Jesse Chatman Positive for Diuretic

It's bizarre, this ridiculous world. We share our lives with one another in ways that defy the basic codes of privacy and personal space. But that's the way it is. I write a blog that is almost exclusively read by myself, but even still I can't pretend that there isn't an enormous world out there gaping at its own senselessness, wondering at times at how stupefying is the scope of human life, how bloated the need for human domination of the natural world, how awful the infinite dimensions of the universe by comparison. You can believe you are alone, but every thought, every word and deed has already had a precedent somewhere out there. Even if you don't believe in the Almighty, you are not alone in the universe.

I will now offer the crudest possible story to illustrate my point. One afternoon last year at work, I experienced a particularly uncomfortable churning sensation in my lower intestine that I instinctively recognized - experienced man of 38 that I was - as my body's signal to unburden itself of solid waste. The sensation was more dire than usual, so I made quickly for the restroom. The event itself requires no description. We have literally all been there before. In situations such as these, I often seek a facility removed from the more traveled restrooms on the first floor. The fact that these washrooms are marked "Faculty Men" is only a slight relief. As a boy, I lived in horror of using public restrooms. This neurosis grew into a cathartic meltdown when I needed to similarly act without hesitation in the toilet of the boys' locker room as a high school freshman after a particularly grueling cross country practice. The olfactory remnant of this event was greeted by the suddenly incoming varsity football team with horrific blasphemies and genuine promises to violently end my life. I was so mortified that I would have submitted had they caught me before I ran out of the locker room.

Back at work, after completing the necessary task, I left the Faculty Men's in a similarly condemned state. However, I quickly realized to my horror that a trusted, respected colleague was about to enter with his own intentions, not knowing what aromatic horror awaited him. We locked eyes, and, coward that I am, I was unable to communicate the truth that I had made the Faculty Men's Room an uninhabitable place of business. There are euphemistic phrases like those employed even in this very entry. But my own sense of shame, combined with my feelings of failure at being to keep this mortification to myself, left me without the ability to speak. I smiled wanly, pathetically, and walked on.

Naturally he found me later. I was sitting in the faculty lounge, grading. I could feel his eyes on me. There was nothing I could do but look up and say what needed to be said.

"I don't really know what to say," I said. "I really have no excuse. I'm sorry."

"Not at all," he said compassionately. He opened up the newspaper. "Although I do feel like I have a window into your soul."

* * *

What was I saying? Did I have a point here?

My wife asked me about the Jets' injury status in preseason and I answered, "We're fine. We're great. Pity the Giants, really." It was then that I immediately got word of Jesse Chatman being suspended for violation of the NFL's substance abuse policy. The story on him was that he has a weight problem that disappeared while with Miami last year, hence giving him a second chance at a career. When you lose 60 pounds, how do you gain it back in all the right places? I myself suggest a diet of SSRI's and donuts. I don't know what Jesse did. His agent has pointed out that Chatman's positive test was from last December, not from a recent test.

But what's interesting is that the actual results only showed the presence of a diuretic often used to mask the presence of a steroid. It's probably not Ex-Lax. (Does Ex-Lax still exist)? Neither was it very likely coffee, oatmeal, McDonald's fries, cauliflower, watermelon, broccoli, Granny Smith apples, cigarettes, or any of the other things I find efficacious to my spastic colon on any given workday. I realize that the very thing that brings shame to a grown fallen-away Catholic man - the business of taking what a college roommate and fellow Jets fan once called a "Mark Duper" - is also essential to the maintenance of an athlete's weight and his masking of the rules of fair play.

But is the business surrounding this offensive diuretic also a window into Eric Mangini's secretive, isolating soul? After all, Chatman is being suspended for only four games. A friend of mine laughed off Chatman's suspension when I mentoned it to him - a natural response in an age when football players are shot, shot at and changing their names to "Ocho Cinco." It's only the four-game kind of suspension. Sort of like what the kids who've done hard time say when they react to a three-day suspension from school.

But did Mangini know the results of Chatman's December tests when he brought him on? Chatman did have an awesome game against the Eagles, but will he be similarly talented five weeks from now? Will he be flabby or thin? Does the coach know something we don't? If anything, maybe now among all three - Washington, Jones and the potentially modified Chatman - might equal one good running back.

