End of last year's Title Game. This feels like a "leftwich."
James Farrior #58 was once seen as just another draft bust in Jet history, at least until he spent the first decade of the next century earning two spots in the Pro Bowl and 2004 Team MVP for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Then he didn't seem like much of a bust. Nope. Not really. The Jets may have made some progress as an organization, but in the last ten years, they let go of linebackers John Abrahams, Jonathan Vilma and James Farrior, actions that constitute impressively bad judgment. Yes, we are in a different time and a different place, where defense has become the focus of the team, but the latter of those two have been in four Super Bowls total. Living in Philadelphia, you can be guaranteed that the local CBS affiliate will show a Ravens game, a Steelers game, or a Jets game. Farrior has had a good career with the Steelers, at times offering people opportunities to recall days of the Steel Curtain, though that's still a stretch, and everybody knows it. But the number of times I've had to see his name flash before the screen in Steeler yellow on the back of his jersey, or the number of times I've had to hear Greg Gumbel say, "James Farrior in on the stop" are directly proportional to the number of times I've left my lunch sitting on the counter and only to realize it when I open the refrigerator in the teacher's lounge and see nothing there with my name on it (my wife calls this a "leftwich"). That is, equal and often.
****
Jason Glenn #58
Bill Ferguson #58 played linebacker two seasons for the Jets, 1973-74, though very few statistics are available on him. Jason Glenn #58 played longer, from 2001-04, when the team went through its swoons under Herman Edwards. He played special teams for the first two seasons and then went on to play more full time linebacking in 2003 and might have continued to do so had he not broken his arm the following year. The rest of his career he spent on special teams with the Dolphins and then the Vikings. Today he is a high school football coach in Texas, which is a lot like being a Sherpa in the Himalayas or a soothsayer on the streets of Mumbai. Outside of his region his skills bring him little of the honor he gets at home. His Wikipedia page is acutely itemized, year by year, almost like a resume. If most of us are not important enough to receive the kind of entry one used to find in a volume of the now defunct encyclopedia or the Who's Who, then we can write our own story, with the idea of being in control of our own past, if not our own destinies.
The page for Joe Kelly #58 features very little, except a link to his NFL statistics. He played for the Jets from 1990-92 - when I knew and kept track of very little of what the team did. I was too busy studying Jacobean Drama or something like that. He must have made some impact on Bruce Coslet, who probably brought Kelly over from the Bengals, for whom he played previously. Otherwise all that's there is a dead link to an article from the Cincinnati Enquirer entitled "NFL Was Easy By Comparison," which made me wonder if he had suffered medical issues post-career. But when I found the link republished on a blog, I saw that the opposite was true. Instead, as of the writing of the article, Kelly was operating several homes for juveniles whose "families are entangled in abuse, drugs, mental illness or behavioral problems." This is no small feat, and had I not just looked a little further, I might have just written off Joe Kelly as another retiree whose life was marred by football. Instead, he is, it would seem, a hero. There are no pictures available for Joe Kelly, except a hint in the article of a man with a shaved head and a ring in his ear.
The link is worth looking at because "by comparison" the NFL did not require the emotional work that Kelly's efforts include. It's one thing to create foundations to help at-risk youth, as James Farrior has, but it is another to be the person to care for them, day by day. As a teacher, I enjoy having six hours with kids from the lower income community where I teach, but I don't go home with them, and home for many of them is the most turbulent place imaginable. And the angry, wounded adolescent is about the most unappealing human on Earth. Of the kids he helps, Kelly gets "walls patched that they've kicked in, and wait(s) with them at hospitals for treatments and emergency evaluations." Here's hoping that amid all of the deterioration of services for the neediest persons in this country, that Joe Kelly's work in Cincinnati still survives. What little I've read of him makes him one of the noblest ex-Jets I've encountered.
There are names that scream out for a caricature, especially names that sound like the stuffy rich guys in a Marx Brothers film - a millionaire of self-important privilege whose wife Groucho is going to insult or whose drawing room will be used by Harpo as a stable. Names like Lynwood Alford and Aubrey Beavers.
But then these guys are also actual human beings, with lives, feelings, thoughts, and most importantly histories. Aubrey Beavers #58 ended his career with the Jets in 1996, after playing two seasons with the Dolphins. He had two interceptions in his first season, but then he started only one game in 1995. Promise, then silence. In the epics of antiquity, only men who have been cursed by the gods or who have to be punished for a wrongdoing against nature are sentenced to places where no man can happily survive. Napoleon was eventually banished to a place as inhospitable as St. Helena. And with stomach cancer. But nothing Aubrey Beavers did in his life could have earned him a fate just worse of not playing at all - that is, playing linebacker for the 1996 New York Jets. Real life is much less fair than history or in myth would lead us to believe.
