shorter member of the cops took out a Dove detergent bottle filled with whiskey and toasted his fellow officers.

Dove for your dishes, girls.

With a waft of cheap alcohol, a tone was set. It was the smell of Failure. The Jets obliged. Joe Namath was sacked seven times and intercepted four times. Their defense would yield 35 points to the Colts. The game is distinguished only in that it was Charley Winner’s last before getting fired the ensuing week.

Joe Namath was already a hero to me by virtue of all the books I had collected about the championship year of 1968 and of Super Bowl III, but now he looked a fragment of his old self. With heavy braces making his knees look bloated and cumbersome, Namath resembled a marionette.

“This is embarrassing,” my father said, as we watch Namath get sacked again and again. A constant wail encircled the stadium, and it was not from the planes flying low over the stadium on their approach to nearby LaGuardia Airport - it was the unhappy fans. Dad begged me to leave with him at the beginning of the fourth quarter.

But I would have none of it. I was mesmerized. The field was a fascinating, messy brown-green - a nasty combination of both the Shea Stadium football grounds and of the lingering Mets' baseball field. The crowd's fury at the Jets seemed also to resonate with me.



The seasoned fans of the past had now adapted themselves to this inferior team; they perhaps even felt a sado-masochistic joy at the incompetence they watched. Amid the bellicose and the drunk, I somehow knew that this was where I belonged. I was home.

My newfound passion for the Jets was one of those indelible conversions that last long beyond the period of initial euphoria. As a six year-old it would have been impossible for me to be prepared for the feeling of being touched by God, and maybe the best kind of transformations must happen to a young person who is too innocent to understand what is happening to him. What’s so funny, though, is that this is the complete opposite of what Dad wanted to happen. Dad had logically thought that in order to dispel my insane, new attachment, he needed to open me up to basic, hard reality of the Jets’ ineptitude. He is such a logical man.

It makes sense in retrospect. It wouldn’t be the first time such an attempt would fail on me. No. In time, my love for the Jets would embrace and help clarify for me all the dimensions of humiliation and defeat awaiting me in the world. Somewhere in the first half of the Colts’ game, I began jumping up and down in excitement toward the end of the game. I had lost it. I was ruined for life.

The shortest of the off-duty cops turned boozily around and gazed at me. “Has he been sneaking some of this, Charlie?” he asked, gesturing to his Dove bottle. Dad didn’t bother to answer.

God and Man in Merrick, 1975

My own general air of obsession was nothing new to my parents. This new obsession was more expansive, though, even dangerous. My strict Roman Catholic mother was beginning to wonder about the development of my early sexual identity when I spent most of my days now parked in wonder at the feet of the manly John Riggins.

When the day came for my first visit to Shea Stadium, I set aside my game clothes even before dressing for Mass. Our church was in the generic cookie-cutter style. Like all Catholic churches built to suit the post-war suburban sprawl, everything inside looked innocuous, plastic and uniform, just as it did in parishes throughout towns nearby like Seaford and Massapequa.

Even the crucified Christ hung above the pre-Vatican II altar looked exactly the same in St. John's Church as it did in every other Catholic church I had ever visited. It was as if the details of the crucifixion were without doubt, as if the company that produced these similarly suffering Christs in Catholic churches had an actual photograph of the event from which to work. It was not explained clearly enough how Jesus, from Nazareth, possessed dirty blonde hair and blue eyes.

I stared intently at Him from my pew. We sat next to the tenth station of the cross, where Jesus was stripped of His garments. The look on His face was problematic.

I’m doing this for you, He seemed to say, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

You did this to me, seemed more like it for some reason.

In light of His own impending peril in the face of the nails, the cross, and the lashing Romans, my own requests that Sunday seemed paltry, as they always did in general. Please do not let my first game at Shea be a blowout. Don’t let it rain. Don’t let him turn the car around if the weather’s bad. I don’t want to go home from the game early. Please let the Jets win. Please let them win. Perhaps Jesus understood, as I was told He understood all prayers. Being a young man loyal to his local Nazarenes, He would appreciate my sympathies for the home team - unless of course He had aligned Himself long ago with the Giants, in which case my prayers were wasted.

On the way to Queens that afternoon, my heart was in my throat. Dad warned me about being a “good fella,” and about not “whining about being cold or bored.” I thought he was crazy. He didn’t know with whom he was dealing.