Dreams and Numbers

It’s another dreary overcast afternoon in my dream. The air is that chill of winter that nags at you; it's not yet decided whether to chill just to one’s skin or to the bone. The environment is familiar - urban/suburban melded into an eclectic landscape that my subconscious has patched together from all the places where I’ve lived.

Sometimes my dreams bring me back to the town outside New York City where I grew up, and my teenage room comes back to me in dramatic detail. Sometimes I’m in the classroom teaching, as I do each day for a living during ten months of my waking hours, but it’s not the high school where I work; instead, it’s an amalgam of that place and my own high school, and the narrative can’t quite place me as either the teacher or the student, so I’m both, and I’m lousy at both, too.

Yet in this dream I retreat to an interior somewhere, and a woman dressed only in a football jersey comes up to me, approaching with the look of desire that takes me off guard. Thank goodness, it’s my wife.

I’m on my back and she begins undressing me. Her uniform is familiar - in this sense the dreamer in my dreams knows what I like; he knows his audience enough to know what works. It's a Jets uniform. When I dream of football games - not necessarily those I recognize, some I do - the dreamer in my dreams is always careful to make sure the details of the uniform translated accurately. The game doesn’t always have to be at the old stadium where I first went to see Joe Namath play some thirty years ago. Sometimes it’s an overcrowded suburb’s football yards just alongside the main road. But usually all my favorite players of the past are there, no matter what the setting, and their uniforms of kelly (if it’s the mid-70‘s) or forest green (from the 80’s) are rendered accurately. As my wife grabs hold of me, I notice the shiny reflection of the light’s glare against the rubbery white numbers “2” and “3.” She smiles.

****

I wake. I usually wake before it’s over. It must be something I trained myself to do growing up Catholic. I was a late bloomer in some respects. Late to lose my virginity, late to let go of adolescent ways of reacting to sex. Now that I’m in my late 30’s, I see now that many things are unlikely to change. The anti-depressants I take certainly make my libido an aged benchwarmer to the formerly irrepressible rookie star it once was. All such pleasures of the flesh have come under reappraisal lately - sexual antics, drunkenness, chain-smoking, painfully earnest, yet remarkably forgettable conversations about sports heroes and the like - all are characteristics of the old regime. And not just because I’m married now, but because that’s the way it must be, for the sake of my own sanity and self-preservation. Maybe you’ve crossed into this rite of passage yourself, wondering why you survived it for as long as you did considering how often you drank and drove around without a single consequence.

But some things will never change, and it may be that my football team, my most magnificent obsession of all, is simply next on the execution list. It seems impossible to imagine, for nothing in my life as superseded the magnitude of being a New York Jets fan.

In waking life, I bring my wife coffee. She looks at me.

"What?" she asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“OK,” she says, sitting up, taking a sip.

She waits. After all, I have to say it before it leaves my memory. “It’s just that I had a dream about you and I having sex.”

Another sip. “Oh that’s nice,” she says. If not in real life, then certainly in the murky one. “Did we enjoy ourselves?”

“Yes.”

More time elapses. The radio goes on. The college station plays insufferable and gentle folk music for the purpose of making its hung-over listeners more likely to contribute at pledge time. “It was interesting,” I said. “You were wearing….a…”

She nods. She guesses it without so much as a flinch. “A Jets jersey.”

“God, yes,” I say. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised that she’s not surprised. “How did you know?” I feign amazement at her powers of observation. “Did you hear me say something in my sleep?”

No, she shakes her head, staring straight ahead. “I just know you. That’s all.”

Of course she does. “Whose uniform was it?” my wife asks after a few more moments. “Was it Joe Namath’s?” she asks.

I shake my head. This will surprise her, at least. “No. Shafer Suggs. Number 23.”

“Who?”

“Number 23,” I repeat. “Shafer Suggs.”

She sips. “Who's he?” she asks.

I nod, acknowledging Suggs’ relative obscurity. “He’s a defensive back from the late 70’s,” I say, matter-of-factly. “Seventy-five to ‘79. Then he went to the Falcons, I think. He played alongside Burgess Owens, who eventually went to the the Raiders.”

She is unimpressed with my mind’s Encyclopedia of Nonsense. The facts are usually all she wants. Unlike me, she has no place in her heart for nostalgia. She entertains the obscurity of the dream for a moment and then smiles at her own association.

“That’s the Patriots’ stadium,” she said. "Isn't it?"

