NY Jets #19 - Part 2 (Includes Profanity)

While riding Amtrak from Philadelphia to Penn Station in the spring of 2000, a guy in the seat directly behind me, who certainly sounded at high decibel like someone from Jamaica, was nearly spitting in my ear while conversing to the person on the other end of his cell phone. He insisted, time and time again, that The Bitch left him with nothing. The bitch took his money. All his money.

"What am I gonna do?" he asked, over and over again - not so much even to the lucky person on the other end after a while, it seemed, but to the world and to God. "What the fuck am I gonna do?"

It went on like this the whole way. It was OK at first, maybe around Croydon, but it was really old by the time we reached Newark. I couldn't move my seat; there was nowhere else available in the car, and I wasn't about to risk losing it in an effort to look through the crowded train just because I couldn't stand hearing it over and over. The bitch left me with nothing. Nothing. What am I gonna do? New York wasn't far by then.

Finally, New York. I got up, and as he and I exited to our separate ways at the station, he caught sight of my New York Jets t-shirt and addressed me in a familiarly distressed tone, as if it were part of his ongoing troubles:

"No!"

I looked at him.

"Holy shit. What the fuck they gonna do without Keyshawn, now? Huh? They are so fucked. What they gonna do?"

Well, we know what Keyshawn Johnson #19 did. He won a Super Bowl with Tampa Bay that the Philadelphia Eagles should gone to and won. I still resent him for leaving the Jets for more money, more respect, more rings the way that I resented John Riggins for doing the same in 1976. But then Keyshawn went and got kicked off the Bucs a little while afterward. He was the first player of this era to whom I had ever heard of this happening. But regardless of where he went, Keyshawn was, deep down, always that petulantly difficult author/rookie on a 3-13 team. He was tall and singularly self-possessive to the point of narcissism, which laid the groundwork for all the headcase wide receivers to come - Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, Ochocinco, Braylon Edwards - and yet the Jets have not had a receiver of his caliber and height since then (including Braylon Edwards) so my friend on the train was right to worry after all.

The only thing he really did wrong was to slam Wayne Chrebet - someone who came to the Jets as a walk-on and not a first-round draft choice - in his 1995 book. And then, after being picked up by Tampa Bay, Keyshawn compared himself to Chrebet by saying. "You're trying to compare a flashlight to a star. Flashlights only last so long, a star is in the sky forever." Their careers are the same number of seasons, with Keyshawn finishing with 814 catches in 162 games, whereas Chrebet finished with 580 in 152. Hardly a star to a flashlight. To this day, Keyshawn's unkind words about Chrebet provide the lone basis for my judgment of him. You can see Keyshawn Johnson on ESPN as a talking head on Sundays, wearing the inexplicably bad suits that they put their talking heads in, but no one will retire his number anywhere because he could never be a part of a team for long enough.

Wayne Chrebet has lost a great deal more. He has lost much of his memory and cognitive function due to the frequency with which he was pounded on the field, and unlike Keyshawn, Wayne Chrebet will be immortal with us, for whatever that is worth to Wayne. Number 80 hasn't been worn by anyone lately, and it should be retired by Wayne Chrebet's only team. Star to a flashlight indeed.

****

Bobby Riley was a replacement wide receiver with the #19 for the scab New York Jets of 1987. I wonder if the squad has reunions.


Number 19 and former Jets quarterback Malcolm Wood's nickname is "Dick."

When did the name "Dick" became something a widely understood slang - scurrilous, profane and insulting? It must have been somewhere around the early-70's, after the declarations of the sexual revolution, just after the Nixon Administration, about when I first became a Jets fan. I don't exactly know when in grade school I first learned that among all the terms for the male member the most notable was "dick," but its usage was widening fast. Thus, when Dick Cheney became Vice President, the name and its bearer were already so inextricably linked as to be anticlimactic, redundant. Of course he was a dick. What kind of man shoots his friend in the face? Now I'm worried that Cheney's complete and overall dickness as a Dick has actually softened the impact of this all-purpose slur.

But talk about redundancy and bad luck, how about "Dick Wood?" When he was drafted in 1959 by the Baltimore Colts, the name Dick was perceived as no more poisonous to the common person than a basement lined with asbestos. But by 1979, most of my classmates named Richard were already nicknamed "Rich" or "Richie." Nobody was a Dick anymore. But Malcolm Wood was still Dick. That wasn't going to change just because society did.

Today the use of "dick" has been expanded to encompass the usage as noun, verb, and adjective - all pejorative, all useful, while "Dick Wood" is now the kind of name that intramural college whiffleball teams give themselves. Among Dicks, Dick Wood is still a lesser figure, despite throwing the first touchdown at Shea Stadium and being the most traveled quarterback among different AFL teams, which, when you think about it, may not be all that much of a compliment.

