NY Jets #57 - 9/23/01

The weekend came and went. When we were not in praise and remembrance for the fallen, we were thinking about how much the country has tilted toward oblivion in the past ten years. We are a more divided country, a poorer one, an angrier one, a less important one in the eyes of the world, and yet the terrorists did not win, nor will they ever. Generations to come will wonder what we were thinking during this time, and I suppose we'll wear the same look of bemused frustration that my parents had when I asked them about living through the 60's. It was a strange time, we'll say. Stranger than usual, and it became difficult to see the difference between what was real and what was just our imagination.

I had an argument with a colleague of mine this week about whether or not it would have been better to make the memorials for the fallen in Schwenksville Shanksville and New York more of an affirmation. Why do we need to build holes in the ground to show where the towers were? he asked. Why can't we have something that reaches for the sky? I think sometimes he just enjoys a good argument. My brother narrowly escaped the World Trade Center that day and ran for his life uptown until he reached my cousin's office at Park Avenue. A colleague of mine once dated a fireman from Queens who was lost in the towers' destruction. The stepsister of a friend of mine was a flight attendant on one of the planes that hit the towers. Everyone on the east coast seemed no more than three degrees separated from someone who was witness or victim that day. Ten years later, given what little comfort we can take from our country's present state, it's appropriate that a void be the main symbol of our remembrance.

***

Two days after JFK was assassinated in 1963, my mother went out on a date with a guy to watch the football Giants play the football Cardinals at Yankee Stadium. She met him at his apartment, arriving just in time to see Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live TV. She remembers being unable to take herself away from the networks showing it over and over, like instant replay. Her boyfriend wanted to get to the game, but she couldn't stop watching it. All the while in her mind she kept wondering, What's going on? What's happening?

Still, the game was played, and she went. So did approximately 63,000 other fans. Richard Rothschild wrote in the Chicago Tribune that he attended the game and remembers no music, no extra sound effects, no halftime bands, nothing extraneous being done and that the crowd in attendance was solemnly focused on the game, with cigarette and cigar smoke wafting everywhere in the late autumn sun. There are legendary (and possibly inaccurate stories) of the tomb-like silence of the big stadium that day, so much so that people claim they could hear the whistles clearly from the upper seats. Bob Shepperd Sheppard called for a moment of silence at the game's start.

The news of Oswald's death buzzed around the stadium. Most people who were at the game got there too early to see it happen on TV as Mom did. They missed an event that would shape their country to come - a man's murder, caught live, witnessed by millions of people who had already been stitched to their TVs in a effort to comprehend the incomprehensible. As for the Giants, they were upset by the Cardinals 24-17, playing poorly throughout. Pete Rozelle later said the Sunday games should never have been allowed to go on, though apparently he had been given permission from the Kennedy family to let them play.

In his article above, Rothschild gives the sense that for the Giants' fans the game was entirely separate from the events of the weekend. They all comprehended that something terrible had happened, but the game itself was an honest distraction in the meantime. Football was a game. Kennedy and Oswald were real life. What separated those two worlds of reality was a void of knowledge, an absence of the intrusive media that we have today, though it could be said that the events of that weekend in 1963 ensured that such a void would not remain for long.

But even today, the world may change, but the games stay the same. You might have voted for one candidate three years ago and are now already following a fashionable wave of indifference toward him today, but three bad seasons for your football team mean nothing to you. If they do, then you're not really a loyal fan, you're an enthusiast. And that's fine; you might be healthier that way. Once the commemorative ceremonies ended, there was still the Jets-Cowboys season opener to play, a game very like one played ten years ago or even forty-nine years ago, and Tony Romo still gave the game away with turnovers, just as Tony Romo often does.

***

Rothschild's article was written exactly ten years ago today, perhaps to give some perspective on why the NFL was reluctant to repeat Rozelle's mistake; they skipped a week after 9/11 and returned to action on September 23, 2001. The Jets played the Patriots at Foxboro in a game intended to unite the two teams, their fanbases, and the entire football community in one knitted brow of sorrow and determination. One sign in the Foxboro stands read, "GO PATS. GO JETS." Both the Jets and Patriots played listlessly, just the Giants did back in the day, just as one imagines two teams would at a time of massive grief.

But this Jets-Patriots game represents a different ten-year milestone - a pivotal moment that signaled a radical change in the history of the two clubs. This was the night that Mo Lewis #57 knocked out Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. There were little more than five minutes left, and the Jets were ahead 10-3. Bledsoe scrambled for the sidelines and was nearly there when he was blindsided by Lewis and hurled to the ground. You may be able to hear the hit in the video below; many people on the field claimed it was the hardest hit anyone had ever heard. A blood vessel burst in Bledsoe's chest, and he was unable to get up. Backup quarterback Tom Brady went in for him, and the rest is, as they say....

In order for a truly great rivalry to develop, one team has to be preeminent and the other the spoiler, the underdog. Since that night, the Patriots and the Jets have been repeating a pattern built by the consequences of that hit. They were already trading coaches and players, but as soon as one of them became a Super Bowl champion later that year, the war of words and gestures that followed developed into one of the great spitting rivalries in the game. Until September 23, 2001, the Jets and the Patriots shared similar spaces near the bottom floors of the five-team AFC East, occasionally seeing one another take a trip to the penthouse, only then to end up in the same space again. After 2001, the format changed, and both teams have been consistently more competitive than Buffalo and Miami, but in the end we all know who's really better, and we all know why.

So the question begs: what if Lewis had pulled up? It's hardly right to blame him for not doing so. Though an excessive hit, it was a legitimate one, and the quarterback is fair game. In a quiet, defensive struggle, Lewis was simply doing his job; he had a fine career with several poor to underachieving Jet clubs, and it is unfair to spend this entire entry talking about him solely in the context of this one moment. But it did make a difference. It's a moment that haunts Jets fans because they're always inclined to believe that Fate works directly against them and in favor of the Patriots, and in this case Fate made a visit on the night football was supposed to return to normalcy.

Let's say Bledsoe stays as starter, and Brady goes somewhere else in the NFL. It's difficult to imagine a Belichick team excelling without Tom Brady, though you could say that 2008 was as close as an example of that as we will find. Where would Brady have played, if not for the Patriots? Would he have ended up a good quarterback on struggling teams, as Matt Cassel, Kevin Kolb or Matt Shaub have? Was he special all along, with or without Belichick?

