NY Jets #50 - Part 2

Pop - my grandfather - was the chief engineer in a paint factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and he was the only one who had to be alert on Christmas in case the works started freezing up.  My mother would drive him down to the factory and wait in the car, looking up at it, while inside the building Pop got its guts moving and pumping to keep them warm and alive. She stared at the factory long enough to recognize it again right away when she went back just last year to see how much Greenpoint had changed.  Today, Greenpoint is just another regentrified Brooklyn neighborhood where you need to be a millionaire to buy an apartment with even the slightest hint of Manhattan's view across the East River.  She found the old factory right away, though of course it had been converted into lofts.

When he was young, Pop lost his beloved younger sister when she choked to death at the dinner table. His own father, a patriotic immigrant from County Wexford, broke his back and lost his own factory job the very next day. Pop came from a world without even a shade of guarantees, when the possibility of ruin lingered around the corner. It must have shaped him, I suppose, this way of being that I've been told is the peculiar property of people who have been displaced, rejected, persecuted - Jews, Africans, Armenians, Irish - a sense of humor that arises from an ingrained sense of doom. He was a happy man at parties but he worried himself to morbidity when one of his own children caught a cold.

I say all this because it reveals the contradictions of the lives of people like Pop; they relished with pride where they had come from, but he never thought anyone should leave the neighborhood for the big, bad world outside. He loved Knute Rockne and Frank Leahy's Notre Dame football because it was Irish-America's Harvard, a school for people like him, but when his oldest son, my Uncle Chris, a real, live, certified genius, wanted to leave Brooklyn and study chemistry at Notre Dame, Pop didn't speak with him for months. Why would you leave the neighborhood? Why would you leave me? But leave home Uncle Chris did, and he never looked back. And in doing so, he inspired my Mom and Uncle Mike to do the same.

In some way, therefore, Notre Dame became for us what it is for a lot of Irish-American families throughout the country - the cultural stamp of success. I wanted to go there when I was a kid because Uncle Chris went there, and of course being the middling high school student I was, I was promptly rejected. I knew I never had a chance. But before and after, I rooted for Notre Dame like they were some kind of family legacy.  Their 38-10 Cotton Bowl upset of Texas in 1978 made up for the disappointment of the Jets' 1977 season. I followed the Forty-Niners in the early 80's because I couldn't believe Notre Dame could produce someone as brilliant as Joe Montana, the man previously resurrected in the 1979 Cotton Bowl by chicken soup.

Pop might have rooted against the Jets in the Heidi Game right there in the living room, sitting next to my Dad because the Raiders were quarterbacked to victory that day by former Notre Dame star Daryle (he pronounced it Daree-al) Lamonica.  Perhaps Pop never liked the Jets much because so very few Notre Dame players really went through the Jets' system. John Huarte came and went and never got a number. There were Jim Carroll LB #55 (1969), Robert Farmer #25 RB (1989), Joe Katcick #77 DT (1960), Lance Legree #70 DT (2005), Bob O'Neil LB #62 (1961), Paul Seiler #79 T-C (1967), and Pat Terrell #27 S (1994). Whether this is typical throughout the league or not I cannot say, but I find it interesting that all of the above lasted no more than a year with the Jets.

Except for Bob Crable #50 who played his entire 1982-87 career with the Jets at linebacker.  When Crable came to the Jets, I was ecstatic.  In 1979, when he was a sophomore in #43, I watched him block a last second Michigan field goal to save an Irish win.  The kick was pretty low but would have been blocked had it been sent straight skyward because Crable got the kind of height that basketball players dream of (though he might have climbed on someone's back).  It looks impossible in the picture because it was.  But at least they beat Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Bob Crable's pro career didn't possess the legend that he found at Notre Dame, and once again we must all simply agree that this is the norm.  That's the way it is.  College glory and pro fame are just two different species.  He was drafted in the first round.  Knee injuries hampered him.  He accumulated 10 sacks in his career overall, which is going to be an important point below.  He did play a full 16-game season in 1986 when the team found the momentum to go to the second round of the playoffs.  I include a picture from Corbis taken on that exquisitely painful day of January 3, 1987, when the Jets blew a 10-point lead against the Browns with 4:14 left and lost the Divisional Playoff.  Whether he imagined his hard work over that season would finally yield something greater in this game - the furthest in the NFL playoffs he had been since his rookie year - I don't know.  Today, he is as a college linebackers coach.

No matter what the lead, no matter how far ahead the Irish were, my Pop paced the floors listening to Notre Dame games on the radio with his characteristically pervasive dread.  No lead was safe, just as no guarantees existed in this life.  Your boys could blow it at any minute.  As I grew into my teenage years, I began to discover my extended families' assortment of ticks and traits programmed into my own, and I saw Pop's characteristic fears and anxieties in myself.  I had inherited his sense of life.  The world was filled with unexpected ruin.  On January 3, 1987, Bob Crable's last playoff game, I felt a justification for this worldview. 

****

There are many ways that ruin has come to the Jets.  Football's two football strikes - 1982 and 1987 - did wreck us.  They each followed an impressive playoff show for the Jets the year before (and it looks like it's going to happen again) and each time, the strike in some way broke their flow for years.  The draft, too, has a notoriously gruesome past for the Jets; whereas some teams make mistakes in the draft that just make a paper cut, the Jets have historically made mistakes that actually hurt them for years.  It's well documented. 

