NY Jets #4 - Part 1

We are in the process of updating all previously discussed numbers up to 61. We are also revising some of the previous entries themselves, making them, we hope, more palatable. More readable. Less unreadable.

At the end of the 2008 football season, I taught with a young colleague who had relocated from a little town in Wisconsin to Philadelphia. Her newlywed husband had recently been transferred because of his job. Here she was, a quiet, Scandinavian-looking girl from one of the most polite and rural states in the union now living in what, one might argue, is one of the angriest, most aggrieved metropolitan areas in the Western Hemisphere. She seemed horrified by the casual vulgarity of the school's hallways, by the ghetto mannerisms that all her students assumed. It was angry and urban. She was at a loss.

To her, a lifelong Packers fan, Brett Favre #4 was a representation of everything that was sacred about the life she left behind. In the mess of all the anger and rage of Eagles fans around her, she cherished the times that she could talk to someone about the Packers - in one case, a 200 pound kid she taught from West Philly who wore a giant puffy Packers sideline parka. And this was going to be her first season without Brett Favre, and she couldn't quite remember the Packers without him - the Packers of Don Majkowski, Lindy Infante and Randy Wright.

When she found out I was a Jets fan, with Favre starting for us that year, she looked at me as if I were her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend. It had been a complicated breakup. She didn't want him back; after all, he had called it off in the first place and had left Green Bay earlier in the year, and then suddenly he had wanted back in when it was convenient for him. Since then, Green Bay had matured, settled down and married her younger boyfriend named Aaron who didn't seem all that much fuss over, but then who can say what's in the eye of the beholder, but love? Green Bay told Brett that she still cared for him, but things had changed, and it was time to let go. As for me (once again, in this analogy playing the new girlfriend of the old boyfriend) she expressed a hope that I'd be happy with Brett, though I could tell there was still some reluctance in her eyes about not having him around anymore. Women - even proverbial women in an uncomfortably extended metaphor - know these kinds of things about one another. She was still a little jealous.

I didn't have as much time with Brett Favre as she did, certainly not enough time to think of him as a personal icon the way Joe Namath is to me. At first, he was just Brett Favre, football legend, like other legends who made their name with another team before coming to the Jets, but I certainly knew how good he could be. And then, after the October win against the then-unbeaten Titans, with the Jets at 8-3, I forgot all the other bleak Decembers of seasons past. It was all new and alive with possibility. Only Brett Favre could have accomplished that, and like all late converts, I fell hard for the magic he so effortlessly wielded, only to be betrayed in the end. By December of that fateful season, though, my Wisconsin friend gave me a commiserating expression. The romance, such as it was, practically ended before it had begun. She could have told me I told you so. But she didn't. Oh gosh, my friend from Wisconsin seemed to say, with all of that kindhearted rural pity in her eyes. Yeah, that's Brett. Kind of lets you down in the end, doesn't he? I remember when he did the same to me. Hurts like heck, I know. But you'll get over him. I promise.

I did, of course. Now I see the whole thing as an unbelievable story. And what's never stopped bothering me is the stone cold truth that, at the end of that season, New England Patriots fans must have been laughing themselves to sleep every night. Maybe they're still laughing about it, if they ever give it so much as a second thought - especially now, as their team prepares for yet another Super Bowl.

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It's the number worn by punters, line judges, and Lou Gehrig. Until Brett Favre came along, who knew or cared about #4? At one time, Favre himself ranked in the catalogue of What If's in our world of the Jets. Onetime Jets executive Ron Wolf had been interested in the rookie quarterback from Southern Mississippi, though as Favre himself attested, considering how wild he was in Atlanta, he would probably have been killed by the experience of living and playing in New York. The Jets would probably have dealt him away just as Atlanta did.

Brett Favre, Jet (2008)

But then he did come to us, many years later, after rewriting the history books and making himself the quintessential romantic hero of America's Game. With a single Super Bowl ring that probably should have been followed by a dynastic line of them, Favre's constant story of familial ups and downs made him a beloved figure to all. For a period of time, outside of Ronald Reagan, he was the lone American icon who could draw the devotion of peoples on both sides of the Mason-Dixon.

Did he belong with the Jets, or even the Vikings? The real question was, after the years, the records, the playoff games and various dramatics on MNF, did Brett Favre really belong anywhere other than in the mythic imagination where all of us are still young and beautiful, charismatic and new? The answer was obviously no. But like all mythical figures, Favre stoked our desire and capacity for wonder. With a seemingly confident offense, he led the team (and here I repeat) to a rare 8-3 record by Week 12. So complete was the general consensus that the Jets would win big in January (and February) that even I began to believe it. And I had been a Favre doubter from the start. Then, when the team went 1-4 the rest of the way, pulling out of the playoffs, it felt like I had awakened from a fever dream where Brett Favre was my quarterback, and he was leading us to the Super Bowl.

