Conversions

I became close with Eddie O'Fallon over the ensuing summer. He grew up with seven other siblings, yet despite (or because of) this cramped atmosphere, Eddie remained generally unfazed by the world’s inconveniences. He wasn’t very good at his studies, but that didn’t seem to bother him very much either. While I frustrated our third grade teacher with being uninterested in Halloween, Eddie inspired similar feelings because of his reluctance to study. But he wasn’t dumb.

He actually possessed a near-photographic memory. He was certainly as obsessive about football I was; he had memorized the names of all the Vikings' starting receivers, dating back to the early 1960s. He loved the Minnesota Vikings (which was strange for a Long Island boy) in a way that was more spiritual and sincere than Jake Walsh’s ephemeral interest in the Denver Broncos. Mrs. Donato didn’t ask him why he never concentrated such skills on learning the names of Spanish explorers, but then I don’t think she knew he had such a great memory.


Eddie loved the Vikings’ receivers, Ahmad Rashad and Sammy White. He loved to say the name Ahmad Rashad. I kept asking him what it meant, the name. Ahmad Rashad.

“It’s Mothlem,” he said, ssing a little through his very pronounced lisp. The school regarded it as a speech impediment, one that had so far defied every form of academic treatment. It seems funny to imagine blithely happy Eddie O’Fallon as the toughest case in speech therapy.

“He uthed to have a different name,” Eddie said. “Like Cathius Clay did.”

“Like who?” I asked, thumbing through his older brother’s copy of a 1972 NFL stamp collector’s book. That book was amazing.
“Whathtamatta with you? Don’t you know Cathius Clay?”
I wasn’t looking.

“Lookit me,” he said.
I did. Eddie said things with such sincerity it was impossible not to respond.
“Muhammad Ali?” he asked.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Was a guy named Cathius Clay. Don’t you know that?”

I didn’t. It was utterly startling. I must have sat there speechless for a moment.
“Are you OK?” Eddie asked.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“Why’d he change his name?” I asked.
“Because he became Mothlem,” Eddie said.
“What’s that?”

He circled his eyes round the room in despair. “I told you. Ittha religion. Like Jeethuth.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Only different.”

Neither Eddie nor I were at liberty to discuss how Christ did not play a part in Ithlam. However, the concept of changing one’s name to suit a religious transformation fascinated us, so he and I experimented with changing religions and, therefore, names. I said I would change my name to Origami Sylvester. I loved the word origami, and there was no better name than Sylvester.
Eddie chose Ahmad Orenthal. He couldn’t let go of Ahmad, while the surname was the “O” in "O.J." Simpson, of course. There was nothing to besmirch O.J.’s name in 1978, other than the fact that he was literally on his last legs in the 49ers’ backfield.

“What religion do we change to?” I asked once we signed our new names in blood.

It was a good question. Then Eddie gave me a look that conveyed that the answer was in front of us the whole time. He slapped my arm. His look was Why didn't I think of this earlier?

“Jehovath Witneth!”

A friend at school named Oscar Sanchez had brought in what looked like little pink Bibles, and we quietly read these together in class during “USSR” time, which stood for “Uninterrupted, Sustained, Silent Reading.” Oscar told us they were Bibles, at least. In the back of the class, he sometimes read stories to us about Jehovah, which he said was another name for Jesus. Sounded great. Even Paul Pacelli got into the act.

Although small, Pauly Pacelli had the physique of a rugged 30 year-old Sicilian fisherman. In gym class, I noticed that each of the muscles of his arms, shoulder and stomach were already well defined. He had a potentially emasculating name, but if you decided to point that out to him he would put you in a headlock until you passed out. However, Pauly's home life was problematic. While riding my bike one afternoon, I passed by Pauly’s house and saw his father - a slightly taller, slightly more muscular version of Pauly - standing on a stepladder against the house. I heard him make a noise of discontent. Aaaarrrgghh. At the bottom of the ladder were Pauly's mother and Pauly himself.