Drew Bledsoe can be forgiven for not anticipating any of this. As he lay in pain on the Patriots' sideline, he certainly knew his night was done, but he probably never entertained the possibility that his career with the Patriots was over, too. Nor could he have known he would be replaced by the greatest quarterback in football history. We can all be forgiven for being unable to see the Hand of Fate in the form of Mo Lewis.

NY Jets #50 - (Redux II)

This is my exciting night life: I return home from work, walk the dog, wait for my wife to come from work, I make dinner, we trade work stories, then we eat in front of the television, which I think every marriage counselor would advise a couple not to do. TV can always be detrimental human interaction, but I am brain dead anyway after a day where I've had to assign and reassign a place for a 17 year-old to sit in my class (which is insane) and it doesn't really matter what we watch. TV is merely a conversation piece, enabling us to talk with one another when we're dead tired. In Hard Day's Night, George disparages a "trend-setter" to her creator by saying that "the lads frequently sit round the television and watch her for a giggle. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things." Though the real Beatles did not end well, at least Richard Lester's Beatles bonded over watching TV and mocking it.

Anyway, the other night, we came upon North Dallas Forty, the film adaptation of Peter Gent's novel based on his time playing for the 1960's Dallas Cowboys. A really generous critic would suggest that the 1973 novel did for football what Catch-22 did for war, by demythologizing it and painting it as an expression of human avarice. I've yet to read the novel, but the 1979 movie is about the best football film ever made, which may not sound like much considering how many really bad football movies there are. Nick Nolte plays hard-living wide receiver Phil Elliott, the Peter Gent character, while Mac Davis effectively plays the bleakly humorous quarterback Seth Maxwell, a thinly veiled version of Don Meredith. I'll watch anything with Nick Nolte in it because although he's played a wide variety of characters - an oily lawyer, an American Nazi, an obsessed painter, Thomas Jefferson - he's still always Nolte, and like Humphrey Bogart he's a flawed malcontent, a powder keg, which is OK, and you buy into him every time.

A comparable film today would study steroids and head injuries in the NFL. North Dallas Forty is about pain killers. BA Strother (GD Spradlin), the head coach who spouts scripture and consults computers for insight into his players' capacity for output, is the slightly veiled version of Tom Landry. Strother manipulates his players like chess pieces, sometimes turning them against one another in order to get better results. Nolte's Elliott is out of shape, he smokes grass and Tiparillos, he drinks Budweiser while lackadaisically lifting weights, and he has fallen out of Strother's favor. The key to his performance are pain killers that he takes ritually, culminating in massive injections he gets just before a game. In one scene, he stretches his body in agony before going to bed, and we hear all his joints crack, one by one. When Strother needs him for a full game, it means that he needs Elliott numbed up enough to take the pain, and Elliott is only happy to oblige.

The real issue of both the novel and film appears to be about whether or not there is life for a professional football player other than football. When Elliott falls in love with a woman who doesn't understand the game at all (and is portrayed as having no sense of humor, either) it means that he's really struggling to find a way out. What else is there? That's a question that fans wonder about when their devotions leave them numb, but it's also what I've been curious to discover about the infinite Jets. Is that all there is? If the football player in my senior high school English is smart enough to work hard but still wants to waste my time by arguing that he should be able to sit next to the pretty girl that he's just going to distract from classwork, I think it's because he's gotten the message that there is nothing in life more rewarding than the game. If only that were true.

***

It took a minute longer than usual to find John Sullivan #50. He's not the John Sullivan who plays for the Minnesota Vikings at center. He is not Vincent John Sullivan who's been robbing banks in Montana wearing a Mark Sanchez jersey. He is John Patrick Sullivan, former linebacker who attended University of Illinois (apparently recruited by alumnus Dick Butkus) was drafted by the Chicago Bears, and then played for the Jets for two seasons. With the Bears he never made it out of preseason. Apparently he got absolutely crushed in a 1979 preseason game against the Jets in which he otherwise played very well. I remember this game, most especially because I got violently ill after a spaghetti meal at the house of a family we were visiting, and I lay down on a couch, watching the game. (Normally I don't have an encyclopedic memory of all my childhood adventures with vomiting, but there are some vivid moments I can still use for effect. I recently had to tell a longtime family friend to stop putting my mother on a Tea Party e-mailing list, and when she refused, I told her that understood why she was doing it. I hurled on her baby blue living room rug when I was about four years old, and I told her that she was probably taking revenge against us for it by vomiting her right-wing propaganda on my Mom. She stopped.)

Sullivan was so badly injured in that Jets-Bears preseason game that he never got to live out the dream of being a new Bears middle linebacker. Instead the Jets, who had seen him play, picked him up and used him in special teams and suicide squads, which the new kickoff rules have recently made somewhat obsolete. Accustomed to being a middle linebacker, the Jets put him on the outside where he could not perform as well. His story is here. You can find out how he was screamed at by Buddy Ryan, how he intercepted Richard Todd and was fired by Walt Michaels.

When football was done with him, he eventually moved to California and turned to yoga. The link above shows a barely aged man with the sinewy build of a yoga master. I'm inclined to an easy cynicism when I see yoga instructors posing on a mountain rock in bare feet, or when they call themselves ministers of something called the "Diamond Approach Community," but John Sullivan seems to have discovered a world for himself after football by making a long journey through the connections between the mind and body. Reading his story made me wonder about Phil Elliott making the break from the game at the end of his season and about his future beyond the world of the game. It took some time, Sullivan says, before he reached a sense of peace of mind. He first had to abandon what he calls the "football mask." Once the Jets let him go, he said:

The phone just stops ringing. I wore the “football mask” for many years after though; I lived with the players, I stayed friends with many of my former teammates, I was part of the fraternity. I felt I was still was part of the team even though I wasn't collecting a check. I was renting a room from one of the guys on the team; I worked at one of his bars for a while as a bartender. I was still running in that circle, so it was very hard to let go.