My single favorite Favre moment from that season came after the Jets defeated the Titans - a moment that seemed to prove the brilliance of their decision to sign him in the first place - when Eric Mangini was being interviewed afterwards on the field, and someone approached him from behind and smacked his ass with such excessive congratulatory force that the coach yelped out, angrily at first, until he realized that his assailant was his quarterback. No matter, then. Let the boy be the boy.

The team never did take to him, though. Hurt or healthy, Chad Pennington was respected by his offense. To players like Laverneus Coles and Thomas Jones, Favre was a snake-oil salesman, pretending, without much effort, to care about something as big as what our team means to us. The criticism among Jets players was that he was not a team player, but while we've thought about him as a kid out there, what we were really saying was that he was only one type of kid. He played for himself, first and foremost. Commentators, with their lilting platitudes about how lovable Favre always was, ignored his inherent selfishness. And why not? Everybody needs to believe in a ridiculously talented, self-reliant, self-assured, though flawed protagonist. Such is the character description of the American hero. But in reality, Favre was simply the kind of popular high school jock whose shenanigans, disobedience and blase attitude are often ignored by the classroom teacher because, secretly, he knows that to deny that kind of kid is to deny the potency of an archetype, of a dream.

So we released Chad Pennington and took Brett Favre. Who wouldn't have done the same? And when the magic flared brightly at 8-3, we believed in the myth. When it burned out, we remembered what we had always been told about him: that he's just a kid out there. A really, really talented kid who plays brilliantly throughout a game, but throws against everyone's better judgment across the field for an interception to lose the game.

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My friend moved back to Wisconsin a year later because neither she nor her husband liked it in Philadelphia. It's an acquired taste. After years of being verbally abused by bartenders and waiters in New York, by cab drivers and cops, I was ready for Philly and its angry people when I first moved here. Not everybody can or should be groomed for it. But I often wondered what she thought about Brett Favre's texting scandal. My God, I could just see her thinking, and to think I used to be in love with that guy. What a loser. Did Brett Favre send pictures of his penis to women when he lived in Mississippi or played in Wisconsin? Was it just that he was happy to be finally living in Joe Namath's old playland, eager to be drawn out by a latent desire to be bad in the big, bad city? It's mildly tragic, I suppose. He could have just finished in Green Bay as he was going to, but then he would have had to have been satisfied with being merely a name, like Tennyson's Ulysses. "As thought to breathe were life," Ulysses says. "I will drink/Life to the lees..."

Still, yet another characteristic of the popular high school jock who gets away with everything is that he always goes too far, and he ends up texting an obscene image of himself to the wrong cheerleader. Then suddenly the teachers and administrators start to remember all the things he's been getting away with all this time. And with that, he goes from being the archetypal hero to being Biff Loman, an outcast, with his days of embodying a mostly phony dream gone for good.

NY Jets #2

We are in the process of updating all previously discussed numbers up to 61. We are also revising some of the previous entries themselves, making them, we hope, more palatable. More readable. Less unreadable.

Is it Mata Hari? Is it a safety?

Two is a strange number in football. You don't see it all alone on a football uniform that often. Who's the greatest #2 in football history? It certainly looks weird on the scoreboard, the way halftime at Super Bowl IX was locked at a 2-0 yawn after Fran Tarkenton landed on his own fumble on the Vikings' end of the field. A safety is signified by the ref with that odd joining of hands over the head. The defense gathers round the grounded, embarrassed offensive player, and they all put their own hands up like so, as if to influence the call. The official agrees or disagrees; if he goes along with it and makes the safety signal, he seems to be hearkening back to some vague, ancient motion, one made by men throughout the ages who've been placed in extraordinary circumstances and haven't an idea of what to do. An extraordinary moment requires an exotic symbol. (Plus, there's really is no limit to the confusion football imposes on us when a Safety can score a safety.)

But we're really here to talk about Nick Folk #2, the Jets' kicker for two seasons at our writing. After this season, he averaged 76% field goals made, which more or less matched last year's rate, though the Jets themselves attempted 14 fewer field goals this year. It was a busier year for punters.

Nick Folk, 1/8/11

Folk is often invoked as the "former Cowboy" who hit 90% of his kicks until a injury reduced his production for Dallas such that he became available to the Jets. His return from injury required a recuperation that revealed to him some of the great medical achievements of his own ancestors. As it's mentioned in the link above, in the tough old days of rudimentary heart surgery, where surgeons needed "nerves of steel," his grandparents (both surgeons) apparently performed pioneering heart procedures that were at the time quite risky and had a high mortality rate.

It made Folk wonder about the nerves needed to be a placekicker. Failure cannot be an option, but it happens all the time. There are no substitutes for the man who can kick the ball 56 yards when we need him to, as Folk did in Denver in 2009. His picture above is taken at the moment he realized that his last second field goal against Indianapolis in the January 2011 playoffs would send the Jets into the second round of the playoffs against New England.