I really haven't got any further cohesive theme to tie together this entry. I'm waiting on the final cuts of the preseason. I confess that the brief, stalwart performance Jesse Chatman put in against the Eagles threw me into sensations of hope for our backfield, and I feel like the news of his positive test left me in a catharsis that might yet spaz my colon a little more than Sumatra coffee. The volume of unrealized expectation and hope has built up so profoundly, that if it doesn't put me back into the crapper, it might yet make me bear the contents of my soul to my colleagues. It's what being a fan is all about. You cannot exist alone, harboring hopes and dreams, rooting for a team that plays in a division that also houses a club that could easily roll off another 18-1 season. It's no use hiding it. You have to perform your manly task and run the risk of exposing yourself to a world that will know the putrid truth. I am a Jets fan, though in exile. The very same colleague (and Eagles fan) who became the unfortunate witness to my intestinal ruin that sad day last year heard me complain yesterday about Chatman's failed diuretic test.

He smiled, obligingly. "Well," he said. "Tough shit, I guess."

Jets 27 Eagles 20 - Preseason Game #4

In the annual Jets-Eagles Meaningless Bowl, I actually glimpsed shades of seeming hope. There were suddenly answers to two offensive questions: Does anyone really know a good backup QB anywhere in a green and white uniform? and Does anyone promise to gain more than two yards a carry - NOT you, Thomas Jones? The answers to these questions were suddenly apparent last night here in Philadelphia, where I reside. No, I did not attend last night's game at Lincoln Field. In fact, at times, especially when Kevin Kolb was running the Eagles offense, I found myself switching over to the Cubs-Phillies game. Then I went to bed around 9:30 pm. Sitting through two three-hour motivational talks this week, both intended to get us psyched to teach a new school year, was exhausting enough. I think they put those things together to make us long to get back to work with our adolescent students that much more. Preseason education sucks about as much as preseason football.

Ah, yes. Of course, the answers came in the form of the other Brett and a Chatman - Ratliff and Jesse, respectively. Question: how do Ratliff and Favre avoid the confusion that their identical first names present? Answer: Easy. Ratliff is "You There," while the Favre is "Brett" or "Sir." I myself was needlessly worried about the extent to which Brett Favre's nose would feel out of joint about not starting a game, but I suppose I needn't have worried because the legend himself says it is no big deal. Then I said to myself, Self - are we going to worry the whole year about how Brett is feeling about being on the Jets? Like an ugly duck afraid that his hot date is going to ditch him, yes. It's hard to imagine a Jets fan not worrying about Brett Favre thinking exactly what he, well, actually said when he arrived: "What have I gotten myself into?" Brett, Sir, it is what we have been asking for years.

With Sir Brett on the sidelines, it was nice to see someone else steal the show last night, and while neither Ratliff nor Erik Ainge astounded, they didn't appall, either. Mind you, we once thought similarly of Clemens at another Meaningless Bowl with the Eagles last year; maybe it's just that our second team offensive line is really just a much better offensive line than the Eagles' second team defensive line. I have never done online dating, but I guess that the process of meeting and greeting on the interweb and setting up a subsequent appointment is not unlike watching preseason games and deciding how your year is going to go. Caution.

The show was actually stolen by Jesse Chatman, who almost took my breath away. Running, catching, a modestly prayerful touchdown celebration. Passing and receiving yards impressive. I mean, each time I found myself close to getting a little too excited over one of his runs - like his breakaway YAC from Erik Ainge in the third quarter - I just kept having to jolt myself to reality: It's a dream, only a dream. And it's fading now...fading away... This is preseason.

Now that I'm back at work, my co-workers find me setting up my classroom, and they congratulate me as if my wife had just given birth or as if I had just gotten married. They look at me and ask aloud, "Do you feel different? Do you like your new life?" While it would be nice to imagine that I actually accomplished something on my own of which they might speak with such anticipation and praise, I know that they're just asking about having Brett Favre as my quarterback. He keeps me up at night worrying about his health, but, y'know - it's a magical thing. I acknowledge the strangeness of it all, how peculiar it seems even now after nearly a month of it. I'm still making breakfast for him in the morning. It's almost as if the honeymoon's still going. But what the hell can I say? They look at me exactly as an Eagles fan does to a Jets fan. Even despite our playing the Eagles last night, all this past week my colleagues felt happy for me. I am not a Giants fan. I am no threat to the always fragile Philadelphia ego. "I'm happy for you, man," they say. "Really happy for you." Knowing a little of the Philadelphia mind - one I have come to acquire just a little myself - if Favre doesn't work out, then I'll probably be met with derision by the same people near the end of the semester. "Well," they'll say. "I could have told you that that whole freakin' thing wasn't going to work out." Indeed. Indeed, you could have.

