NY Jets #56 - Part 1

Roger Ellis: linebacker,
Secret Service Agent

This is what a linebacker looked like in 1960.

Well, Ray Nitschke didn't look like this, though one could argue that Larry Grantham did. We are talking about the New York Titans, and we are talking about Roger Ellis #56, the overachiever who always impressed coaches and kept his place in a uniform in the AFL. After him, there was Ted Bates #56, who had played at linebacker for the Chicago Cardinals and then for the Jets in 1963. This was a time when players were smaller, and football Cardinals played in Comiskey Park, but that time was changing rapidly right before everyone's eyes. It was a strange epoch by any measurement. It was the early 60's. There were Soviet satellites orbiting the Earth. There were Catholics in the White House. Things were shifting. Suddenly there were two different Cardinals in the St. Louis. Suddenly a man could run a football team out of a hotel room. Anything was possible. Ted Bates and Roger Ellis were just passengers in time.

After showing up to the Jets training camp in 1963 for one last tryout, Roger Ellis managed to gain a spot as an "understudy" to Sherman Plunkett who, by God, was what football players were going to look like more and more in the wide open future of what would become a national game better suited to an increasingly corpulent people. Perhaps it was not that players weren't large enough; it was that our appetites had grown to Sherman Plunkett's supersize. Still, you can't help but look at Roger Ellis and see someone who has an honest appraisal of his chances and yet believes in himself all the same - a combination that any sane person would envy if he felt it lacking.

After leaving the Jets that year, Roger Ellis pops up again later on in the annals of time as a Secret Service Agent following the detail of then-Vice President Spiro Agnew, which I have to tell you, makes me jealous. I don't know why. Traveling with Agnew (codename: Pathfinder) must have been a hoot for anyone having to transcribe the English language, as rendered by Messrs. Safire and Buchanan. Here's a great deal more from William Ryczek's fine book Crash of the Titans. In his credits, Ryczek says Ellis was of enormous help to him but also a little defensive when first approached with questions about Titans history. He didn't just want to be made fun of the way he felt that former Titans always were. No one wants to be made fun of, and Ryczek does them all a service. Sadly, Ellis passed away in 2008. Bates is probably still alive and somewhere in Texas. As always, folks, remember your Titans.

****

Sam Cowart #56 joined the Jets in 2002 after playing with Buffalo for five seasons and then played regularly at linebacker for us until he became injured in 2004. He played the equivalent of half that season. His injury was Jonathan Vilma's opportunity, and Vilma then became the starter. Cowart asked for a trade, and what happened next is triangulated confusion to me. Randy Moss went from the Vikings to Oakland for the Raiders' seventh pick in the first round and the Raiders' overall seventh round pick. Cowart went to Minnesota, and in n exchange for him, the Jets wanted that seventh round pick from Oakland via Minnesota. This seems like a plan thematically assembled from Norse mythology, with language from the Old Testament. I saw Odin bring unto the Viking nation the seventh from the first and the first from the seventh, yet the Raiding men clothed in darkness were handed only the gift of moss in exchange, and in time they came to curse themselves for it, with a wailing and gnashing of teeth, for the moss yielded nothing unto them.

Phantom reader, do you know who that seventh round Raiders pick was?

****

Paul Crane, C/LB

The man who passed the ball between his legs to Joe Namath and Steve Sloan at the University of Alabama in the mid-1960's was Paul Crane #56, an All-American center whom the Jets converted into a linebacker from 1966-72, earning him a Super Bowl ring. He netted three interceptions in 1969. In 1994, he was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, an entity whose existence appears to rely on a careful balance between the Alabama Crimson Tide and Auburn. For every Tide player inducted, there is a Tiger inducted. In 1978, Alabama's Joe Namath was inducted the same year as Auburn's Heisman Trophy winner Pat Sullivan. But nothing will ever really keep the peace in the Middle East or the Deep South when both regions are peopled by fanatics. The recent poisoning of Toomer's trees in Auburn is an indication of how perverse this rivalry is.

The alleged tree assailant Harvey Updyke, Jr. is described as having mental health issues, manifesting themselves here in his attachment to a school he did not attend. But how many of us really are this close to the boundary between earnest fanaticism and full-blown mental illness masking itself as fandom? In such cases, it isn't the face-painter that people should worry about but the middle-aged man who sits alone in his room and thinks more about the football games he's watched than all the things in the world he could be doing with his life, aside from thinking about football. I got into a shouting match last night with some young suburban guy and his date over a parking spot in the city; is it really "just a coincidence" that I'm also worried about the Jets' offensive line? I mean, my God. It was just a parking spot.

I've done plenty of dumb things in my time, including stealing a large sign from a Shell station in Rhode Island, but I don't think I would kill anyone's trees. I suppose the dumbest thing I do as a fan is that I hold it against my old Massachusetts friends from college that the Patriots have been so successful. It isn't their fault that a team that was in fourth place in the hearts of most New Englanders not so long ago is now one of the most successful franchises in professional sports.