He also discusses football's compulsion to build only the muscles and strength in players that it needs, leaving other muscles vulnerable to injury, which he feels is ultimately what happened to him. There is a remarkable moment in North Dallas Forty when we see players in the weight room; their repetitions make their bodies seem cruelly melded to the weight machines themselves. They are conditioned and shaped by the industrial power of the team's owner, and they are a part of his chemical company empire. They are not machines; they are only small cogs in a vast machinery, and they are all disposable and replaceable. Sullivan's tale made me envious of what he was able to accomplish by reclaiming his body from the machine.

***

Born in Teaneck, NJ, Dan Murray #50 might, for all we know, have grown up rooting for the New York Jets. After graduating from little East Stroudsburg University in rural Pennsylvania - a college that has seen only five players drafted all-time in the NFL (and all in the 1980's) he began his professional career at linebacker with the Indianapolis Colts and then came to the New York Jets in 1990, where his career ended. There is so much more to be said but so else little to add, and that is the nature of life.

***

Final bid at auction: $1,220. Number of bids: 0

Michael Taylor #50 was an All-American out of Michigan, an exceptional college linebacker drafted in the first round by the Jets in 1972. He played two years for the Jets and then jumped to the WFL and the Detroit Wheels, who didn't even finish their only season in 1974. Taylor was one of several Jets who left for the new league, including Gerry Philbin, Bob Parrish, Steve Thompson, and John Elliott. A truly comprehensive WFL site offers a surprisingly detailed discussion of the Wheels, a team described as "the most forgettable of W.F.L. teams," which is sort of like being last in England's Fourth Division in 1974 (Stockport County). It's rough stuff. The above link on the Wheels includes a couple of good pictures of Taylor. He might have briefly entertained the notion of returning to Michigan as a hometown hero, albeit near Ann Arbor, in Ypsilanti, where the Wheels shared a stadium with Eastern Michigan University.

The team was bankrupt even before the midway point of the year. After their loss to the New York Stars at Downing Stadium, the Stars themselves were immediately sold to Charlotte, NC and the Wheels were sold to no one. They landed back home to no one waiting for them at the airport and no one to watch them any longer. According to Jim Cusano's fine write-up, the Wheels were the first of the WFL teams to die. Their final record was 1-13. Michael Taylor went in the subsequent dispersal draft to the Shreveport Steamer. The league itself did not last through the 1975 season. If I'm not mistaken, this was also the end of Mike Taylor's professional career. The game-worn helmet at auction above is a relic of a time when style reigned over substance, a time when, arguably, the very best designed logos and uniforms in football history were wasted on teams with little or nothing else left over in the bank to spend. In our own contemporary society today, where 1% of our people own a quarter of American wealth, we must all sometimes feel like WFL franchises. So let's hear it for the the Stars, the Hawaiians, the Sun, and the Wheels. Let us all carry on the doomed tradition.

NY Jets #50 - (Redux)

This is an entry on #50 that should have been completed months ago. I inadvertently omitted mention of seven whole human beings in this discussion of #50. I am forced to locate my own error - a labor with which better read contemporaries don't have to worry themselves - and am now correcting it. My apologies, phantom reader. Let me continue. 

S, M, L, XL (XXL not yet available)

Carl McAdams #50 was an All-American linebacker coming out of the University of Oklahoma in 1967. He was drafted by the Jets and played for two more seasons after that, which included Super Bowl III. He is the big guy at extreme right in this Daily News photograph just after the team had gotten its Super Bowl rings on July 14, 1969, two days before the launch of Apollo 11. You see from left to right Emerson Boozer, Curley Johnson, John Elliott, and Carl McAdams - a big guy, even by today's XXL standards. He technically played for the Jets at both linebacker and defensive tackle, which seems funny to think of now. He would definitely fit in with today's linebackers because of his documented speed, but on defensive lines that are too big to fail, McAdams would have been a little out of place.

Just after the Super Bowl between the Saints and Colts, McAdams was interviewed by a local Oklahoma station about his role in the game of games. He shows off the ring that he received in the photograph above. I think it's interesting that he also confesses to what Mike Curtis and Bill Curry say about Super Bowl III in the NFL Network's story on the 1970 Colts - that on any other day, the 1968 Colts would almost certainly have beaten the 1968 Jets. Today, McAdams sells real estate, and if you're interested in obtaining life, home or auto insurance from someone in the general vicinity of Antlers, OK, you might be able to speak with a veteran of the most important Super Bowl of them all.

***

Mike Mock #50 has a tough name. It sounds tough to carry around too. On an alphabetical list, it appears as "Mock, Michael," which must have been a little trying, after countless first days of classes at school, being asked by teachers "Do people mock, Michael?" or saying, "I don't think you should be mocked, Michael." Maybe I'm investing too much humor in the lives and work of teachers in the places where where Mock grew up. But the truth is that Mock was born in Trondheim, Norway, a harbor town located on the Nidelva River, so I guess his teachers didn't do that. The Internet tells me that "spotte" is Norwegian for "mock," but how long did he live there? He was drafted by the Jets out of Texas Tech, so maybe his parents were just passing through. "Mock" is not, that I know of, a Norwegian name, though being a linebacker means you can be named anything - Lipshitz, Sukoff. It's all in the attitude you carry with it, and if anything, a player can live up to the name of "mock" by being irreverent and droll. In any event, Mike Mock wore #50 on the sidelines for the 1978 season and doesn't seem to have an NFL record beyond that, which is why I bothered to fret about his name.

***

Kelvin Moses, LB

Drafted out of Wake Forest, Kelvin Moses #50 is as tall as I am (six feet even) and, when he played for the Jets, he weighed about 50 pounds more than I do (185) now. Fifty pounds of muscle, no doubt. I would have liked to have said the same about myself, but I had the distinct displeasure of looking at myself in the mirror this morning, and I saw a sagging, prematurely aged middle aged man with what looks like a layer flab at his midsection that his skin is holding back with less and less enthusiasm. I imagine anyone performing my autopsy would say this was a layer of fat sadly reminiscent of most grown, sedentary men - men who spend most of their time hunched over, writing, all the while remaining staunchly attached to the notion that they are physically about as healthy as a person half their age. If you are out there, Kelvin Moses, beware. Like Phlebus, whose dead body decayed in the water while turning in the gyre of the whirlpool, I can only act as a warning now to you, who are still young, but older, and who may be holding onto that weight you carried back in 2001-02 when you played predominantly special teams for the Jets. We see him in the attached photograph above in one of his last regular season games, a happy occasion, when the Jets beat the Patriots 30-17 and put themselves in a position to win the division, which they did. It's the last division title they've won.