Yet he retains a distinction of having a name that scores high in repressed giggles, along with names that are even funnier, like Dick Trickle of NASCAR or Dick Pole of the Red Sox and Mariners in the 70's. And interestingly enough, Dick Wood coached his way back to the Jets, as running backs coach for a Richard - Ritchie - Kotite's 3-13 squad of 1995. Just a couple of Dicks.

NY Jets #19 - Part 1

Someone very close to me has a quote he uses almost unselfconsciously to describe his reaction to the status of life in general, and his words become more and more important to me as I get older. Is est quis est. It is what it is.

It's another version of Doris Day's que sera, sera, but with a little more acceptance of the present, not just the future, as an uncontrollable element of life. It is what it is. What is it? What it is. Accept it or not. It is only what it is - which is what it already is. This is not to rhetorically say, in the manner of Peggy Lee, est ut totus illic est ("Is That All There Is?") for what is is not actually all there is, but what is is what is.

Back in the early 1970's, it was common to greet someone with, "What it is?" as in "What's happening?" but the question soon became a statement - less a curious interrogative than a declarative of preemptive mutual acceptance: "What it is, my man." Slang changes quickly, though, and "What it is" is now long dated even among my Me Generation colleagues at work.

When I think about American culture in the span of my 41 years, I have to admit how much has changed in just the last decade. This morning, I corresponded with three people via Facebook and e-mail, whereas at college in the late 80's, I had to speak on the phone, by mail, or by face-to-face contact, none of which I'm particularly good at. This was also the case in 1971, when Chris Farasopoulos #19 first joined the New York Jets. In a very short period of time, within the last ten years, the world has gotten better at accommodating hermits like me. I'm not entirely sure that this is a step forward for civilization, but I am of a mind that all forms of progress - with the exception of cul-de-sac track housing and Twitter - are to the benefit of humanity. And it is what it is, anyway.

Two years ago, when I first did research on Chris Farasopoulos, I found a story that says he was initially offered a baseball contract with the Baltimore Orioles, which he apparently turned down because they asked him to shorten his name. He refused. It is what it is, he said. Accept what it is or not. Can you imagine any sports team trying to pull that today? Ask Troy Polamalu, whose hair is allowed to conceal his own name on his jersey and nearly his number. Times have changed for the better in a short span.

Of course, there's always the chance that the Orioles may simply have been trying to be polite in saying that Farasopolous' long "ethnic" name was the problem when it might, for all we know, have been his lack of ability, although that's a strange way of being polite. Luckily, the New York Jets were a team that welcomed eccentrics and individualists, so they were certainly capable of accepting someone on the squad whose only peculiarity was that he was born in Greece. Did Farasopolous feel cheated later that decade when Jon Lowenstein was allowed to keep his name on the back of his Orioles jersey? Does he feel cheated by progress' ironic sense of humor, especially when the Jets are a contender in their sport now (which wasn't the case in the 70's) but the Orioles are not? Nowadays the O's would take a Sri Lankan bowler like Muthumudalige Pushpakumara if they thought he could throw a curveball.

****

I don't have children, but if I had produced a son by some accident and were allowed to give him a name, it would almost certainly be Laveranues. It's a first name you can never spell correctly the first time. Laveranues Roche.

Sometimes people leave your life, then they come back. Then they leave again. Then they come back again. This is our team's relationship with Laveranues Coles, now #19. As we know, when he played for the Jets time and again, Coles wore #87. We wore #80 for the Redskins and #11 for the Bengals. David Clowney wears #87 for us now, and numbers 82 and 88 are taken by tight ends this summer. I think Number 80 has been kept special (though not retired) in the wake of Wayne Chrebet, as is #85, (for Wesley Walker). Dustin Keller is #81. Jerricho Cotchery is #89. That still left #84 and #83. Is it an insult to wear a number too close to your old number? I'm not going into why I disapprove of receivers wearing such low numbers. I just do. There's precedent for it, but linemen don't wear any numbers in the 80's anymore, so there's plenty of those ten digits to go around these days on any given squad, even with more tight ends than there were in the old days. A receiver shouldn't wear a quarterback's number. That's not the way God made us.

(NBC lists Coles' 1999 near $400 discount at Dillard's as one of the most bizarre sports scandals of all-time, which is silly. How many of us have received discounts from friends working at a major chain? When I was in grad school I got a $3.23 employee discount on a copy of Richard Bausch's Violence from a guy who worked at Borders back in 1992. Does that make me a criminal? Likewise who can blame Coles for stealing? College students and graduate students do their work for nothing, after all)

Coles' receiving numbers are a little bit better than most receivers. Compare him to - or confuse him with - Santana Moss who was drafted by the Jets out of the University of Miami a year after Coles (and who mocked him with a Dillard's bag, no doubt) and for whom he was once traded back to the Jets later on; we see that Coles' numbers are statistically better. Would it therefore have been an insult to wear #83, the number of a player for whom you were once traded by very same team that signed you on again, and then again?