But then consider Lynwood Alford #58, who played linebacker for one game in 1987. That's right. Alford was a replacement player for the 1987 replacement New York Jets. In a poignant article in the Times on October 5, 1987, Alford talks about what it meant to be in uniform and living out a dream he thought had long ago passed him by after graduating from Syracuse in 1985:
''It was a dream come true,'' Alford said about playing in an N.F.L. game. ''It was something that I'll never forget, something that I'll tell my grandchildren. I don't care if I was just on the kickoff return unit. I was in the game.''
Alford played in only one game in 1987, and it was the only game in his whole pro career. He was not even a starter in a loss to the replacement Cowboys.
I was in the game...something that I'll tell my grandchildren.
A paycheck is a paycheck, but I confess I felt slightly humbled by Alford's words, if only because being "in the game" is where so few of us end up. I once had a literary agent for four months, but like a girlfriend who is trying to let you down, she stopped returning my calls. The dream was over. The game was over.
But they will never be able to take that away, any more than they can take the replacement game away from Lynwood Alford. His experience of covering a kickoff, technically, took place in an NFL game. You can look him up on the NFL's website. He's there. No one is taking that away. Replacement or not, he played in what the League construes as an actual game. His one distinction is simply putting on #58, going onto the field, and making a brief contribution. That would be enough for any of us who've never been anywhere that we always wished we were.
The article above about the 1987 strike talks about "Integrity and Dreams" being the replacement players' inspiration during the strike. But there were two particular regular players on the Jets who were scabs that year: Marty Lyons and Mark Gastineau.
"Dreams" belonged to guys like Lynwood Alford. But when he was asked why he was playing during the strike, Marty Lyons invoked the "integrity of the game." That will never sit particularly well with me. Lyons is and always will be a legendary Jet, but I'm a union man, too, and if there was one thing my mother told me when I left home and went off into the world in 1987, when I was 18, it was "to never cross a picket line."
Alford talks about his otherwise impossible dream as something he will be able to talk about to his grandchildren. In the Times article, Lyons invoked something of the same when he said that crossing the picket line was about creating a future for his "little boy." He said that his decision was one that "he will live with for the rest of my life." At least he understood there was a legacy for every decision and action. Both men left a legacy that season, and it's best to say nothing more.
But then remember that Lyons and Gastineau were both drafted for the 1979 season, and they were members of the Sack Exchange. They represented a period of hope of the the team after years of terrible play in the 70's, and that finally came to an end in '87, a year when the Jets played in a division so bad that they might very well have won it had they just one a few more games. But they didn't. Gastineau was a clown, a rube. He says in the article above that playing during the strike made him "uncomfortable," as if that would explain away his decision while Bridgitte Nielsen blew kisses at him from the stands. Lyons was still an anchor (just as he is the Jets' commentating voice on the radio each Sunday) and when he crossed the line that year, he made all my unambiguous devotion to the team change into something else, to be defined later. Being a fan would never really be the same after he did that, and it's probably just as well.
Recently, Lyons talked about his 1987 decision in light of the most recent lockout, contextualizing it as a matter of how Gene Upshaw and the NFLPA did not take into account the money needed for players down the road, past retirement. After this year's lockout, we have still a long way to go before players start thinking about the money they won't have later, as opposed to the money they get now, so it's at least good to see Lyons speaking up for retired players and the pension fund. Lyons is also the head of the Marty Lyons Foundation and has a long track record of philanthropy.
Bobby Bell #58 was a replacement player in 1987, too, although for the Chicago Bears. Prior to that, he started a handful of games for the Jets in 1984 at linebacker. He came from the University of Missouri and was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, which makes sense because his father was also Bobby Bell, the Hall of Famer who played for the Kansas City Chiefs and went to the University of Minnesota. Bell the younger must have played with heavy expectations, though if you're going to have a father who leaves a legacy, let it be Bobby Bell, the elder.
This was originally written as we approached the Jets' week five trip in 2011 to Foxboro. They lost 27-21 - not a bad showing for a team that got flatly outplayed two weeks beforehand. The circumstances of this game are starkly different from the last time the Jets were there, back in January 2011, when they took the field as underdogs in the Divisional Playoffs and upended a Patriots team that everyone took for granted would win the Super Bowl.
For a brief moment, when it was all over, everything in the world seemed possible. I was grateful, joyous. My wife took this picture of me and my dog Harry when the game was over. Harry even has eyes to match his dear friend's beloved team. He's not happy about the scarf; he does not appreciate human clothing at all. He does not value its aesthetics, and frankly, he doesn't know why we can't go without, particularly in the morning, when he needs his walk and his human friends are picking out their outfits for the day.
Our enthusiasm after the playoff win could not stave off the inevitable title game loss the following week. Still, he looks ebullient in the photo, throwing his muzzle in their air with total pride, as if he knew all along it would work out. This was taken not long after Bart Scott #57 expressed his own pride at the playoff win over the Patriots. He did it to Sal Paolantonio, who must have known Scott was going to give him something good, and he did. Bart Scott was neither grateful, nor joyous. He was indignant. Why did so many people doubt us? What were they thinking? Or as he says, "Anyone can be beat."