But one could argue that the Jets have made very good draft choices since the beginning of the millennium.  The lone, really brilliant choice in the 1990's was James Farrior, but in 2000, we chose Jon Abraham #56, Shaun Ellis #92 and Chad Pennington #10.  Then there's 2001, with Santana Moss #83. In 2002, we picked Bryan Thomas #58, Jon McGraw #38; in 2004, we picked Jonathan Vilma #51 and Jerricho Cotchery #89.  In 2005, there was Kerry Rhodes #25.  The motherload was 2006:  D'Brickashaw Ferguson #60, Nick Mangold #74, Eric Smith #33, Brad Smith #16, and Leon Washington #29.  In 2007, Darrelle Revis #24 and David Harris #52.  In 2009, Mark Sanchez #6 and Shonn Greene #23.  There are some notable absences above from the team that went to the AFC Championship, and James Farrior was on the winning side of that game, but look at it.  For the most part the team we brought was the team we drafted.  It's amazing.  Life is not all about blue ruin.

But we must admit that one of the players for whom we all felt the highest expectation didn't pan out at all - Vernon Gholston #50 - the furiously talented Ohio State linebacker who was going to terrorize quarterbacks, just as he did in the Big 10.  For years after he was drafted, they would speak of his growth, his potential.  It happens.  Players take time in the NFL.  In Hard Knocks, Rex Ryan made several references to Gholston's performance in training camp this past season - most specifically, indicating something to the effect that "they really dropped today."  If you are a male or are familiar with the anatomical behaviors of male farm animals, then you have some idea of what Rex was talking about, as only Rex can.  But he was talking about Vernon Gholston.

But earlier this year, Gholston was finally cut, having made a handful of tackles in three years and (as noted so often) no sacks.  He is the kind of draft bust that people wrote about mockingly in terms of the Jets for years, but now he is the exception to the rule (we did draft Dustin Keller #81 that season, too).  He is a top draft choice that didn't work out.  The same might be said for Mike Nugent #1 in 2005, as well as the entire 2004 draft, which includes not a single active player.  And our 2010 draft did not seem to produce much (I'm still imagining Joe McKnight doing something).  It's tricky when you play well the year before.  But still, the Jets now officially draft slightly above the average for success.  But not Vernon.

Perhaps it was the hype that surrounded him as a defensive player, the sense of possibility we have never felt for, say, Kyle Wilson, drafted first round last year at defensive back.  Maybe it's being a linebacker, the man at a position with the capacity to change the flow of a game just like that; can you imagine last year's team with a Farrior, or a Vilma, or an Abraham still on staff?  I do when I'm daydreaming.  Perhaps it's because we let so many great linebackers go over the years that we put so much hope - too much perhaps - on Vernon Gholston, so his departure feels poignant.

And so it is, Vernon, we say farewell:

NY Jets #50 - Part 1

Eric Barton

Memory is not kind. Many of us go through days and nights of hard work, only to be remembered for slipping on a banana peel. We dedicate ourselves to endeavors that require years of preparation and practice with the focus on a single goal that others would have abandoned long ago, but suddenly we are pointed to the stray piece of toilet paper that has adhered to our shoe. Tommy Marvaso's son eviscerated me for pointing out, in #37, a brief moment where his Dad got beat on a pass in 1976. He rightly pointed out that I ignored his Dad's fine play in other games, all for the purpose of blogging droll comments about this and that.

This brings us to Eric Barton #50, linebacker for the Jets from 2004-08. Like several players from the Mangini era, Barton followed the squat coach to Cleveland and was released this year. First, I will do him justice. Eric Barton had a good career in the NFL. I quote the Wiki: "He has played in 120 career Regular Season games with 85 starts and has recorded 680 tackles, 18.5 sacks, four INTs, 18 pass [sic] deflected, six forced fumbles and four fumble recovery [sic] in his career. So far he has posted four seasons with 100 or more total tackles." As we shall see in a later entry, these statistics make plain that Eric Barton was worth the number he wore, whatever that means. Others, as we shall in our later installment for #50, may not have been.

It’s ironic, therefore, that we recall the 2005 Wild Card Game against the San Diego Chargers. He played well in the game so far as I can recall, but let’s go straight where we need to. Now, I mean no animus toward Barton here, but I watched the Wild Card Game from the edge of my sofa, where I had spent the great bulk of what was a second season of not drinking during football games. This was my first playoff game since my adolescence without a drink, and frankly it was more difficult than I expected. The Jets lead 17-7 well into the third quarter, but San Diego was driving with less than a minute left at 17-10. On what was essentially the last down (or maybe the third down) inside the red zone, Philip Rivers (no, Drew Brees) threw an incomplete pass, and by some terrible stroke of bad luck or poor judgment, Eric Barton hit Rivers (actually, Brees) late, a flag was thrown, and an automatic first down was granted to the Chargers, resulting in an Antonio Gates touchdown.


(Here by the way, was a slightly humorous - if I do say so myself - riff on how much I dislike Philip Rivers. However, as was pointed out to me by a kind reader, Philip Rivers was on the bench at the time as a rookie and Drew Brees was quarterbacking. How I could make that mistake is, well, inexplicable. So from here on in I correct myself. But still, as I said before, "even with his extraordinary numbers, Philip Rivers is a trash-talking, big-game choke artist. He is an obnoxious rube in a sport that thrives on the knuckle-dragging exploits of its Magillas. And that’s coming from a Jets fan." I feel like that that still needed to remain)

Brees or Rivers, I understand what Barton did; he was doing his job. He was showing up a little late for it, but there we are.