She means Schaefer Stadium, not "Shafer" or "Shafer Suggs Stadium" either. It got renamed Sullivan Stadium. It used to be easier to identify teams’ stadium names when they weren’t ephemerally named for corporate sponsors. She grew up in New England. “I went there with Jim the Jock, and we saw a game there against the Jets.”

Jim the Jock. It turns out she was the kind of girl who wore her boyfriend’s football jacket. I clarify for her, though she won’t respond.

“The final score of that game of that 1981 game of which you speak,” I say, “was a blowout."

Turns out that in this sense, she is nostalgic after all. I, on the other hand sound like Rain Man. “Jets won the game. The final was 31-7.”

“He was nice,” she said. “He let me wear his jacket. It was so damn cold.”

I shake my head and mutter over the coffee again. “Shafer Suggs,” I say. “I’ll be damned.” I see him in my mind’s eye as he appears in the 1979 Jets Yearbook, which I promise myself I am not just now going to get up and look at just in order to verify that it appears exactly as I just now imagined it.

“What does it mean?” she asks hopefully. “The dream. Are you thinking about my date with Jim the Jock at Schaefer Stadium?”

No. “Have you been thinking about it?” I ask with a vaguely accusatory tone. I am insanely jealous by nature, as I am, after all, insane.

“Not until just now.”

“Good,” I say.

“Oh stop it.”

I shake my head. “No,” I said. “I wish I could say it was something significant.”

“Are you thinking about binge drinking?” she asks. She means Schaefer Beer. A fine diuretic as beers go. Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one?” When you're getting wicked cocked, more like. Her mind is like a steel trap when it comes to ad jingles. This she recalls.

If the Mitchell and Ness vintage sportswear company put out a #23 Shafer Suggs jersey, they’d just be showing off. And I think that’s what my subconscious was trying to do - yank out an obscure name from the unfathomably deep structures of my Jets memory bank just to make sure I knew that it was on top of its shit. It went with the one thing that I feel only I can know with consistent, complete and total accuracy - obscure Jets players forgotten by time.

Let's see... Carl Barzilauskas. Wayne Mulligan. Kurt Sohn. Jazz Jackson. How could anyone forget a name that begins with a musical genre? And Carl Barzilauskas? What was his number again?

77. Of course.

Fanatics

I come from a long line of apparent fanatics. If family lore is to be trusted (should it really ever be?) my mother’s fraternal grandfather came from County Wexford in British-occupied Ireland to New York City in 1882. He belonged to a faction of the Irish Nationalist Fenian Brotherhood called the Invincibles - a name that seems today, to be honest, a little overly compensatory.

Nevertheless, Wexford had once received the worst of Oliver Cromwell’s murderous rampages across Ireland more than two hundred years before, so the county town was a place that nurtured a young man’s fanaticism. The Invincibles claimed responsibility for killing two British cabinet members in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1882, and among the members on a short list to be rounded up and interrogated was Joseph Barry, an apparently a card-carrying Invincible. While attending Mass (and where else would a good Irish Nationalist have been?) a note was passed to him via the collection basket (this is the best way for the Catholic Church to communicate with its congregants). The note read:

Joe,
The British are outside waiting for you. Go out the back.

Which he did. The Irish Nationalist always receives absolution from the Eucharist under such conditions. The next part of the story finds him taking the next ship out of Wexford bound, he thought, for Johannesburg, South Africa where he could join up with the Boers. However, he miscalculated and the next ship was actually bound for New York Harbor, which is where he eventually landed.

The entire story lacks details and, frankly, a little truth. Did he play any part in the murders? And what about those collection basket? Did he throw anything in? And if the British Empire could encompass the globe, couldn’t it as well send representatives who might have enough common sense to cover the back door to a local church? Even more suspicious is the assertion that Joe wanted to give aid to the rebellious Boers in South Africa, whose guerrilla war against the British would actually not get started for another 15 years. More likely he was a young man in over his head, and he ran for his life, which was a smart move. Maybe, just maybe, he left because his Mother Country was an impoverished hellhole.

According to my mother, Great Grandfather Joe became a ferocious American patriot upon his arrival, which shows just how much in the ordinary Joe might have been. Like most normal people, he followed a new home team when he moved.

His own son, my grandfather Mickey, inherited his father’s zeal and directed it toward following Notre Dame football, which was the Irish working class’ answer to the football-crazed Ivies. By all accounts, Mickey was a gloomy man, sometimes given to pangs euphoria only when Notre Dame won a Saturday football game, which would happen often during the years he followed them. No win was ever enough for Mickey Barry, for with winning comes inevitable losses down the stretch, too - maybe not next week, but some day. And then what'll happen?