Watch the video below. As Folk lines up for the kick, the arena is filled with the plain white noise of the crowd's anxiety. When Folk sees his kick go through the uprights, you can actually hear him make what Whitman would call his "barbaric yawp." It's a spontaneous, instinctive, guttural cry of satisfaction more than relief. It's one of my favorite Jet moments of all time, and it's a sad reminder of what a disappointment the 2011 season has been.

Just before the Christmas Eve 2012 game with the Giants, the Post predicted that Folk was looking to have a "key role" in the game, one that, according to his coach, would be a true 50-50 matchup. "It's going to be a fun game on Saturday," Folk is quoted as saying. All indications were by then that the Jets had a decent chance at a Wild Card spot if only they could just play reasonably well. I actually thought that the vaguely flagging Giants would win the game, but of course, like the old fool that I am, a Jets fan, I had no idea how outmatched they really would be. None of us knew the deep decline the Jets were in nor how much worse things would get. There would be no playoffs, no barbaric yawp. And Nick Folk would play no major role.

Yet the kicker endures; he goes on elsewhere if need be. The Jets will hold onto him for next year, or they won't. He will have to win a spot in the summer, or he won't. But in my mind, and on a pirated video, he will always be there in memory, providing the aural punctuation to a favorite moment at a much happier time in our beloved team's long, troubled history.

If you need more on the trials of the placekicker, on how all his need for precision, repetition, and consistency can still go for naught, consider the Times' graphic that suggests that Folk is "terrible." He's not even nearly terrible, though every season is a long season. Things can always get worse.

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The 1991 season was the first in my life where I literally unplugged from football. I attribute this mostly to my own desire at the end of college to seek out something that would make me useful to someone other than myself. I thought I would make my life interesting. Of course, the waywardness and vanities of youth were probably to blame as well, but back then I was adventurous enough to believe that I would live in a different city every year of my life. At this time, I lived in a commune in St. Louis, Missouri. It was what was called a "social justice community;" I was living with three other men and four women, and each one of us worked in a social work job in a city that had been gutted by white flight, vanished industry, and crack. I traded my Fridays at college house parties where floors were sticky with stale beer for Friday nights in a candlelight circle with my roommates, talking about socialist revolution taking hold in the United States.

I went to meetings of the Socialist Workers Party and believed that even in the year of the failed coup in Moscow the United States was still ripe for economic revolution. We were told the fall of the Soviets happened because it had been corrupted by Stalinism, whereas Castro's Cuba was still the hope for the future. There were pictures of Che Guevera and Oscar Romero in our house, without the slightest concern for their various ideological contradictions. I suppose there is no razor idealism quite like the kind you find in a person between the ages of 17 and 25. At that age, you're old enough to digest complex ideas but still not in possession of a fully grown frontal lobe. I put away childish things like working for money, owning things, and, most importantly, monogamy - all of which I cherish today - in order to be a revolutionary.

Most especially, I didn't care about football anymore. I'm not even sure what happened, but it turned September, and I just wasn't watching games on Sundays. "Football's so chauvinistically exploitative and imperialist," I would say to the pretty roommate on my floor while I mixed beans over the stove. I may even have said such things at our Friday group meetings. I couldn't have really believed it, any more than I could have actually believed that a radical redistribution of wealth would appeal to the mostly conservative people of my own country. It wasn't even a gradual change, which may explain why I went back to it when things became interesting for the Jets at the end of another dim season under Bruce Coslet.

There were cracks developing in my newfound worldview. The Miami-Jets game at the very end of the season was being shown on the local NBC, and, as if awakening from a fever dream, I suddenly knew I had to watch. While my housemates were out clearing an empty lot somewhere in North St. Louis, I found a way to stay home and watch the Jets' last game of the season. Both teams were hoping to finish with a dinky Wild Card spot; the Dolphins' season had been a disappointment, while the Jets managed through their Coslet-era blandness and injury to get to 7-8. I told my unsuspecting roommates that I would work on the compost in the back yard while they went to the north side to pull out weeds, glass and brush from yet another spot of urban blight.

I don't remember much of the game; a Jets game can make you feel the same whether they win or lose, conjuring in the Jets fan all a childhood's feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, fear. And of course, the Jets blew a lead late when Dan Marino led the Dolphins to the end zone with a fourth and goal touchdown. What could possibly be more familiar? At that very instant, Marty Glickman's swan song as Jets' radio announcer was, "Folks, in all my years of broadcasting, I've never said this, but there is no way the New York Jets can come back and win this game. There is just no way it can happen." (I didn't hear him all the way in the Midwest; you can hear them on the Jets' history DVD.) And given all the things that Marty had seen in all his years with the Jets, can you really blame him? It made sense for him to say it. And yet, come back the Jets did. They tied the game with a no-huddle at under a minute to play. Placekicker Raul Allegre #2 hit a 44 yarder to send the game into overtime, and then he won it with a 30-yard field goal.