It's actually nice to have Coles back one more time. He felt loyal to Chad Pennington in 2008 when people like me were willing to let him go in favor of Brett Favre. He never really seemed to buy Favre's act, and now it's fashionable for everyone to turn their nose up at Brett. He also sang with Elmo, which my wife loves. When sports figures really aren't supposed to admit any level of vulnerability, he also had the courage to open up about being a victim of childhood sexual abuse: it is what it is, he seemed to say, in hopes of helping others to come to terms with accepting what it is, too.

His second reappearance with us signals the twilight of his career, which I suppose explains why he wears a number that's, well, just available. He admitted that this is the end for him and that he will probably be gone as soon as Santonio Holmes is ready to play again. When you have to give up your old number to David Clowney, you know you are very near done. Other than giving up his old number, he is willing to accept what it is and that what will be, will be. Is est quis est quod quis ero, ero.

NY Jets #11 (Updated)

The years with which I have least connection as a Jets fan would have to be the years I was at college in New England. I just lost my way a little. One of those college years was also spent in England. The old one. And Tony Eason? Yeah #11 Tony Eason quarterbacked for the Jets as a backup from 1989 to 1990, my last two years at school. Put him up there with Frank Reich, Bubby Brister, Jack Trudeau, Boomer Esiason, Jay Fielder. Quarterback castaways. This is where the road mostly ends, fellas. Cast off your burden here, ye mighties but look upon this sight and despair. He played two seasons with the Jets in the Coslet years. And I cannot recall a single thing about his play with us. Sometimes it just works that way. I was at college, drinking very heavily, and working on deadlines. I had priorities, such as they were.

No. 11 Brian Hansen came to the Jets in 1994 when Louis Aguiar's directional punting didn't work out. He played five seasons with us, though when I look him up on the Jets' all-time roster, I see that his information is exactly the same as Don Silvestri's. So Brian Hansen enabled me to locate some errors on he New York Jets website. How about that. Yeah. (Time elapses) It's kind of hard to say interesting things about a punter. It's not Brian Hansen's fault.

The Jets had their share of guys who backed up Joe Namath in the 1970's, but the last to do it before Richard Todd was given the full-time job was Steve Joachim, #11 in that magic year of 1976. College coach that he was by nature, Lou Holtz must have noticed that Joachim won the Maxwell Award for excellence in college football after playing for Temple University. In 1974. Originally drafted in 1975 by - say it together - the Baltimore Colts, Joachim's statistics indicate "1G," one game, while his career indicates one team: the New York Jets. We do not know if he even so much as threw the ball.

Is this Patrick Ramsey's
only pass for the Jets?

In the continuing story of the weird rivalry between the Redskins and the Jets, #11 Patrick Ramsey traveled the other end of the pipeline to the Meadowlands. It always boggled my mind how intent Steve Spurrier was in keeping Patrick Ramsey at quarterback in DC. According to several records I checked, Patrick Ramsey has also the extraordinary distinction of having thrown one pass for the Jets all through the 2006 regular season. It is possible that depicted to the right is that selfsame pass. He was shipped to Denver where he played behind the guy who backed up Jay Cutler. How do you go through a whole season and get to throw one pass for a team? How do you not lose your mind?

Ed "Butch" Songin was a New York Titans #11 who apparently quarterbacked behind Al Dorow in 1962 after quarterbacking for the Boston Patriots the years before. We have no photographs, no stories, no images, no half-true anecdotes. To have been an unknown player on a team that was practically a rumor on even the AFL scene is a difficult burden to carry. The only thing I do know is that he passed out of this world on May 25, 1976, a relatively young man, no doubt. The cause of death remains unknown. RIP Butch.

Jim Turner has the unique distinction of being one of five New York Jets to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated. He is also a placekicker who's nickname is "Tank," a distinction normally reserved for nose tackles. The Football Issue of September 1969 (left) shows Jim putting the boot to it. He is the last of the straight-on kickers, for both the Jets and the NFL as a whole. He scored nine points of the Jets' 16 in Super Bowl III. If you own the NFL Greatest Games replay of the game, there is a great moment caught on the sideline where a clearly agitated Joe Namath is unhappy about not getting the ball closer for Jim Turner to kick a field goal. Placed in the strange position of reassuring his somewhat high maintenance field general, Tank just keeps saying over and over, "It's OK, Joe. It's OK. Don't worry about it. It's OK."

Troy Woodbury

Tory Woodbury? Anybody? Tory Woodbury? A running back and a backup quarterback in 2001? C'mon. Somebody's got to have something somewhere on this guy. This is crazy. I found more stuff on Butch Songin. What is this, exactly?