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.*

***

Wayne Mulligan #50 was another former Cardinal that Charley Winner brought over from St. Louis when he replaced his father-in-law Weeb Ewbank as Head Coach of the Jets in 1974. Mulligan was the center who handed off to Joe Namath in the two games I saw with my Dad in 1975, games that resonate in my mind like personal myths. Where did we sit? How many off-duty cops were there sitting in front if us? What did Dad get me to eat? I still hold that the greatest piece of mystery is how my mind was able to not see the Mets' infield and home plate that remained left over in the Jets' season at Shea. I don't recall it at all, though I do recall the disappointment I felt when I noticed it in 1978, when Dad took me to the Jets-Dolphins' season opener at Shea. Did my brain not actually see the infield in 1975 because I wasn't expecting to see it? Was it like the apocryphal story of the natives who could not see Columbus' ships on the horizon because they had no prior basis for understanding something like that could exist?

Mulligan appears to have retired after the 1975 season. He was replaced by rookie Joe Fields, who would snap the ball to Joe Namath, Richard Todd, Pat Ryan, Matt Robinson, and Ken O'Brien. And Phil Simms in 1988, when he became a Giant for one season. Centers act as the keystone to the line, the transitional arc from one side of the line to the other, with their posteriors pointed toward the most important man on the field. It's such an odd place for anyone to find himself, and I suppose centers, whom you rarely hear about, have to have as good a sense of humor about themselves as Mike Mock does about his name. Do we never hear about the center because we are too embarrassed to admit that the game we love requires a man to have the ball fed to him between another man's legs? Anyone not already acclimated to the absurdities of this great game would likely be suspicious. "You construct intricate rituals," Barbara Kruger once said in one of her works, "which allow you to touch the skin of other men."

Regardless, Wayne Mulligan was the transitional point in the arc between John Schmitt #52 (1966-73) and Joe Fields #65 (1976-87). That's a total of 22 seasons among three men at one position. Only at the quietly devout position of center (and placekicker) is something like that even remotely possible.

NY Jets #56 - Part 4

John Abraham in 2005

Am I wrong, or does John Abraham have really long arms? I keep staring at this picture, amazed at what I'm seeing. When I stand up straight, my full palm goes past my waist. His elbow almost meets his waist. When I was a little boy I drew pictures of football players with one physical aspect usually out of proportion with the whole - a giant head, giant feet, or arms as inordinately long as John Abraham's. So we can think of this not as a deformity but as an abstraction of the human form, an aesthetic improvement over the norm, certainly for a linebacker.

This Life photo is, as Jets fans know, taken from 2005, the one season Abraham wore #56, a gesture that always seemed derivative of another famous player with that number from another New York-based team. Normally, Abraham wore #94 for the Jets, and he now wears #55 with Atlanta. That he could not be kept on the Jets is one of the greatest frustrations of my recent fandom, alongside the departure of James Farrior and Jonathan Vilma. The Jets never really made good draft choices before the first decade of the 21st century, so I guess it would have been too much to expect them to keep all the great ones they made afterwards.

His #56 in 2005 was a tribute to Lawrence Taylor, I think. I guess for a Jets fan that's a bit like seeing the Mets wear black hats, which still smacks too much of trying to be like the Yankees. You have colors already, I keep saying every time I see David Knight in those black shirts that make them look like they're Auto Zone attendants. Be who you are, not who they are. But even more, by wearing #56, John Abraham seemed like he was expressing a need to appear like something that he couldn't be, that no one could be. To offer a tribute to LT is as understandable as it was for the Greeks to make alms to the gods of Olympus, but it's kind of obvious, too, isn't it? Don't all men want to be gods? All linebackers in some sense want to be like the man who redefined their position, so wearing his number is just being redundant. Of course you want to be LT, I wanted to say. Just be grateful you're not a criminal offender the way he is. Be yourself. You have a number. Be that number. You don't have to be anyone but yourself. So John Abraham became a Falcon and then gave up #56. I should have been more specific.

Linebacker Godwin Turk #56 does not have arms as long as John Abraham's, but I'm certain most people don't, not even Lawrence Taylor. Turk was drafted by the Jets in 1974, and I probably saw him play the following season when he started every game. He then went on to play mostly special teams for the Denver Broncos for three seasons (1976-78) and like John Abraham, he traded #56 for #55. He played for the AFC Champion Broncos of 1977, the Orange Crush. Turk is also apparently "infamous" for separating his shoulder after spiking the football in celebration of a fumble recovery. I don't know for whom he played at the time it happened. According to his database record, he suited for almost every game in each of his seasons of play, save for one or two. He recovered fumbles in 1975 and 1978, so did he do it at the end of one of those seasons? It would be horrible to think of him doing it at the end of his career. Maybe it happened in the 1974 preseason? The card below lists him as "injured" that year.

Your mystery Jet? Jerome Barkum or Winston Hill

As has been pointed out before, it's unfair to identify a player's career with a single foible in the field, and considering how popular it was to spike the ball in the 1970's, you could hardly blame him. It was a sign of the new, exuberant football of Billy "White Shoes" Johnson. It seems innocuous compared with hiding a cell phone in the padding of a goal post. Godwin Turk was celebrating what a defensive man always wants for himself - to be in on the play that will turn the game around. A Denver Post laundry list of worse "freak injuries" is here, and Turk's spike is on it. Some of these are acts of God, others are acts of ignorance, and others are just a matter of someone being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I can't attribute any of that to Godwin Turk. All he hurt was himself, and his sin was one of exuberance. The back of his card is all we really have to go on. It calls him a "lusty hitter," which also sounds exuberant, though I don't think anyone would call a player that today, probably because it sounds like something Don Meredith would have made fun of Howard Cosell for saying.