But I do hold it against them, and they hold it against me that the Jets are even in the same division as the Patriots. Now we exist on disparate shores of an abyss, filled with resentment. We've tried to exchange occasional pleasantries while secretly plotting each other's demise. For a brief period of time, Facebook gave us an opportunity to chat about the good old days of stealing signs from gas stations, and we laughed about how none of us are in the physical shape we apparently believed we were in at college. But the football season renders everything silent, and like two groups forced to exist on either side of a concrete wall, we find it more convenient to refrain from speaking to one another. Since the Jets' defeat of the Patriots in the playoffs last year, I have heard nothing from New England, nor do I expect to any time soon.

Paul Crane still lives in Mobile, Alabama. He was also an assistant coach for the Crimson Tide and for the University of Tennessee for a time. Alabama (the school) gives out awards in the springtime for "A-Day," which are for players who performed best in spring practices. According to the Alabama HOF site above, the "I Like to Practice Award" given on A-Day was initially named for Paul Crane. It's an award that sounds like a nice parting gift for a game show contestant. Having recently visited the Jets training camp at Florham Park, I can tell you that the man who likes to practice most is the man who is desperately trying to find a place on the roster. But according to the A-Day story above, the award named for Paul Crane is now now the "Offensive Lineman Award," which this year was given to William Vlachos.

The "I Like to Practice Award" is currently named for Jerry Duncan, a small tackle sometimes used by Bear Bryant as a receiver in the 60's. According to an equipment manager at the time, Duncan liked to practice so much that he once wept when he was too injured to do so. I don't know if Paul Crane could possibly have competed with that, or that he'd have wanted to.

NY Titans #55 - Part 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NY Jets #55 - Part 4

What is the measure of a good linebacker? Is it sacks? Is it tackles? If it's the former, then Marvin Jones #55 had nine, which is as many as Ray Lewis got in his first three seasons. If it's the latter, then consider that Jones played his entire career with the Jets - 11 seasons total - and finished with 1200 tackles. Lewis, in 15 seasons, has 1452. I understand that this is a slightly unfair comparison, but it also illustrates Jones' strong contribution to our team. On squads consistently inferior to those for whom Ray Lewis has played, Marvin Jones made a significant mark at his position.

I say this because Jones had to deal with the tag of his being a high draft choice when the Jets desperately needed an improvement in their defense. In their transition from Bruce Coslet to Pete Carroll, the Jets were poised to begin a new defensive era, one that was trying more and more to effectively stop the run. Picked from Florida State in the first round, Jones was highly touted, and rightly so. (He wore #54 until 1997, after Bobby Houston left) It did not work that way. He had the burden of people whispering Lawrence Taylor's name when he first walked into the room. He had the burden of replacing the popular leader Kyle Clifton in the longstanding tandem with Mo Lewis and Bobby Houston. He also had the burden of early injuries that make fans particularly impatient with first rounders. His hip injury, so early in his career in 1994, made him vulnerable to being called a waste of money, a lazy player, a player who cannot handle pain, and I recently encountered a Jets fan who still felt that way, and that fan was wrong.

Aside from his respectable statistics, Jones had a good career in terms of duration, and the fact that he managed the stats he did in the midst of the most absurd 11 years that a pro team can imagine makes it all the more impressive. What effect do years of consistent, almost insurmountable losing have on the mind of someone who was, at least in premise, as talented as Jones? He certainly found more comfort in his friendship with Mo Lewis #57 than he did in the hopes and aspirations of the many head coaches he played for - Coslet, Carroll, Kotite, Parcells, Groh, and Edwards. This article from the Times late in his career illustrates exactly what happened: both he and Mo Lewis, the defensive leaders, had been so conditioned to the yearly false promises that they had both lost their own veteran leaders' voices - the hectoring, driving, motivating voices so available to team leaders (and manslaughter accomplices) like Ray Lewis, to whom both men are unfairly compared in the article.

Imagine playing under six coaches in your career, each time having to shift gears, listening to the same opening speeches from training camp to training camp. The money helps add salve to the wounds, but aside from the amount they made in their time, Jones and Mo Lewis (for they go together in my mind) played late afternoons on cold days at the dawning of winter some time in 1995 or '96, in a cavernously empty Meadowlands stadium named for another team, at a time when the Jets were the laughingstock of professional sports. The two might as well have been sea-faring characters from a Joseph Conrad novel, sitting on the bow of a docked merchant ship, recounting tales of battling their enemies with nothing more than their own existential grief.

Interlude:

Actually, how did any of us who love our team survive those miserable years, when the Jets went from laughable doormat to playing in the 1999 AFC Championship Game to being the team for whom Bill Belichick wouldn't work to ending up as Al Groh's sloppy seconds? How did we get through it, other than with _____________ ? (alcohol/grass/religion/junk food/xanax) At least Marvin Jones had his money. What did I have? Old Smuggler. Back then, "if things don't work out this year" meant another losing season. Now it means something different. And I forget this sometimes. If we end up there again, and stakes is high, then I need to file those experiences away for future use.

And, back:

Finally, I always loved Marvin Jones for maybe the single most evocative nickname I have found in all of sports - "Shade Tree." Ed Jones was "Too Tall." Nate Newton was "The Kitchen" to William Perry's "Refrigerator." But "Shade Tree" is Southern Gothic. It's almost Native American, or maybe like a wise character in a Toni Morrison novel. It's great. And because I like it, I added it to Wikipedia's page for Sportspeople By Nickname. I hope it turns up soon, and I hope Marvin doesn't mind.