Today Raul Allegre is a Spanish language broadcaster of the NFL. Until Nick Folk, he was the most famous #2 the Jets ever had, which is galling. Like many of the Jets of the late 80's early 90's, Raul Allegre made himself originally famous with someone else, in this case with the 1986 New York Football Giants. He ended his career with the flagging Jets that season.

And what did his heroics get them? A whimpering 17-10 Wild Card Game loss to the Houston Oilers the following week. Raul Allegre's field goals against the Dolphins were the singular highlight of the Bruce Coslet era. I left the commune the following year, I gave up socialism, and the Jets gave up their briefly winning ways.

When I was in high school, there was this kid who came from one of the more upstanding families in town. His parents looked like a couple smiling at their kids in the Sears catalogue. The kids did great in school; I think there were four of them in all, and they never got in a scrap of trouble. This kid was especially courteous even to the most outlandishly unfair teachers, and he was an attendance aide, which meant that he was in charge of collecting all the attendance notices teachers left in the little hanging baskets by the classroom door.

It was a small town. Everybody knew everyone's business, or so we thought. We all returned to school one autumn, and everything had changed for him. He was different. His face was suddenly pocked with acne, pale, with piercings long before it became fashionable to have them; several of them looked like DIY jobs with safety pins. His eyes shamelessly betrayed an emptiness born of something that had shattered him. Evidently his father had been carrying on with someone else's wife, and perhaps in the spirit of everything being out in the open, the kid also discovered that his mother had been shacking up with someone else, too. What I think troubled him the most was learning at the age of 16 that his parents had actually known about one another's infidelities for a while, and they not only tolerated them but had also known of others reaching further back into the cloudy, rounded-framed, earth-toned photographs of his earlier childhood. Within a year, he was expelled for pushing over the high school library stacks like a bunch of dominoes. A year after that he was in jail for dealing angel dust.

It only takes a few hard truths to undo a daydream. Whether you're old or young, you can buy into anything that looks secure. Try to imagine what it must be like for young Jets fans unaccustomed to being the laughingstock of the NFL. Imagine how hard it is for them to be wearing their jerseys, even at home. I thought they were good. They were. But sometimes things don't work out, and things change. Actually, most of the time they don't. You'll get used to it.

It's been a long time since the Jets have looked as bad - organizationally and spiritually - as they have over the last month. It is, for lack of a better term, a disgrace. I mean, no one expects a professional football team to exude integrity; Belichick's football machine in Foxboro vibrates with a cold, analytical precision that leaves anyone who loves football feeling empty and glum. Last Sunday a delusional Fundamentalist Christian beat a probable repeat rapist at Mile High Stadium; I don't turn to football for integrity. If that's what integrity looks like, I'll take ineptitude.

But Greg McElroy's puritanical tirade about the Jets' locker room possessing a "corrupt mindset" filled with "selfishness" made me think back to my old friend from high school. I wonder where he is now. You never quite forget your first truly authentic disillusionment, your first shattered dream. Mine was January 1987, when a stupid late hit by Mark Gastineau plunged the Jets into one of the worst playoff collapses in football history (at least until the day the Oilers franchise died, after Houston gave up a 35-3 lead to Buffalo five years later). I would say to any young Jet fan left feeling lost and empty after this season that you grow a callus over it. You get used to it. Consider Didi and Gogo from Waiting for Godot:

ESTRAGON:
Fancy that. (He raises what remains of the carrot by the stub of leaf, twirls it before his eyes) Funny, the more you eat, the worse it gets.

VLADIMIR:
With me it's just the opposite.

ESTRAGON:
In other words?

VLADIMIR:
I get used to the muck as I go along.

NY Jets #60 - Part 2

Dennis O'Sullivan #60 played at center for the Jets in 2002, though he was technically in the NFL for about five years, including years on the Jets' bench and with the 49ers. In 2003, he was compelled to testify about an assault on a limo driver that may have also included him, Jason Fabini, Todd Husak, and Jumbo Elliott. Of all the players, Elliott seemed the one most implicated, with the suggestion that "one of the players was drunk and rowdy." Elliott himself was previously involved in a legal case after he apparently injured people in a bar brawl in 2000. Perhaps these and other things O'Sullivan witnessed influenced his retirement decision to become a speaker on the subject of alcohol and drug abuse among athletes.

Apparently he is a vice president for development for the American Athletic Institute, which sounds like a pretty broad name for a group focused primarily on "proactive" issues addressing behavior, sportsmanship, and health among student-athletes. O'Sullivan has spoken at schools and community centers on the subject of drug and alcohol abuse. As a high school teacher, it's almost commonplace for me to have to tell the football players in my class not to talk aloud about the details of their weekends where, no doubt, they were probably hammered. We write referrals to the substance abuse program at the school, but there's no proactive initiative to deal with drinking among athletes, specifically. In this community, it seems that every other year a young person dies from an overdose, though it's rarely an athlete. But our athletes are drunk or high often, sometimes even at school.