But in that moment, and in the context of my life as a fan, I experienced what I can only describe as a meltdown. First, I had a flashback, taking me some 22 years in the past, when a late hit by Mark Gastineau on Bernie Kosar kept a Cleveland Browns drive going against the Jets in the 1987 Divisional Playoff - a game that should have ended with the Jets winning. No doubt fueled by this, when the flag was thrown at Eric Barton, I went catatonic, then outwardly crazy. I became silent in a way that only a child does before it begins wailing cosmically, and then without a single word, I horrified my wife by hurling the remote control across the room so that it struck the exposed brick of our railroad apartment. The remote shattered into pieces and fell to the ground the way the lights of the Knights Stadium explode into the air as Roy Hobbs rounds the bases at the end of The Natural.

I'm not sure I remember what happened next. I think I stood up and started yelling something to the effect of this being The Last Jets Game I Would Ever Watch; this was The Last Time I Would Ever Waste Another Minute Of My Worthless Life On This Fucking Team. And so on.

My wife told me to go away and let her watch the rest of the game alone because I was an idiot. I said something like, fine, fine, root for this stupid team if you want to, I'm going to my room. The room in question, of course, was our room - my wife's and mine - but I think it's telling that I had completely regressed to the status of my childhood. I'm going to my room. This team is stupid. This game is stupid. I'm taking my shit, and I'm going home.

Except that I was home. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I stared down at the wood floor, reflecting on what my life would now be like since I would no longer be a Jets fan, which seemed a certainty at that moment. What was that going to be like? This team is dead to me. Did I actually mean it, any more than I had actually meant that I wouldn't drink during football games? Would this be a one game at a time thing? Would I have to adjust mindfully to my autumns and winters, without the Jets, without caring? Would I root for the Eagles? What?

My wife is a good person. A kind and loving spouse. I had closed the door, but she kept letting me know the details of the rest of the game. Yes, the Chargers tied it up, but Nate Kaeding missed a field goal in overtime, and now the Jets were driving downfield. Slowly, slowly, I discovered what I already knew somehow deep inside - that my will to give up was worthless. I knew who I was. I was a Jets fan, and if Doug Brien was going to screw up a game-winning field goal for the Jets in the Wild Game overtime, then I would die a Jets fan there and then, anyway. So I came out of the bedroom, and watched Brien line up for the kick. It was good. And then Doug Brien fucked it up the following week in the Divisional Playoff. But hell. What are you going to do?

But let's get back to Eric Barton. I believe he made as many as nine tackles in the Wild Card game, which apparently he also did in about seven games during that season. He was a good player in as much as any player who works hard and plays hard and often is. His only real mistake in that game was making a split-second error that he knew better than to make. This happens to all of us (Gastineau, notwithstanding). For me (and maybe for an assortment of Jets fans throughout North Jersey, the Island, and South Connecticut) it just came at the wrong time, both in terms of the game's clock and in our life clocks as fans. But it didn't change anything permanently. It never does.

****

Glenn Cadrez #50 played linebacker for the Jets from 1992-95. Then he went on to win two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos in the latter part of the decade. My recollection of his play is dim. Technically, he is noted as playing only one game of the 1995 season before moving to Denver; the Jets would win four games over 1995-96 and be the laughingstock of the NFL. In Cadrez's best season - 1999 - he himself registered statistically somewhere in the middle of all defensive players, which won't get you to the Pro Bowl or Canton, but it will make you a respectable player. We can't all be Ray Lewis, and if we were, we would all be insane.

It made him enough of a football player that he ended up with the kind of life that a really good high school football player imagines when he first recognizes the potential for the road ahead. After football, he happily married a Playboy model, has been on sports radio and has co-started his own horror film production company.

But what if you don't want to stop playing football after the NFL? Tim Cofield #50 played his last season in the league as a linebacker for the Jets in 1989. But then he went to Canada. I recall that during the 1982 Football Strike, NBC showed CFL games in the hopes of recuperating some of their losses. It must not have worked (could 1987 really have been any better?) though it was our first introduction to Warren Moon, quarterback for the Edmonton Eskimos. I wouldn't sneeze at CFL games this winter, though it won't compare, obviously. Am I an Argonaut or an Alouette?

In his years in Canada, Cofield was an Argonaut, a Stampeder, a Mad-Dog, and most importantly, a Tiger Cat. If you can name all the cities associated with these entities, you win a prize (one of them was in the US). I say most importantly as a Tiger Cat because it is here, in his - I don't know what you call it – Tiger Cat tribute page that you see Tim Cofield saluted as a hero not just to the profession of linebacking but to the very existence of Canadian football itself. In what is called the CFL Scrapbook, a former opponent named Chris Shultz describes Cofield as, "a nightmare experienced in real time" and that "I retired because my body told me to in a very direct way named Tim Cofield."

I'm not even quite sure I understand what that means, but I love how the statistic-heavy NFL is in such stark contrast to the narrative-laden heritage of our brothers to the North. The CFL doesn't keep track of the individual stats of its players as minutely as the NFL does; perhaps they see their players more mythologically, as through the veil of legend. "He may have only spent parts of 6 seasons in Canadian Football," the site says, "but Tim Cofield left a path of destruction that rivals that of the top defenders in league history. Tim Cofield as a defensive force deserves to be remembered." A path of destruction.

Tim Cofield - we who are about to go without football this year salute you. Would that I could conjure a memory of you as a Jet with a tone as Homeric as the one with which your Canadian fans remember you.

So who's up for some British Columbia Lions this year? Some Blue Bombers? Some Roughriders?

****
Behold the journeymen's life - eight teams in eight seasons. Drafted originally by the Raiders, linebacker Ron Holmberg #50 suited up for nine games for the Jets in 1998, and then was sent to Indianapolis later that season. Even his collegiate years were disparate, as he played for both Navy and Penn State, which seems as much a jump in setting from Minnesota to New England, or from Green Bay to Carolina, as seen below. But you get to see the country that way, and if there's a better way for a vagabond to pick up a paycheck, I would like to know what it is:

57 50 59 51 50 56 47 58

The Chants

I recently read Elif Batuman's article on the Istanbul soccer team Besiktas, and I find at least one commonality between Turkey's most passionate fans and our own.