****

Brad Kassell #55 arrived with the Jets in 2006 after a good career in special teams with the Tennessee Titans. At North Texas University, Denton, TX, home of Midlake, he was a star running back. He was a special teams leader with the Jets in 2007. A year later JetsBlog documented the manner in which Kassell's re-signing was meant to be a patching up at linebacker after Jonathan Vilma left the Jets for the Saints. In reality, the team probably had no long term interest in Kassell, and that's no way to run an organization. No offense to Brad Kassell. If you look at the comments, several people point out how Eric Mangini's hard lines in negotiations, and his reluctance to deal with players, were harmful to the team. This is something that Ryan and Tannenbaum have clearly learned to manage differently, and at the very least, I'm glad that Rex Ryan is not, if you'll excuse me, a dick in this particular way. As a result, his players want to play for him, even taking pay cuts to do so. See what happens when you let the green flow? And this is why Eric Mangini is today employed by ESPN, and not by a professional football team in any capacity whatsoever.

Jamaal Westerman

And yet, I worry that Ryan's high opinion of Jamaal Westerman #55 is a false optimism inspired by the loss of Shaun Ellis to the Patriots. Like a Dad who is trying to convince the kids that a round of miniature golf makes the vacation just as good as it would have been had Wally World been open, Ryan says, without provocation, that Westerman has exceeded his expectations. He said the same of Vernon Gholsten. Westerman is an interesting guy, having played in Ontario and then at Rutgers, where he excelled. Is he the kind of player who can fill the gap left behind by Ellis, who is now with New England? The real question we all should ask is whether or not Ellis is merely just a psychological ploy to get at Ryan and his impressionable crew. Maybe Shaun Ellis is just another toy Jet that Belichick has added to his collection, just as Charles Foster Kane bought all the Chronicle's men. Isn't it possible that all of this will lead someday down the road to Bill Belichick aimlessly pacing the corridors of his Kubla Khan, counting the days until his death, foundering from room to room, confronted by limitless reflections of himself, all while his trophy wife is chewing gum and assembling a vast puzzle in his mansion's great hall? One can only hope. That or Jamaal Westerman is every bit as good or Ellis, or better as Ryan hopefully suggests. I would take that too. 

NY Jets #55 - Part 3

Lately the weather on the east coast has been boiling hot. It's rarely below 90 this summer, and when it is, you know it's not really a reprieve. Neighbors say, "Better than yesterday, right?" And I nod. I don't say anything. I just agree. But it's still too hot. Most days are overcast, and the heat just seems to hold itself still under the dull clouds. I should have gotten used to this kind of thing in between years at college when I spent my summer breaks in Memphis, Tennessee. Dad moved us there just after I graduated from high school, and I would return to Memphis each May. I worked in an auto parts warehouse where we'd unload trucks, going from near 100 degrees in the vast building to something approximating the surface of Venus inside the trailer. You endured, staying perfectly still, like a lizard camouflaged on a desert rock.

Memphis is a sleepwalking town. There is a Civil Rights Museum on the site where Dr. King was killed, but when I first lived in Memphis, the Lorraine was still a seedy motel, the sort of place where a hooker brought her john. Things change slowly there. When there was talk about the city getting an NFL team, the locals responded in a typically Southern way, with the kind of smile that politely masks a deep reluctance. You get the same thing when you sit down at a Southern restaurant and are met by a waiter who wants to be your friend yet never remembers your order. The South loves college football, which is played for honor. The North loves the professional game, whose fans believe they have made a contributory investment in the club. That they are both wrong may help to explain who we are as a nation.

Every time the NFL played an exhibition game in Memphis, just enough people would show up to make the league curious. The Phoenix Cardinals played Doug Flutie's Patriots at the Liberty Bowl in 1990, and I went with my brother and his friends, who were only interested so that I could buy them beer. Still, local impresarios like Pepper Rodgers and corporate giants like Fred Smith tried to make pro football happen in Memphs. But it never happened. When Jacksonville got the Jaguars, it seemed a folly to keep trying.

But then Rodgers and Smith turned to the CFL, which tried expanding into American markets that couldn't get an NFL team. Smith pledged to be owner of the CFL's Memphis Mad Dogs, and Rodgers assumed the Presidency. The cynical venture collapsed after just a year, and the whole story is starkly painted here; Rodgers wanted to turn the CFL into a rival of the NFL, while Smith invested nothing more than his initial $100,000. The team's uniforms were a bizarre forest green not unlike the Jets of the late 70's, but with the number placed in the right hand corner of the jersey front.

Not the Most Valuable
Canadian

Alex Gordon #55, who played linebacker for the Jets from 1987-89, with a longer career elsewhere in the NFL until the mid-90's, was picked up by the Mad Dogs in 1995. When you look at his stats, you get some idea as to the difference in quality between the two leagues. According to his information on Jimmy Wales' dying website, Gordon led the Mad Dogs with 61 tackles, and he registered seven sacks, which was almost his career total in the NFL. After the team fell apart, he was picked up in the "dispersal draft" (as if he were some kind of molecule) by the Toronto Argonauts who, as luck would have it, won the 1996 Grey Cup. Alex Gordon's career ended on that high note. By the way, the Most Valuable Player for that Cup was Toronto's Doug Flutie. It says something about the expectations of our brothers and sisters to the north that there is also a Most Valuable Canadian award in the Grey Cup. It reminds me of an old friend of mine from Montreal who, for example, will hear William Shatner's name in conversation and suddenly blurt, "And you know what? Canadian!"