His household was devoutly Catholic, and although Original Sin is a concept shared among Christian denominations, Catholics all the while fear that Protestants are right - that good works are a paltry gift to God. So a double jeopardy takes hold in the Catholic. In his heart an irrepressible sense grows that no good work is enough and that if the works are no good, then his faith is probably just a delusion (to Catholics, Protestants always seem to get away with a freer and happier conscience).

Thus, if original sin makes existence so hopeless, then how could dozens of Notre Dame wins give comfort for the suffering caused by one inevitable loss? Therefore no one approached Mickey in his despair during the week after a hard Notre Dame loss. Had this lugubrious man lived long enough, I might have actually witnessed in him a reflection of my own hopelessness with the Jets. Surely he would have agreed: No win is ever enough, and consciousness itself consists of a pervasive struggle against the dangerous comfort of hope.

The Nightmare

A moment of silence, if you please. This is difficult.

Fine. I'm ready.

Looking back on it now, it’s clear that the Jets' fate was sealed even before the game got started, when Pat Ryan pulled a groin muscle in warm-ups. He would re-injure it during the first half and would be replaced by Ken O'Brien, whose career had already begun its decline midseason after the fabled 10-1 start. Pat Ryan was forced to leave the game after throwing a thrilling 57-yard flea flicker to Wesley Walker that he threaded beautifully between Cleveland defenders. Jets 7 Browns 0.

Then O'Brien went a respectable 11 for 19 in relief of Ryan, but he couldn't quite convert on an absolutely critical third down quarterback sneak (a Pat Ryan specialty, I might add) on the Jets' very last drive of regulation time. Both teams played poorly throughout the game. Cleveland coach Marty Shottenheimer referred to it as "one of the finest games in the history of the sport," but we Jets fans knew better afterwards. The honest loser always sees the reality of the opportunities missed, and in truth the Browns played like shit most of the day as well, and it was simply we who made the most crucial mistakes at the most inopportune moments.

For example, the following can be recited from memory by many Jet fans: Jets 20 Browns 10. 4:14 remaining. Second and 24. Browns on their own 18. Late hit by Gastineau. Fifteen yard penalty. First down Cleveland.

Can you pin a collapse to a single instant? History provides so few moments, even if we study its snapshots. You can say World War I started because the Archduke Ferdinand was gunned down, but its causes are in its near and distant past as well. You can't just say that the Vietnam War would have been prevented if Kennedy had not been killed in Dallas. Would Dr. King have made people more aware of poverty in rural and urban America had he lived? How about an America without Nixon and Watergate because Robert Kennedy was elected President? What large, unwieldy conclusions have we developed to try and understand September 11? Historians know that our past is much more complex than we'd like it to be and that a single moment cannot provide anything more than a comforting, rationalizing antidote to history’s insanity.

However, let's be less globally significant. I would add that with its short seasons, football provides many such single instances, and that a single moment on January 3, 1987 changed everything for Jets fans. Freeman McNeil had run 25 yards for a seemingly consensus-rendering touchdown, making it 20-10 Jets over the Browns with 4:14 to go in the game. We were now so close. It had been a war between two vacillating forces until McNeil manfully took the reigns. We could breathe a sigh of relief for that single instant, yes indeed.

Encouraged by this, the Jets defense then held the Browns back on their next drive. With time ticking away, the Browns approached a crucial second down with 24 yards to go for a first down.

Concentrate. Concentrate. Don’t blow the lead. Please. Not again. I stretched my whole body out prostrate before the television. I had already chewed off the vestiges of my nails and now began at the cuticles and the raw skin. My mother came into the den and caught notice of this. I had been biting my nails for years, and of all of my many tics and my compulsive behaviors, it was my chronic, feverish nail biting that seemed to enrage Mom most. She told me that I wouldn’t be hired for a job someday because no one hires nail biters, but her claim backfired on me because my growing sense of justice told me that people who were obsessive-compulsive should not have been discriminated against any more than minorities, women and homosexuals.

Nail biters were treated unjustly, I concluded. She pointed out my hands to me in front of the game and reminded me of a bargain we had made when I was 12 that she would buy me a copy of Pink Floyd's The Final Cut if I swore off nail biting for a month. I went back to biting my nails after I got the album. It was clearly inferior to The Wall. I ignored her. It was Browns' ball, second and 24.

Quarterback Bernie Kosar threw an incomplete pass from his own 18. Yet, even before the camera zoomed to the endpoint of the play, I knew that something was terribly wrong. As they fell out of the frame, I saw Mark Gastineau apply a late hit on Kosar. I didn't see the penalty flag fall, and I made myself somehow believe that it was all going to be okay and that the hit was clean. It clearly was not. Gastineau pleaded his case to the officials as they awarded a first down at their own 33 to Cleveland.