Besiktas' fanbase is known as Carsi; their chant lead by the chief cheerleader, Armenian Alen:



and a more familiar one, by Fireman Ed:



Apparently Besiktas supporters broke the record for a decibel level when their beloveds recently beat Liverpool. Admittedly, when you read Batuman's article, you realize that their fans have it way over football fans in this country in every way. They sing love songs to their club ("I remember when we first met. It was raining. You were wearing stripes...") and announce to their Istanbul opponents Fener that they will renounce profanity, but not before requesting that Fener perform a sexual act upon them. I can't think of an American fan base that is as lyrical, but then as of Batuman's article, Alen is laid up in bed, nursing a gunshot wound he received from a rival Carsi faction member. Fireman Ed is less inclined to take a clip from some guy who lives in Mineola.

NY Jets #31 - Part 2

I take back what I said about #31. Nothing in our history will ever compare with Antonio Cromartie #31. Let us count his legendary ways:

1) For being a prodigious parent. He will always be a living legend for having difficulty in naming all of his children. Several were conceived the same year. Obviously this is not an acceptable circumstance (nine children with eight women in six states) for anyone who is not a monarch of the Mongol Empire, but I think the hype around Cromartie's on-camera struggle with his children's names was overstated. He names them all in due time, you will notice, though with effort. He knows their birthdays.

2) Cromartie stated something that all of us have known about Tom Brady. Maybe Brady deserves his accolades and his status as one of the greatest ever. Granted he has not fathered children with as many different women as Cromartie, but he will be in the Hall when Cromartie, likely, will not. But Tom Brady is a punk.

I am not alone in thinking this, no less so than I am certain there are people out there who also think that Forrest Gump is, in fact, the worst movie ever made. There aren't many of us, but you cannot deny our existence. We don't necessarily deserve to be heard, but we are strong. Heartache to heartache, we stand. Leading up to vanquishing the Pats in the playoffs, he was asked about Brady as a competitor. He said he didn't care about him, the way that so many athletes who face Brady are compelled to say: it doesn't matter, we are going to play him tough. But Cromartie fearlessly added what all of America - outside of you Pahhts fans and wannabees - instinctively feel, though you may not say it. Take away the hair, the twinkle in his eye, the coach, and his beautiful women, and Tom Brady is what everybody now knows Cromartie believes he is: "an asshole." And for no reason at all, for good measure, I suppose, he added (either previous to that statement or after), "Fuck him." I print these words here because it is worthless to try and feel the effect of their basic truth unless they are spelled out plain as day. What's especially wonderful about the Daily News' cover story at right on the matter is that on game day, two punks were put in their place - Tom Brady and Mike Lupica. Thank you, thank you.

3) Antonio Cromartie made himself an accidental stooge for ownership when he tweeted his wish for the NFLPA to get back to the table and make a deal before the Lockout time. Naturally he was told to keep quiet, remarks about Tom Brady notwithstanding, and he subsequently has. One thing we know about Antonio Cromartie is that he obviously acts in every sense of the word without thinking, and thus he works in the manner of his loud, ribald and frankly peculiar coach. This Jets team as of this writing (3/27/11) with its vaguely interesting controversies is honestly mild by comparison to the cocaine-addled Cowboys of the 90's or the Bengals of any given era after Forrest Gregg, but they are lovably strange, and Cromartie is just another cast member in Ryan's carnie.

Obviously his tweet was foolish, but I genuinely choose to believe that he was saying what I feel purely as a fan as well. The Jets could (here I pause and roll my head around in a sign of self-conscious unease) go the Super Bowl next year. Let's not waste time. Let's get a deal done. Let's make my dream come true. The fan cannot help but feel otherwise; the union man in me knows better and will suffer the consequences as I have, as a Jets fan year after year. I know my place in the universe.

****

Ray Green #31? Anybody? How many Ray Greens are there in America right now? How many are born Queens? Probably not as many as there used to be. The Ray Green we are thinking of played one season with us - 2005 - and not even a full one. Interestingly, it was also his best season as a pro, with 11 tackles registered in eight games. Then he vanishes and reappears in the Meadowlands in a Giants uniform. He registers a few more tackles in 2003 for Big Blue, then vanishes altogether. Sounds like a strange dream.

Aaron Glenn #31 is and always will be one of my favorite players in a Jets uniform. I suppose it was because like all of us, he had good days and bad. He went to the Pro Bowl twice as a Jet, which is impressive considering our sometimes problematic history with the concept of a secondary. No player that I can recall had such a visible range of good and bad, but with all of the shifting of philosophy that goes on in secondaries - from man-to-man to two-deep and three-deep zones, playing back, playing forward, playing for other guys who are injured in positions who are expected to fill and know completely - it was hard to blame him entirely for the worst it. He has also been a journeyman since leaving us and is still apparently playing, although on injured reserve for the Saints. And - always my favorite detail - Aaron Glenn comes originally from Humble, Texas.

I'm not sure how many games in 2005 Jeremy LeSueur played for us while wearing #31 and playing cornerback. I know that he had quite a bright career at Michigan, though. What amazed me, was the remarkable discussion forum on the web one finds immediately while searching his name. For Paddy Chayefsky, television was democracy at its ugliest, but I argue that this was only because internet discussion boards about women dating professional athletes weren't available yet. This discussion, entitled, "Does Jeremy LeSueur have a girlfriend? Is he dating someone? Is he married? Would you date him? Did you date him?" proves there are worse things than the redundancies of TV. Ladies, as one anonymous person apparently puts it, "I know everyone is laid off but damm (sic), it has to be something we can do besides this lol!!" Girl, you know it's true. Remember what people say about Antonio.