That wasn't exactly weird at my high school growing up, either. Every weekend, football players held hibachi parties where everyone knew they were drinking. When I was a junior, I inherited a copy of the Best American Short Stories in my English class from the kid who had it before me, a huge, belching defensive lineman who had scrawled the word "ALCOHOL" on the side of the book. It was no big deal.

My upbringing was sufficiently strict to keep me from drinking in high school. I was also a band kid, a theater kid, a geek about music, old movies and statistics in sports. I was a blogger before there were blogs - someone with only a few friends, all of whom drank cola and ate Doritos while listening to the Big Chill soundtrack at Friday night parties. That's how crazy it got. I didn't start drinking until college. Once there, I was surrounded by Irish-American kids and kegs of beer, and so I joined in. But I will never forget the first high I got from beer. "Where have you been all my life?" it made me wonder. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

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There are plenty of things I remember faintly and unhappily from my drinking life - things like trashing a room, putting my fist through a wall, visiting bars I didn't want to go to just for a drink, dancing with women I didn't want to talk to, laughing at jokes that weren't funny, saying unfunny things just to say anything. I remember blackouts, though obviously not well. I remember lashing out at people for no reason. I remember not doing well at my job and trying to disappear behind my cubicle. I remember only feeling comfortable talking with people socially if I were liquored up enough to chat, and I remember running out of things to say. I remember saying I didn't want to drink anymore and then drinking more. I remember folding myself up in the shower, trying to imagine the hot water washing away the hard wall of misery that came with the morning. I remember wishing I were dead. I remember the planning, the endless planning that came with a night's drinking, and planning it out so that it could be just the right kind of high without going too far, and being despondent the next morning because I always drank myself to sleep, often on a floor.

Drinking was great, though. I've always known it was from the very first drunk. It would be pointless of me to say otherwise. I can't drink anymore, I won't tonight, but after I got sober it always felt false to testify that I hated drinking. I always loved it. It made me happy in the moment when so few things do. The very idea of it made me happy; it still does. Knowing that there's alcohol in the house was a kind of security that comes from believing implicitly there is only one thing that can make you content. Tonight is New Year's Eve. If I were drinking, I wouldn't want champagne, or the champagne of beers. I would want whiskey, and if it were in the house, I would normally want to drink the better part of a quart before bed, before sleep, or whatever it would be called. Then I'd go out the next day and buy another quart.

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Larry Grantham #60 shares a distinction with only three other men we've discussed; along with Curley Johnson, Don Maynard, and Bill Mathis, he is a Super Bowl III starter who also played for the New York Titans. When he retired in 1973, he had been a five-time All Star in the AFL at linebacker and a longtime leader of the Jets' defenses. His deep, dour face, lined with the expression of a herd driver in John Wayne's crew in Red River, reveals a pathos that I always found impressive. He seemed the diametric opposite of the people in Namath's buoyant jock world. Grantham came from Mississippi, which made sense in a way. When I read Best American Short Stories, I imagined that Faulkner's Wash of Yoknapatawpha County looked a lot like Larry Grantham. Or maybe he looked like one of the endless numbers of knuckle-cracking bad guy henchmen that Jim Rockford had to fight off in slacks. He looked quiet and hard.

He re-emerged in the news over the past few years because an ongoing battle with cancer had drained his finances, and in 2009, he was thinking about pawning his Super Bowl ring to pay some of his bills. Bassett writes eloquently about Grantham's importance in Jets history, but he also mentions how a Star-Ledger article about Grantham's financial plight brought thousands donations in so that he could keep the ring. Bassett suggests that this was karma. Dave Anderson wrote a year before that Grantham is known for his generosity, in being the regular coordinator of '68 alumni events, but most of all because he has been the key fundraiser for a New Jersey drug and alcohol recovery center called Freedom House.

According to Anderson in 2008, Grantham had been sober for decades, and Freedom House has become the main focus of his interest. One of his good friends from the defensive front line in 1968 was Paul Rochester, who hadn't had a drink in 37 years at the time of the article. Rochester describes the struggles in retirement of his other teammates from that famous squad, like Verlon Biggs #86 and Sam Walton #72, and the role Grantham had in trying to help:

“Larry and I spoke at Verlon’s funeral in Mississippi,” Rochester said. “Sam was a sad situation. Larry heard that Sam was living on the streets in Memphis and tried to find him to help him. One time, Larry even spotted him, but Sam took off; I guess he was too embarrassed. When Larry heard that Sam died in an abandoned house, he arranged for a proper burial for him. That’s Larry.”