****

Bobby Houston, LB

Bobby Houston #55 played his best years at left linebacker with the Jets, from 1991-96, the formative years of my twenties, the time when a young man is supposed to be on the path to discovering the grown man he will someday become. His thirties are the time when he accepts the man he has already become. I don't know where I heard that, and it sounds like nonsense, but there you are. Perhaps his forties are a time to reflect on what he could have been. As a teacher, I'm sure that my students' standardized test scores will soon be used to see what kind of professional I am. I may have one or two Pro Bowl years, or I may end up looking like Bobby Houston did: no Pro Bowls, no All-Pro years, but a career filled with solid, dependable play.

For his best years he shared linebacking position with Mo Lewis and Kyle Clifton on Jets teams that consistently ranked at or below average on defense. For better or worse, Houston, Clifton and Lewis must truly know one another. He retired with the 1998 Minnesota Vikings, the greatest team that never was. At the very end of his career, he could at least say he was this close. Had fate been kinder to all of us that season, he might also have met the Jets in the Super Bowl, but then I'm being too much like a man in his forties again, thinking about what could have been.

The Spring 2009 article from Lifestyle Magazine profiles a retired Bobby Houston. One thing he mentions is being robbed as a boy selling peanuts in RFK Stadium at Redskin games. "A man crept up behind the little league star," it says, "and said 'don’t turn around' and proceeded to rob him. From that moment forward, Houston’s childhood was primarily spent enrolled in self defense classes." Personally, I would have stopped selling peanuts at RFK. He says that if he had known the odds he would eventually face in his football career, he probably would never have tried as hard as he did. How's that for what could have been? But then none of us can go back and change anything, and we made the decisions that we made back then because we were the people we were back then and not the ones we are today.

But with all the regret we see in the lives of players who retire, Houston makes middle age seem approachable and decent. It might be that he is just being profiled in a magazine and putting on a face, following the athlete's stoic credo to remain instinctively positive whenever someone from the press asks him a question. Maybe I've been feeling rather old and lost lately myself, and I need to hear someone talk about simplicity and humility, traits that Bobby Houston says he willingly embraces: “There are a lot of empty millionaires out there,” he says.

One burdensome realization for the former athlete is knowing he will never be as rich as he was in the years when he was just discovering the grown man he would someday become. It's the inverse of what we are taught to believe is the American Dream. I'm just optimistic enough to believe that Bobby Houston really believes he was never an "empty millionaire" at heart. I want to believe he always knew who he was. I'm not sure any of that will be of comfort to someone like Randy Moss - the bright young rookie teammate of Bobby Houston's on that '98 Vikings team - but by now, at 35, Moss probably knows who he is and is probably content with it. I suppose he has no other choice.

****

If I had been forced as a boy to pick any team other than the Jets to root for, I might have picked the Kansas City Chiefs. There is absolutely no basis in geography or logic to support this, but I think about what my father told me about Vince Lombardi. My father loved the Jets, but he also felt loyal to the entire AFL enterprise. To make my childhood enthusiasm for football that much more amusing to him, he insisted to me that Lombardi was a "bad man" because he had said at the end of the Super Bowl I that the AFL was inferior to the NFL. With a Catholic boy's paradoxical mix of infallibility and inferiority, I reacted to what my father told me by being loyal to every original AFL team (except Oakland), but most especially to Kansas City because they were the league's first Super Bowl club and because, without question, they had the coolest helmet decal in the NFL and the coolest uniforms: bright red with yellow, a fire engine red you'd also find on the Flash or on Daredevil, the Man Without Fear.

Charles Jackson #55 played his last two seasons at linebacker for the Jets. Before then, he played for the Kansas City Chiefs from 1978-84. Out in the other universes, where they also care about who played in what number on what franchise, Arrowhead Pride asks who the greatest Kansas City Chiefs are, in this case for #51, which was Jackson's number when he played linebacker for them. Being a Chiefs fan was not always easy. Discounting any residual happiness around Super Bowl IV, I imagine that the 1971 Christmas Day double-overtime playoff loss to the Dolphins was a game from which no Chiefs fan could possibly have recovered. Consider how the team declined throughout the 70's and 80's, having to play in a division with some of the AFC's best teams: the Raiders (three Super Bowl wins), the Broncos (four Super Bowl appearances from 1977-89), and the Chargers of Air Coryell. During the years that Charles Jackson played for Chiefs in #51, the team played above .500 just once, in 1981.

About him, Pride adds:

Charles "Melvin" Jackson played seven of his nine NFL seasons in KC. He started 42 of 86 games; had five sacks; and get this - ten fumble recoveries for the Chiefs.

Why is Melvin in quotes? It's his middle name, but did his teammates actually call him "Melvin?" Why? Anyway, I like the format of Chris Thorman's countdown for the Chiefs because he asks who's best in each number, something which I have neither the inclination nor the readership to answer for the Jets. For #51 on the Chiefs, the winner is Jim Lynch, who wore it right before Jackson did, from 1967-77. Jackson places a distant fourth.