Finally, there's #31, Bill Mathis, one of four original New York Titans to play in Super Bowl III. It must have been a complicated business for a pioneer AFL player like Mathis - who had been the team's best runner in 1961 - to discover himself playing as a supporting player for a more profitable AFL later in the decade. But Bill Mathis did play regularly and effectively behind Emerson Boozer and Matt Snell in 1968. Mathis was known for a toughness made obvious when he broke his collarbone in 1961 with the Titans, for he played on with a broken collarbone regardless. (I love how Wikipedia puts it: "He played in the next game, and in fact in all the remaining games of the season." That quote had to have been written by a storyteller.) When a player's livelihood - even in the form of Harry Wismer's bouncing checks - depended on his playing, he played with a broken collarbone. Can you imagine such a player today?

NY Jets #49 - Part 3

As I said earlier, there is something about the #49 - or about any number on the cusp of turning over to another tenth - that it does not attract a great many players, nor many players who stay long. I wonder if, when he is given this number, a player says, "Oh. I see how it is." Look at #'s 19, 29, 39, and you'll find some of the least notable Jets players among a franchise roster that doesn't count many legends.

But in each, there are notable exceptions. Keyshawn Johnson #19. Bake Turner and Leon Washington in #29. Johnny Johnson #39. Here we acknowledge Tony Paige, who played for the Jets in #49 from 1984-1986. During the Jets very best showing, Paige was a steady presence in the backfield alongside the more prominent running machine, Freeman McNeil. After the sad, sad end to the 1986 season, he then played for the Lions and, more crucially, the Dolphins. I remember how sore it always felt to see people like Woody Bennett and Tony Paige in the backfield for the dread Fish. Paige played the way fellows like him are expected to. He ran short yardage, he blocked for McNeil, he took short passes. He made 469 yards in receptions for the Dolphins in his second-to-last season for them, 1991.

He is currently a sports agent - which I'm surprised more former player's aren't - in this case for Perennial Sports Management. He is the agent for Kris Jenkins #77, and apparently the organization itself claims it has signed Cam Newton for representation, which is a little like Diaghilev signing Nijinsky, only without all the homoeroticism. This is a bizarre time to represent football players and agents obviously, due to the Lockout that will likely negate the entire season (a circumstance for which I am obviously in denial, as I never, ever write about it; why write about something that you don't want to happen? It's why I actually couldn't be a journalist). Plus Jenkins was released by the Jets a month ago, after a heartbreaking injury to his ACL toward the beginning of last season. Altogether, the Lockout is a weird place to be for Tony Paige. Agents tend to rebound regardless, probably more easily than do players. Kris Jenkins was quoted as saying that "Tony has always been with me, every step of the way. If it wasn’t for Tony then I probably wouldn’t be in the game at this point." One would hope Tony will still be with him now.

To his credit (although this is probably the kind of spin that modern agents are expected to use), Tony Paige does say on the Perennial website that in the world outside of football that:

"...The problem is, your career as an athlete won’t last forever...the average NFL career is about three and a half seasons and in the NBA, the average player is around for less than four years.

Because of this, athletes need to be smart about the money they make during their short active years. They need to save, invest well, start companies and foundations and begin making inroads to a post-sports career."

This is something that I've tried to consistently make note of - the disposibility of professional football players. Perhaps Tony Paige is exactly the kind to guide men like Jenkins in this sense.

Did I just say that about an agent?

*

On an entirely different subject, Tony Paige plays a part in an adolescent, subconscious experience (in other words, a dream) that I still recall vividly to this day.

It was February 1987. I was 17. The Giants had beaten the Broncos in Super Bowl XXI 39-20 maybe a week or so before. I had watched the game with friends, thinking about how my Jets had been just weeks away from the very same game. No pain will leave you like the first great betrayal of your life, and Mark Gastineau's late hit on Bernie Kosar in the 1987 AFC Divisional Playoffs is a pain that will be with me long after I have been left as an friendless, miserable old man in a nursing home. I will still be crying "NO! NO! A FLAG! SHIT! OH SHIT!" and the nursing home attendants will ignore me with the disdain that they reserve for the facility's most incontinent, deranged old fools.

Anyway, I had a dream some nights after Super Bowl XXI that the Jets beat the Bears in the very same Super Bowl. (Ironically, both the Bears and the Jets had lost earlier on the playoffs the same weekend to the Redskins and the Browns, respectively - the two teams that the Giants and the Broncos would then beat in their conference championships.) The dream goes like this: it is midway through the fourth quarter. The Jets are up by one over the Bears. Night has fallen on Pasadena. Our quarterback takes the snap somewhere in Bear territory. He is neither Pat Ryan nor Ken O'Brien, but John Rogan. Yes. You don't know who he is, except that he played for Yale in the early 80's and was apparently signed (briefly) or was a walk-on for the Jets in 1982 right after his graduation. I don't think he took a snap for the Jets, but he apparently he played for the Montreal Alouettes from 1982 to '83. Somewhere, around 1982 (this is still reality now), I think I must have read some kind of article in Newsday or the Times when I was maybe about 12 or 13 about John Rogan trying out for the Jets when he was a rookie. This article chiseled itself profoundly into my memory, waiting for a moment when my mind needed a mythology to condole me (as mythologies do) and it provided a fine, unconscious antidote to reality.