Grantham is the player who grabbed the ball at the very end of Super Bowl III and ran off the field with it. He runs off like a fan who has invaded the pitch, stolen the ball, and needs to be chased down by security. Grantham looks not at all like the stoic leatherface I once imagined him to be. He leaps into the air with the joy of a kid; he is carrying the ball that Johnny Unitas has just thrown on the very last play. He is ecstatic in a way that a football player is not supposed to be, or maybe he looks like a young high schooler whose team has just beaten the state champ. Braylon Edwards' end-over-end leap at the end of the playoff game against the Pats last year was like that too, and as I've said before, that was one of those moments where, for a fan, anything seemed possible.

When I watch the Super Bowl III game tape - which I do more often than I'd like to admit - I see Larry Grantham standing alongside his other defensive players and looking considerably smaller. He was light and short for a defensive player at any position, even back then. He is as tall as I am. As a recovered alcoholic, he knows what it is to be his own enemy. Dave Anderson says that in truth, Grantham's "greatest asset really was and is himself."

Obviously, it was beautiful that others were there for Grantham when he needed them and that he was able to hold onto his ring. The ring has meant more to other people than perhaps it even meant to him. It signified that an unlikely win against an indomitable foe was not out of the question. It suggested that an effervescent childhood innocence could be conjured out of a grown man such that he would leapfrog jump across a football field. It meant that a hopeless drunk or junkie could experience freedom from the sole obsession that occupies the addicted mind. In more than one article about Grantham's quandary, a Freedom House resident is quoted as saying that Grantham would regularly take the ring off his finger and place it into the resident's hand, suggesting that if Larry Grantham could get clean, then the resident could too, and that anything is possible.

NY Jets #60 - Part 1

On Christmas Eve, my wife and I drove to another commonwealth, where my parents live. Somehow, though moving away from the New York-New Jersey area, we were able to pick up the Jets-Giants game on the radio all the way down. Needless to say, what began as a promising matchup turned out to be no matchup at all. It was an awful experience, listening helplessly. You sensed the momentum shift after Victor Cruz's 99-yard touchdown. Antonio Cromartie forced two returns when he should have taken the touchback. Penalties abounded. The Jets were a team forced by a mediocre Giants club to see themselves for what they really are, fueled by symbolism, fortune, hubris, energy, hot air, but little else. Even the announcers craved a Sanchez pass way downfield to Burress, Holmes, or Keller - to somebody, anybody - but it didn't come. Or maybe if they just ran the ball more.

Christmas came. My nephew got an Ahmad Bradshaw jersey and a kid's sized Giants helmet that reminded me of the Jets one I had when lived on Long Island. He and I played catch out back, and he talked about all the players from Big Blue that he loved. He talked about playing the game himself against all sorts of NFL players, and I realized that he was talking about Madden 11. He's light on his feet, tall for his age, curious and thoughtful, most of all. Perhaps I had moaned once too often about how remote the chance of even backing into the playoffs seemed to be for the Jets, and he said, looking through his Giants' face mask, "Don't worry, Uncle Marty. The Jets are still a good team." It was nice of him to say. He pitied me.

Is this the end of the current era of winning for the Jets? The 49ers are back to being dominant, which is a condition that cosmologically necessitates that the Jets do poorly. Was it worth it? Did we learn anything during this time? Is that all there is? Over the years 1997-present, which represented the 49ers descent into mediocrity, we've gone to the playoffs seven times, which is as many times as the Jets managed in their entire history before then.


D'Brickashaw Ferguson #60 is a character representation of the best of these years. At tackle, he was drafted #1 in 2006, has made the Pro Bowl three out of the six years in the NFL and is regularly considered to be among the better offensive linemen in the game. True to an offensive lineman's nature, he does not appear to be boastful or particularly nasty to anyone, and he heads charitable work outside the game. He is, in other words, not really an ideal character in a Rex Ryan drama. His tweets are quite innocuous, polite, thoughtful, and not at all the confessional work of today's players. Aside from appearing to have arms as long as his legs, he is the sort of fellow that I would hope my nephew would grow up to be.

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Casey Wiegmann #60 should win an award for surviving. He is 38 years old, has played for six clubs (one twice over, and that one being Kansas City), actually married a contestant on Survivor, his house in his childhood town was destroyed by a tornado, he played for the 1996 New York Jets, got to go to the Pro Bowl for first time in 2008, and currently has the longest starting streak at his position of any player in the NFL. If you are wondering, he plays center, the most unrewarded and unrewarding of positions in the game, and he is from Iowa - a stoic, virtuous Midwestern state that may, for all I know, produce many a remarkable number of centers. It is a position that must demand a self-sustaining sense of humility and humor, for the center must have his fanny touched on every play. He endures. He survives.

NY Jets #59

For Jets fans, this season has been a little disappointing. For old fans like me, this has been a trip down a memory lane that's about as enjoyable as a hangover to a drunk. For young fans, it's like showing up at the popular hamburger joint you've enjoyed every weekend that's suddenly run out of beef and shutting down for good in a few weeks. I'm not sure if that makes sense. When you know that this season won't be as well off as the last, nothing feels as good, and the words come slowly, meaninglessly. The Jets lost a month ago on a Sunday night when our biggest rival suddenly found their passing game. Then they lost the following Thursday night to a team that literally doesn't have a passing game. This seems like old times.