Mrs. Pacelli called up to her husband, saying, “I know you see her so just admit it!” I reckoned this meant Pauly's father could actually see a woman on the other side of the house from where he stood.

Pauly's dad responded by looking down toward his son. “Pauly?” he said with some relish, “Tell your mother she's fuckin’ paranoid."

And this Pauly did, probably knowing as little of its meaning as I. This little window into Pauly's world made me feel mysteriously sad for him, even if he had sometimes used my head as a knuckle sharpener at recess. I knew that Dad would never have spoken to Mom that way. And perhaps because of his sufferings, Pauly seemed to take to Oscar’s “Bible” teachings with real openness.


Our reading circle came to an end however when Eddie went to his Mom and told her that he was changing his name in order to become a Jehovah’s Witness, despite the fact that such a thing was not a requirement for conversion. He assumed that he’d be respected for making a sincere religious choice, just as Ahmad Rashad had been. This was America, after all. I had warned him that informing his mother about our reading group wouldn’t be a good idea, for I was learning that letting mothers in on plans generally didn’t result in anything good. Sure enough, Mrs. O’Fallon called both Mom and Mrs. Pacelli to report the scandal of secret Jehovah’s Witnesses proselytizing in the public schools. Eddie and I had to keep our Christian names, and Pauly Pacelli - who years later would spend a decade at Riker’s Island for attempted robbery, assault and possession of cocaine with intent to sell - was probably deprived of his only real chance at a spiritually edifying life.

Black and White

Jake Walsh only rooted for winning teams. During the 1977 season, he loved the Denver Broncos because they were winning every week. He kept telling everybody that he had been a Broncos fan all his short life, but it was an obvious lie. His love of football was always more expansive than mine, except when it came to his sense of racial diversity in the NFL.

While playing football at recess, Jake and I would pretend to be our favorite players. He was Denver’s quarterback Craig Morton, and therefore he objected to my wanting to be Wesley Walker. He insisted that I couldn’t be. I asked him why. He said I had to be a Denver receiver. Obviously, the question of his being Richard Todd was not even entertained. The Jets were simply not good enough for him. I knew how fussy Jake could be about wanting his way. So I said OK, I would be Haven Moses, the Broncos’ wide receiver. But Jake still said no. I didn’t understand what his problem was. He insisted I had to choose somebody else.


“How about Riley Odoms?” I asked - Denver’s huge tight end. That would appease him.

But Jake shook his head vigorously. No. The bangs of his red, Adam Rich/bowl haircut whipped back and forth. I still didn’t get it.

“Rob Lytle,” he said. “You’re Rob Lytle.”
I paused for a moment. Then I said, “Rob Lytle’s a running back, not a wide receiver.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jake said impatiently. “You’re Rob Lytle.”

It still didn’t make sense, except in Jake’s universe. I would have done well to remember a conversation Mom and I had earlier in the 1977 football season. One afternoon, while the Jets were away at Foxboro and we were watching them lose on TV, Mom asked me who my favorite players on the Jets were. I named Richard Todd, Randy Rasmussen, Mickey Schuler, Lou Piccone, and David Knight.

“Now that’s interesting,” she said, suspiciously.
“What?”
“Well, they’re all white,” she said. “Do you have any favorite players who are black?”

Of course. But they were black players.
I never immediately thought of black players as being my favorites, even as I thought highly of Pittsburgh’s Franco Harris, the Colts’ Lydell Mitchell, and the Jets’ Richard Caster. But my favorites? Among my extensive magic marker drawings of all my favorite players around the NFL, those same players were never actually drawn as black. They were faces without color. White. Was that supposed to be something racist, or was that being color-blind? Mom’s question didn’t so much change as perplex me. Why didn’t I name any black players? There were no exceptionally good African-American players on the Jets that season because they had few exceptional players of any race to speak of. So I wondered about this.