From there, Kosar never looked back. The drive then continued until Cleveland's Kevin Mack made it 20-17 Jets. When O'Brien fouled up that crucial quarterback sneak on the Jets' next drive, the demoralized Jets defense then gave up the tying field goal to the Browns. 20-20.

Beyond that, I can offer no recollection, and perhaps it’s just as well. I literally cannot – or will not. Upon a visit to the 2001 preseason camp at Hofstra, I found a number of Jet fans that couldn’t talk about the 1986 AFC Divisional Playoff against Cleveland and would wave a hand as if to say, Please. I remember. I've never recovered. Simply put, the Jets fan marks history before and after that match up as two entirely different epochs.

At the expiration of the regular time, the two teams went into one overtime, and then another. More than two minutes into the sixth period, Mark Moseley won the game 23-20 for Cleveland with a 27-yard field goal. Apparently, Moseley had missed an earlier attempt in the first overtime, yet I remember nothing of the post-regulation time. It is repressed trauma. I suppose we all knew - from Flushing to Bayside, from Islip to Matawan - that it was inevitable that the Browns would win. We knew what we were looking at now that it threw off its disguise. Jets fans had come to know the teasing work of Fate so plainly now that the overtimes were merely perfunctory. Nothing could have saved us.

The collapse was so complete, so total that when it ended, Doug did not call (just as he had promised) but instead came to my house to offer solace. The absurdity of the Jets' losing on Gastineau's penalty made him want to reach beyond the barriers that separated us to touch an Untouchable with compassion. His eyes welled with tears.

“I don't know what to say,” he said. “I don't know what to say.”

In the present day, when I catch a student in my classroom or in the hall ways doing something so obviously wrong that he cannot explain it away, he nevertheless tries making several divergent, contradictory excuses at once in the hope that I will believe one of them. I didn’t do it. I didn’t mean to do it. Teenagers are generally used to being interrogated and yet are not equipped with the skills of escaping interrogation without being accused. Those conflicting explanations are usually the tip-off that he is guilty.

Quote Gastineau at game's end, trying to claim his penalty was not a late hit: “I couldn't stop," implying that he could not stop the momentum of his hit on Kosar. Then: “I’ve done that lots of times without being called."

Bingo.

It would be another five seasons before the Jets would be in the playoffs again.

Shea

The great second wave of blight in Jets history would begin with the Ken O'Brien era, but every Jets fan really knows it most likely came with the passing of Shea Stadium at the end of 1983; or rather, it was the ejection of the New York Jets from the ruddy, badly surfaced football grounds of Shea. The New York Mets had formally requested the city give the Jets the heave-ho, and the Jets left New York to play in Giants Stadium, in the Meadowlands of East Rutherford, New Jersey.

It made for a perfect closure to my childhood. Shea Stadium had been the terrible house in which I had been raised, but it was the dump I called home. I can't make the memories speak through the games I saw there because the games are now romantic illusions - moments so cherished that if I'm still this demented a fan when I die, I will choose to relive them again and again in nirvana.

I remember once sitting beneath the Shea mezzanine during a game and felt cold drops of water pelt me on the head and thinking that a menacing bully lurked somewhere around. I was pointed by a fan nearby to a leak of acidic water from the level above that was also permanently staining my jacket with droplets of industrial Jet-green slime. I remember once watching the scoreboard flash "NEW YORK JETS VS. MIAMI SEAHAWKS" as the Jets prepared to take on the Dolphins.

I remember the embarrassing baseball diamond showing through the football field in September. I remember the feedback from the loudspeaker, and the airplanes whose serial numbers and landing gear tire brands could be easily read from the Loge section as they passed overhead. You learned to pace your conversation around domestic flights coming into LaGuardia, and your ears rang from the hissing of airplanes, never from the roar of the crowd. (Do I ever remember cheers? I remember sighs, pouts, screams of agony and despair, mocking laughter, and the boos -the incessant, blood curdling boos).

I remember the beverages in the waxy Harry Stevens cups and the numbing wind and drizzle. I prayed for a sunny day upon a visit to Shea, and when I got one on the day the Jets' opened the 1978 season with a victory over the Dolphins, I felt somehow as if the sun garishly revealed the stadium's insecurities a bit too forwardly - as if its inconveniences were better suited to another blatantly disappointing performance under the skies of a soft autumn day.