That was three years ago. If you go to JetsTwit, you'll get the answers that can only come when a writer takes a blog to the next level - analyzing Twitter content on the Jets in the blogosphere. Wish I had thought of that. Take a look at about 2:27 in the video at the bottom of the link, and you'll see Woodbury's first NFL catch, playing as one of several receivers filling in for injured Wayne Chrebet in a loss to Jacksonville in 2002. He promptly takes the ball to the sidelines at the end of the play.

Erik Ainge #3, #9, #10, (#8?)

Erik Ainge can't be the only Jet to have ever switched his number three times, but I can only find ones who've switched twice. If they've been renumbered thrice, it probably means they were on the practice squad. Maybe they were cut and brought back and then cut again, then brought back. There is the case of Ty Law who went from #24 and came back again at #22. Or Lonnie Young, who started out at #31 and ended up at #44, or Jim Hudson, who started out as #44 and ended up at #22. It happens.

When Erik Ainge was drafted in the spring of 2008, I swear to God he was initially given the #8. I feel quite sure of this. I don't think he ever wore the number, but I recall that the Jets' website first put him down as such. He's played nothing but preseason in his career, he's still listed as a backup quarterback in a franchise that has had its Bermuda Triangle at the position, but nothing can be more vexing for a pro - whether he plays or not - than to have his number changed as frequently as he has since he arrived. He wore #9 as a backup to the backup to Favre, which then became punter Steve Weatherford's number last year, which means he was never active. Backup to backup quarterbacks are trumped by punters.

In 2008, he was apparently caught on steroids and so therefore left off the team in training camp; I'm grateful that other more successful offenders did not test thus. When one glosses through the photographs documenting his years as a starting quarterback at the University of Tennessee, one truly begins to understand the humility men still feel when the game they played for nothing (nothing except the university's profit) in front of more than 100,000 paying customers at game at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville has been reduced to the working week of a man who has yet to be give a single start - a man without a number.

Then he got Pennington's #10 last year, with a couple of nice moments in preseason. Number 10 has a lot of importance, obviously. In my sentimental mind, I still think Pennington is my quarterback. I still imagine that I have to worry about his fitness for the year. I mean, is this an odd year or an even year, because it will affect Chad's elbow. But no. No Chad. More importantly for Ainge, #10 is the number he wore at Tennessee, which must have meant something to him. But now, no longer. Right now #10 is the big man in the corner of the end zone, Santonio Holmes.

By 2010, Ainge was #3, but that didn't last. His write-up on the Jets page has indicated nothing more than his collegiate statistics. But what many of us didn't know was how bad off he was from the very beginning. According to Zachary Rhymer at Bleacher Report, Ainge has had a bad, bad journey down into the hell of painkiller addiction, one that predated his arrival with the Jets. In this sense, the apparent steroid issue in 2008 was small potatoes. According to his piece, Rhymer quotes an ESPN interview with Ainge, who claims that while still at Tennessee, he would take 25 percocets at a pop. His dependency, apparently, began with a broken finger.

Ironically, his finger was part of an easy barb I made. Initially, Erik Ainge stoked my bitterness about being a public school teacher who's paid a lot less than an NFL bench warmer. "It's not (his) fault," I initially said, "that the invisible hand of our society gives me the bird every day. I mean, look. I start at my position every day." But as the link points out, now with the NFL Lockout, Ainge can't get insurance to cover his ongoing addiction recovery. Now, I just feel that whatever number he wears, Ainge will have to deal with one day at a time in a way that non-addicts can only guess at. If you have not had to look at life with the constant white static of addiction fizzing in your brain, then you are lucky. Addiction has a grip much stronger than the fickle comfort of the invisible hand.

NY Jets: #10

With updates....

Erik Ainge (#10)

At the moment, the New York Jets fourth string quarterback Erik Ainge, formerly from the Tennessee Vols, formerly #10, may yet spend his career riding the bench the way quarterbacks do, this time wearing #3. Yes, he is Danny Ainge's nephew, which could happen to anybody. Erik Ainge is still waiting for his big chance. I have chosen to co-opt the photograph to the right as a representation of his life in limbo - as being half up on his own feet, half down by someone else's power. Now that QB Kevin O'Connell has been brought over from the Patriots, the wait continues. We are all waiting, I suppose. Where will the axe fall? Before it does, I would like to offer a numbers tribute to Erik Ainge. It's the least we can do. Tune in....

Pat Ry

Pat Ryan? Yes, the man who nearly rescued the 1986 season from certain ruin after playing years as a backup. And then came certain ruin. He was injured in the January 1987 Divisional Playoff against the Cleveland Browns after starting the game off by throwing a magnificent flea flicker touchdown to Wesley Walker. What happened? Did he not stretch before the game? Even after the mortifying humiliations and shame of my Irish Catholic childhood, the worst thing that ever happened to me by the age of 17 was Pat Ryan's groin pull in the January when the Giants first won the Super Bowl. What a desolation.

