NY Jets #17 - The Curse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farewell #17, and again, sayonara.

NY Jets #55 - Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernie Barnes' "Sugar Shack" (1976)

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

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

NY Jets #54 - Part 3

When I was eight, my parents took us to Disney World, which was the biggest trip of my life to that point. It was the beginning of February, the gloomiest month for anyone who lives in the northeast. It was my first trip on a plane, and I remember being amazed by the idea of leaving behind an horrendous snowstorm at JFK Airport for the warmth of the sun only a few hours later.

Disney World's greatest attraction back then was Space Mountain, which had opened two years before.  The ride simulated the build-up to a NASA space-launch, with authentic-sounding Mission Control banter in the background as you rode a moving platform to your destination, which was frankly paradoxical. "Space" and "Mountain" are two concepts that are a little disconnected. You can find a mountain in space, but usually on a planet moving through space. It was called "Space Port" or "Space Voyage" when the ride was first conceived in the 1960's, but I gather that "mountain" conveys more the sense of a human adventure, so there you are. It was and still is an indoor roller coaster ride in the dark (here with the lights on) simulating what in reality would be considered a really bad ride in space.

I remember the ads quite vividly (at the link, enjoy the animation, the futuristic font, the control panel lights, the yellow turtleneck on the guy riding it and the Dorothy Hamill haircut on his date). It was advertised as a dangerous ride. As Dad and I moved along the moving walkway toward space, there were warning signs letting people know that this was not for everyone. An attendant stopped a woman on the way toward the roller coaster and told her that expectant mothers were not permitted on the ride. The woman looked indignantly at the young man. "I'm not pregnant," she said. "I'm just fat." Dad, who was always encouraging me toward more adventurous, mannish pursuits, thought this might be just the thing. Never mind the fact that I hid through most of Haunted Mansion ride and that at eight, I still slept with a stuffed ocelot every night. His name was Ozzie.

I mention all of this reference to Steve Poole #54 for two reasons. One is simply because I have no real statistics on him, other that in 1976 he played nine games for the Jets, recovering two fumbles, one of them a touchdown recovery of a blocked punt against the Bills on Halloween. He is on the University of Tennessee's professionals list between between "Gordon Polofsky" and "Peerless Price." But I remembered his picture from a Jets' game program, and I always thought what an odd name it was - Poole. It registered with me because I was afraid of the pool as a kid. In his continuing efforts to have me experience a moment of bravery, Dad tried to coax me off the diving board, but I wouldn't do it. I refused to put my head underwater. What was it like to have a name that conjured something so fearful to me as water?

Somewhere in the transition from the hotel where we were first staying and the Magic Kingdom, Ozzie went lost. I do not recall the moment I realized he was lost; I just assumed that he would appear some time. He did not. By the time we reached Orlando we were a couple of hours from wherever Ozzie had been left behind, in a Florida motel. I tried to enjoy Disney World as best I could, but the simple truth was that my best friend, an non-animated figure made of artificial fabric, whose intestines had been filled and refilled again, whose cheap manufacture necessitated that my grandmother in Brooklyn redesign a neck for him made out of one of her opaque medicine bottles, was no longer with me.

I have always been troubled by an inability to let go of things - my football team, the past, the people I hurt and who've hurt me, the towns I left behind, my drinking, the jobs I've had, the women I kissed and so on, so much so that my life sounds like a Woody Guthrie song when it most obviously is not. If Dad at first thought this was a moment of serendipity, he was probably soon compelled by the gnawing look of gloom I wore in the Magic Kingdom to go on a mission to bring Ozzie back. And this, despite his own hopes for toughening me a little, is what he did. While I went on rides and posed for photographs with disarming-looking mascots, he traveled hours back and found Ozzie in the possession of a Mrs. Poole, a maid in the motel where we had stayed. She had found Ozzie in a laundry basket wrapped up in the sheets to be delivered down for the wash. I scarcely think he would have survived the ordeal.

Steve Poole then became associated by a highly associative child with something larger than the fear of the many, many things that seemed to threaten his childhood. He became associated with someone who saved one of its symbolic protectors, which Dad was only glad to redeliver, hoping I suppose, that my day of manly reckoning with fear would come some other time.