Back in the dream, John Rogan, quarterbacking the Jets in Pasadena for the Lombardi Trophy, hands the ball off to Johnny Hector who then laterals it to Tony Paige #49, who then throws the ball accurately back to Rogan, who is now streaking down the sideline - a kind of play that John Elway used to sometimes run - with only a barely recovered Dave Duerson or Gary Fencik for the Bears coming too late to tackle him. The Jets win the Super Bowl by eight. Maybe they tag on a field goal, too. Who knows.

In real life, John Rogan does still exist. Today he works for a group that, near as I can tell, recruits "high-level senior associates for corporate clients," which sounds like finding matches among high-level executives, board members and corporations. Perhaps he and Tony Paige could trade notes on millionaires.

I woke from my dream filled with a nervous joy that quickly dissipated when I realized that it wasn't real; but unlike other such dreams, the vivid feeling of happiness it gave me has remained with me even to this day. I can still see it happen through my mind's eye. It wasn't real, but it felt real. They didn't win, but somewhere in the cosmic infinite of one human subconsciousness, they did. John Rogan was a hero. And so was Tony Paige.

****

Tony Richardson #49 blocked for Marcus Allen and Priest Homes in Kansas City; he blocked for Adrian Peterson in Minnesota and then for Thomas Jones and Shonn Greene in New York. An article in SI from last year gives some sense of how valuable yet expendable men like him really are. Though at pressing 40, the man can hardly complain. He's made good work of it, and he is the offensive equivalent of a mensch. He's a guy who's job is to be in front of you while you run for daylight. This is a man who shouldn't worry about having a future career beyond football because he's probably got a plan. Most men who block for stars do. At least that's my conjecture, but I assume he knows something that a lot of other players don't.

I knew we'd have to return to the subject of the Lockout. Historically, Richardson is a member of the NFLPA's board, and his article in the Huffington Post doesn't have anything new to say from the point of view of players facing the Lockout: football is popular, fans are being cheated by the Lockout, owners won't open up their books, players are already giving up enough as it is. But we all know that players will ultimately be blamed for the the absence of football this season. Eventually, players are expected to give in, despite how grotesquely wealthy and cynically bloated the ownership really is. Remember what Tony Paige said: players "need to save, invest well, start companies and foundations and begin making inroads to a post-sports career." They are the expendables, whether they like it or not. The owners are not, only because they have actual control over the comfort of their fans, as well as more long-term cash.

In the end, the unionized worker can certainly expect that he will eventually be asked by a mostly underpaid, non-unionized public, "What makes you so special? How come you're different from everybody else?" In our culture, we always take it for granted that it's perfectly normal that there should be rich men who make enormous contributions to political campaigns, who gouge prices, who move their businesses where the labor is cheapest, and imagine with a hubris characteristic of Gaddafi that their money is their ultimate self-justification. For some reason in America these persons are seen as more worthy of the wealth they possess than the unionized workers whose labor fills their coffers.

As a teacher, a person sometimes told that I don't have a "real" job because I have part of the year off, I can honestly sympathize with grossly paid football players whose season lasts from September to January. I know (as I've learned in Wisconsin recently) that when push comes to shove, management will spin it to make it look like union labor is taking advantage of low-wage non-union people in hard times. And that is garbage.

So here's to you, Tony Richardson. I honestly don't mind how much you make. Yes, it's a bucketload more than I earn. I'll continue to root for football players who are "overpaid" throughout the darkening months each year because they're work is what makes football what it is. Football is not Jerry Jones, not Bud Adams, not Bill Bidwill, not the Irsays, not former owner Art Modell, not Mike Brown, not Pat Bowlen, Daniel Snyder, nor even the Rooneys or Woody Johnson. They call their teams their "product." When I am bereft of happiness on Sundays next season, I'll know it was the owners' fault that the Lockout was put in place. Money speaks for money just as the devil speaks for his own.

NY Jets #49 - Part 2

There are no real NFL statistics on the game by game career of Troy Johnson #49 who played for the Jets from 1990-91. Of course, if the Jets web site is to be believed, then he wore #49 for a period of time, but the pro football database reminds us he was eventually given his #95, the number he also wore for the Chicago Bears, who drafted him in 1987. According to PFD, he registered a sack with the Bears and four with the Jets in 1990. Aside from that, we will have to wait until #95 to offer anything more than just this short video compilation from theGoodMagneto of his play at Oklahoma, at a time when the Sooners were King. If a compilation of my play at college were offered on YouTube, it would include segments with me sitting in my apartment, eating pasta in my underwear and scratching my head with a fork.

And there's college again, staring at us in the face. For the exceptional athlete, college is in an inversely proportionate relationship to the rest of us. Were you the captain of your team in college? No. Do you call yourself a Conference Champion? No. Forgive me for speaking for you, but no. Eric Kattus #49 did and does. Frankly I wish the standard Wikipedia entry (on which I rely too often) on a former NFL player would be better if it told more about the lives and times of players after they played (I would get a lot less angry commentary if this were so). The truth is (and here I paraphrase Our Master), Kattus then started on and off for the Cincinnati Bengals from 1986-91, the Bengals' last, great glory years ("Child, please..."). Recall that Bruce Coslet was hired on the basis of his work with the Bengals during that time. Oddly, Wikiwonka has no more than this to say in Kattus' work with the Bengals of 1988:

"The Bengal playoff run that season was best remembered for the Ickey Shuffle."

Really? That's all? Not Sam Wyche's no-huddle offense? Not Anthony Munoz, James Brooks, or Eddie Brown? Not Tim Krumrie's flapping leg? (yeush). Not even Turk Schonert? The Ickey Shuffle. Boomer Esaison can take small comfort from that. I was once able to perform the Ickey Shuffle for my wife in front of our car while she sat bored in the driver's seat and I was waiting for the gas pump to finish. She was vaguely entertained.