Jack Trudeau

Now for the tens who make less of a dent in the memory. Like Jack Trudeau. He was supposed to be the next big thing for the Indianapolis Colts, and then, in turn, he was not. He was a star at the University of Illinois. I remember Illinois playing UCLA in the Rose Bowl as I sat in the little Italian restaurant in Pleasantville, and Jack Trudeau was quarterbacking. I wandered away from my family into the restaurant bar and gaped up at the TV there, ignoring the stares of the lonely New Year's night drinkers, ignoring the sensation of misery of knowing that I was 15 and eating dinner with my family in a small town and that Christmas vacation was over. Ah, youth. Trudeau played one year as a backup for the Jets in 1994, but there are no pictures that I can find of him in green. It was his second-to-last season in the NFL. Last year, Trudeau had to pay a fine for serving alcohol to minors at his child's high school graduation party. Twenty years ago, he punched a cop in an Indiana bar. Can there be such a thing as a promising quarterback without a behavioral problem?

by Marty Domres

Marty Domres was another big hope at quarterback for the Colts. Of course, he was from Dartmouth, so it makes sense that what he was better at was writing than he was at quarterbacking. He's the guy who played for Baltimore between Johnny Unitas and Bert Jones. And while we're at it, we could spend days tracing the history of failed Jets quarterbacks, but look at the Baltimore/Indianapolis Colts' QB's over the years before Manning arrived: Art Schlichter, John Elway (who never arrived), Mark Pagel, Gary Hogeboom, Jack Trudeau, Jeff George. It's a hard life being a fan sometimes.

As with Jack Trudeau, there are no photographs of Marty Domres in a Jets uniform. He backed up Joe Namath for one season, in #10. However, if I'm in a second-hand bookstore and I get a chance to find his book on his first year of playing in San Diego, I will be sure to skim its yellowing pages, even as they fill my lungs with paralyzing mold. The cover alone is a piece of the past, a picture of a time when any book on any subject required the depiction of a busty stewardess, sort of like the one (if you squinted your eyes) who was serving you a bloody mary on your Eastern Airlines flight to an insurance convention in Omaha.

There's something about
the Colts and our #10's.

Cary Blanchard played two seasons with the Jets toward the beginning of his career. He came and went. I don't know why. He is the first kicker of the post-Pat Leahy era, and I suppose the chance to nab Nick Lowery was just too much for the Jets. Or they were too cheap to hold onto Blanchard. Then he went to have a successful career with - wait for it - the Colts. Must be something about the #10.

The same year the Jets were trying out Blanchard, Jason Staurovsky was also used as a place kicker. It was a brief career for Jason, starting with the St. Louis football Cardinals; it continued with the woeful New England Patriots of my college years, and it ended with the Jets. Nothing beside remains. This is Jason Staurovsky's entry on Wikipedia: "He is the uncle of Garrett and father of two. He is also a tutor to many children." OK. Fair enough. But why does Garrett get named in the entry but his own kids don't? Oh God, never mind.

Julian Fagan also ended his career with the Jets - in 1973, his only season kicking with them. By the time he was done with them he was already practicing law in the off-season back home in Mississippi. I'm only curious about this because as a graduate of Ole Miss, he belonged to one of the first classes to graduate African-Americans, which, as a white man himself, must have been an interesting experience. After college, he kicked for the New Orleans Saints. Can you imagine what it was like for a Deep South boy to suddenly play in Queens? Is that why he decided that practicing law in Jackson was better than kicking into the Flushing Bay swirl? Did playing in capital city of the East Coast Intellectual Elite (albeit one of its residential boroughs) drive him back home? Did he work for Trent Lott's campaign? Kirk Fordyce's? Yeesh.

Julian Fagan and friend

But have you ever seen a more telling photograph than this one at right, courtesy of AP? We just recently finished our long tribute to John Riggins, one of only four legendary Jets to get his own Infinite Jets profile - a tribute for which every pro Jet longs, no doubt. No doubt. Here is Fagan on the sideline of an exhibition game with Riggins during the latter's brief '73 holdout. There are two worldviews at work here. One appears to appreciate sportsmanship, knowing your place on the totem pole, showing up, not making a display of yourself, and getting in line just like everybody else. The other is clearly carving his own face on the totem pole. I've already adequately explained why John Riggins needed to wear this version of "authentic" Native American wear. Was he moved by the weeping Indian? No. He was following cosmic advice. But Julian Fagan is looking southward, back to the place where he imagines this kind of weirdo stuff is not so important just yet. He's looking toward a refuge unspoiled by the need for self-expression, where people follow rules and stuff like that. As if it were that simple.