The fact that it begins with his rendition of the flying jet is terrific. Bart Scott dances around the background, and Paolantonio waits patiently for him to pull into the terminal, and as he lands, Scott pauses to signify that the flight is over and that passengers may disembark when the seat belt sign is turned off. Thank you for flying. It is a complete performance piece. How did it feel to win? It felt great. Tom Jackson and Keyshawn were wrong. Are you looking forward to the title game? "Can't wait." Jets fans are a struggling people who don't look to championship seasons or MVP awards to find validation. They go to YouTube to find brief videos like the one above, where the necessary gave way to the possible.
We know the rest of the story, but things change so quickly. Two weeks ago, the Phillies were the best team in baseball and about to embark on a championship run. Last night, they were a team that couldn't score more than two runs a game against a St. Louis Cardinals team that seemed another makeshift creation of an allegedly "genius" manager with Gene Simmons hair treatment and a penchant for guest appearances with Albert Pujols at Tea Party rallies. To make matters worse, the gods chose the Phillies' last out for Ryan Howard to tear his Achilles tendon. Wanting so badly to make up for watching the last strike go by him in his last World Series, Howard ran with all his hefty might down the first base line and blew out his ankle. As the stunned Cardinals celebrated the end of the game, Ryan Howard lay a crumpled heap in front of his dugout. How did it happen? To all the unbelievers, anyone can be beat.
And now the Raiders and the Ravens have outplayed us this season, and I find myself thinking about how quickly things change. Will Jets fans have to wait years and years for another moment like the one above? Will we ever know what it will be like to permanently outdo the doubters, the haters? Although I never felt this way, many of the NFL's TV people were willing to eat crow, and they admitted that the Jets' 28-21 victory over the Patriots in the playoffs was a sign of the changing of the guard, the beginning of a different team's preeminence over their most detested rival, at long last. Admit it, they said, Bart Scott is right.
And now it all seems like a sad replay of the near and distant past. Anyone can be beat, but mostly the Jets. "There is no present or future," Eugene O'Neill wrote, "only the past, happening over and over again, now." At least for one night, Bart Scott stood up to all the prognosticating unbelievers who put their trust exclusively in the power of the past. And it felt very good at the time.
***
This is a tale of Mac Stephens and Blake Whitlatch both #57. Between them, they suited up for 11 games in the pros. From LSU, Whitlatch was in a Jets uniform for four games in 1978 and then no more. Stephens appeared in four games for the Jets in 1990 and then three games for the Vikings the following season. As professionals this is all I have to report. Whitlatch might be the same guy who today is a business owner in Baton Rouge. Stephens might be a recreation program and activities manager in Euclid, Ohio. We know that there is life after football.
John Woodring, LB
Or consider John Woodring #57. He played five seasons on and off as a linebacker for the Jets, from 1981-85. You see him at right in one of the two last seasons, obviously at the Meadowlands. Perhaps he might not have been the focus of an article had he not played for the Jets. Apparently he worked on Wall Street until he chose to become a teacher for 15 years. A year ago this article in the Norwalk Times appeared about his work as a football coach for third graders, which was the one year I played football. My football coach was an alcoholic, abusive, and plainly crazy man who forfeited our final game when the referee finally penalized him for forcing his players to fake injuries to stop the clock. It seems like John Woodring is a better guy than that, and he mentions loving to teach players who are too young to know that they are doing anything other than playing for love. As for his playing days, Woodring says, "My wife knows that easiest way to embarrass me is to talk about that...It happened a long time ago. It was 25 years ago, and that's where I'd like to keep it."
So be it. Another coach is John Yohn #57, also known as "David Yohn," which might be preferable to a name that rhymes. Life after football enabled him to become a legend as a high school football coach. In rural places like Ohio and Texas, high school football has an enormous cultural importance. So too in Pennsylvania, a state that some people think of in terms of the Amish, the Continental Congress, cheese steaks, empty steel mills, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but it is also, as James Carville once wrote, "Alabama in between." Most of Pennsylvania is a cloistered world, two spots of urban progressivism on either side of a rigid, traditional plurality. Barack Obama described Pennsylvania and other rural areas running for President in 2008 as places where people "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Harsh, maybe, but Rick Santorum didn't come from Texas or Alabama. He came from Pennsylvania. It is a largely conservative state, and in such places people gather at high school football games as a means for being in community, and there the high school coach is a lightening rod personality (note: I have never watched a single episode of Friday Night Lights, much to the chagrin of many of my friends).
John "David" Yohn was drafted by the Baltimore Colts in the late 50's, and he then played for the Jets in 1963 until he had to retire due to his back troubles. He briefly replaced Hubert Bobo in number and position in that first Jets training camp. He was born in 1937, the same year as my mother, in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, a quiet town within an olfactory-pleasing distance from Hershey. Yohn became a high school football coach of the Middletown Area High School football team in 1968. If you are a resident of the Commonwealth, as I have been for the past 19 years, you know how typically Pennsylvanian a name like "Middletown" really is. Tucked into the anonymity of a very long state from east to west, a place like Middletown never needs to be thought of as the extreme of anything, and so it builds its own mythology out of the world between worlds, between the Yohn and the John.