Then, when time was running out on his career, Kattus was called up by the Jets in 1992 when tight end Johnny Mitchell, and all the hopes that accompanied him, was injured. Kattus' NFL career ended when Mitchell came back. Would that Eric had stayed, frankly.

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Ed Marinaro, 1976

When John Riggins left the Jets at the end of 1975, there was no one to replace him in the backfield. For years Riggins and Emerson Boozer had carried the Jets' offense when Namath's aerial attack either went awry or was on the sideline. The beginning of the post-Riggins era was Ed Marinaro #49, and his time with us didn't last past 1976. He scored two touchdowns that season and rushed for 332 yards, with about 100 yards receiving. Mom and Dad went to see him play against the Bills at Shea, and Mom came back saying he was the star that day. In fact, he scored the first touchdown of the game and rushed for 119 yards in a 17-14 win. I must not have really thought about it, but somehow I must have known that Ed Marinaro was no more John Riggins than “Leo, Bo's friend from the Merchant Marines” was “Mitch Hendon, a threatening presence in Springfield who rightly suspicious of his wife Ramona’s relationship with her personal assistant.” Figure that one out and you’ve got a prize.

But let's not be too obscure. Like Namath, John Dockery, and even little Mike Adamle, Ed Marinaro had a successful showbiz career after the Jets - a legitimate acting career, one might say. There was a point where I actually started seeing him on TV and would think, "There's TV's Ed Marinaro," not "There's former Jet Ed Marinaro." First, he began as a little-known downstairs character from Laverne and Shirley after the Milwaukee pair jumped the shark and moved out to Hollywood. Then he was Joe Coffey, the flatfoot cop on Hill Street Blues, who died at the end of season one but was apparently so popular that they brought him back for season two.

If you go to Ebay, you can find a combination SI cover/head shot for Ed Marinaro, signed. He disappeared altogether by season six. Ah, the 80's. You never really knew if your death was temporary, just Victoria Principal's dream, or perhaps the snow globe figment of an autistic child's imagination.

Lest we forget, he came to the NFL a year after Riggins, and recall that Marinaro was a very close runner-up to Auburn's Pat Sullivan for the 1971 Heisman Trophy. We know that Riggins' signature goes for much more, but does Riggins' head shot fetch as much as Marinaro's?

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But why didn't Emerson Boozer ever had an acting career.Why? It keeps me awake at night.

NY Jets #6 - Part 2

Until recently, the most important #6 in New York Jets history was Ray Lucas, and for half a season - the ill-fated one in 1999 - he was the Jets' starter. He was the greatest overachiever at a position that is traditionally mixed with promise, hope, misery and disappointment for the Jets. When all of us had so many big dreams for that season, starting quarterback Vinny Testaverde went down in the opener with a snapped Achilles tendon, and there was literally no one ready to take his place. You can blame Bill Parcells for both those situations. Right before the season opener, he ordered the grass they were planning to use be replaced by an artificial turf that caught Vinny's foot in the hot sun and helped snap his tendon. You can blame Parcells for not having any decent backup. I still do.

By the bye week, the leaderless Jets played themselves out of the playoffs. But then Ray Lucas took over and lead the Jets to a .500 finish. Parcells called it (at the time) his finest achievement in coaching. I prefer to thank Ray Lucas. He became a Dolphin in 2000 and then fell off the high wire, but for eight games in 1999, Ray Lucas was one of the the most successful QB's in the AFC. Today, if I wanted to say anything bad about Mark Sanchez (and it's going to be a half-hearted effort below to do so, let me say) then I would wear Ray Lucas' jersey to a Jets game.

Joe Prokop #6 is found in many of longtime Jets' placekicker Pat Leahy's best photographs because Prokop was the holder on Leahy's kicks during the 1990 season, the year Leahy was voted team MVP. Prokop was also the Jets' punter from 1988-90. He would be our Booth Lustig Award winner if not for a man named Bubby Brister. That's distinction in the world of the Gang Green for you. But on one very dull afternoon in another one of Bruce Coslet's (er, Joe Walton) unfortunate seasons (1989) Joe Prokop apparently took the ball at the snap of a Pat Leahy field goal and ran it in for a 17 yard touchdown in a losing effort against the Patriots. This must have been the design of the play. The well-traveled handler and punter was given his moment, and he took it. Life is worth living for a host of reasons that may seem mundane to anyone not looking very closely, the way one never really notices the man holding the ball for the placekicker. Doing your job well and dependably is its own reward, and I hope I don't sound too much like a high school teacher when I say that such things make life worth living. But who in the world would sneeze at the chance to run it past the point of things as they are? Who wouldn't consider such an opportunity even more worthwhile?

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Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes I make dumb mistakes. In this case, I called Reggie Hodges #6 "Russell" Hodges in my last update and was properly corrected by davidill (as seen below). Now that I have failed to even so much as get his name right, I owe it to this man to paraphrase the very best of the mere tip of the iceberg that the web invariably offers - and who knows, maybe even more. How could I have lost the opportunity to talk about this man? Where to begin?

1) You can follow him on Twitter, and when you do, you will see a man who is happy with life, or at least happy in the way that Twitter presents all of us, in 140 characters or less. Reggie exists in a spectrum of experience by which I am fascinated. He believes in Jesus as an active, living presence in his life. I grew up Roman Catholic, and though there are many ways of believing in Christianity as a Catholic, I confess I never wrote or thought about Jesus in quite the way that a believer like Reggie Hodges does. I often wished that I could as a child, but always He seemed distant and mysterious, talking of love and the end of time all on the same page. Thinking about Jesus truly appears to make him happy (Twitter happy, maybe, but I believe it's the real thing in this case). For me, as a Catholic, Jesus always reminded me (without meaning to, no doubt) of my deep limitations as a human being (Jesus wouldn't have called Reggie Russell, for example, nor vice versa). He was always an example of what we should try to imitate, and He still is. There are people who talk about a personal relationship with Him. I know they're not crazy, but that's not what I have felt. My loss, I guess.