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Bobby Renn?

I know this is very likely the Bobby Renn who died in 1971 but played in #10 for the New York Titans and the Jets. He got to be on the cover of the Florida State's yearbook because he was an exceptional player, the kind that college fans love because he was all heart. I mean, let's face it, working for nothing is a Southern thing, and that's still why college football is a Southerner's game. Good ol' Bobby. Sounded like a great player. He was a sixty minute man, playing both running back and defensive back, a position eccentricity that was already fazed out of the game by the time he was starting at the same positions for the Jets in 1963, his only season with them. My wife still thinks that football should be a two-position game, which will give you some idea of what our household chore assignments are like.

But why did Bobby die before his time?

NY Jets #44 - John Riggins (cont'd)

About four minutes into the NFL Films interview with John Riggins, the real reasons why my favorite footballer of all time left the New York Jets are explained. He had come to hate the losing team the Jets had become. Most of all, though, he knew he was never going to be granted pay parity with Joe Namath, and with a passing attack (or whatever was left of it) at the core of Namath's game, John Riggins felt entitled to more. I was crestfallen. I didn't get it. I wrote him a letter, begging him to come back. He had been my football hero for such a short time, and now he belonged to some other six year old.

It's absurd to think of Namath getting more money than Riggins when the latter's Hall of Fame career was ahead of him and former's long behind. But times were what they were. Our quarterback would hobble through a final season with the Jets. Even with Riggins, the Jets would still have finished the 1976 season 3-11. They were a terrible team, and I cannot imagine how he would have endured Lou Holtz as Head Coach. Becoming a free agent in an era when the concept was still novel in sports meant that Riggins was merely fulfilling the expectations of his own self-defined unconventionality. Still, for years and years afterward, I kept the poster of him that Mom once got for me while he was still a Jet. In that picture, he is forever playing for the Jets against the Dolphins at the Orange Bowl in 1972. When I would come back from college or from a visit wherever I was living afterwards, he was still there on my wall, looking for a hole, grasping the ball on either of its sides as if it were a brick. On my wall, he was forever a Jet.

****

The story is fairly well known. A man recently hired to coach the football team located in our nation's capital had a piece of unfinished business left over from his predecessors. Specifically, he needed to locate a player of some exceptional talent who was once rumored to have been transported by aliens to another dimension or something like that and had recently vanished back home into the anonymity of Kansas. He had refused to play in 1980 for a contract that he felt beneath him. The coach was a racing enthusiast and a Southerner, but hardly the sort of man to believe in such wild stories. Instead, the coach believed in the power of God's salvation. A man was with God or against Him. If God made this strange man, then the coach intended to make some good of it and trade the player for somebody who fit his model.

When Joe Gibbs found John Riggins outfitted in a camouflage hunting outfit, hitting the sauce, he was appalled:

He had been hunting, him and a buddy. He had a beer can in his hand. It was 10 o'clock in the morning and he's meeting his coach for the first time and I'm thinking [sarcastically], 'This guy really impresses me.' But I went in there, and halfway through the conversation he says, 'You need to get me back there. I'll make you famous.<sup>[13] 

I thought to myself, 'Oh, my God, he's an egomaniac.' I thought, 'I'll get him back and then I'll trade him. I'm not putting up with a fruitcake.' So I fly back to Washington, and two days later he calls me. He says, 'Joe, I made up my mind, and I'm going to play next season.' I thought it was great. I've got him back, and I'll trade that sucker. But then he says, 'There's only one thing I want in my contract.' I ask what it was. He says, 'A no-trade clause.'[13]</sup>

Egomaniac, fruitcake. To Joe Gibbs, at first, John Riggins could be understood no other way. But he would obviously come to know just how famous John Riggins would make him. In Gibbs' offense, the pass and the run balanced beautifully, but John Riggins was special - simply a force of nature. Riggins simply did not fit into the world view of any man who believes that he exists either in God's mercy or without it. He carried the whole thing himself.

From 1981 on, John Riggins's statistics become the work of an epic storyteller. As I turned from a callow child to adolescent, my mind's picture of him as a Jet began to blur and fade. The world was now parceling out its realities to where nothing could ever make me completely happy the way a Jets Super Bowl victory once promised. I was forced to take my joys where I could, and following John Riggins throughout his career became one of those diluted pleasures in a confusing world. I knew what Joe Gibbs only half-suspected when he took the fruitcake on his team. John Riggins had the capacity to carry the whole thing across the line. I had seen it with my own eyes, and John would do it with panache in Super Bowl XVI.