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Jamie Rivers #54 LB

Jamie Rivers #54 played middle linebacker with the St. Louis football Cardinals before he came to Jets in 1974. This does not surprise me. The Jets of the late 70's (with all due respect to Jamie Rivers) were a hodgepodge of old players, traveled veterans from mediocre teams and blossoming players (very few talented young players were on the 1974 team, except for Jerome Barkum and, of course, John Riggins). The best explanation for Rivers' arrival on the Jets is that his coach in St. Louis was Charley Winner, who was later Head Coach of the Jets from 1973 to the middle of 1975, which was Jamie Rivers' last season in the NFL. He had a good run.

Still, I love to play a game to which I will someday devote a multi-part entry called "Infinite What If's" (just made the name up; we'll consider something else) that re-imagines outcomes for the Jets teams of the past. I have argued before that the 1974 team is one of the most compelling to study. (Commenter Michael said he was interviewing members of the squad, so I'm curious about that.) This is a team that won their last six games of a 14-game season, two of which were against division rivals who were going to the playoffs. Had they defeated Buffalo earlier in the season (they lost by 4) they would have won the Wild Card. If they had also won an additional game (against the middling Oilers, most likely) they would have won the division. Jamie Rivers played for the Jets that year and the year after, seasons which were quite different; for some reason the 1974 club had the breaks going their way. Teams like that get lucky, like the 2002 or 2004 Jets. I like to think we're beyond that point now, especially since those lucky Jets teams, like all such teams, didn't make it as far as the conference championship game.

Had they won the Wild Card in 1974, they would have played eventual champion Pittsburgh in the playoffs. Had they won the division, they would have played the Wild Card Miami Dolphins at Shea or the AFC West champ Oakland Raiders at Oakland, which means we would never have known the Sea of Hands, which would have been a loss to the history of the game itself. But such considerations have no merit in Infinite What-If's. At least the Jets would have been in the playoffs, even if they probably would not have gotten any further. In a little boy's mind, it would have made the possibility of a winning team seem less impossible.

Does this look like a
linebacker?

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Actor Peter Gallagher went to my high school, as did the late Laura Branigan, whom no one would remember if you didn't hear this on the radio all the time. My best friend in grammar school has become reasonably famous over the years, but there comes a point where you stop mentioning aloud, to whomever is around, that "I went to school with that guy." In all of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' appearances on TV over the years, at what point did Jim Waskiewicz #54 stop telling people that he "went to school with Bob Gates?"


Jim Waskiewicz graduated from Wichita High School in Witchita, Kansas and then went to Witchita State, which inducted him into their Hall of Fame in 1981. Witchita State is known more for baseball than football, and their teams are the "Shockers," but did you know that the full name is "Wheatshockers?" I didn't. You husk corn in Nebraska but shock wheat in Kansas. Now I know. At any rate, he played linebacker for the Jets from 1966-67 but didn't get a Super Bowl ring the following year because he was on the 1968 expansion draft for the Cincinnati Bengals, though I do not see him on their roster. He played the year after that for the Atlanta Falcons, which was his last in the NFL. From the vault of a someone named Meteorite Guy (online, we are all becoming Brazilian soccer players) who apparently collects high school yearbooks of famous people, we see junior year Wichita High man Jim Waskiewicz (above right) in 1961 not looking much like a football player.

Go to the link, scroll down and find Waskiewicz sitting (at left) with his awkwardly bare chested high school wrestling squad.  He resembles a geeky kid anxious to get the approval of everybody around him, which traditionally is not the attitude of the stoic high school jock who prefers to blend into a wall against which he hopes a pretty girl will lean.

But in the above link you will also see that one of of Waskiewicz's classmates at Witchita High from that year was senior "Bob Gates," who is, indeed the outgoing Defense Secretary of the United States. To be honest, young Gates really does look like someone who will become the leader of the Young Republicans at William and Mary and then join Washington's elite, working for the CIA. He was a flunky for William Casey, he probably knew a great deal about what happened during the Iran-Contra Scandal, and yet he has survived cannily enough to be Defense Secretary for two Presidents from different parties. Perhaps you really can see the future in high school yearbook photos. If he doesn't jump out as a linebacker, Jim Waskiewicz still doesn't look like he would lie to his mother to cover up his knowledge of a trade of arms-for-hostages in what he believed was inevitably going to protect national security. Am I wrong in thinking, on the other hand, that young Bob Gates already looks as though he would?