But theology classes never helped cure my sense of alienation from Him. Never mind how extraordinarily diverse the character of Jesus is when you start looking at Him historically. Read Bart Ehrman on the subject (Misquoting Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet) and you are shaken. Jesus has been many things to many people throughout time, but who he actually was historically is a subject of debate. Who He is to a believer like Reggie Hodges, a person of faith, is a matter entirely different. To Hodges, He is as real now as He was then. Hodges says, "I am a servant of God disguised as a punter." That's real stuff. I have always felt that the disguise I wear is just one that sits over another and another and another, to the point where who I am depends on whom I'm talking to. I suppose that this is often what life is like. I always imagine people like Reggie Hodges to be exactly who they say they are to every person to whom they speak, and I suppose that they may be happier than I.

2) There is something poignant to the punter's life. Unless he's Ray Guy, the punter going to be shuttled around as needed. He is not a glorified personage. His #6 is not as desired as, say, Mark Sanchez's. In six seasons, Hodges has officially played for eight teams, though he is signed with the Browns through 2012. His player's biography resembles that of a picaresque's nomadic hero. The Jets signed him when Ben Graham's punts kept falling short and sent him off the following spring. Signed by the Titans the following Fall, he was cut a month later. And though he didn't do it as a Jet, Hodges did something that ranks as a remarkable act among punters. He took a fake for 68 yards, the longest run for a punter in NFL history, and - if it is to be believed - the longest run from scrimmage for the Browns all through the 2010 season. And there you are. God works in mysterious ways.

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I remember sitting at a wedding once next to an older woman who claimed that she had spent some time in her early 20's in Miami during the weeks leading up to Super Bowl III with Joe Namath. She never said in what capacity this time was spent. When you read about Namath's record of liaisons in Mark Kriegal's biography, it is remarkable. Any man who dated Suzy Storm alone is a star. He had poise.

Mark Sanchez #6 might someday get his own entry on our gloriously unread blog. At first, the funniest part of Mark Sanchez's fame was his overstated attribute of "poise." Deadspin used Sanchez as a poster boy for sports media's absolute dearth of original thought in its profligate use of the word. Because poise was all we were looking for in him, our expectations of his rookie year at the starting position were minimal. What else could we expect from a young, overpaid underwear model? Neil O'Donnell had poise, too, and it didn't do us much good, but he was an old man by football's standards when he was a Jet.

What we've discovered is that Mark Sanchez is intelligent on the field, with a manner of being that is Namath incarnate, the manner of champions who use their own self-confidence to deflect away the fear of failure. I suppose that's what poise is, isn't it? He played like Namath in his first season because he threw more interceptions than touchdowns, though made very good decisions in the postseason in January 2010 which did not involve red, green, and yellow colors on his sleeve, or even handing off to Shonn Greene.

Then in 2010, his numbers improved. He reversed his touchdown to interception ratio, with a QB rating that moved from 63.0 to 75.3. The Jets did their December dive, but they rebounded. When they took the field against the seemingly unbeatable Patriots in Foxboro, I noticed that Sanchez ran out of the tunnel with a calm, blinding confidence in his own happiness that Colisseum spectators must surely have seen in an occasional defenseless Christian who was about to be fed to the beasts. I suppose I would have still remembered that expression even if the Jets had lost. But they didn't. He is our quarterback.

But in case you haven't noticed, people in the field of athletics are twisted. They post very easily found videos about their wives' feet. They father children with different women with the speed of Genghis Khan. They accidentally shoot themselves. They also rape women in the bathrooms of bars, or possibly (well, "possibly" in Sanchez's case) even on college campuses. They send photographs of their penises to women who give them only the vaguest sign of professional interest. Then it all ends up on Deadspin.

Mark Sanchez's possibly/possibly not heated romantic relationship with a 17 year-old fits somewhat squarely into this paradigm - one that befits a person who has grown up believing, through community and educational reinforcement, that he is above the moral law. When people have razzed me about Sanchez's rendezvous with Eliza Kruger, I have caught myself nearly saying the same thing that Eliza said to Mark about her being legal in New York. How can I possibly defend it? I cannot. I certainly know the difference between an adolescent and an adult, but a 24 year-old man should, too. It's not exactly trapping a woman in a bathroom, but it's still morally wrong.

And what's remarkable is that, like Joe Namath in his time, Mark Sanchez could have any woman in any borough of America's largest and most culturally diverse city. But instead he texted a 17 year-old girl from Connecticut. This is also an aspect of the successful athlete's experience. His pampered life cloisters him from the real experiences of failure and success that the rest of us had to have with romance. Apparently the key to a great athlete's psychological growth is his ability to "forgive" himself when he fails on the field. I'm not always so sure that such failures are acceptable off it. This isn't a rationalization, but it is a psychological explanation for why men who take the field against an unbeatable team with the smile of a winner can also appear completely unable to grasp that a sober, intelligent grown woman might be interest in him for something other than his own vanity.

More likely, Mark Sanchez was not interested in conversation, but in exactly the kind of ephemeral, superficial adoration that a 17 year-old girl bestows on the high school's hottest football player. One senses that he needs to join the adult world, not just as an athlete, but as a human being.