As for his being a Jet, at least he enjoyed two winning seasons with us at the end of the career (1985-86). Consider the supernatural possibility that he might have been a good luck charm because the Jets didn't get above .500 for 11 years after he retired. This seems unlikely all the same, for the infamous double overtime Divisional Playoff loss to Cleveland, a game from which this Jets fan has never recovered, was technically the last game of his career.

NY Jets #55 - Part 2

Mark Brown #55 played linebacker for the New York Jets from 2003-05. Then his career statistics end. Those three seasons, Herman Edwards' last as coach, were difficult for Jets fans because it seemed as if we were always one or two injuries away from ruin, and sometimes ruin was inevitable anyway. Then in 2005, the fragile apparatus finally gave way, and no amount of duct tape could keep it standing any longer. Consecutive losing seasons are difficult, but a 4-12 season after being a game away from the Super Bowl the year before was just too rough on the system. By the Bye, we were done. Brooks Bollinger started nine games at quarterback. Vinny Testaverde, who was 42 in 2005, started four. These were desperate times.

The 2005 season ended at the Meadowlands between the Jets (3-12) and Buffalo Bills (5-10). It was the kind of game that comes up at the end of every season between two clubs whose chances at the playoffs ended at least a month before. They're not the worst of the worst teams that'll have everything to gain in the draft (though the Jets drafted well months later); they're just two teams that'll end with a whimper, hoping to salvage what is often referred to in the locker room as "pride." It's really just an opportunity to clean out your locker. It's an existential crisis - what is the purpose of this? one is compelled to ask. Is anyone really watching? Does anyone care enough to pay attention if I do well? Should I even try? Why?

Mark Brown ending on
a high note.

On New Year's Day, a smattering of cold, loyal, hungover, disenchanted, or maybe just bored faithful came to the game. They came because they had tickets, because they didn't want to mingle at home with relatives over pork chops and apple sauce, because their friends would be there, or unfortunately because they wanted to enjoy the last of the season's as yet unpublicized horrors at Gate D. Watching Fireman Ed do his schtick that day is like watching a kid's clown perform at a wake. The game was mostly decided by the two placekickers, Mike Nugent and Rian Lindell. The Jets limped to one touchdown on offense, yet they won 30-26.

But for one man, there was something eternally meaningful. While the game effectively ended with Justin Miller's kickoff return for a touchdown, Jets linebacker Mark Brown intercepted one of Kelly Holcomb's passes in the second quarter and returned it 33 yards for a touchdown. The image of him in the end zone is forever frozen on the card you see above, and it seems particularly important because it was Brown's last game in the NFL. It gave the Jets a 17-6 lead that they would squander in the third quarter, but Mark Brown can rightly claim that he hit one of his professional highs in one of his very last opportunities. If only life were like that all the time, allowing us these dramatic chances to find meaning in a purposeless existence, then maybe we would try harder. Or maybe we wouldn't try as hard; we would just always wait idly by for our chance to come round. I don't know.

****

Notre Dame used to make quarterbacks. USC used to make running backs. The University of Miami used to make receivers and defensive front lines. Penn State made linebackers. In the 60's the Jets had Ralph Baker #51, but then in the 70's and 80's, the team featured Nittany Lion linebackers like Dennis Onkontz #35, Greg Buttle #51, Lance Mehl #56, and Ron Crosby #55. I wonder if they all simply felt resigned to end up in Flushing. I've come to adopt Penn State a little bit as my local college football team, which means that I follow them when they're undefeated but don't when they're not. Alright, I'm a bandwagoneer. It's painful to watch Joe Paterno trying to coach lately, though, and it's too bad that young people in Happy Valley see him as a dithering old man propped up by coaches and players. At one time, he paced the sideline and gesticulated like a deranged math teacher, complete with pit stains, hard-frame glasses and a pocket protector (one of those is an exaggeration).

Rob Crosby

At the risk of generalizing, defensive lines are formed by men who, like Albert Haynesworth, simply move their mass against the offense. Secondaries are filled with roving, jittery, hectoring guys who must not allow anyone to get behind them, though receivers often manage to. But linebackers make the decision to go forward or back, entering entirely different zones of defense with disparate strategies of playing the game. Rob Crosby did this for the Jets from 1979-83.

In this image at left it looks as though Rob Crosby has suddenly thrust himself into the frame and is now eyeing your lunch. Near as I can tell, this photo was taken at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. This picture might be from the Jets' 17-14 loss to the Browns on December 7, 1980, a bad game in one of the most disappointing of Jets' seasons. It might be from the Jets' 14-13 win over the Browns on December 12th the following year. You can see Municipal's light towers reflected in his helmet. It's obviously cold out, Crosby's got his hand warmer stitched into his jersey, and there's an overcast, wintery afternoon light very like the kind cast at Cleveland Municipal in December. The light within the stadium in winter was always washed gray by persistently overcast skies, while the stands were made darker by Municipal's large overhang. The effect of watching a Browns telecast was such that you'd think the color had gone wonky on your TV. Colorblind players might have felt right at home in Cleveland, though I don't know if Rob Crosby is colorblind.

Like Rob Crosby, the wind-blown, tired-looking linebacker John Ebersole #55 (at right) also went to Penn State and ended up playing eight seasons at linebacker for the Jets, from 1970-77. In his 1977 card, he looks exactly like a man who's witnessed the deep decline of the Jets' franchise in the 70's. "O, woe is me,/To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!" A defensive rating of -7.1 in 1975!