NY Jets #54 - Part 2

When I go the gym, I find that I don't have the enthusiasm that people have when they work out. The people who grunt and wheeze when they lift more than their own weight. People who do handstands against the wall. People who do those crazy things with the heavy ropes. People who do pull-ups far beyond the point it seems possible. People who take up a lot of room doing exercises. People doing that spinning thing. I run on the treadmill and then work on the machines for a little while and sweat so much that people sometimes look at me as if to say, Are you OK? You look like you're going to die. And I don't like pain. I don't endure it well. If it hurts even vaguely, I stop doing it and go home.

Once I went a little too far with the running and began to have horrible weakness and nausea and felt myself disappearing. I don't know what was going on with me, but I decided that the best thing for me to do was to follow the example of a wounded dog and find a private place to die. In this case, a bench in the locker room was the best place. I lay down, hoping that someone would find me and bring me to the hospital. I tried to call out for help, but no one was there, and I didn't have the strength. Then in about five minutes, I found that I could get up again and walk out of the gym, acting like nothing had happened.

Maybe if I had a trainer like Dwayne Gordon #54, I would know what I was doing. But then male trainers at gyms tend to flirt with beautiful women while they're supposed to be counseling you about how to perform an exercise on the machine without ripping your muscles out of your shoulder. I don't blame them. What else are they supposed to do? They advise people about working out. It sounds a little dull, frankly. They try to communicate essential information about working out correctly with people who, for the most part, have unrealistic expectations about why they are there. And there you are, strapped to a Pec Dec machine that you're supposed to be using to turn your distressingly flabby pectoral muscles into something resembling a man's, and your trainer is pretending to talk shop with an inquiring blond who is pretending to be talking shop with him, and no one's noticing that you're letting your arms go way beyond your line of peripheral vision. Ah, what the hell, you say. This must be the right way to do it. Two months later, an equally disinterested orthopedist informs you of your partially torn supraspinitis. You hope the trainer got lucky.

Maybe Dwayne Gordon is different.  He is described as the Fitness Trainer at 24 Hour Fitness in the Bronx, and that is where you'll find him. He played linebacker for the Jets in the late 1990's, ending his career in football and beginning his career in fitness in the vicinity of where his life began, in White Plains, NY.  I'm sure he does a good job.  

Olrick Johnson does a good job singing the National Anthem at professional football games. He too has found an avocation after football. In this video, he sings "The Star-Spangled Banner" quite briskly before a Vikings game in his old Vikings uniform. The announcer has to clarify at the end of his performance that "Olrick played for the Vikings in the 1999-2000 season" because you sense that the crowd at the Metrodome asked, in their various clanging Northwestern, Scandanavian-American tones, "Ol-what-who Johnson?  Sure doesn't ring a bell with me."  The speed with which he gets through the song is advisable for television, but it's also the secret of singing our National Anthem in public.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" has tonal changes that seem ridiculous.  The lyrics are a series of run-on sentences and its overall structure is that of a wandering, searching, appositive-filled question. "Is it still there?" it basically asks. "With all the shit that's happening, do you still see it?" That's it. If you stop to think about what's being with each digression of thought, about when and how often we hailed the flag, amid rockets and bombs, how it inspires you in the midst of terror, you find yourself wandering with these parenthetical ideas, and this, I believe, is where people get off track, forgetting lyrics, repeating verses, going off-key. Don't think about it, move quickly before you realize what's happening, add embellishments to the ending notes of the late verses, and get the hell out of there. Like life.

Johnson was listed at the Jets All-Time Database as a #54 but on the Pro Football Reference Database, he wore #52 for the Jets. If we missed him earlier, then we're making up for it now. As a pro, he suited up for the Vikings, the Jets and the Patriots for what appear to be no more than 28 games over two seasons. He also has what appears to be a gospel/R&B album called Bless My Soul. There are categories we have in Infinite Jets for pros who went artistic after football, though it's rare. George Nock #37: sculptor; Al Woodall #18: artist and gallery owner of a sort (to my delight, I found that Nock advertises on his old teammate's website); John Riggins #44: actor, radio personality, alien abductee. Bless my soul, indeed.