Yohn died of cancer in 2002, yet even in 2008 he was remembered fondly as an "iconic" coach. He accumulated an impressive win-loss record such that one wonders why he retired after only nine seasons of coaching (1968-75) when a high school coach can often stay in his job when he's losing. One description of his prolific 1971 offense in the above link suggests that his team scored "a point every minute," which seems like something mythological, or true, or both. When he was dying, apparently a former player traveled all the way from Idaho to say goodbye to him. Long journies, victories on the gigantic scale - these describe the kind of myth still allowed in the middle places of the Earth, the places where the legends of men like John Yohn live on forever without being dashed by the cynical, professional world, where life is cheap.
***
After the Jets defeated the Patriots in the January 2011 playoffs, Shaun Ellis #92 was given a chance in Greg Bishop's article to reflect on how much had changed in his tenure with the team (2000-11). He was at that point the active player with the most experience on the Jets. Originally he was a part of the complicated transaction that allowed Bill Belichick to leave the Jets for the Patriots. Ellis was one of two linebackers drafted in 2000 as a result, and he will always be among my favorite Jets.
But first we're here to talk about Ryan Riddle #57, linebacker for the Jets for 12 games in 2006. Riddle was released amid that confusion at the end of Mangini's first season as coach. His story is an object example of Mangini's communication skills, for a team spokesman simply insists that the move was "Coach's decision." Such was Mangini's way, a kind of patronizing restatement of the action in order to explain it. I don't miss that.
But we also mention Shaun Ellis because last January, in Bishop's article above, Ellis used the Jets' #57's over the years to show how much (or how little) changed. In his years with the Jets - among Al Groh, Herman Edwards, Eric Mangini and Rex Ryan - #57 on the Jets was worn by Mo Lewis, Darrell McClover, Ryan Riddle and now Bart Scott. Ellis had seen it all. Bishop suggests in his article that in January 2011 things to come would be better, that the long climb was reaching somewhere, and where there had been turnover in the past, stability in the future was bound to come.
And now I miss Shaun Ellis. He is a New England Patriot now, playing across the field from the Jets as they go off to Foxboro. Bill Belichick picked him up late in the summer, perhaps as a symbolic trophy of his complete victory over the team that dared claimed Belichick as their own. Number 92 on the Jets, long worn by one guy, will now be offered the same revolving door that's been used by men in #57 as they entered and left.
When I walked out to do some errands last Sunday morning, I saw my next door neighbor sitting on his front porch, smoking, and in his Ravens jersey, about nine hours early for kickoff. I smiled. He smiled back, somewhat wanly.
"We're not neighbors today," he said.
I sensed that he was only partly kidding. But there are plenty of things in this world that he probably wouldn't half-kid about in the same way. Some things in life are just not that important, and some are just that important. He was kind enough to say he thought the Jets would win, and I said the opposite. The only difference was he was just trying to be polite, whereas I believed I was right. And, of course, I was. Last Sunday night the Jets played the kind of game that's too painful to watch. Their defense is not the immovable force that we, with smoke and mirrors, have imagined that they are. Their running game is officially in need of magic. Their offensive line, missing only one crucial part, is now a catastrophe. Nothing is working properly, except for Joe McKnight.
The Jets were completely over-matched by the Ravens, and one sensed from the beginning that while the Jets are a team pretending to be as good as the Ravens, the Ravens themselves might be as good as they pretend, even with all of the stupid mistakes they made throughout the Jets game. They may still develop into the team that plays the Patriots in the title game. The Jets are not.
The following morning I greeted my class, knowing that they would be upset about the Phillies' loss in game two of their series against the Cardinals, but they were even more furious that the Eagles blew a 20-point lead against the 49ers, a team that, on paper, is simply not as good. Their defense failed miserably in the second half, and their offensive line has become the subject of speculation about Michael Vick's meeting with karma. The Eagles' running game still resides squarely behind the passing game in importance. My students are at the edge of despair. One of them said he had been rooting since he was little, but he now asserted that he was "done."
One thing all throughout my fandom to which I have become accustomed is seeing the Jets play beneath the lowliest of expectations, and I feel sad for the newer, smaller fans who haven't gotten the chance yet to adjust their expectations. They never saw Bill Simpson or AJ Duhe intercept Richard Todd in the postseason, nor did they see the New York Jets suddenly fall to 7-9 in 1983. Nor have they known what it was like to deal with an entire decade (1990's) spent watching their team vainly compete with infinitely better teams week after week. Abandon hope all ye who enter. If you don't like it, leave now. You might be grateful you did.