September Nears

As I return back to work this week, I see the upcoming teaching year as part of the continuing arc of my career. I think about how many things I have yet to successfully put into practice after nine years of teaching public school. Technically, I should have learned by now how to put all my grades on a computer. More of my lessons should have had their start on the web. I should have a file cabinet full of lessons ready to go instead of six copy boxes containing mismatched pages with yellowing corners. I should change that lame bulletin board with the reference to old white writers whom no reads because, well, no one reads. What the hell is wrong with me? Ah, but there's always September, the month of new beginnings in education and in American football. God bless September. She's a harsh mistress.

We are unused, I think, to thinking optimistically about the seasons ahead; last year caught a lot of us off-guard. One of my colleagues is the only Jets fan I know within the Delaware Valley, and both he and I, each with a lifetime of grief to recall, were beguiled at how bad the Jets really were in 2007. We're trying not to be too promiscuous with hope this coming year, even with the radical changes in identity the Jets have undergone since August. Now many prognosticators are even imagining that we are perhaps a "sleeper" team for the coming year. I actually think Chad's going to beat us in the opener. But maybe I'm just overcompensating. I don't know what the hell I think anymore.

But that's not important, either. When I tried to quit drinking some years back, a rather intense non-drinking alcoholic advised me, "Don't think, stupid!" which...I don't know...just didn't seem like good advice even at the time. I mean, don't think? "Thinking just gets you in trouble," he added, failing to include that abstract thought is also what separates human beings from leopards, or ducks, or Labradors. I didn't argue with him, and not just because his name was "Sniper." Instead I consulted Eastern philosophy to help me to understand that while emotional thoughts within the mind were inevitable, emotions did not have to inevitably control my mind. So I took up meditation for a while.

Long story short, now I don't drink and I don't meditate, but I guess along the way I have learned the fine art of appreciating what I can and cannot control. I'm not very good at applying that appreciation often, but the truth is that nothing can help mediate the helplessness of being a football fan during the season. It's not as if I have a plan any better than the ones Mangini and Callahan have in mind for the offense. It's not as if I can will the Jets to have a more effective running game. It's not as if I can teach Washington and Jones to hit the holes better, to make Laverneus Coles talk to Brett Favre, or make Coles grow taller, or make Justin Miller feel better, or Vernon Gholsten learn faster. I don't have the solution to the Jets continuing problems in the secondary. And problems? Why so many penalties on false starts? I am so...alone.

Well, no. And how can I worry like this about something over which I have no control when I can't even find the will to clean out my classroom alcove? Does being a fan become indispensable when it mirrors the true helplessness of our lives? or does the experience act as a fiction of helplessness, a convenient existential excuse for not doing the things we have to do? Ah, screw it. I'll stop thinking now.

Commemoratives

This is what fans of other teams with bigger stars go through. No sooner did the second week of preseason come to a close than offers for expensive merchandise came knocking at our door. Yesterday my wife received an offer from the Danbury Mint - a lesser version of the Franklin Mint, I would gather - to purchase a commemorative plaque depicting Brett Favre in his debut for the New York Jets. We see a picture of Favre throwing one of his six passing attempts in his first Jets game, the preseason match against Washington. "Two 24kt gold-plated medallions and a replica ticket to the Jets' 2008 home opener" accompany the photograph. One medallion depicts Favre without eyeballs, making him look a little like he's been commemorated upon his death. No word on whether these medallions can be traded for food or whether they possess any particular healing qualities.

Also not available for bartering is a "replica ticket" that depicts a decidedly grumpy, almost disconsolate Eric Mangini. He looks as if he has been asked to look at the camera for a picture specifically to be used on a replica ticket.

Total for this commemoration is $129, plus $10 shipping and handling, payable in three easy installments of $46.30. My satisfaction is as completely guaranteed as Super Bowl III, but I will pass.

I can't be too critical of a bad purchase when I have personally contemplated the purchase of plenty of Jets crap. But when I buy crap, it is done so to commemorate things that are only important to great moments in The Martin Roche Experience. This is the essence of the fan's life. If the game did not actually have an impact on our daily lives, then we wouldn't spend our time so morbidly fascinated by it all year. For example, the 1975 Welch's jelly glasses I bought on Ebay commemorate all of the orange juice and milk (orange juice in the NFC glass, milk in the AFC glass) I consumed while staring at the conference helmets, twirling them round and round and round, memorizing every nuance, finding coherence in the disordered universe of a neurotic childhood. Gently hand wash, please.




And I don't even know what the New York Jets light switch cover commemorates, other than a wish I did not even know existed.