Mom’s observation started to make sense when I realized what Rob Lytle was that Riley Odoms and Haven Moses were not: white. Later that week, I insisted to Jake once again that I be Haven Moses to his Craig Morton. Haven Moses was a really good receiver.

Profanity was Jake’s casual address. “I told you. You can’t be, you asshole,” said Jake.

“Yes I can,” I said, unclear.
“No, you can’t,” he repeated. “You’re Fred Bilentnikoff.” He suddenly decided it.
“Wait,” I said, confused even further. “No. Bilentnikoff plays for Oakland.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Jake said, as boys gathered around us, “You can’t be Haven Moses.”
“I can’t be Haven Moses, and I can’t be Wesley Walker.”
“No.”
“Yes he can,” said Eddie O’Fallon aloud to the group around us. “What’s the problem?” Eddie was Simon to Jake’s Jack in Lord of the Flies. In this, he vindicated me somewhat.

It was his absolute simplicity of mind that made Eddie O'Fallon the first true saint I ever knew. Without any of the casual malice that possesses children at times, Eddie somehow brought the issue back to its essentials. The logic of prejudice simply didn’t operate in his mind.

Then, Pauly Fiorentino spoke up. He got what Jake’s problem was. He recognized that I was supposed to pick a white player, so he added a helpful observation. “He can too be Haven Moses,” he said. Pauly pointed at me. “Look at his hair.”

My hair.
My vagabond brown curls had exploded out of my head, and not being very conscientious of my own looks, and with my mother thinking her first-born to be handsome just as he was, no one in my house thought to have it cut. While the Afro look in the 70’s was acceptable for an Irish boy if you were in Thin Lizzy, most boys with whom I played at recess were still strictly flat haired. In other words, Pauly had helped the all-white recess field discover the Other - me. I was Black.

It might have appeared that a racial understanding had been achieved on the recess ground, but it was offset by my new nicknames. I wish I could say I experienced some pride on the bottom of a pile-on of smelly, screaming boys. Instead I felt only the requisite shame that most children wear in place of real wisdom.

Raiders 28 Jets 27 - 10/23/77

Dad did not renew the season tickets for 1977.

We didn’t have to worry about what to do with him on weekends because he had to work more Saturdays and Sundays. Now the Jets were never sold out at home (the Giants did sell out week after week, despite their equally poor performance). Even today, in the present era of Direct TV, the NFL dictates that without a sellout, a game has to be blacked out on TV in the local area of the home team; thus there were no Jets games at Shea that season on TV. I just told myself that this was all just a new test of loyalty.

I had become accustomed to the visceral experience of Shea. I made Charlie giggle at Mass by imitating Shea’s announcer: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN (gentlemen): PLEASE RISE AND GREET OUR CELEBRENT, FATHER (father) SHERIDAN (sheridan). Mom thumped me for that one. The last straw, though, was midway through Mass when I mimicked the noise of the planes that flew low over Shea Stadium before landing at LaGuardia Airport. I don’t even remember how Mom reacted to that, which is a little frightening to consider.

When Dad came back from work on the Sunday evening of the Jets’ opener at Houston in 1977, he found me slumped on the floor of the den. Awful, as so many of their openers are, the Jets lost 20-0, thus confirming in his mind everything that he had thought about renewing tickets.

“Marty…,” he said, his voice going down an octave in sympathy, “it’s just not worth it. We would have been miserable at Shea this year.”

I said nothing.

“You’re going to need a new distraction this year,” he said. “Why don’t you go outside and see what your buddies are doing?”

Buddies? Who still used that word? My buddies were not as important to me as the Jets, though they were probably better at football. I wasn’t ready to give up watching games by Flushing Bay, even if Dad was. He hated spending money on a loser. He hated the long drive from North Merrick to Flushing. He hated the dilapidated and unsafe Flushing Meadow-Corona Park just outside the stadium. He despaired of the drunken losers at the game who were watching a loser play, and he winced at the association he thought I might make with them. He didn’t want to be a Guy anymore. He wanted to be a reliable husband and a good father. He and I saw life differently.