But I also live in Philadelphia, and for once the Eagles are failing even more impossibly than the Jets, despite all their apparent talent. Here it is a time for self-recrimination, regret, the placing of blame, cynicism, and general bitterness - the business of the soul's dark night, the hour best suited to the people of this fair city. Unreasonably euphoric when the Birds when four in a row, Philadelphians find a groove of misery when the Iggs disappoint, and they will stay there with a masochistic relish for as a long as possible. Losing, I find, brings out metaphors and similies in this town.

"Disappointment is a dish best served with Cheese Whiz on a soft roll," one of my co-workers said to me when I told him I was sorry to see the Eagles lose to the Pats the way they did. "Slather it," he said.

"It was like watching a chicken getting eaten by a snake," another fan, my next door neighbor said after the Eagles lost so entirely to an inferior Seahawks team, "you keep watching, thinking that the chicken's got to be able to get away. But he doesn't."

Sometimes failure, so common to people in hard times, so omnipresent to most football fans is familiar and warm. "As familiar as your father's plaid Christmas pants," another Eagles fan said to me when I extended my condolences toward after their bizarre. "You wish it weren't there, but you remember it, you got through the sight of it before, so you know you can survive it." Perhaps that's why I feel so comfortable here. Losing brings out the wordsmith in the denizens of this place, and it's consoling to me too. It may even last through the game the Jets and Eagles will play in a few weeks.

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What makes a man a "good guy?" Is he a mensch, someone who's there when you need him? Is he someone who is actively good, going above and beyond what people expect of him? Or is he just a guy that doesn't give you trouble? He does his homework, he doesn't give the teacher problems in class, he nods at his jokes. In high school, I recall that girls didn't date good guys. They dated bad guys. When you ask a woman about the man her friend is marrying and she says, "He's a good guy," you somehow know that there's something disappointing in what she's saying, though you don't know what it is.

The Jets' yearly "Good Guy Award" is named for linebacker Kyle Clifton #59, who might recall some familiar losing seasons with the Jets. To anyone who has followed the Jets for the past 30 years, you might recognize his name as longtime veteran of an absurd era (1984-96). Thirteen seasons, four coaches, two winning campaigns. Through most of it, Clifton was a good player on some poorly performing teams. His best year was 1990, when he caught three interceptions and made 199 tackles, an extraordinary statistic in and of itself. He led the NFL that year, but that number of tackles would correspond with the top number in several of the past seasons in the current NFL. Whether or not this meant that no one else was making tackles on the Jets in 1990 is irrelevant; someone had to do it, and in almost 200 instances, Kyle Clifton did.

The Kyle Clifton Good Guy Award is explained in German here. Brad Smith received it in 2007, and on his Wikipedia page, it's described as recognizing a player with "consistent willingness, cooperation and professionalism in everyday dealings with various departments in organization." And I wonder about this. Was this Eric Mangini's description of the award that year? He cooperated, he didn't give us problems, he didn't ask us for anything big. Sounds like the kind of thing Mangini valued in his players. And indeed this year Brad Smith went out the door like a good guy when the Jets picked up Plaxico Burress and made a contract with Santonio Holmes.

"Good guy." It sounds corporate. When Kyle Clifton made 199 tackles in 1990, he was not so much valuable in his everyday dealings with the organization but valuable where it counts, as a player in the field doing his job above and beyond expectations (and he should have gone to the Pro Bowl). The award was first given out in 1996, and to him, and it may have been a way for the organization, as it were, to say goodbye, especially after he had been slotted to be replaced by Marvin Jones for so long. But still, it feels clinical, flat, a kind gesture toward the door, with nice parting gifts. He may not have taken it that way; I certainly hope he didn't. But sometimes "good guy" doesn't feel like a compliment.

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In 1974, Howard Kindig #59 was brought in to play his last year with the Jets after being a longtime AFL guy with the Chargers and Bills. He played in 1972 for the perfect Dolphins. His career ended with the Jets, which may have been exactly as it should have been. Had he played with the Jets the following year, he might well have given up on the integrity of the game altogether. The Bills have a more thorough background on its "alumni," and here is Kindig's story, including his sense that the AFL had two distinct times - the early era, when teams were playing for financial survival, and the period after the merger, when bonus babies like Joe Namath and OJ Simpson redefined the AFL player. Kindig, on the other hand, seems a relic of the older version. As the link makes clear, Kindig even forsook balmy San Diego to play with his buddies in Buffalo, which to me is an almost unthinkable transition. I don't have anything interesting on his year with the Jets, but here are the details of the case the United States made against him in 1988. I presume he weathered it. 