Jints

I post this picture because it is one of those unsung, unheralded moments in Jets history - the opening kickoff of the first Jets-Giants game, which Mike Battle ran back (leaping like a gazelle, actually) for a touchdown over the New York Giants in a hot August preseason game at the Yale Bowl in 1969. I was almost six months old, the nation had owned the moon for a month, and about 150 miles away from New Haven, both your uncles were looking for a Port-O-San at Woodstock. Once Mike Battle scored, the Jets then spent the rest of that humid, bright day pummeling the Giants into submission. Like Hal at Agincourt, it was a brief victory, followed by years attrition, illness and, ultimately, total loss. But for one moment, the Jets were the only football team in New York.

Oy me. Tonight's Jets-Giants game is not on in Philly. Instead, while following the game online, I will be watching the Steelers and Vikings in Minnesota. For the love of God, I hope that the Vikings will not be wearing their Bob Fosse outfits. I do not know what kind of pride you can have when you are taking on the Steelers in purple leggings. I don't know why I should care, except that I have a latent sympathy for the old Vikes from their days of unbeatable home field advantage. They were one of my three adopted proxy teams during the first great Jets miasma, the 9-43 years of 1975-77. Basically, I rooted for them in the playoffs, the one place where I knew I wouldn't find the Jets, and Minnesota was well in the thick of it back then. What clinched my proxy feeling was the loathsome outcome of the 1975 playoff game at Bloomington against the Cowboys, the game that is the titular owner of the first "Hail Mary" pass. Like anything else associated with the Cowboys, such a claim is a ridiculous fraud born of the worst form of American hubris. How could I ever root against the Vikings when they were victims of Drew Pearson's push off of Nate Wright?

This well edited tailgating retrospective on the moment epitomizes the kind of fans and game the Vikings were once known for. In the present, we see stout descendants of actual pillaging Norsemen drinking beer in a parking lot, dressed for the kind of shattering cold that, strangely enough, was not in evidence on the day of the 1975 game in question. Two things here: it is impossible to appreciate the madness of that playoff game without forgetting that the referee who blew the interference call was then tagged by a bottle to the head from one of the end zone fans. This is a remarkable detail often forgotten, one that transcends the Lake Wobegon stereotype of Minnesotans as withdrawn, shy, and largely harmless folk. Second, it is important to remind ourselves that since they left the frigid, abandoned-by-God confines of Metropolitan Stadium, the Vikings have never returned to the Super Bowl.

Back to our heroes: An uncanny number of the past and present preseason squabbles between Jets-Giants have been humdrum, awful games - usually won by a point, a touchdown, or by apathy - 16-15, 15-14, 16-14, 10-0. Nothing at all like the circus Aaron Rodgers and Jay Cutler apparently put on display last night. Whereas during that hot weekend in 1969, as his country transformed all around him without his really understanding it yet, my father saw Don Maynard leading a chorus of "Goodbye Allie" for Jets fans to sing at the conclusion of the game at the Yale Bowl. Maynard sang it for Allie Sherman, the coach who cut him from the Giants in the late fifties. Jets 37 Giants 14. Dad still remembers it.

True to the drama of the moment, Sherman lost his job that season and never made it to the Hall of Fame. Maynard kept his job, and his bronze bust is visible in Canton, Ohio. I will take whatever belated pride I can. Beat the Jints.

Bizarro

Jets fans are not Packers fans, and maybe it's in their nature. Join with me right now as we imagine once again the parallel universe that Earth occupies somewhere in the cosmos where Al Gore won the 2000 election and the Jets have not suffered the misfortunes, mismanagement, bad coaching, bad drafting, bad luck of their post-1969 history. In this alternate universe, Brett Favre was drafted by the Jets in 1991 and not by Atlanta. Of course as Favre himself admitted, had he been offered the chance to play in New York, he might not ever have had a career anywhere at all. I don't think he meant any disrespect by that; yes, it would have meant being coached by Bruce Coslet and Ritchie Kotite. But without the aid a good front line to protect him, his career might well have gone the way of Browning Nagle's. As he himself is aware, Favre might also have killed himself with the reckless abandon and self-destruction that the city that never sleeps offers to the kind of hellraiser he was reputed to have been when he first broke into the NFL.

Still, let's say things worked out swimmingly for Favre and the Jets back in the Bizarro Jets world of the 1990's. By 2008, Bizarro New York Jets legend Brett Favre leaves the Meadowlands this summer (actually, the Jets would probably have had their own Lambeau by that time, maybe even at Willets Point) after hemming and hawing over his retirement and ends up somewhere else for the beginning of the season. I propose that even then, Jets fans would not have worn his jersey in an act of grateful respect the way so many Packer fans did to the second preseason game in the real world of last week. Even in their Bizarro world, Jets fans are not good sports. It's in their blood. They are not polite or respectful. I suppose it would have been easier and nicer to have been a Packers fan, a Chiefs fan or the 12th man of the Seahawks organization. No dice.