I remember when the fans booed Governor Hugh Carey while the city's Mayor Ed Koch was cheered during the pregame festivities honoring the '68 coach, Weeb Ewbank. Why did they boo Carey and not Koch? There had been a dispute over funding for the city. Dad tapped someone in front of him and asked.

"Just getting ready for another season," the man said.


The Jets and I would cross the Rubicon to our respective territories - they to Jersey, I to adolescence, knowing that pieces of what we left behind were appropriately richer and more intrinsically ours than anything we would know in our new worlds. The Jets might have stayed in Queens a bit longer, but their staying at Shea wouldn’t have offset the ravages of their next few years’ performances. Time marches on. With a 34-7 loss to Pittsburgh, the Jets said farewell to Shea in appropriate Jets-style.

I didn’t cry. I kept close to the things I had loved as a boy: its frame gray and lifeless, punctuated by those garish, corrugated blue and orange aluminum shingles that were removed even before the Jets left. Maybe when the cheesy shingles were gone, the magic of staying at Shea was gone, too. They had been placed there originally to spruce up the hulking concrete arena during the '64-'65 World's Fair next door. Could the removed shingles of Shea have survived a better fate? Maybe they were piled onto the sea-faring barges that carry New York City's trash around the world in search of a home. I wonder what a dock worker in New Orleans, Villa Cisneros or Caracas might have made of a corrugated pumpkin or royal blue shingle if he had seen it.

Trash. Just as Leon Hess viewed Shea itself, the shingles would probably be viewed as ugly, with no purpose. Having shed all the symbolism of their dwindling glories, the Jets were now willing to innocently take on their troubled maturation with Ken O'Brien at quarterback into Giants Stadium. I cannot remember if I felt it boded well or not, but I have since then never met an older Jet fan who does not miss watching a game at Shea, and like demented pilgrims, Jets fans are looking forward to the day we return to our homeland.

   Yet with the passing of the West Side Stadium, and a newly planned Jersey venue to be shared with the Giants, this will never be. A Jets stadium in Manhattan would have been like a bacon cheeseburger served with fries at the Four Seasons. We know where our heart's true home is - Queens. Something was left behind in Flushing Meadow, and it would take the Jets years to retrieve even a semblance of their greatness again once they left Shea. We now see the whole thing as a terrible omen from the start.

Epilogue to the 1981 NY Jets Season

As the curtain closes on Henry V, Henry marries the beautiful French Princess Katherine. Yet the Chorus reminds us that this story is exceptional. Henry was a great conqueror in 1415, but his larger victory was doomed to fail. As soon as he died, not long after Agincourt, England began losing again; Henry’s frail son after him eventually lost all of France to its rightful owners. Shakespeare’s audience went home from the play saying, Oh, yeah. Right. Right. I forgot. We lost the Hundred Years’ War.

It’s a self-conscious sentimentality that many English now carry with them in their remaining obsession. Though once the sun never set on the British Empire, to hear it from them the last real triumph that mattered was in 1966 when England won the World Cup. That’s their Agincourt, their Arthurian story, too - once there was a brief shining moment, and since then, nothing.

The 1981 Jets finished 10-5-1 and were in the playoffs with a Wild Card. So did Miami, which meant that the Dolphins won the division. Again, had Leahy made his overtime field goal attempt in Miami earlier in the year... Oh, never mind. The point was the Jets were still in the playoffs for the first time since 1969. Here the Chorus tells us the rest. They played Buffalo at home in the AFC Wild Card game, my first great playoff nightmare.


In the muck and rain of Shea Stadium, the Jets played incompetently in the first half and trailed Buffalo 24-0 at halftime. But damned if the Jets did not suddenly come back in the second half. I had promised Dad not to get upset as we watched the game, but the polarized quality of the game was too much. The Times would later refer to it as one of the best playoff games in memory, but it was agonizing to me. Down 31-27, with under a minute to play, Richard Todd drove the Jets downfield, hitting all of his receivers - Walker, Lam Jones, Derrick Gaffney.

I loved the Jets, had nurtured that love beyond normal expectations, and now they were finally returning the favor. I loved them beyond measure, beyond reason. I had been infected by a higher expectation that accompanies even the slightest rise in winning.
Within the ten-yard line, Todd dropped back and threw into the end zone, hoping to find Derrick Gaffney down the middle. Instead found Buffalo's Bill Simpson. His interception was played over and over in instant replay until it became a flashbulb image, engendering horror and dread in my consciousness.

My sense of disappointment stayed with me that night, filled with dark shades of gloom that lingered well into dinnertime, then throughout the week and into the rest of the winter. It was depression, pure and simple, exacerbated by heartbreak. That evening of the loss, my parents grimaced at their misfortune, for they knew they would have to live with this unsmiling moribund throughout the off-season.