But many don't. Particularly if they decide to become a fan on the basis of even the most innocuous thing. Sometimes the tinier the inspiration, the greater fire that burns. Take johnjet on a Jets forum who describes the following about John Matlock #57, former center of the Jets in 1967:
When I was about 9 years old I was given a couple dollars to spend at a book fair at school. I didnt know what book to buy, but for some reason I decided to buy a Joe Namath book. My father introduced me to his friends son in law. His name was John Matlock, he played for the Jets and he was a center. He came to my house knowing I liked the Jets. I am the only Jets fan In my family. Everyone else are Eagles fans. I just never looked back. I seem to become more obsessed with the Jets every year.
More obsessed every year. Why is that? Do you Patriots fans feel that way? Maybe the little ones do when they first learn that they root for a team that has Tom Brady on it, but the older you Pats fans get, the more you probably take for granted that your team will win. The Patriots' situation stands in grand incongruity to yours after a while. Your life is filled with painful ups and downs. Not so your Patriots on most days. You begin to realize the simple truth that, of all the things they need to keep winning, the Patriots certainly don't need you.
You. The guy living in Swansea or Pawtucket or Chelmsford or Natick. Is it really the same as it used to be? Admit it. The thrill and flavor of your fandom are gone. How many times can you feel anxious for the Patriots and believe it's an authentic feeling? Your will to live is no less horrible after that loss to Buffalo. You don't need to know the score of this week's game at this precise moment, do you? Check it later. You don't check it in on your iPhone.
You don't live Sunday on the edge anymore. Somehow you know the ship will be righted if they fall behind, so why not do some yard work, or work your errands instead? Go to your kid's soccer game, all the while wondering about Monday at work. You don't have to worry about how the Pats are doing. They've got it under control. And if they don't, you feel even less satisfied because you know they're the best team in football. What excuses could they possibly have for losing? You're going to be resentful and maybe even dismissive if they do. And when they win, you feel unmoved because that's what's supposed to happen. In fact, you follow the Patriots less and less each Sunday.
Don't you?
It's the very fact that the Jets are always perilously close to disappointing even my small, fragile expectations that I too am as obsessed as ever. Life on the margin is more interesting, more compelling than a life with a perennial winner. It's a gambler's life, and no gambler would ever honestly deny that the house doesn't always win in the end, any more than a drunk honestly believes that this next bender is going to different this time. But they keep coming back.
***
Sometimes a football player's life is just like yours. Like Richard Lewis #57, you were on a journey that lead you to a place where you are today, and no one might have guessed - certainly not you - that this is where you would lay down roots, find a home, a family, a life. Lewis did this after he played linebacker for the New York Jets. He then played four seasons with the Toronto Argonauts and then never left. He became a rather active member of organizations linked to parks, recreation and churches in Toronto. According to his write-up with Twisted Sports International, which is a "hybrid organization" that seems to want to encourage children to be more active, he has been a part of Toronto life since he retired. A moment from his pro career that he recollects with greatest pride at the link above came in 1974 while playing for the Buffalo Bills, when he intercepted a Joe Namath pass (this also happened to Namath 21 other times throughout that season, but Lewis is entitled to feel it was special to him). He also recollects the day in 1973 when OJ Simpson ran over the Jets to gain the mark beyond 2,000 yards for the season and says, as carefully as a member of Toronto's Board of Trade possibly can, that Simpson's infamous life over the past 20 years is, simply, "sad."
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Darrell McClover #57 was drafted by the Jets out of the University of Miami in 2004, and in 2009 he finished his career after four seasons with the Bears. He was injured in his rookie year, and might well have felt strange playing in the metaphorical shadow of his good friend, the other player drafted out of Miami that year, Jonathan Vilma. As is often the case with linebackers that teams don't know quite what do with, McClover played with the Bears mostly on special teams.
Kevin Macarthur, LB
Such are the journeymen's lives. They are the rule more than the exception. Kevin Macarthur #57 has a story that gives some insight into how to engage in the struggle of your life. It helps to believe in God. Macarthur was cut three times by the Jets before he was brought back to play in the 1986 playoffs, where he intercepted a pass for a touchdown in the Wild Card victory over the Chiefs, giving the Jets a 28-6 lead in the third quarter. That's a good memory.
His story, written in 1987 by Gerald Eskanazi for the Times, reveals a portrait of a man whose belief that he would be back on the team the following season appears to be part of a cosmic struggle. There is a quote he gives Eskanazi about his mother that comes across as an eerie prophecy:
''I knew I'd be back with the Jets, and I was very proud of that,'' he said. ''I went to see my mother back home in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I told her about the coming season. She said something strange to me. She said, 'I won't take a train, and I won't take a boat, and I won't take a plane, but I'm going to be watching you play next season.' ''
Her words come across as a riddle, but apparently she died of a stroke soon afterward. Macarthur says she lead a hard life, an unforgiving one that saw her become a mother for the first time when she was only 16. Such stories sound cliche-ish, though it's not surprising that the most resilient players who at cutting time endure the constant rejection and acceptance and rejection again are the ones with the toughest mothers, and most especially religious mothers. He says that therefore each time the Jets cut him (and not when they brought him back) he fell on his knees and prayed.