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After playing football in the AFL for the Oilers, the Jets, the Dolphins and Broncos, Edward "Wahoo" McDaniel #54 became one of the country's most popular professional wrestlers in the late 60's and early 70's. Professional wrestling today is filled with cartoonishly huge, steroid-addled monsters who bellow and preen the way wrestlers always have. Their stunts are less humorous than they were long, long ago, and certainly the WWE wrestlers today are more athletic than I remember them in the past. My brother recently took his son to a WWE bill at the Westchester County Center, where back in 1983, he, my cousin Will, Dad and I once saw Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka square off against his nemesis, the Magnificent Muraco.

Back then, wrestling was somewhere between worlds. Many wrestlers still looked like bar bouncers, with whatever they lacked in muscle matched by just their sheer size. Snuka, though, looked like the buff trainer who unselfconsciously who flirts with the blond at the gym. Muraco looked like the guy whom the gas station manager forces to come over to explain to you the work that's been done on your car. Snuka is considered by many to be a pioneer of the modern WWE look.

The Tomahawk Chop vs. the Figure Four Leg Lock

As a native Fijian, he might have taken inspiration from Wahoo McDaniel. It would seem that from the moment Ed McDaniel was born into the Choctaw-Chickasaw tribe in Oklahoma, the son of a man known as "the Big Wahoo" (making him the "Little Wahoo" for a while before finally settling on the simpler "Wahoo") he understood that success would come by way of the barely harnessed power of his large personality. In this way, professional football was at the right time in the right place, but professional wrestling was his true calling. In a genuinely good young adult biography on him by G. Neri, McDaniel is described as discovering, while playing games with his white classmates, that the Indian was always tied up and killed. To some degree, that lesson must have always resonated with him. In a changing world, where She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was eventually replaced by Little Big Man, McDaniel wore his nickname on the back of his pro football jersey (which they eventually did for most players in the XFL) and then wore his feathered headdress into the wrestling ring. He "played the Injun," as Neri says, but he wanted to be the Lone Ranger. He never lost the label of the former, but he insisted on taking the top billing of the latter.

In this way, he was also in the right place for Jets' owner Sonny Werblin in the early 1960's, a man who preferred his marquee players to be independent-minded attention-seekers. At the University of Oklahoma, McDaniel chafed under the disciplined style of Bud Wilkinson much as Joe Namath sometimes did under Bear Bryant. At OU, he was as large as a Native American legend.  According to Neri, he ran 36 miles on a bet for $100. On a dare, he ate a pile of jalapeno peppers and washed it down with - and I am quoting directly here - "a can of motor oil." Phantom reader, like professional wrestling itself, the point here is not whether or not any of this is true. Werblin understood the power of myth in the circus show, and so he brought the large person of Wahoo McDaniel over to the Jets from Denver in 1964.

Wahoo McDaniel is the ur-Jet. Where the New York Titans had merely tried in vain to replicate the success of the Giants, the Jets were different from the corporate style of the Big Blue. They had pom-pom cheerleaders, a go-kart Jet car, fan giveaways, halftime spectacles and, for a time, a man named Wahoo. Because there was no Super Bowl, the goal was to put otherwise unsuspecting circus fans in the seats, and give them a show. Apparently Wahoo did. As a former Jets season tickets holder, my father has distinct memories of watching McDaniel play. It didn't matter if he played well or not; his name was "Wahoo," which is fun to say in unison with tens of thousands of other people.

Sept. 12 1964 - NY Jets 30 Denver 6

On the evening of September 12, 1964, the Jets played their very first football game at Shea Stadium. It was my Dad's first Jets game there, too, and the home team won 30-6. It was also Wahoo McDaniel's first game as a Jet, and it was against his former team. Several sources have corroborated this, including Dad:  apparently McDaniel recorded 23 tackles in that one game. I haven't been able to find anything to show that this constitutes a record. People are right to say that tackles are hard to pinpoint and track because they involve so many assists, though we know how many tackles, overall, players amass each season. For perspective, since 2000, the NCAA record for tackles in one game is 26. I'm inclined to think that Werblin found his temporary marquee in the man who made 23 on opening day.

Dad remembers  that at some point during the game, as McDaniel was in on one play after another, the Jets announcer began to join in on the carnival atmosphere of Shea. I wonder if Werblin gave the announcer $50 to do it. Neri writes:

When Wahoo became unstoppable, the announcer got the crowd going by shouting “Who made that last tackle?” The crowd would chant back, “Waaa-hooo!”