“Marty, Richard Todd doesn't care as much as you do,” Dad said. In March, when he asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I replied a division championship.

Dolphins at Jets 11/81 - Part 2

Running back Mike Augustyniak had almost died after suffering a chest injury against New England two weeks before. AUGIE WE ARE THINKING OF YOU, the giant 2001: A Space Odyssey-like monolithic scoreboard in center field read at one time during the Dolphins game, but no sooner did that disappear than Donald Dykes would go down with a dislocated elbow, and Marty Lyons a pulled hamstring.

Freeman McNeil got a good run off to midfield at the beginning of the game, and the crowd pitched its voices high to hysteria the way a crowd can early in the game when it keeps its expectations naïve. They would roar like that again only well into the second quarter, when Abdul Salaam sacked Dolphins quarterback David Woodley.
All the signs in the rafters were for the Sack Exchange. The New York Jets finally had a nickname, this for their pass rush. The front four of Lyons, Salaam, Klecko and Gastineau. Thugs. They were fast, violent, angry men. Perfect for New York in the age of subway shootings and stickups.

I remember how angry Richard Todd was when he was hit late out of bounds; he had to be held back from fighting with the Miami defense after the play. He was already injured with a broken rib, and perhaps he felt that the Dolphins had aimed for his rib cage in the hit. Earlier in the year, Todd had punched out a New York Post reporter. He had grown weary of how often he had been contrasted with the savvier, cooler Namath. Though drafted from Alabama like Namath, he was not a passing quarterback there, but a running one. He played with less confidence, though no less courageously in pain. Still, he had not made fans feel the same self-confidence that Namath instilled, even in defeat. He was mercurial and introverted, aware of this, and it appeared to bother him.

I grasped every part of that. A football fan usually watches the action develop in the middle of the line or downfield, but I liked also to watch what the quarterback would do after he threw or handed off. Todd’s offense failed on offensive drives in the first and second quarter and reacted with arms flapping in frustration, making dramatic gestures when things didn’t go his way.

Throughout the game, Uncle Mike did not act like the kind of adult who was an aspiring parent, the way I assumed all adults were. He would often look at me in childish amazement at plays the Jets ran well in the first half, like when Gastineau sacked David Woodley and danced raucously around the field in celebration. “Did you see that?”
It was Gastineau’s trademark. Uncle Mike smiled at me like I was just another guy in the Loge. And I wanted to be a Guy Uncle Mike Hung Around With in Bars on Weeknights. I loved the idea of that. At the half, the Jets had failed to do better than a pair of field goals and trailed 12-6.
A high school band played “Hooked on a Feeling,” complete with its bizarre opening. I mentioned that Todd’s injury was starting to show. His answer was classic Uncle Mike. He paused, dramatically.

“How much Shakespeare have you read?” There was a lilt, almost a slur to his voice. It occurred to me at this moment that he might have been drunk, but it was still too early for that. I remember him having conversations with people at family parties about the Shakespeare Folios.
I remember Henry Winkler having a Shakespeare special on ABC several years before – the Fonz and the Bard. This is what I knew of Shakespeare. Bugs Bunny playing Juliet to Elmer Fudd’s Romeo. My uncomprehending look was sufficient for Uncle Mike.

“You should read Henry the Fifth. It’s a wonderful play, Marty.” I nodded at this. He continued. “Henry’s the king. He’s young, and he’s just been put in charge after his father died. His father made himself king after overthrowing the king before him. Kind of like the mafia.” Again the little man in front of us turned around, but this time revealed a smile of appreciation.

Uncle Mike looked at me meaningfully and lit another cigarette, exhaling with a flourish. It had gotten colder with the night. I noticed his hair was thinning and graying; he had small brown patches on his forehead. “He’s going into battle against the French. He’s outnumbered ten to one. And the night before,” he paused, “Henry prays that God will not punish him or his soldiers for his father overthrowing the old king. You understand?”

I nodded.

“Not to punish Henry for his father’s sins, you see - even though he knows that the English can’t win, outnumbered as they are. So you know what he does?”
I shook my head.

Uncle Mike smiled and inhaled. The smoke peppered out of his mouth with his words. “He gets up and gives a speech to his troops the morning of the battle. It’s called the St. Crispian’s Day speech. Instead of telling them they’re outnumbered, he tells them they can’t lose. So what happens?”

I shrugged.

The little man in front of us turned around again and said with the hint of a smile. “A bird craps on his head.”