And this is what stays with me as we enter into the weekend where the Jets will travel to Foxboro, to once again play the role of underdog, the less and less likely team to vanquish the perennial division champion. I was also raised by a religious mother, and though I haven't fallen on my knees the last two weeks after consecutive losses, maybe it's time to try. I've always felt that unconditionally loyal fandom is a creature born under the same sign as unconditional faith. A Patriots fan may make his trip to Home Depot this weekend while the Jets are being pounded into paste. Whether he realizes it or not, he has become disaffected with the existential experience of being a fan. And if he wants to watch it later in the week he's got it on Tivo. But then who has the time to follow football these days? He won't be on his knees when it's over. He's already lost his faith.
To give Mo Lewis #57 a tribute higher than simply being the man who inadvertently changed the modern game of football with a single devastating hit on Drew Bledsoe, I think it's important to mention something which should both elevate Lewis to a place of genuine respect and also shed light on a sad truth about the way the franchise has played defense over the past 51 years.
Pro-football-reference.com offers a comprehensive list of the 1000 best players on offense and on defense using the Elo system, "a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games" based on the calculation system for chess ratings made by Arpad Elo. I don't claim to understand it, except that the list is a set of matches, one player against another statistically, in order to determine who is better than whom. The overall list puts Jerry Rice as the best overall offensive player who won the most statistical matchups out of 720 possible players, and Reggie White as the overall best defensive player out of a possible 815. Mo Lewis is at a rather high ranking - #142. Whether any of this has any validity at all is questionable. But putting Lewis there is no fluke, especially when you take into account his high rate of tackles early in his career, forced fumbles and interceptions.
The comparably rated offensive player is Grady Alderman, the longtime Vikings lineman. Above Alderman there are eight offensive players who spent a considerable time with the Jets, notably Curtis Martin (80), Vinny Testaverde (90), Joe Namath (102), Kevin Mawae (114), John Riggins (126), Don Maynard (137), with present-day Jet LaDainian Tomlinson #21 at number 18. Not many, but what can you do? Those ratings are themselves a little absurd. I would put Martin above Riggins, but I would put Riggins above Namath. But the really striking point is that above Mo Lewis there are no Jets defensive players. No one. This point cannot be emphasized enough, and to be honest, I think this is reasonable. It is only very recently that the Jets have been considered a strong defense, though after Sunday's game against Oakland, there is reason to believe that they may be rated lower this year. The Sack Exchange ranks lower (Gastineau at 188, Klecko at 247, Lyons sadly not at all) while Larry Grantham #60 ranks just below Lewis. So there is at least one argument here that Mo Lewis is statistically the best defensive player in New York Jets history. True? False? Perhaps it was appropriate that in 2001 the "best defensive player" in our history helped create a seismic shift in the AFC, for who else could be capable of such a thing? James Farrior #51, whose best statistics have come with the Steelers? Maybe. He is ranked overall at 140.
***
Jim Jerome #57 played special teams for the Jets during the latter part of the 1977 season, when the sky was darkening on an increasingly poor season. After starting the year 2-2, the Jets dropped seven in a row before they managed to barely squeeze past the equally poor New Orleans Saints. When Jerome joined the ride, the season had long lost its momentum, and the young team had probably fallen into the ennui that infects a late failed football season. When a new player enters the locker room he must feel like the new teacher in our disgruntled faculty who tries to save her inspiration for new ideas from the veteran colleague's compulsion to stay attached to old ways, whether tried and true or not. But regardless, when you play a few hours or weeks in the NFL, you are always known as someone who played in the pros. The Watertown Daily Times of Connecticut mentions Jim Jerome as a standout for Syracuse football when their program was at a low and then as a a special teams man for an NFL team on the slide.
Whether the Jets of 1977 (3-11) were really pros in the sense that, say, the 1977 Oakland Raiders (11-3) were is hard to say. The Jets might even have done as well as 7-7 in '77 if you take into account how close the games were that season. Four losses alone were within four or fewer points. But on the last day of what appears to Jim Jerome's career, the Jets fell 27-0 to the Philadelphia Eagles, a team that managed only a 5-9 record.
***
On July 12, 1997, the Seattle Times published the following about John Little #57:
Former NFL lineman John Little died of a heart attack in Hot Coffee, Miss., earlier this week. The two-time All-Big Eight selection at Oklahoma State spent seven years in the NFL, with the New York Jets, Houston Oilers and Buffalo Bills.
Apparently he was born in Tallulah, Louisiana, but he died in Hot Coffee, as rural a community as one could possibly imagine - even rural by the definition of a rural state; according to Wikipedia: "about halfway between Jackson and Hattiesburg ... Hot Coffee isn't a quaint little town; it's not even a town. Instead it's a tiny community of farms, homes, and businesses scattered along two-lane Highway 532...According to local lore, a resident [J.J. Davis] opened an inn in 1870 and sold coffee to passersby. Apparently the drink was the only memorable thing about the place."