Dad remembers that this went on for a couple of games, and the announcer then went on to say, "Tackle by you-know-who...," and the crowd would respond in kind. To my knowledge, Wahoo McDaniel never had a game like that again, but you never have quite another game quite like the game of your life. They put his name on the back of his jersey, which was doubly profane by the standards of the corporate NFL Giants who never allowed anyone that distinction until long after it had become standard practice elsewhere.

This wasn't enough for Wahoo McDaniel, though. He became an early marquee player for the 1966 Miami Dolphins. Then in 1968, according to Neri, he punched out a San Diego cop even before he got to put on a Chargers uniform. The novelty of "Wahoo" on the back of a jersey had worn off. Joe Namath had re-written the rules of conventional sports. By beating the Colts, Namath made the AFL circus the industry standard and, unwittingly, had helped enable pro football to become even more corporate. But Wahoo McDaniel's secret passion for professional wrestling, that most unconventional of professions resembling sport, was his logical next step. In his time he straddled both worlds, the mythical and the real, like the land between the Chickasaw and the Choctaw.

He passed away in 2002. But Wahoo McDaniel lives in each and every one of us who love the Jets. Perhaps we forget the greasepaint and slapstick our forefathers embraced when they decided to stop waiting in line for Giants tickets and started going to Jets games at Shea. If you are sometimes fatigued by the absurd, outsized circus barker personality of Rex Ryan and his traveling show of troubled overachievers, just remember where we all first came from. We are not Titans pretending to be Giants. We are Jets fans, born to live and die lying on the bench near the precipice of insanity, torn between the world of sport and the world of entertainment. We are all Wahoo McDaniel.

Wa-hoo.

Let the Anxiety Commence

Back from Paris, where my wife and I spent nine days. The trip was wonderful. Parisians are friendly people. With the exception of a snippy little man in an information booth in Gare de l’Ouest, every person I came in contact with was thoughtful and kind. If you try a little French, they appreciate it, and all I possess is the ability to create broken sentences with verbs in the present tense. Hello, thank you, I'm sorry, please, and good night were pretty much the only things I said. It was like being a robot programmed for only politeness, or maybe a simple child.

There are no fat people. It's extraordinary to visit a place where overweight people are the exception to the rule. And a walk down any busy street in Paris for an American is striking because very few people are on their cell phones. Very few are playing with their iPhones. In a city as large as Paris, there is excellent, efficient and predictable public transportation. Big book chains are the exception in Paris. Small bookstores are everywhere. In Philadelphia, we are down to barely a handful of really good, small bookstores while the colonizing force of Borders has retreated, leaving a desolate browser’s landscape in its wake.

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Though the United States gropes even more blandly toward the precipice of total economic collapse, at least the National Football League and its players have come to an agreement. And although I was hoping that Brett Favre would start flirting with his final disaster by thinking about the Oakland Raiders, his story has gotten even better now that he appeared recently in a Phillies hat, signaling that he's interested, perhaps, in playing backup to Michael Vick here in town. Just when I thought Andy Reid had done all he could to court collective dysfunction, he does me even prouder. What can anyone say? He's like a woman who picks all the bad men and knows it. The ego of Favre and the personality disorders of the Eagles' fans would make for awesome combination. Alien versus Predator. I only hope it happens. And now we watch to see which receivers the Jets will hold and which will leave. How much disorientation has there been to the offense due to the impasse? Let the great anxiety commence.

Before getting back to work, I will first tell you of two stories from my trip. I saw a surprising number of Parisians walking around in Yankee hats. While dropping into a park along Boulevard Haussman, we came across two people being entertained by a guy who looked crazy wearing one. Seeing an obvious tourist, he came up to me and, much to the entertainment of others, began kidding me in French, knowing I wouldn't understand. I pointed to his hat and said, "Yankees?" He stopped and stared at me, blankly. "Monsieur," I said, tsking and shaking my head. "Mets." I don't think he knew what I meant, but then I don't either.

This man doesn't know that he's confused.