I was 12. I couldn’t control my laughter. But Uncle Mike laughed, too. “No, you asshole,” he said, slightly pushing the little man. He turns to me. “He gives them the halftime speech. That’s what’s going to get them through the rest of the game. Henry tells them they won’t lose; that they’ll remember this day for the rest of their lives.” His eyes lit up. “And they win. Damned if they don’t win every time I read it.” He nodded. “You never know, Marty. Words can do powerful things.”

Again, the man turned round for the last time. “Unless you’re a Jets fan.”

The listless Jets did nothing in the second half, and it seemed Uncle Mike’s lesson was purely for aesthetics. The self-effacing man in your head, or literally in front of you, was right every time. You can come close, but it’ll never fucking happen. The Jets managed only another field goal going into the fourth quarter. The game ground down to that hypnotic state that defensively played games often will where the sense of who has possession suddenly seems unclear. Even Uncle Mike said, “Boring football,” shaking his head, his own power for inspiring metaphor gone. “The usual.”


But the Jets stopped a late Miami drive short of a touchdown, and the Dolphins managed only a field goal with a little over a minute remaining. Without even so much as a moment to take in the end of the game, Richard Todd was suddenly now throwing effectively downfield. He found Wesley Walker, then a pair of running backs. I felt myself beginning to nervously hop up and down, just as I would do at home in front of the TV. The crowd became aware, as fans of losing teams so often do, of both the potential for heartbreak and also the imaginative possibility of winning, even if it had seemed so remote all day. The Jets were only down by 6.

Go. GO.

With 40 seconds left, Todd threw an incomplete pass for Lam Jones in the corner of the end zone that had sent me on the tips of my toes, shrieking, as if I were watching somebody fall from a building. The crowd looked around at one another, as if to say, Is this really happening? Are we blowing the game again? Winning? What the fuck? Many were pale between pain and joy. The incompletion to Jones stopped the clock. Then, with a break from the huddle and an instant snap of the ball from the line, another pass play. I could feel every person’s body around me tighten up, ready for the impending trauma.

In a last try for a touchdown pass, there is a second’s suspense between snapping the ball and throwing it where on TV one can only see the quarterback and our unknowing sense of where he is looking becomes fraught with terror. But in person, one can see the streaming players piling into the end zone and have a good idea where the quarterback is looking. Todd must have known Derrick Gaffney was there in the corner and that Walker was split right of him. But he threw the ball into the center of the end zone between two defenders, where Jerome Barkum caught his pass for a touchdown. A great pass from an injured player and a great catch.

* * * *

My voice left my body at the same time as everyone else’s. It was Dad’s sound from years back, when I first became enchanted by the idea of being a fan. But here at Shea, it was now magnified by the self-same voices of 55,000 other human beings - the sound of men and women instantly, simultaneously saying the word YES! As ringing an affirmative as any human on Earth might hear - a chemical release of 12 years’ frustration. If I had rooted for the Jets through last place, how many more years did this single moment of joy buy me?

The crowd was wild, its sound twirled into a howl of monstrous joy. At last - the possibility of a playoff spot after 12 years of struggle. The Jets jumped for joy on the sideline. Around me, Uncle Mike, the off-duty cops and assorted other kindred Jets souls were grabbing at one another, toppling over one another in full roar, in the combined states of inebriation and euphoria. Grown men fell on and over me again and again. I turned around and saw one man holding another one. This one touchdown was probably the only thing that could have inspired these two grizzlies to behave tenderly toward anyone. I noticed that the taller man had tears in his eyes as he kept shouting into the empty night, while the other had fallen to his knees, gripping his friend around the stomach, leaning his tear-stained head in emotional exhaustion. He was not so much lost in the moment as he was just enervated.


I was hyperventilating. Uncle Mike shoved me with an assertive vindication that Hal must also have felt on the battlefield of Agincourt. It was a collective melee, a bacchae, a Dionysian moment, and though I can honestly say the game is so branded in my memory because the Jets were now in first place, I also realized that I had been given an opportunity to witness the lingering presence of innocence among grown men. To a nearly pubescent boy, this was quite a thing to see.

Leahy made the point after. Jets 16-15. Final. Tied for first place.

Dolphins at Jets 11/81- Part 1

I was in the circles of love and hate all over again. I couldn’t live with them; I couldn’t live without them. They couldn’t help but disappoint; I couldn’t help but hope. In years to come, this was also the way I insufferably described women, drinking, God. However, at 12, nothing other than the Jets could really be comprehended enough to inspire neurosis at such an intense level. The Jets began 1981 with their usual 0-3 mediocrity.