As if to emphasize the loss, the Jets actually managed a 2-2 start, including a last minute 30-27 win over the Patriots. The week before Halloween the Jets played the defending champion Oakland Raiders at Shea. Dad was away on business again. Much of the 1977 season would be spent with Mom, following games on WOR. On the day of the Raiders game, Mom, Jamie and I went to the A&S department store in Hempstead, and we listened to the game on the car radio. I was already maturing into a skeptical, if loyal, fan. As the game started, I could feel an anxious hesitancy arising out of me, the kind that accompanies me now, in the present time, with every Jets game. Don’t get your hopes up.

I was growing up, I suppose. I wasn’t all the way there yet, but I was already beginning to form a gray filter through which I could look at the world. Today, this filter has evolved into a veritable philosophy of full-blown doubt that persists throughout the week leading up to a Sunday Jets game and - win or lose – continues well beyond the game into the ensuing week, so that every day seems like Sunday. Yet it has also come to establish itself as an entire way of being for my life beyond football and has grown larger than my fandom, forming a worldview that manifests itself everywhere in my adult life: Don’t get your hopes up. On October 23, 1977, though, it still seemed innocent enough to invoke it as a defense mechanism of short order. The Jets were playing the champion Raiders: Don’t get your hopes up.

At this time, the Jets were the youngest team in football. Their 1977 draft had included players who were already starters - people who would eventually nettle all my expectations in the decade to come: Richard Todd, Wesley Walker, Bruce Harper, Mickey Shuler, Marvin Powell, Joe Klecko.
I listened forlornly on the car radio for the fire alarm sound at kickoff. Oakland received, and the Raiders quickly scored with a Mark van Eegan touchdown at the end of a 78-yard drive.

“You can change the station,” I told my mother.
“That’s a terrible attitude,” she said. “We should see how they do from here. They might score.” She threw the pronoun we with regard to the Jets. “There’s nothing worse than a fair-weather fan,” she added, strangely. Was she talking about Dad?


No sooner did the Jets have the ball than Richard Todd, the Jets’ replacement for Namath, threw a 70 yard bomb touchdown to Richard Caster. He would throw yet another to Wesley Walker in the first quarter. Only the Hand of Fate, or rather Its Foot, in the form of Jets’ place-kicker Pat Leahy, could stop the Gang Green;
his missed point-after made it 14-13 in favor of Oakland at first quarter’s end. For the first time in my memory, the Jets were challenging a championship team.

Don’t get your hopes up.

Or maybe I could. By the second quarter, Mom brought Jamie and me into A&S, and I could feel an electric nervousness building within me again. I begged her to let me stay in appliances, where I might catch the Jets score on the NBC Game of the Week being shown on dozens of Zenith Trinitrons. The score momentarily flashed on screen, and to my amazement, it was now Jets 20 Raiders 14 in the second quarter. Mother of God.

On the way home we listened to Marty Glickman’s play-by-play on WOR. The score stayed that way into halftime. I can vividly recall Glickman’s harried voice, normally laced with Doom and Loss, this time saying, “Unbelievable as it may seem, fans, the Jets have actually come out for this game!” He then allowed us a moment to listen to the gratified Shea crowd as the Jets headed for the locker room. When we got home, Mom shut off the car radio in the driveway, but I sat in the backseat of our Nova with my face pressed against the vinyl headrest.

“You have to come in now,” she said, hiding a smile. “You can listen inside, too, you know.”

It was no use. I was numb with an accelerated state of mental growth. My brain’s synapses were now firing in new directions, charting neural pathways for heretofore unknown concepts. Since October 23, 1977, I have measured time by being able to catalogue memories within their contemporary historical context – all because the halftime score was 20-14.