Brett Favre's Debut II

Seasons end. Seasons begin. This time next week I will be digesting the business surrounding our new school administration, the new course I'm teaching, the old course I've made my own. I'm an old pro at this, but lots of things have changed, and nearing Labor Day, I'm not quite where I thought I would be. But I can do this. I've handled beginnings and endings before. I guess I'm just like Brett Favre. Just like him, in fact.

I expected to go to Hofstra this week in order to see the Jets say farewell to their old training grounds. I did not. I attended none of the practices this summer, which is kind of too bad - except that it isn't. I have no excuse except that I didn't feel like schlepping from Philly to Long Island to see the Jets train. This is contrary to my previous feelings about "seeing the greatest QB ever to wear the number 4 blah, blah...," but like many Jets fans who did not attend Brett Favre's preseason opener at the Meadowlands, I just didn't feel like it.

You know, I too was surprised at the number of no-shows at the Meadowlands for Favre's preseason debut, but unlike Peter King, I sympathize with the fans. Maybe people were at the shore. Maybe people were spending time with their adolescent kids. Maybe they were in a nice air-conditioned bar getting hammered, complaining about their PSL's. Maybe they were at home, fixing something that got loose under the sink. Maybe they were arguing with a spouse. Maybe they were out on a date. Maybe they were tucking their little ones in. There are lots of good things to do instead of attending the second preseason game. There are even lots of good things to do in lieu of seeing Brett Favre wear a Jets uniform for the first time. Jets fans are a little like the "difficult" and "reluctant" students I teach who never really seem to like what you're teaching, never appreciate it when you're teaching your ass off for them. They greet your extra help after school like they're taking toll money from you on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. But those students are always the ones who wave their arms off the next year and say, "Mr. Roche! Yo! My favorite teacher!" Really? Why? I thought you didn't give a damn. Well, they don't. Except that they do. Afterwards, though. It's complicated.

Because of Gate D, because of the cheers for Chad's injury in the opener last year, Jets fans are now the convenient (and often justified) target of the talking heads at ESPN and Sports Illustrated. I spent the better part of the last two days digesting Peter King's anger at the disrespect his friend Brett Favre got when so few fans showed up for his debut. So here's yet another reason to say Jets fans have no pride, no self-respect, and on and on.

Maybe. I mean, these are Jets fans. Look who we are rooting for. The team that won the Super Bowl over New England...oh, wait. No. How embarrassing. I'm confusing us with that other team from "New York." Gosh. Is my face red? Green, more likely. Envy and shame have a corrosive effect on the conscious and subconscious processing of the human mind. We have always has been the runt and mutt of the litter. Fans behave accordingly. Sometimes it's ugly. Sometimes it's just a matter of being difficult.

So maybe it's nurture and not nature. Like the blue collar 11th graders I teach who spend their Monday mornings discussing who got arrested over the weekend - as opposed to the better off kids I teach who spent the weekend studying - Jets fans have not had the opportunity to hone the skills normally attributed to the better class of person. It would be easy to blame the former; why can't they just be more like the latter? But what does it take to be a Jets fan when really you could just root for Big Blue? It may be loyalty, dedication, love, faith, and other such wonderful traits. Or maybe not. Maybe Jets fans feed off of a hearty KFC bowl mass of passive aggression, fear, self-hatred, shame, and insecurity. Despair and disappointment are a hearty stew, but they can be an elixir, too. You get used to it. And it changes you. So you don't show up.

Actually, I don't know if any of that is a good explanation of what Peter King is upset about. Of course none of this character analysis can excuse Jets fans' garbage behavior at Gate D last year, but those were the specific actions of a minority of fans. Not showing up for Favre in exhibition, however, should not be equated with the sociopathology of a bunch of sick fans last year. There's an enormous difference.

The no-shows are just parcel of the general air of grumpiness and disconsolation in Gang Green Land, and there should be no apologies for that. It's a tough crowd, but then they're not the only ones. Football itself is a large, grumpy person's sport. It's sad, but here it is - I wouldn't take my kid to a Jets game the way Dad took me to Shea back in the day, but then I wouldn't take my kid to Lincoln Field to see an Eagles game, either. Some places are just not suitable for kids. That's why baseball exists. That's the reality.

And finally, if - as is suggested by the way the PSL's are promoted - fans really are investing in their seats the way you think of investing in other things like education, cars, boats, etc., then maybe fans are entitled to do whatever they like with their investment - like not use it for a preseason game. Owning the license to your seat does not require you to be a good sport. If sportswriters, the self-appointed gatekeepers of good sportsmanship, do not appreciate that truth, I would hope that Brett Favre does.