****

Craig Powell #56 played linebacker at Ohio State and then in a pro career that originally saw him as one of the players who moved with the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore. He returned from knee injury briefly to play in 1998 with the Jets, but he wrecked his knee again and was finished in the NFL. He returned in 2001 to play for the San Francisco Demons of the XFL. His write-up on the Demons' page says that at Ohio State, he was "touted as one of the fastest linebackers in college football, always arrived at the ball in a hurry and in a nasty frame of mind."

It seemed that one of the failures of the XFL was its insistence that what Americans wanted was not a better game, but a nastier game, a game played with a manufactured sense of violence. I suppose you could say that all of this began with the spike, which suggested that the game was also a spectacle of a player's attitude, his sense of himself. The spike was a threat to the game's traditionalists; as late as the 1980's Tom Landry didn't want his players to spike the football. The NFL is named the No Fun League for a reason, but part of its conservatism is legitimate - too much exuberance in a violent game can sometimes lead to uncontrollable violence. Consider the brawl in 1983 that started with Jackie Slater attacking Mark Gastineau for his sack dance and that eventually lead to the NFL banning the dance.

The XFL struggled because it wanted to cast real people in a narrative that had the nature of fiction but was also an actual game. Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo would never have made it in the XFL, probably because they were friends in real life as well as teammates in an unscripted drama. They were also real people played by Billy Dee Williams and James Caan in a motion picture film based on a real story, the polar opposite of the kind of drama Vince McMahon wanted. Brian's Song would have been deemed "pantywaist" entertainment by McMahon (one of his favorite words), probably because it transcended notions of what football was all about and attributed a sensitive nature to men.

Excessive celebration is also an element of professional wrestling, but you can feign the bluster of a professional wrestler because the professional wrestling is not real. Most importantly, wrestling's violence is controlled and scripted. I remember feeling true unease when the XFL was first planned because Vince McMahon seemed to want to compound the level of violence in a game with enough unscripted violence as it was. Perhaps because it was such uncharted territory for him, he failed. I just kept seeing the excesses of a growing fascistic state being stirred by the nearly mortal violence of its favorite sport. What I was really seeing in my mind was Rollerball, another good James Caan film that, like Brian's Song, was made into a terrible remake.

Anthony Schlegel #56 came from Ohio State a decade later and was drafted by the Jets in 2006. He is out of the NFL today and is apparently a strength coach for Ohio State. His web site is an advertisement of sorts for his services in building strength in the weight room. On the other hand, it is also laced with references to Biblical scripture, offering what seems to be his philosophy behind "strength building." It's also a window into a part of the United States that I don't really think I understand, offering a conflation of things like football, guns, God, and hunting that could only come out of Texas. My sausages for tonight's grilling came from the market. Schlegel started hog hunting when he was 16.

He says that today when he hunts he comes back with meat that he will then clean and offer to homeless shelters, an altruistic gesture that most hunters probably don't even think of. So there's that. But sometimes when I look at the Red States I see another country, one that is also the core inspiration for the game I love, so it's disorienting. I feel like I'm unable to communicate with that part of the world. A queasiness comes over me, I shake it off, I move on. The games must be played and watched. The German poet Friedrich von Schlegel (no relation to Anthony that anyone knows of) once said that it was "peculiar of mankind to transcend mankind," which I think is especially true in reference to football. Whatever Brian's Song might have suggested.

***

Chris Wing #56 came out of Boise State and suited up for two wholly non-statistical games at linebacker for the Jets in 2007 and that was that. Vernon Gholston came out of Ohio State, was drafted #1 in 2008, he briefly wore #56, suited up for three seasons with the Jets, producing virtually the same results. Who could have seen it coming? "The historian, says von Schlegel, "is a prophet looking backwards." So, no one.

NY Jets #56 - Part 3

A colleague of mine came into the copier room this morning with a radiant expression, which is not the manner of anyone entering the copier room of a public high school. At least one or two copiers are always out of order, and the line for the one still working is usually populated with teachers who've now been given some unsolicited time to consider their own blundering careers. As for my colleague, he's just recently been hired for a full-time college coaching job at a nearby university and will be leaving us in January.

He slapped me on the shoulder, as if my wife had just had a baby. "This is it, Roche," he said. "This is our year."

I knew what he was talking about. He's one of the few people in the Philadelphia-area school where I work who, like me, was born on Long Island. He's a Jets fan, and although he once insisted that The Great Gatsby was the dullest book he was ever forced to read in high school (he's in the Social Studies Department) at least he knows who Lance Mehl #56 is, and why he's important. He too can recall the moment that Lance Mehl made the Impossible seem briefly possible.

"I can't believe you'd say that," I said. "I'm impressed."

"It's true," he said, shaking his head at his own disbelief. "I feel it. I really do."

Like any good Jets fan, he's usually skeptical, almost to the point of gallows humor, for why would anyone call any Jets season "our year," a phrase that can mean only one thing? Normally Jets fans look at life much the way teachers on the copier line do - with low expectations, with a manner of being already defeated. I know I've been harping on it of late, but the average public educator in a down-and-out school feels a bit like a fan who knows that his team is not going to have a winning season. It's a "rebuilding year" among many to come, at least until public education becomes a less popular target in the age of recession. It doesn't mean that you're giving up the ghost; you're just waiting for things to get better. You're waiting and waiting.

But my colleague is no longer waiting. It doesn't mean that he's impatient. He just believes that it's here. He believes the time we have been waiting for all of our lives has finally come. He's entitled to believe in the Impossible, in a championship season, even if I think he's been affected by his own recent good fortune. For the rabid fan, the spectator's life is intertwined with his own personal hopes and ambitions. For some reason, the fate of people who don't even know or care about you means as much to you as a new job, a love affair or a bigger house. For some bizarre reason that makes sense.

*

I was 13 the first time I ever thought that the time I had been waiting for all of my life had come. It's not an age I would ever want to return to, personally. I was repellent to girls back then and not likely to attract them any time soon. School was filled with moments of personal mediocrity. The one thing that could make everything OK was the Jets winning the Super Bowl. And in January 1983, it became possible because of Lance Mehl. In the fourth quarter of the 1983 AFC Divisional Playoffs, as the Jets edged past the heavily favored Raiders at the LA Coliseum, Lance Mehl intercepted two passes and kept the Jets from blowing the game, as they had in the previous year's Wild Card Game.