The Super Bowl that year was personal for me, and not just because of him. Miami's Dade County had destroyed my 13 year-old's faint hopes for a Super Bowl appearance by not putting down the tarp the night before the 1983 AFC Championship between the Dolphins and the Jets. They played in puddles therefore, and the Jets were shut out and kept out of the Super Bowl against Washington. I don't think I hated a team any more than I did the Miami Dolphins, with their nickel and dime quarterbacks Strock and Woodley, their little running backs, their Killer B's. I wanted to see them destroyed, which I really didn't believe could happen.

They weren't. But what happened was more beautiful than that. Midway through the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, the Redskins were down 17-13 at 4th and 1. The Dolphins called a timeout, knowing that the ball would likely be given to John Riggins. When play resumed, the plan didn't change, but Riggins ran off-tackle, carefully extricating himself from the grasp of Don McNeal, whose efforts to get to the outside fell short with a slip on the turf. Once he was free, Riggins ran for daylight along the sidelines, charging and pumping his body and almost running through the grandstands at the end zone's edge. He had put the Redskins ahead in the game for good and created an image that still stands as one of the singularly important moments in Redskins history, when their team was suddenly no longer an also-ran and runner-up to the likes of Dallas. They were the champions.

John Riggins' breakaway, which I remember watching on TV with as much excitement as if he were still in green and white, is a moment that all fans wait for - the transformative moment when you realize the team you love is now about to enter into immortality. I see it in Flyers' fans right now around Philly; I mean real ones, not fair-weather hockey fans like me, but ones who've been following every game this season and every one before it. As they await Game 1 of the Stanley Cup, they wonder, Is this the year? Riggins' mad scramble on fourth and 1 answered the question. For all the Redskin fans who survived the 35-34 Thanksgiving loss to the Cowboys in 1979, the answer was clear: Yes. This is your year.

Beating Miami that day was like getting the plastic action figure version of that feeling. Though he broke my heart, John Riggins showed me what it might feel like. Now I'm also grateful that the Jets didn't win the Mud Bowl in Miami because my heart wouldn't have been able to bear the sight of John Riggins running off-tackle over Bobby Humphrey on fourth and one. No thank you.

****

The story is very well known. My memory tells me it happened right after the Super Bowl, but I may simply be mixing up events where I read that John Riggins showed up somewhere in top hat and tails, which he did often. At a black tie affair attended by the nation's political elite at the Washington Press Club in January 1985, John Riggins drunkenly collapsed during (what he says was) Sam Donaldson's speech (other reports suggest it was then Vice President Bush's). But it was what he said just before entering the land of nod that was true to his nature, even if that nature happened to have been absolutely snackered at the time. Seated next to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, John Riggins offered a bleary-eyed piece of advice to America's first female appointee to the high court, one that may or may not have changed the course of legal history:

"Loosen up, Sandy baby. You're too tight."

He's been asked about it many times. He was asked about his drinking around the same time, the twilight of his career. Did he have a drinking problem? "Only when I'm hanging from the rafters by my knees." That's a drunkard's reply. But since finishing his career, after being inducted into the Hall of Fame, Riggins became an actor, however briefly, on soap operas and on stage. He is an eloquent critic of the circus program that is Dan Snyder's Washington Redskins, and he seems rather well put together as a human being right now. We cannot ever really know the extent of what the acid aliens did to his brain, but I am grateful for their work. John Riggins defies the expectations of the No Fun League, with its squads predictably filled with nothing but bland religious zealots and illiterate hedonists. John Riggins would have had no fun there.

But I argue his influence is lasting. The question remains: Did Sandy baby actually loosen up? Is it merely a coincidence that Sandra Day O'Connor, nominated by Ronald Reagan, became one of the more reliable moderates on an increasingly strident, conservative court? Could John Riggins have had something to do with it? Are we to credit the influence of peyote-eating extraterrestrials and their Sioux captives? I think it's very, very possible. I want to believe.

NY Jets #44 - John Riggins

There are rules for being a fan, but they are mostly held and maintained by people who are loyal to one team and can't fathom anyone changing sides. Contrary to what some people might tell you, it's perfectly acceptable for a fan to love two teams, even three, at once, though he or she will probably lack the sense of kinship that's intrinsic to the entire experience. I think your likelihood to play the field in sports is directly related to the love of the sport in question. I follow more than one baseball team but only one football team. I'm on a hockey team's bandwagon right now, but that will not last through the playoffs. I don't even recognize basketball as the game that used to be played by Bird and Magic. In football, I wish Andy Reid's grim-faced soap opera in Philadelphia well because I've lived here for eighteen years. But the only football team I could possibly have followed outside of my one and only were the Washington Redskins from 1976 to 1984, and for only one reason: John Riggins.

Perm, handlebar

In a fan's life, one becomes occasionally attached to one player for whatever reason, and he follows the player's career regardless of where the player plays. Sometimes this attachment arises from some personal sense of belonging stirred in you. For some peculiar reason, you can feel it. The player belongs to you. You aren't about to camp out in front of his home or write letters to his children, but he becomes the embodiment of everything you need to believe about your team. Yet if he is traded or departs of his own volition, he sticks to your heart such that you can live, spiritually, in two places at once. This is what happened when John Riggins #44 became a free agent.