The "only thing." Is that all there is? Hot Coffee, Mississippi is a non-census municipality without a zip code. This is where John Little's life came to an end, far from the northern cities where he once played, distanced from suburbs, freeways or malls.
I suppose one of his last games in a uniform was playing for the Buffalo Bills, and probably against the Jets in that middling season of 1977. This was a cold, gray, poorly played December game at Shea that I listened to on the radio with my Dad as we drove around Roosevelt Field, doing Christmas errands. I remember feeling what I felt last week as the Jets fell to Oakland. They can still win. They will, won't they? Is that all there is? Dad suggested that it was. "This is why I gave the season tickets away," he said. They trailed in the fourth quarter 7-3 before Wesley Walker caught a touchdown pass from Richard Todd, raising our expectations for two wins in a row, a feat they hadn't achieved since October. And then the Bills scored, and I slumped across the back of the bench seat, staring at Dad's shoulder and then beyond it, out into the vast, flat cold slate color landscape of the Long Island Expressway. That's all there was.
***
Hubert Bobo #57 has the best name for any season. In a new magazine called Sports Illustrated in 1954, he is included in their preview of the upcoming Rose Bowl between Ohio State and USC. SI noted the formidable backfield of the Buckeyes, which included Bobo, Bobby Watkins and "Hopalong" Cassaday. Bobo had been a Ohio high school football star, and at Ohio State, he helped win a National Championship for a team that also included future Hall of Famer Jim Parker. He would then go on to play as a pro in Canada and then eventually begin a professional career in the States with the Los Angeles Chargers, and then at linebacker with the New York Titans for two seasons. His Wikipedia page thoughtfully outlines his statistics as a pro.
But at one time in our history, during Christmas season in 1954, a marvelous moment of synchronicity occurred. In that 1954 issue of SI, Hubert Bobo is mentioned as one of the keys to the Buckeyes' offense, but on page 24, a story can be found on middleweight champion Carl "Bobo" Olsen. In the midst of the holidays, readers were given a Christmas gift of two Bobos. Would that we were so lucky.
During the spring and summer of 1972, my Mom and Dad were expecting my little brother, so they began looking for a house. We lived in a rented apartment in Flushing, a mere long walk from Shea Stadium in the autumn, a subway stop in winter. Up until this time, they had never owned anything except their clothing, their cutlery, their furniture, their books, a TV and a 1967 Volvo. Now we were moving to suburbia, to Long Island, a logical step along the narrow strip of land to Nassau County from Queens. Now they were diving for more. Dad had known a little of the town and country growing up as a small child in middle class Braintree, Massachusetts, but his family soon hit hard times, and he became a city child. Mom had never known anything but the city, in a railroad apartment where she and her siblings slept in the same bed. She wanted my little brother and me to have our own rooms.
I have vague memories of being driven around in the backseat of a Saab by a realtor, looking at houses. I was three and a half, and I recall very few details of the trip around the South Shore neighborhoods. I remember seeing more trees than ever before, and tall ones at that. I saw a car that advertised a product with a plastic German shepherd dog attached to the roof. I wish I could remember what that company sold. It's killing me. What I don't remember is what my parents told me many years later after I became a Jets fan. Among the many houses we saw, we also looked at #52 John Schmitt's house in Hempstead.
Apparently he was moving out. He was Joe Namath's starting center from about 1966-73. Like my Mom, Schmitt was born in Brooklyn. He had already made the move out of New York City to the Island, settling near where he went to college at Hofstra. I always assumed that we were looking at his house back then because he wasn't playing for the Jets anymore, but I see now that he still had another year to play for the Jets when we were there. So where was John Schmitt moving?
I just know that as a boy each time I read about the Jets in Super Bowl III and saw a passing imagine of John Schmitt - his white towel attached to his back belt so Namath could wipe his hands before the snap, the peculiar cleats the offensive line wore with the circle on the heel - I always felt like he had been rendered a little less magical by virtue of knowing him to be a regular person, with a home, cutlery and china, a TV, books, and a car in his garage. Suddenly he was like a member of my extended family, or at least a family friend, for why else would a person allow me into his home? No matter how distant these people were from my devotion, I had to realize too that they had lives, sometimes decorating them with vestiges of the lives of the city they left behind. There was no mass-produced, fixed accounting of personal taste in the 1970's; things were pretty loose, and there was no IKEA. All the accoutrements of real life only served to make the paradox that much more incomprehensible to a little boy: the Jets of the mythical time of 1968 were immortal, but all the same merely human. John Schmitt was the first to be filed in my understanding of the world in just this way.