The Jets and the Raiders were two teams that had followed different paths since the year I was born. For the Jets, the once visible path to greatness had been made invisible, and whatever good things fate had granted me by the time I was 13, it had also made me a Jets fan, and that was only thing I cared about.

Lance Mehl, making the Impossible possible.

The Jets led at halftime 10-0. They barely held onto a 17-14 fourth quarter lead, and I can still see Freeman McNeil fumble in Raiders territory with just under a minute left, and Jim Plunkett being given one last chance to come back and move the Raiders downfield. Plunkett hit Cliff Branch, then Todd Christensen, and my feelings of desperation crept in. I gripped my aching stomach. Don't blow the lead. Please. Please, not again.

I remember Lyle Alzado from that Divisional Game. He would suffer years later from a cancer that he claimed, before he died, was related to his steroid use. He reacted to being held by the Jets' Chris Ward by tearing off Ward's helmet and throwing it at him. These were Al Davis' Raiders of a different time, back when Davis didn't look like his own skeletal remains. The Raiders were relentless, opportunistic sociopaths, the kind of men who didn't so much join drug-dealing, chain-wielding gangs in prison as organize them. In order to feel comfortable about being anywhere near the game on TV, I fantasized that I was a traveler from a future age who already knew the end result and that the Jets had lost. I was visiting the residents of this sad, powerless time who had pinned their hopes on the Jets. Poor fools, I thought. It was best to accept only the existence of the possible, and nothing more. All else was impossible.

In truth, I was learning the manly art of repression. Just as I saw that crying was something that real men didn't do, so too was I learning how to resist even the slightest hint of emotion or the expectation of happiness. (My wife often comments on how even now I watch Jets games in a state of tense silence, perched on my chair, like an owl.) Nauseous, filled with quiet stress, I was becoming a man. Don’t kid yourself. The Raiders are going to win, I thought. Don’t get hopeful. Just accept whatever happens.

You can watch the fourth quarter of the 1983 Divisional Playoff here. Ex-Jet Burgess Owens intercepts at 9:20, and the Jets seem doomed, as they usually do. But at 16:44, with the game clock at 4:52, Todd throws through double coverage to Wesley Walker for a great catch down to the Raider 1. Scott Dierking scores to put the Jets ahead, 17-14. Dick Enberg mentions Walker's partial blindness, something that still makes him the ultimate Jet, and one of my favorite players in all of football.

I will watch this game on my computer from time to time, whenever a bad day forces me to seek out the kind of consolation that others might find in a kind word from a friend or in a glass of scotch. You can see that the Coliseum's air that day is colored the grayish yellow of Los Angeles' persistent smog, and the turf is a scrabbled green and brown from all the dry months of the autumn and winter. If it rained during the playoffs in the Coliseum, the ground would turn into an sodden pit of mud. When Mehl comes down with his first interception at 21:16, he lands on desert grass.

Then Burgess Owens dislodges a fumble from Freeman McNeil, but yet again, on what appears to be an identical play, Lance Mehl intercepts Plunkett on the ensuing drive. The game is done. The Jets will move on.

But it's only now that I notice that the images of the two interceptions are identical in the video. Whoever edited the footage actually looped Lance Mehl's first interception twice. Why hadn't I noticed it before? His two interceptions, coming over the middle, seemed identical in my memory anyway, so I suppose it's appropriate that the second catch is exactly the same as the first. It's as if to prove the point that what we see on film is actually a trick of the eye, as unreliable as our own memory. We replay these moments on film and in our memory because they mean so much to us, but aren't they also altered somewhat by the emotions that accompanied them then and that accompany them now? Why shouldn't they be simply one frame looped over another? What difference does it make?

The following week, the Jets would lose in the Mud Bowl, a misnomer for a game actually played in a vast, clear puddle in the Orange Bowl. Miami's AJ Duhe sealed the win with an interception, and my brief hopes splashed away. For years since, the possible has been mostly impossible, reappearing only of late, and teasing us all into believing once more in bigger things to come some other day.

****

At some point my wife became enamored of Arena Football. I confess I look at Arena Football as a sideshow act, suitable for viewing alongside the bearded woman and the Turtle Man. For her, it may have been the irresistible lure that Jon Bon Jovi has for all white women between the ages of 35-50; he was the primary owner of the local Philadelphia team that won the Arena Bowl in 2008 (I had to look that up). It's like watching lacrosse, played with an enthusiasm that seems manufactured. She picked up on the hyperbole of NBC's coverage of the Arena Football League a few years ago when a commentator intoned, "This is Arena Football, Bob. There's nowhere to hide."

Nowhere to hide. Arena Football has lived out its life, and though it has been reincarnated somewhat, it had nowhere to hide in the geography created by America's Game. The American Football League endured from 1960-69 because it offered a more colorful - though only slightly modified - version of the game that already existed, not a re-imagined alternative. Arena Football will endure for the same reason that the circus has; because men and women need things to do on a date; because divorced men need to do something with their children when they have them for the weekend.

Which brings us to Rick Hamilton #56. To end your career with the New York Jets in 1996 (1-15) was when you were ready for Arena Football. And yet, to read the Orlando Predators' tribute page for Rick Hamilton (the more desperate a league, the more violent its mascot) is to discover something you'd never find for a contemporary NFL player. In a league so overladen with an emphasis on measurable performance, where a player's worth is gauged in his fantasy statistics and not in the incalculable drive of his desire, the NFL has lost the mythologies that once made the game what it is in our memories. No wonder NFL Films is nowhere near as important as it once was - it can no longer help us in the fantasy draft. Its narratives were themselves fantasies full of hyperbole, the original language of sports.

Was Odysseus not as great as Homer would have us believe? Does it matter? Perhaps he was like Rick Hamilton - a player who survived his destinations and returned home. Who knows? If the past can be as unreliable as our memories of Lance Mehl's interceptions in 1983, then why can't Arena Football someday be compared with The Odyssey? When the fall of NFL comes along with the fall of our civilization (or which ever comes first) people will have forgotten the short-sighted ambitions of Fantasy Football and will want to bring back the language of the mythical, back to the story of Rick Hamilton's struggle for survival.