From 1971 to 1975, he played for the Jets, and if you don't mind, aside from the handlebar snapshot above, John Riggins will here remain a Jet. Drafted out of Kansas, having broken all of Gale Sayers' records, John Riggins was seen as the kind of player who might be able to replace Matt Snell. He did that and more. If anything, he possessed an eccentric streak that was decidedly less cosmopolitan than Namath's. It was a bravado born of the prairie, a kind of odd, middle American anarchism that represented nothing in particular - no politics to speak of (other than posing with a gun in a 1980's magazine ad for the NRA or needling Sandra Day O'Connor), no commercial products - nothing other than the zest to shock and appall ordinary people.

Mohawk, beads

In fact, if we so desired, we could decide to write exclusively about the subject of John Riggins' hair. For a long time, it was his primary mode of self-expression. Consider his early 1970's mohawk. This came with a leather vest and Indian beads so as to express Riggins' unhappiness with his contract. In Kay Iselin Gilman's Life Inside the Pressure Cooker: A Year in the Life of the New York Jets about the 1973 season, there is a photograph inside of Weeb Ewbank sitting down for a chat with Riggins and his mohawk, and they so obviously represent two generations separated not so much by time but by the contortions of outer space. Riggins looks like a man abducted from Lawrence, Kansas by hallucinogenic-ingesting aliens just before his college graduation and brought to a radiation farm on a planet located in an anterior galaxy where he was apparently adopted by a contingent of Sioux nation who themselves were abducted a hundred years before and stayed ageless due to constant light speed travel. Centuries passed, but within a twilight of our own time, Riggins was returned to his home planet in order to shift his shape, play football and practice whatever he managed to glean from his Sioux teachers. He didn't speak their language, which made his whole interstellar experience a little frustrating, but he returned to Earth a new man. In the picture, Weeb Ewbank looks like the chubby, FBI man, obviously near retirement, who has been brought in to debrief the time-space traveler.

Sandy afro, stache

I've written before on the subject of John Riggins' departure from the Jets. I remember how often Dad spoke about him during the seasons he was on the Jets, as if there was something transformative about him, and when I looked through my next door neighbor's discarded books about modern heroes of the NFL, I noticed that Riggins' appearance changed from year to year. Short crop, mohawk, sandy afro, dark brown bouffant. It was similar to how John Lennon transformed with every Beatles' album cover, from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road. In that era of weird freedom, the greatest artists were shape shifters, constantly displaying on the outside an impetuosity that accompanies the creative mind. So too John Riggins.

But I have to clarify something that I realize now. I mistook my first epiphany of hero worship to be his performance in the 1975 home game against New England. It wasn't. It was the late season away game at Foxboro. I had already watched him run off-tackle, but until late in the season, there was still only one Jet hero worth all the attention, and he wore #12. Everyone else remained a supporting cast member. I see myself clearly sitting on the sofa with Mom and Dad watching the cold game at Foxboro on NBC. I see John Riggins scoring not just once, but twice. The first was a 37 yard run for a touchdown, while the second was a 6 yard touchdown I see being scored in my mind's eye by Riggins, carrying two or three defenders across the line all by himself. That last one was the clincher, not just for the Jets, who would hold onto a 30-28 win, but for me, for my absolute devotion.

The Jets had lost eight games in a row up until that point, two of which I had seen at Shea with Dad. I was no less a fan than when I started out at the beginning of the year, but I had also become aware of the fact that being a Jets fan would demand a great deal of my young, developing soul. This was not a passing thing. This was a life's demanding and spiritless work. Today I think I am able to greet my unreasonabe, irrationally reluctant 16 year-old students each morning because I have been rooting for a losing cause for so long. I'm not sure what it's doing for my circulatory system, but being a Jets fan from a very early age has taught me a patience at the molecular level, albeit with teeth and fists clenched. Alright, the spirit says, here we go again. You know the drill.

So when I watched John Riggins help the Jets to win over the Patriots late in the 1975 season, I felt like I was watching a man single-handedly pull the Jets into the end zone. For at least one more game, and for the last time that season, the Jets would win. By virtue of his sheer will, Riggins would see to it. He was the man. And in my very immature sense of personal mythology that he was also now The Man. I had found my own football hero, perhaps in much the same way that Dad had once found Namath. John Riggins had done it all himself.

The only trouble is that he had also made himself that much more appealing to the free agent market. And having been instructed in the importance of sharing and pitching in at public school, how could a child possibly be expected to understand the real principles of Ayn Rand's self-interest on which his society rested? Well, he would find out.

To be continued...