But then, finally…

Finally, it began to pay off. The Jets won 6 of the next 8 games, tying the first-place Dolphins in the Orange Bowl, 28-28. If Pat Leahy had only made his field goal attempts late in the game, the Jets would have won. The crucial game against the Dolphins, though, would be played later in the year, this time back at Shea. All during the week leading up to the Dolphins home game, newspapers in New York had been invoking the 1968 championship, as if the return to glory had indisputably arrived. It had taken the sum total of my life. Perhaps feeling my agonies and ecstasies, Uncle Mike invited me to the game.


Unlike Dad, Uncle Mike had never given away his half of the season tickets. He had cleaned up his act a little over the years, but he still lived as the lone soul in Greenwich Village. He didn’t go to Jack Barry’s or the White Horse on Sundays, but there was still a good chance that he spent his Saturdays and some weeknights there after work. He was in publishing, a thirsty industry, and unlike Dad, he was a scholar of literature who might just as well have been a college professor in a different universe.

When Dad gave up his season tickets, Uncle Mike arranged it so that he would be with a different friend with each home game so as to never be bored with the same company. (He reassured me at some point in time that this was not intended to be a comment about Dad.) He had apparently been waiting for some time to invite me, and as soon as one of his pals was unavailable, my number was up, and it just so happened to be the Miami game. He called Mom and told her. He demanded it, in fact. Whether she approved or not, she would have refused him nothing, thank God. But she got off the phone and warily told me the news. Mike was not really a parenting adult but more like a big child.

The less I seemed to resemble Dad, the more people told me I was like Uncle Mike. Mom, in particular, noticed it, and she spoke about our similarities with both pride and concern, as if it were a very complicated assignation. I thought that growing up like Uncle Mike would probably be just fine. Everybody liked him. He arrived at our house to pick me up for the game in his sky blue 1965 Dodge Dart with the funny hubcaps that twirled extremities like the wheels of the chariot in Ben-Hur. He drove me to Shea.

He slowed down before the Whitestone toll. His cigarette still in his mouth, he clambered for change as we approached. He was the kind of person with change strewn about his car because all his moments leading up to the toll were like this. He never had his money ready, and when he found it, there was always an eruptive stream of change freed from his pockets’ constrictions just as he came to the toll, and with it a stream of profanity. I smiled.

When we arrived at Shea, he maneuvered the long and narrow automobile to a spot located suspiciously close to the gate entrance gate.

“One of the perks of befriending the city’s finest,” he said.
“The cops?” I asked him.
“You remember your Dad’s old friends in the Loge, don’t you?”
“Sure,” I said, as we got out.

“Well, the most important things to know are not the philosophical vagaries of life, but the essential ones.” I understood maybe half of what he talked about, but it sounded interesting. “For example,” he said, winking at me, “I own a car, do I not?”

I nodded. He was also a short, dapper man. Apparently Uncle Mike wore a bow-tie and a snappy Brooks Brothers suit to work in the morning, but unlike other men of his generation, he had already caught up with the shift toward men’s casual wear, wearing blue jeans, a flannel shirt and a short brown leather jacket to the game.

“A city dweller with a car is a fool unless he parks safely wherever he goes. That’s my city dollars at work. That’s how the police work for me. Who knows where to park better than a cop?”

I didn’t know.

“Always befriend a cop,” he added as we approached the gate. He handed me my ticket. “They’re not as friendly as firemen, but that’s only because cops see more of the ugly side of human nature, don’t they? It’s not their fault.”

“OK,” I dutifully answered.

I had forgotten how much I loved watching games from the Loge. I felt like the luckiest kid in the solar system. Had I never appreciated how good Dad’s view had been of the field? We had a full view of its entire green, with no baseball field lingering behind and a huge Jets football helmet designed at midfield, just like other teams had in their real football stadiums. I turned to thank Uncle Mike for bringing me. Mom had told me to do so, certainly more than once. But Mike had already gone to get a beer. The day was unseasonably warm for November, at least at first.

Yes, the off-duty cops were there; some had grown considerably greyer and larger in five years. There were quite a few people around us I did not remember. None of them recognized me. They looked stern and nervous. It may have been the sense of anxiety about the importance of the game in general, for there was a restless, frightened euphoria moving around the place. It wasn’t cold, but people were dancing in place as if they were. It couldn’t be helped. Fans knew how brittle the Jets could be in important games. Had Pat Leahy made his field goals earlier in the season, the Jets would have been tied for the division lead at the start of this game, instead of a game behind Miami.