Meantime, we must come back to reality; sports is a crass and cold business. The smaller the league, the greater the language that's used to describe its players. The smaller the life, the greater the hyperbole. That's the secret of myth. But before we draw the veil away, look at Rick Hamilton's tribute link above, and you'll find something Jon Facenda would have said about Unitas. Would that we might inspire such descriptions for ourselves in the smallest of our endeavors, as teachers, business people, artists, servants, laborers, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters:

"From today on, any player who straps up in the red and black and plays FB/LB will be compared to Rick Hamilton, the best ever!"

NY Jets #56 - Part 2

his 1978 card

I'm getting started with a new school year at work, and as we were sitting in our introductory meeting, the ground began to shake. Literally. We had a tremor that derived from a 5.8 earthquake centered in Northern Virginia. It's appropriate to our time. I feel like everything that we have taken for granted as a culture has to started to shift dramatically because of our economic ills. Especially in education. No teacher is safe anymore in a universe where a standardized test grade can determine your future. I feel like Larry Keller looks.

I'm probably reading into it, but linebacker Larry Keller #56 doesn't look too excited in this 1978 card. The best that I can tell, he's doing warmups before a Jets' exhibition game at the old Meadowlands, probably summer 1977. I think the Jets won 10-0, which will tell you what kind of game it was.

Living in Orange, Texas, a town close to the border of Louisiana and near the Gulf of Mexico, Keller is probably wondering about how luck put him in America's biggest city at its worst time. Crime is a scourge, there's been a mass killer on the loose, and the city recently had a blackout that brought out anarchic looting. The Jets and Giants elicited about as much excitement back then as a pair of Peewee teams on an autumn afternoon. Maybe less than that. It would be a long season for both teams, and another long one in New York for Larry Keller. He seems to know it.

his 1979 card

Or maybe he looks determined. Maybe he's looking squarely into the camera and thinking to himself, "I'm giving it what I got. I'm getting a paycheck. I know what I have to do. People will know that I've been here." Who knows? Larry Keller had been a veteran of three leagues by the beginning of 1977. He played well for the University of Houston in the early 70's, was drafted by the Chargers but spent his first pro year in 1974 in Canada with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Then he played with Csonka, Kiick and Warfield in the WFL's Memphis club in 1975. Then he went to the Jets in 1976, a tough place to start in the NFL. You'll see it all laid out on the back of his 1979 card, one which I also have in my collection. His last season in any league was 1978. The information on the back of the card tells us all we need to know: he played "specialty teams" and was "good against the run." Most of all, back home in Orange, he was a volunteer fireman, and for all we know, he may still be one. A Texas boy, he had traveled around quite a bit by the end of a decade when everything seemed to have been shifting under the feet of ordinary people. Leagues came and went. Fads arose and vanished. Kids smoked weed. Perhaps we're just like Larry Keller in odd times of our own, the ground shifting under us.

****

For some, you can find #56 Jeff Lageman's bronze likeness in a wing of our Hall of Infamy devoted to Jets draft busts (no pun intended). Listing him as a least disastrous draft bust can hardly be flattering, or even fair. He played well early in his career. The Jets were simply guilty for many years of a crime that all teams perpetrate at one time or another - they failed to pick up the real gem from the pile. As the Bleacher Report mentions in the above link, Carnell Lake, Daryl Johnston and Steve Atwater were all available when the Jets picked Lageman.

This is another what-if obsession of mine, and I would like to someday assemble the teams that might have been had the Jets made what might be deemed the "right" choices, beginning, obviously, with Dan Marino in 1983. Since I'm middle aged and in a reflective mood these days, I find myself doing the same for my own life, yet finding I probably am fine with everything I've already done, relatively speaking. But "relatively speaking" doesn't exist for a football fan; his team either makes the right decision or the wrong one. Such judgments are ultimately subjective, though. Who's the biggest bust? Vernon Gholsten? Lam Jones? Blair Thomas? Certainly not Jeff Lageman; that's clear. But who you think is the biggest will probably vary according to the era in which you rooted. Lee White was a bust in 1969. Carl Barzilauskas in 1974.

Considering that Lageman played fairly well in his seasons with us (1989-94), and suffered injuries, you can't really call him the "wrong" choice. Every team makes a "wrong" choice in the draft, but the volume of mistakes that one organization makes consecutively or over time can convince a fan that everyone the team picks is a bust. This has been historically true for the Jets and for other teams like the Bengals. Suddenly Lageman goes from a less appropriate choice to a "bust." Because we Jets fans are prone to sensational collapses, the odd draft choice here or there can be thrown into a bridge abutment of poured concrete ineptitude (that metaphor might be a bust). It's all part of the insurmountable network of failure that we wear like a hairshirt (that's better).

The issue ultimately is whether or not the team can change the pattern. You have to agree that their choices of late have been getting better (excepting Gholsten), so the pattern has changed, and it's what we've done with them that made the difference one way or another.

Lageman got to play later on for the Jacksonville club that went to the AFC Title Game, while his old teammates were losing by four or five touchdowns during the Kotite era ('95-'96). His Wikipedia page mentions that he and other players questioned the disciplinary approach of Tom Couglin. Today he is a Jacksonville area sports guy and an avid hunter and fishermen who will sometimes offer guest appearances to experts in turkey calls on his program, starting with Dave Holloran and the "Crystal Mistress."

Another wing in the Hall of Infamy goes to players lost during the Belichick era to the New England Patriots, and you will find the bronze likeness of Roman Phifer #56 there. When he went to the Jets in 1999, the Rams took Patriot Todd Collins to fill his space, but then the Patriots took Phifer when the Jets let him go. Was it a good idea? The only thing I can gauge it by are the 100-plus tackles he made in two of the four seasons he was there, and he earned three Super Bowl rings. At the end of his first year with the Pats, teammate and future Jet Terrell Buckley called Phifer the silent MVP of the team. The Pats' first Super Bowl win was something to admire, a victory of David over Goliath, and I had no sense of its being the beginning of a new Goliath, which in a way is what David became anyway. I remember that letting Phifer go bothered me, as has letting Shaun Ellis get away. You begin to see the patterns that bind one team to mediocrity and another to success. It was good for Roman Phifer to leave us, and his bronze bust in the Belichick Wing is well earned. Will Ellis have one too? We are already heating up the bronze.