My primitive childhood memory bank systems were now upgraded by the empowering and novel experience of the Jets beating the Raiders. Not only that, but it was also as if the colors of the world around me suddenly became vibrant as never before. The blue of the sky was uniquely complex, as were the blues of the half-shells in which the Virgin Mary stood on the fading green autumn lawns throughout North Merrick.
Within the sky were different kinds of clouds, each forming a unique shape of something recognizable on Earth. My mind’s eye, in the process of stitching together Marty Glickman’s dramatic narrative, had somehow activated a range of signals that would, from now on, enable everything I encountered in both the foreground and the background of my experience to receive a fuller, more detailed accounting.

Listen to this Shea crowd.

And I wasn’t there for it. Shit.

And yet....

And yet, as it was, the Jets did not defeat the Raiders that day. Oakland would come back in the second half; Pat Leahy’s errant point-after in the first half would prove to be the first of his career’s few but fatal misses. The Raiders won, 28-27. But still, the strange order of things, the mysteries and paradoxes of life, were beginning to take shape, if not real clarity.

As the priests told us in catechism, though no one knew the time of his or her unfortunate departure from this Earth, there was a promised order in the seeming madness of God’s plan. The Jets-Raiders game made this paradox clearer. No halftime lead was ever safe. No division lead was secure. But the game had the potential to punctuate the fan’s life with moments of victory, joy, and wisdom. Like death, you didn’t know when these happy moments might come.

Bad Dog

As a kid, I believed big guys were supposed to be like Rosey Grier or Mean Joe Greene - gentle giants. I don't even think kids would believe such illusions anymore. Large professionals are obviously like Michael Vick and Chris Benoit - bloated, erratic, probably homicidal. They cannot be content with being large and powerful; they must be more so, and at the expense of others.

Seeing that this is a blog written from the point of view of being a football fan, it's more appropriate to talk about Michael Vick. If the indictment against him is to be believed, more than fifty dogs were found on Vick's property, presumably bred and kept for fighting alone. Yes, it sickens me. Yes, it's inhumane. My wife is a dog lover who notices and makes noises about every dog she sees on the sidewalk. I can't help but think of the countless links lost in the chain of human psychology between someone like her and someone who hangs dogs after they lose their fighting ability.

I think it's also ironically damning to American spectatorship. Overlooking the longstanding rural American tradition of dogfighting, there will always be something American about having other people do your fighting for you. It's a luxury you earn, and while Vick may not have appreciated the jeering he got from Atlanta fans last year, he knew he had to apologize for giving them the finger because he is paid so much. He's still doing our fighting for us on the field, and he is being compensated accordingly. Yet he is, ultimately, disposable. No, he will not be drowned or beaten to death like the dogs he is alleged to have killed without even a thought. However, the disposability of the competing animal is something I find intriguing here, especially as both the NFL and the Players Association look the other way at competing cases of long-term injury among the league's retired players.

In this way, someone so disassociated from his humanity as Vick is alleged to be deserves to be punished for stupidity as well as cruelty. He does not even possess the basic intelligence to recognize that his actions serve as a metaphor for how athletes thrown into the ring are treated when they're not needed anymore.

It is the essence of American sports to keep playing to win, even when you have nothing else to gain. Instead of going on a nice vacation, pursuing a graduate degree in something, doing volunteer work, or even devoting his talents in his free time to addressing the forgotten players of the past, someone like the kind of person Michael Vick is alleged to be will always fall back on the limitless need to compete. How is it that we do not see that, stripped of all the money and celebrity, people like Vick and Chris Benoit are never trained to be anything other than dogs in the ring? No wonder retired players who suffer from the long-term effects of football's violence have such a hard time making their case to the very same fans who cheered them on in the first place.

The Strong Island

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What do you mean what happened?"

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

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

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

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

"Carl or Rosey?"

"Carl!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

“I’m OK,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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


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

Colts 20 Jets 0 - 1976

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

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

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

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

How…how?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear John - 1975

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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