Without many other statistics, it's still worth mentioning that Ebersole made three interceptions in 1974, one of which he apparently took for 41 yards. I've tried looking for it in the vast collection of 1974NFL's Channel without any luck. There is one moment of funny choreography from the Jets' final game of that season, a 45-38 win at Memorial Stadium. Go to 1:26 of the clip, and you see second-year Colts quarterback Bert Jones, who shredded the Jets earlier in the year, overthrowing his man and instead hitting Ralph Baker in the linebackers' no man's land. The ball then jettisons off Baker and high into the air, producing a Maculate Interception: under the ball are three men - Baker, Burgess Owens and John Ebersole. It looks like Ebersole's got it, but then Owens is faster; he gathers it and makes it into the end zone where he is upended by Jones. It's Baker's last game, and it's the last time the Jets will beat the Colts until 1978, when Bert Jones will be out of the picture with injuries.

Today, John Ebersole is listed as the Vice Chairman of the Celebrity Golf Board of Directors. I'm not sure what that means, but he looks like he plays the celebrity golf circuit. This spells hope for all of us, especially in the era where being a celebrity can be permanently defined by anything at all. Perhaps the Chinese are our economic overlords now because our most prescient prophet was Andy Warhol. At least Ebersole's LeeMo Marketing write-up grants him his celebrity status for toughness. "Once played almost an entire game with a separated shoulder and a broken hand," it says. (And a broken hand.) "Also had the dubious honor of leading the NFL in concussions in 1975 and 1976." I don't know why anyone would call that "dubious." I can see "unfortunate" maybe, but not "dubious." I'm just glad to see he's survived his injuries with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact. Not every player does, as we know.

****

In midseason 1965, linebacker Mike Dukes #55 was traded or released from the Boston Patriots to the New York Jets, perhaps to play alongside Wahoo McDaniel. The statistics show that he suited up for three games, and that is all. Sadly, he was killed in 2008 in a car accident in Beaumont, TX. On his memoriam page, you see him proudly displaying a championship ring from one of the first two AFL Championships in 1960 and '61 by the Houston Oilers, for whom Dukes also played at linebacker. A year before his death, his son Brandonn had written to the great site Remember the AFL and asked if anyone knew where he could acquire a game tape of the 1962 AFL Championship Game between the Dallas Texans and Houston Oilers. It's poignant that he was looking for something he thought would interest his Dad in retirement. I truly hope Brandonn Dukes found what he was looking for in time.

NY Jets #17 - The Curse?

I used to live in a neighborhood where the resident across the street from me was labeled by everyone on the block as "Poor Choices." If there were a meth addict to impregnate her, she would find him. If there were a fistfight to be had with another woman over a parking space, she would mix it up in front of her kids. Often, with a determined smile, she would stare down the shady-looking baby daddies who came by to berate her for being disloyal or duplicitous. She endured, mothered several children, and maintained such a zen-like unselfconsciousness about how the neighborhood viewed her that I came to admire her. Though I wouldn't exactly gamble on her children growing up with the sense of a happy home, she had the power of Mother Courage, driving her children on to the next scheme for survival.

I'm not at all sure that this was a good choice for an introduction. I suppose the point I meant to make was that some people just make poor choices, yet they endure out of profit or pride, destined to live it out all over again at the risk of running infamous in the eyes of the world. As of writing this, two men who have such a reputation have come to confluence over the #17 - Braylon Edwards and Plaxico Burress. One is on his way out of the franchise, and one is seeking redemption on his way in.

I've maintained before that there is a curse to the #17 on the Jets, in that its wearer usually ends his career with the team for one reason or another. It is a black hole, absorbing the last, best hopes of any athlete. These two now add a new twist to the curse.

First, incoming. Before Plaxico Burress accidentally shot himself and began a prison sentence, he wore #17 for the Giants. I didn't know until today that it was because he signed with the Giants on a March 17th, making the number, in his eyes, lucky. Who wore it before him on the Giants?

Apparently, there is a tradition where players will hand over their numbers to other players who wish it so long as the player surrendering the number receives some remuneration. In the case of aged punter Jeff Feagles who wore #10 on the Giants until Eli Manning came to the team, Manning paid Feagles back for the number with an all-expense paid Florida vacation. Feagles then switched to #17. When Burress came calling for #17, the punter was only happy to hand it over in return for a new kitchen, which apparently Feagles never received. This stiffing of a longtime veteran was just further ammunition in the press about Plax's shadiness, his unreliability, selfishness and so on. He still owes Feagles a kitchen; perhaps part of his work to re-establish his reputation would be to make amends by allowing Mrs. Feagles (presuming there is one) a chance to look at swatches.

Burress is a Poor Choices, an enduringly flawed figure, now "prison strong," who finds a new home with the most colorful of coaches on a team that itself has become the kind of circus show that Sonny Werblin could only have dreamt of in his darkest moments at Toots Shor's. Burress chose the Jets over the Giants, the team whose fans still feel he owes them something symbolic ever since his self-wounding threw the team into a lengthy funk from which they have not yet recovered. Something more than a kitchen. My brother is a Giants fan, and I can only imagine his combined sense of grief and relief as Plaxico Burress replaces Braylon Edwards in #17. But will the curse endure?