Then there's this. You might think this is a photo taken on an autumn day in any major American city, but the weather in Paris was wet and cool all week. This is a Parisian and not an American. Crossing Boulevard Sebastopol, he is wearing a bastardized Patriots jersey; you might not be able to make out that instead of Tom Brady's name on the back it reads, "New England." His hat reads, "New York;" you see the Yankees logo in the right hand corner. It's kind of like an American wearing a Real Madrid baseball hat and an FC Barcelona basketball jersey. That was worth stopping in the middle of the street to see. I live with a lot of contradictions; most of us do in some way or another. Are we any better off for knowing what they are or why they exist? Do we benefit from really knowing which were given to us by Fate and which we chose for ourselves to carry around? Does it really do any good for us to know that others see them as easily as I was able to see his from across the street? At least he lives in a culture where this particular paradox doesn't matter. He's lucky. Would that I could live with such contradictions, so blithely and untroubled, going about my day.

I'm Out of the Office

Another work-stoppage, but this time I have a legitimate reason.  I will be going on vacation for a little over a week starting tomorrow, and will have very little or no access to the Internet.  And no, I am not going to prison.  They have internet there.

We are in the midst of #54, and if you know anything about the history of professional wrestling, then you know that we still have to discuss the somewhat mistrustful looking man depicted at left, and we will.  The numbers keep going up.  There is no other way.  I hope that when I return there will be an agreement to end the lockout because my inner clock is telling me that I need to begin thinking about how to parse out my emotional breakdowns so that they be gradually distributed through another football season.  I also hope that the Oakland Raiders will begin wooing Brett Favre.  I also hope the Jets manage to hold onto one good receiver.  If, phantom gentle reader, you can do anything about any of these issues, I would be grateful.  See you in about nine days.

NY Jets #54 - Part 1

I started collecting football cards when I was six, just after I saw my first Jets game with Dad.  My collection wasn't that large.  I remember that the most important players I got from the 1975 Topps season were Coy Bacon, Mel Gray, and Randy Vataha.  Not a Jet in the bunch, which was heartbreaking for a small child, but familiar in the order of things.  I was a Jets fan, after all.  I assumed football cards had the same significance in the world as baseball cards, and it took me all of four more years of collecting to see that this was not true.  "Why do you get those?" Jake Walsh, a classic know-it-all friend, would ask in that way that was intended to remind me that I was stupid.  In 1978, Jake followed the Red Sox until the end of the summer, when suddenly the Yankees hit their stride.  Then he was with the Bronx all the way.  Eddie O'Fallon kept the dream alive, though, and we constantly bought and traded football cards in front of the deli on Merrick Avenue, between Orchard Street and Old Mill Road during the summer before the start of the season.

Sometimes you'd see distracted men coming into the unwelcome sunshine from the Lucky 7's Cocktail Lounge on the corner of Old Mill Road.  They seem like they were awakening from their sleep, tilting and reeling, listing like wounded ships.  I remember how one of them tried to chat with us in a voice that registered as a growl as we stood there, straddling our bicycles, going over our loot.  You guys got cards, huh?  What you got?  Who you got?  When we wouldn't answer or would just stare, he quickly renounced his offer of friendship and told us we were ungrateful children for the world we had inherited.  I couldn't help but notice the Lucky 7's windows, diamond shaped, colored and frosted, concealing the bleary light within.  Today, my old football cards are somewhere in my house, in a narrow box, kept from the light and the world like those afternoon drinkers, and I wonder where Eddie's are today, or where he is, rather.   

I gave up collecting football cards by 1979, though I had made my best collection that year.  I had become weary of the poorer characteristics of Topps cards.  They didn't show a great deal of action, and even when they did, the cards had no logos on the helmets.  Here Jake Walsh may have had a point; at first I assumed that there were some games during the season when teams played without logos on their helmets; maybe they were out being cleaned, or maybe players were sometimes asked to pose with a blank helmet.  I didn't realize the lost art of touching up the photos on cards, in the same way Stalin would have portraits touched up to remove people from reality.  Topps had a less pernicious reasoning for editing out the logos - to avoid copyright infringement.  That never happened on baseball cards, except when an entire mop-up revision needed to be done to convey a change of team for a player, as with Oscar Gamble in 1975.   

This is still better than my college roommate's fake ID

This looks like #54 Troy Benson's driver's license, but it's his 1989 NFL ProSet card.  It just happens to do something that I have never seen; it puts his face on the back of the card, alongside the statistics. As the write-up points out, Benson posted fairly good numbers in tackles, finishing "alone in second" in tackles on the team for 1988.  Now that's a phrase, isn't it?  "Alone in second."  It really conjures a sense of being a Jets fan.