But I didn't know until I began looking into his background that Phifer was a producer of Blood Equity, the HBO show that two years ago dealt directly with the issue of the inadequate pension for retired players. The target of the film isn't management but the Players Association and its inability to deal with long-term issues of retired player disability, both mental and physical. The show is poignant because a recent suit fronted by players like Jim McMahon alleges that the NFL has hidden the effects of player concussions for decades. The Players Association has yet to deal with what its present membership will have to face in the many years to come. At the end of the above clip, Bob Costas says that, "If a handful of active superstar players stepped up and said, 'Hey, we understand. We're concerned. We're behind this,' that'd help a lot too."

Of course, if you listened to Drew Brees, that doesn't seem very likely. Brees has always taken advantage of the opportunity to generalize wildly where he has zero expertise. And the matter of whether or not the recent agreement is any good for NFL's Legacy Club remains a mystery, certainly to someone as ill-equipped to understand it as I. The only thing I'd like to know right now is exactly how many older NFL retirees Drew Brees has actually met in his lifetime.

Training Camp 2011

At his destination

Finding the Jets' training camp at Florham Park, NJ is a lot like trying to find the prize in a massive box of Cracker Jacks. It's there, you know it's there, it says it's there, you have no idea why it's taking so long to get there, and you start to think it's all a vast trick they're playing on you. In a way, that makes sense. No football team wants everybody to stop in and say hi during the summer, and since the Jets are still one of the franchises that doesn't charge tickets for admission, it's still worth it. If you want it bad enough, you'll figure it all out.

There are no signs anywhere in town letting you know this way or that is the right direction, but there are Jets flags everywhere to let you know that geographically you are in the right village. Finally, we clearly went in the back way, following the compass on my wife's iPhone, or maybe it was the front way, I don't know which, passing through an AT&T business park. Suddenly a cop directs you past the main entrance, and you head out to a vast parking lot that looks as old as the franchise itself, all covered with weeds and broken asphalt. You are then guided by silent, dehydrated parking attendants to the exact spot where they want you to park, and you walk the length of ten football fields to the shiny silver mother ship of the Jets' new summer facilities. It is the last public day of training camp 2011. You are home.

LT, Jim Leonhard - behind them a place 
where you can register for your wedding.

This was my first time here, so I couldn't help but compare past and present. For the players, it's obviously better than Hofstra; for the fans, not so much. With fewer fields on which to play at Hofstra, all the players used to have to practice  on the same field, which they still sort of do now, though the punters and placekickers had a larger space of their own for practice. There are fewer seats for fans to sit and watch things up close, but the ones available are much closer than in the past; if you got there early, you got a good spot. But by the time the first, second, and third strings were practicing against one another, I noticed that the players standing on the sidelines were actually blocking the fans' view. So where we ended up standing, at the end zone of the main practice field, leaning up against the artificial fencing like refugees, ended up being a pretty good place to stand and observe. Hofstra offered better seating, but the players must love the new building, which they no longer need to share with a college. Local suburban residents might even mistake it for a Crate and Barrel.

Of course, Shonn Greene was not playing due to a skin infection, so Joe McKnight played a great deal, as did Chris Jennings who was sharing #32 with another guy. From our vantage, Sanchez looked sharp enough, but threw a few worrisome errant passes. Plaxico Burress caught a few nice passes; one that elicited the biggest cheers from the crowd was a long one from Sanchez, and I found myself going right along with the crowd. Many people mumbled around me about how happy they were to see Jim Leonhard play, and he was pushing Dustin Keller and Tomlinson around, letting them know he was there. Mark Brunell still seemed to hobble a little (as did Plaxico) so Greg McEvoy (wearing fellow Alabaman Richard Todd's old #14) took a lot of snaps. From our end it was easier to see how the offense did.

My wife took the photos, and she caught some good candids:

Plaxico Burress, lining up

Derrick Mason, Mark Sanchez

Plaxico, in thought

Mark Brunell, still injured

Nick Mangold and Rex Ryan

We play the Bengals tonight in exhibition without Brunell and Mason, and there still plenty of injuries to be concerned about on the defense, especially to Bart Scott. It is hard to remember who was and was not playing on defense that afternoon, and since I'm more of a historian than a reporter, I admit that I wasn't looking hard enough. The crowd was a little more interesting in a way. A woman from North Jersey was excited to be there with her husband and son, and they let us have a closer view after standing at the fence for a while. She was a math teacher, about as eager to go back to work next week as I am, which is not very much. It was hot out, very humid, and a young woman behind me collapsed, and we all went scurrying to find water and shade for her. 

Another guy with his two little kids was there, and we chatted about our worries for the season. His little son kept bugging him about getting water, and the Dad kept telling him that he couldn't pull it up out of the ground. I was with the Dad on this one. "You said you wanted to see Revis," he told his son. "He's right there," he said to the boy, pointing at the field. When my wife and I started for home, she laughed and said, "Leave it to a Dad to not think to bring bottles of water to the practice field," and I laughed because I wouldn't have thought of that either.

We had Tom Moore's view of the offense the entire time

After about and hour and a half, we got our fill. We stopped by the Jets Shop, and I bought nothing, which is on the same par as a struggling diabetic abstaining in a candy store. The inflatable bouncing things were there for kids; a bunch of high school girls were enduring the tropical sun while guiding little ones through its obstacle courses. I'm glad I'm not young anymore. 

It's his real spot.

And we found Woody Johnson's parking spot inside the facility area. There's no way you can park there. My wife and I had the following exchange:

"Is that supposed to be a joke?"

"No, that's his real name," I said.

"I know that's his real name. Are they just kidding about that being his spot?"

"Oh," I said. "I don't know. I don't think so."

We bought a $4 bottle of water and left. This time we were able to take what seemed like the front way; to tell you the truth, it was only more obvious because a electric construction sign was temporarily placed at the entrance flashing, "JETS FANS ---->" on and off.

It was a good visit. I felt like it made me that much ready to gird my loins for another tough season with its high and low expectations. It was especially good to be around nothing but Jets fans in a place specifically designed for our team - not somewhere we share with someone else, or a place with another entity's name on it. In this sense, Woody Johnson deserves his own parking spot. I will park miles away for that.