In order to answer that question, one must take into account the future of Braylon Edwards. Plaxico will not have to buy Edwards so much as a sandwich for #17 since the Jets have said sayanora to him. He will likely show up on someone's roster, like Arizona's, or better yet, Oakland's; Poor Choices will endure as Poor Choices always does. But as of this writing, though he has not been implicated directly, members of Edwards' entourage actually attacked staff at a Birmingham, Michigan nightclub on July 31, 2011:

... Edwards' buddies got into an argument with employees that "eventually spilled into the kitchen" and that one worker was "sliced with a knife requiring 14 stitches...another was attacked with a fork."

Again, the fight continued into the kitchen, as if it were a farcical brawl in a Mack Sennett silent film.

Great Men have entourages because Great Men are always inherently insecure. Unless you were the queen bee of a group of catty girls in middle school, you (and I) have no idea what it's like to have one. Your entourage is your protection, your enablers, your familiars, the people who keep your secrets, your true friends who know you best and can be alternately blessed by your generosity or cursed by your contemptuous regard. 

Edwards has had conflicts with the law and has avoided jail time, but if Plaxico Burress is truly settling upon a different way of living, he might advise Braylon Edwards to avoid nightclubs with his entourage altogether. But we know that's not going to happen. And Edwards? He apparently tweeted at the nighclub: "Damn. Get ya knuckles ready," followed by, "Don't fight if. You don't know how." The punctuation is his. I say "apparently" because these tweets were later erased, and Edwards claimed that his phone had been hijacked and that they were sent out by someone else, which is exactly what I would have done. It might have been the idea of one of his humbled entourage; it does takes a village.

****

Braylon Edwards always made me nervous. It seemed at first that his sense of timing was impeccable when it was time to make a poor choice. All players make mistakes with every game, but in the first two and a half weeks of the 2010 season, I made note that Edwards did the following:

1. Formation penalty that prevented the Jets from setting up in the red zone in the first half against the Ravens, week one.

2. Running into the kicker when placed in as special teams to block a punt against Baltimore, which then gave the Ravens the ball so that they could score.

3. Scored against New England in week two but taunted the man covering him, which earned him an unsportsmanlike penalty. Taunted his defender later on a two-point conversion but did not get penalized after he probably should have.

4. Received a DUI arrest after leaving a nightclub with D'Brickashaw Ferguson and Vernon Gholsten.

But then, I got soft on Edwards. Throughout the offseason, in order to deflect worry about the Lockout,  or about whether or not Rex Ryan's traveling show will finally derail,  I found it comforting to have Edwards' fine performances in the playoffs rewind in my head. First, there is this play against the Colts that essentially guaranteed that the Jets could move forward in the playoffs:

Great receivers can make poor choices, but they must make great catches when it is absolutely necessary. Steve Smith and Plaxico Burress did in the Super Bowl, as did Santonio Holmes. The fan tolerates the poor choices in exchange for such singular moments from your mentally ill wide receiver. It's all you can ask in the playoffs, and you are willing to forgive everything so long as he will save your beloved team from sudden death. Whether he tweeted about his entourage's violence outside Detroit or not, it seems impossible in the modern era to enjoy such moments without a dose or two of poor choices. 

And then when the gun sounded last year against the Patriots, Braylon Edwards, eager to stand out as always, added his personal signature to the happy night, and we see it now as one of his last acts as a Jet. You can call it showboating or insanity. Such flamboyance and vibrancy exists outside the stoic realm of football; Braylon Edwards, filled with the unlikely joy all of us felt that night, transformed into a sylph out of Cirque du Soleil and backflipped in front of all of Foxboro. 

Farewell #17, and again, sayonara.

NY Jets #55 - Part 1

I foolishly assumed that the Jets would win the bidding war for Nnmadi Asomugha, and while I'm glad he didn't go to Dallas, it surprised me that the hometown Philadelphia Eagles got him instead. A loyal fan of any NFL team should know to assume nothing, though the safest of all assumptions was that, at the very least, Asomugha was leaving Oakland.

But this is also an assumption that illustrates a strange paradox about my football fan life. When I was a kid, there were nine planets, 12 apostles, seven continents, fifty states, and three counties to the self-descriptive piece of land known as Long Island. There was the Soviet Union. Cable TV was for rich people. There was no water on the moon. Today I'm more inclined to believe simple geographical truths over astronomical, geopolitical or theological assertions. But when I was a kid, one assumption remained true no matter what scientists said. The Oakland Raiders would go to the playoffs, and the New York Jets would stay home.

This 1969 picture goes to illustrate a moment when these two forces in American football were first sent into opposite orbits. More to the point, it helps highlight Jim Carroll #55, who played his last season in football in 1969 with the Jets, at linebacker. The 1969 season ended with the Jets' senseless playoff loss to the eventual AFL and Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs. In this picture, though, Carroll is shown defending in the Jets' 27-14 home loss to the Oakland Raiders. This game signals a cosmic shift between the Raiders and the Jets, equal AFL rivals in every sense up until that point. From here, only one of the two teams would go on to have winning seasons year after year. Only one would go on to cement an outlaw status that was itself simultaneously a violation and a vindication of the American way of life, further emphasizing this point by winning the Super Bowl in the year of the Bicentennial. The other team was the New York Jets.