***
John Schmitt #52, playing with pneumonia
Back in the day when I used to go to work with crippling hangovers, I found a completely distorted inspiration in When Pride Still Mattered, David Marraniss' excellent book on Vince Lombardi. One of the coach's primary lessons was that to be a successful in the game, a player had to live with and accept constant pain. Running back Jim Taylor specifically said that Lombardi taught him the lessons of how to recognize his own limits for pain and to then push through that limit to a new place where the player gave that much more than his opponent. It made the Packers of the 60's fearful from more than a strategic point of view; it made them psychologically impenetrable.
Yet Marraniss also points out that Lombardi's own ability to face pain was constantly at odds with what he demanded from his players. In his own private experience, Lombardi was apparently greatly afraid of physical pain, perhaps as any normal person is. But football is not normal, not the real world, and while Lombardi became the first professional coach to embody lessons that could be apparently applied to the real world, his insistence on his players being intolerant of pain is not part of the normal world. It belongs in the fantasies of football heroism, where it erodes the mind and spirit of many of its players.
In North Dallas Forty, a violent mid-day practice before a key divisional game against a fictional Chicago team ends with a receiver going down with a pulled hamstring. From high above the field in a tower overlooking the whole practice, Coach Strouther speaks evenly through a megaphone to the trainer below. Is the player ready? he asks. The trainer admits he can't tell but he doesn't think so. Wide receiver Phil Elliott, a sometimes sour veteran, a free spirit, not at all to Strouther's taste, is the next man up. Strouther doesn't like Elliott's independence, his immaturity, and Elliott doesn't like how the coach stokes the racial tensions on the team to create a greater hunger on the squad for violence. But they need one another. He calls out from the megaphone for Elliott, and he takes a walk with the receiver. Can you be ready for a whole game? he asks, knowing that Elliott will have to be shot with pain killers to play.
Of course, says Elliott. "Hell, I ain't afraid of needles," he says, walking away, but not before adding to Strouther, "I guess that's what's called maturity."
Where's the fine between a distorted maturity and pride? When I consider John Schmitt on the day of Super Bowl III, I admit find something admirable in his masochistic determination to compete. Apparently in the New York Daily News back in 2008, John Schmitt admitted that he had played the Super Bowl while seriously ill. Rich Cimini of the Daily News writes:
"Schmitt...said he played Super Bowl III with pneumonia. By the fourth quarter, he was on the verge of exhaustion. He was so ill that, during the postgame prayer in the locker room, he vomited. Namath, kneeling beside Schmitt, scooted away in a hurry."
There is Schmitt, hulking over in pain and puking during a solemn moment, and there is Namath, kneeling at his greatest moment of professional pride and very nearly hit with something that would have been difficult to explain to the reporters amassed around his locker without first trying to use the towel tucked into the posterior end of his center's pants.
***
Someone mentioned to me today that he was taking comfort at work from remembering to see things as they are, not as he hopes they will be. It's strange because I've been doing the same lately, and finding myself mostly reassured by the results. Keeping your expectations low can wedge you through lean days when it seems as though that what you planned to accomplish in the most rudimentary way will simply not get done. Some people complain endlessly at my job, and it might be because their high expectations are always dashed. It's human for us to hope, to aspire. But should we see things as they are? As a Jets fan, I have been given the unique privilege of practicing a life of low expectations but found myself still bitterly humbled in 1983, in 1999 by things as they truly were. But consider Rich Cimini's recent article on the miraculous reappearance of John Schmitt's Super Bowl ring. According to the story, in 1971, not long before my parents began following their hopes for a new house, John Schmitt was surfing in Hawaii when the ring that signified his heroic part in one of the most important games in professional football history vanished into the Pacific Ocean. It slipped off his finger and disappeared into the blue. The entire story is circuitous. A lifeguard found it some time later and gave it to his wife, but it became part of a niece's estate. The niece then had it appraised and contacted Schmitt recently to let him know that it still survives, saved from the waters of Waikiki. What do you believe you have lost that you still wonder about after all these years? Are you diving beneath the surface, despite your own exhaustion, hoping to find what disappeared into the abyss? Is it recoverable? A perfect love lost to your years of selfishness and dissolution? A friend whom you suspect might wonder about you too? Is it a book you loaned? Words of consolation that you know might have made someone smile, helped remind someone that she was loved, that he was important? As the song goes, you must come to the surface and come to your senses, though it's a very deep sea around your own devices. But there are times when it seems as though that what we have lost, what we have missed all these years, is retrievable, after all. The remnant of our beautiful, innocent hopes are suddenly glimmering through waves and sand, and someone discerns them, recognizing instantly something of value. Suddenly it seems that nothing is lost, everything is recoverable. Perhaps that's why Cimini felt it worthwhile to add that Schmitt's ring is the stuff of larger legend, a sign for others to begin to imagine hopes just as impossible and miraculous: When Jets fans read about Schmitt's ring discovery Friday night on the Internet, some began tweeting it's a sign of luck and that the current team is destined for the Super Bowl. They haven't been back since 1969. When the words "luck" and "destined" are found in the same sentence, you realize that you should come to the surface, you should come to your senses. But it's a very deep sea. It could be down there anywhere.
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.