Anyway, this might as well be Troy Benson's driver's license photo for 1989.  He has the look of a man who has been waiting on an unconscionably long line, being commanded by perpetually angry people to sit in one area, move to another, then go back to another waiting area because he has not completed his paperwork in full.  Other than that, he looks like an average football player I knew in high school, with his nose wide and flat, his large chin taking up half his face, and his eyes far apart and dull.  His hair sits flatly on his head with a fashionable part down the middle; he has the signature blond mustache of the era, with the look of a man you will run into when you both coincidentally need to pick up a case of Bud Light at the Circle K - that is, if you didn't live in Troy Benson's home state of Pennsylvania, with its Blue Laws.
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Stan Blinka, LB

Stan Blinka #54 is looking up at us as if we are twelve feet tall.  Perhaps he is looking up at the football gods, asking for some help.  Blinka was a fairly accomplished linebacker for us from 1979 to 1983.  He played one season alongside with the Denver Gold in the USFL.  I found him on Facebook, and he looks healthy, happy and satisfied.  I suppose that's how I look on Facebook.  Does anyone ever offer up a Facebook page filled only with images that conjure the bleakness and fear inherent to the human condition?  At the risk of sounding like George W. Bush talking about Vladimir Putin, I looked at Stan Blinka's picture on Facebook, and I thought I saw enough of him to say that this man has a good soul.  On the NFL database, I found only statistics on interceptions (he had three in his career) but sadly nothing on his tackles or assists. 

There are two things on the Interwebs I found about him. Though he was born in Columbus, Ohio (day-dreaming of playing for Woody Hayes, I presume?) Blinka went to Sam Houston State in Texas and was then drafted by the Jets.  Here's a good article on his return to his alma mater in 2010, along with many other SHS alumni, to inspire last year's players as they took the field at Reliant Stadium to play rival Stephen F. Austin University (the Lumberjacks).  The players left the tunnel with old SHS players standing in a line, rooting them on, which is nice.  I wonder if any other players there would be labeled "NFL stars," as Blinka is in the article.

The next set of stories though are a little less flattering to Blinka, but I would argue that they represent a larger problem that defenders are dealing with even now.  After the Jets' 15-13 victory over the Green Bay Packers in 1982, Packers Coach Bart Starr filed a complaint with the NFL over a hit Stan Blinka leveled at Packers' receiver John Jefferson.  Here is the New York Times story on it.  Here are more stories on its immediate after-effects.  It seems to me that the hit, which I do not recall, was one of those that makes officials, coaches, players, reporters, and league executives mindfully stop and reflect (or more likely pretend to reflect) on the true nature of the game.  What can be done to stop football's worst brutalities? they ask. So Blinka was fined and briefly suspended for the hit.  If you scroll down and find Dave Anderson's article on the issue (which has two grainy photographs of the forearm hit to the head) Anderson notes that the league claimed that, up until that hit, it had been 63 years since anyone had been similarly fined and suspended as Blinka was that week in 1982.

Anderson is right to point out the hypocrisy of this decision.  He gets Pete Rozelle to look at Stan Blinka's record of penalties to show that Blinka was, to that point, statistically a clean player - especially, Rozelle admits, "for a linebacker."  Anderson also maintains that it is difficult to believe that the league would really require 63 years to find as egregious a hit as Blinka's apparently was.  Without any real precedent, the punishment seemed fairly arbitrary, except that the Blinka hit occurred only three and a half years after Darryl Stingley had been paralyzed by Jack Tatum.  The league felt that it could concretely deal with the inevitability of paralysis.  They did not even realize that someday they would also have to devise a strategy for understanding the long-term psychological, physical, and emotional effects of even ordinary week-by-week contact; of course, they still don't know how to respond to such realities today, though they claim to try.  The league tries again and again, often in vain, to reduce the number of horrors that the game, by its very nature, creates.

What stays with me most, though, is that in trying to find out specifics about Stan Blinka's career (other than those from my own memory, of hearing Spencer Ross say his name on WCBS) I discovered only information about this now largely forgotten moment.  How little we really know of each other from the Internet, yet it is fast becoming our sole source of all knowledge.  It behaves like our own memories, holding onto only the fragments of things we would otherwise soon forget or enhancing those things that we have sugarcoated into believing about ourselves.  There is much more to Stan Blinka's career - the career of an otherwise clean player - than the one moment we find in cyberspace.