To me it's poignant that the 1969 season was the last of Jim Carroll's football career, for it was an ending of a kind for the Jets, too; it represented their last postseason appearance until 1981. Conversely, in 1981 the Raiders posted their very first losing season in 17 years. Since 1969, the Jets and the Raiders, who will be meeting in Alameda once again this season, have existed in direct oppositional orbits circling around the same binary point. Take a look at the win-loss totals for the Raiders and Jets, and an eerily perfect inverse manifests itself. The Jets, one of the teams we assume will be a competitor for the playoffs this coming season (and may the gods not smite my team for this assumption) have a franchise record of 351-418-8. The Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders have an overall record of 418-343-11. When I was a kid, the tradition of excellence in Al Davis' Raiders was as predictable as the planetary list of the Solar System that ended with the name of Mickey Mouse's dog. Now, like Al Davis' Raiders, "Pluto's not a planet anymore, either." Like Charon, the Jets are locked into an eternal orbit with the Raiders' Pluto, their eyes fixed forever on each other in their respective fortunes, destined never again to meet in on equal ground.

And what of Jim Carroll? It's hard to hear his name and not think of the late author of The Basketball Diaries, who died nearly two years ago. I saw that Jim Carroll interviewed a few times over the last ten years of his life and was horrified by how he aged so profoundly in his last four. At 60, he looked like a spectral version of himself. I can't help but read him and think of another dead author and addict, Frederick Exley, who wrote about his obsessions in and around sports. Like Walter Kirn, I met people in literature classes who thought both men were like self-sacrificial literary saints. Frankly, Jim Carroll #55 who played linebacker for the Jets fared better. Though perhaps not an artist, he is at least still alive.

****

We were recently talking about football players-turned-artists, and offensive guard Ernie Barnes #55 is probably the most famous associated with the franchise, although he often took pains to mention how unhappy he was with playing in New York, specifically for the Titans in 1960. In his online biography, we learn that

Barnes loathed being on the Titans. He said, “(New York) was a circus of ineptitude. The equipment was poor, the coaches not as knowledgeable as the ones in Baltimore. We were like a group of guys in the neighborhood who said let’s pretend we’re pros.”

If the AFL was the Mickey Mouse League that NFLers claimed it was, then the Titans were its Goofy. We know that the real culprit was Harry Wismer, the sportscaster turned entrepreneur who ran the team out of a New York City hotel room. But Barnes maintains that the club's lack of character was represented in the death of his friend Howard Glenn #66, whom we will talk about later. Barnes believes that the organization - such as it was - never really told the truth about Glenn's death. He thought that Glenn didn't die of a broken neck sustained in a game against the Los Angeles Chargers, as the team maintained, but of heat exhaustion, a cause of death that would have cast Head Coach Sammy Baugh in an even poorer light.

In 1959, Ernie Barnes was drafted out of North Carolina College by the Washington Redskins, a team that didn't hire black players. His name was "Ernest Barnes" officially, and it would seem that a player named "Ernest" wasn't someone of color to George Preston Marshall's racist organization. Once they realized it, the Redskins disavowed him. After playing for the Colts that season, Barnes was labeled "Ernie" in the Baltimore press, and the name stuck. After the Titans, he would play in the AFL for San Diego and Denver before retiring from football entirely in 1965. But even when he quit the Titans after their game against the Chargers, Barnes was already an artist. According to his biography link above, he studied art at college and frequently painted scenes from football and elsewhere, honing a craft that would ultimately sustain him in a way that very few artists could ever hope to imagine.

His work ultimately enabled him to be picked as the official artist of the 1984 Olympics, but you also recognize Barnes' painting if you watched Norman Lear's 1970's sitcom Good Times. Early productions of the show featured Barnes' painting of the Evans family in the closing credits. Later episodes, though, featured one of Barnes' most famous works, "Sugar Shack," which was also used on the cover of Marvin Gaye's 1976 album, I Want You. The Evans family was one of the very few black families on American TV at the time, other than Lear's Jeffersons. I watched the famous episode where James Evans dies, suddenly struck with the same kind of horror I felt when Jake Walsh brought me into the laundry room in our basement to show me where my parents hid my Christmas presents. To a cloistered white boy from Long Island, Good Times provided a view of African-American life that wasn't exactly accurate, but it was vivid and alive, like Barnes' shack.

Ernie Barnes' "Sugar Shack" (1976)

Barnes' final revelation that he wanted to quit his day job for good and paint for a living apparently came to him late in his football career while playing for the Broncos, when he says, "The sun hitting the unmuddied parts of the uniforms created a yellowish white, it was just gorgeous. I knew then it was time for me to get out of the game." In his 2009 obituary, he is described by friends as believing that art could educate. In this sense, the game was merely a vehicle through which he could find new meanings in a world that defined him narrowly by his race and by his job.

As a fan, I can understand at least the bit about finding out something valuable about human life by accident in sports. At a certain point, even when we go number by number, the love of it has nothing to do with football. Even then I don't always expect to learn something as broad and profound as I did reading about Ernie Barnes. Football was a paycheck that enabled him to explore his designs on painting, but I still feel his unhappy time with the Titans is as revelatory about him as anything he painted. Whatever our assumptions about football players, the man who quits a team in disgust over the death of a friend is perhaps an artist at heart.