Linebacker Bob Martin #59 replaced Kindig in number for the Jets. He played from 1976-78 before playing briefly with the 49ers. He started all of 1978, netting two interceptions that season and today he works for a Nebraska-based corporation that sells industrial-based equipment. The company's name is, curiously enough, Valmont. I'm certain that they didn't intend to name their company after one of literature's greatest rogues, but who knows? Aren't there Lotharios in Lincoln and Omaha? Aren't there aimless young aristocrats hanging around the halls of prairie mammon, hoping to corrupt a guileless young debutante? Perhaps there is a correlation between the sale of industrial equipment and sexual seduction. What do I know?

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Rob Spicer #59, linebacker for the Jets in 1973, may have been a junior in high school the year the Indiana Hoosiers went to the 1968 Rose Bowl. He may have thought that they would return again when he enrolled there as a freshman in 1969, but they haven't been back since. I don't need to tell you that's a little bit longer than we've been waiting for a conference championship. I remember how my college's basketball team went to the Final Four the year before I enrolled there, and they haven't been there since, either. We're all waiting for something, though most of us don't really know what it is half the time. But at least, as fans, we have discernible needs, wishes and wants. We know what we want. We're just waiting for it to happen.

NY Jets #58 - Part 3

The other day I found my second grade class class photo, taken sometime in January 1977. It's been a very, very long time since I've seen this. I vaguely recall seeing occasionally unearthed among other photos as I grew up. I remember almost all of the kids in the picture. There's Mrs. Saperstein, with her cat's eye glasses. There's my best friend John who works in Hollywood now. There's JT, whose Dad was a fireman; Jose, the class clown; Sean, a psychotic who spat in my face; Colin, whose Dad was my Aunt's boss; Vinny, who ended up on Riker's Island; Annie, Miss Perfect; Jennifer, who could beat up Sean. And then there's me. It took a few seconds to find me. Everybody else jumped right out.

What do you expect to find when you look back to find yourself? I don't know what I expected. What I found was a little boy in the front row sitting next to two girls, his arms wedged in slightly. He has his hands folded almost prayerfully in his lap, his striped shirt buttoned to the top contrasting against the bright patterns of the girls' blouses and skirts. He looks a little tired and a little frightened; or is that the way I feel lately? His smile seems forced. In a strange way, I want to go back and tell him a joke, tell him to lighten up a little when he's on his own. Or maybe I want to tell him not to try so hard to make other people laugh, and that it will get him into some bad habits. Don't try so hard. Watch out for bullies.

The older one gets, the less one looks back to find assurances or understanding. At a certain age, one tends to look forward, to stare at people older than yourself; you stop looking backward to see what you have become and to start to wonder what you will become someday if you play your cards right or, conversely, what you will turn into if you don't take better care of yourself.

Which brings us to Wilber Marshall #58, the longtime fearsome middle linebacker who played for the Jets for one season - 1995, a cruel punishment (3-13) in and of itself. If you look back and regret, what kind of life can you lead? If you look back in anger, where can you find comfort? As with many retired NFL players, Marshall is looking forward by looking back. He refuses to be sentimental or attached to his pro career because he knows that his career is at the root of his current problems. A recent article coming out of a Redskins blog talks about the physical and mental toll the game took on him, the worst thing being that he believes the Chicago Bears swindling him out of his pay. He says they re-negged on a promise of a long term payout after he agreed to not take a salary up front, all in order to help the team financially. He was also denied disability by the NFL for a long time. Marshall has been angry enough to say that he won't even watch NFL football games.

Are these the circumstances that Drew Brees blithely talks about when he says that current players shouldn't be forced to help pay for former players' financial mistakes? As the blogger above writes, Marshall believes the only decent lesson he should have learned was that you shouldn't do the organization any favors, that you should always take the lump sum. Is that the moral? I just hope Brees has some sense of what's waiting for him when it's all over. Perhaps he will be lucky enough to still have medical insurance.

The only other regret Marshall can have is that he made the mistake of playing football to begin with. This is one of the ironies of modern football. The player is a gladiator, a star in the arena, and as with all stars his worth is only as significant as his duration of play. He thinks of nothing else but what he is. We've seen many players whose life after football has been significantly positive. I can at least amuse myself with the notion that many of the players I've written about have become teachers. But when I was in second grade, I wanted to be like the big men who played the game. I wanted to be like Randy Rasmussen, Carl Barzilauskus and Winston Hill. When I look at my frail little self in my school picture, taken at the end of a football season, it seems humorous, but little children do dream of becoming big men, not knowing that their own lives will be just beginning with hopes and dreams just as the lives of the big men are already, prematurely coming to an end.

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What are the odds? Three guys in #58 at linebacker with alliterative names beginning with "M?" There's Mark Merrill #58, and no, he's NOT the guy who opposes gay marriage with his organization Family First. And Mike Merriweather #58 who finished his career with the Jets after accumulating as many as 18 interceptions. Matt Monger #58 is now a financial advisor with Merrill Lynch after playing a few seasons and a handful of games for the Jets and Bills. Apparently in 2002 he was in partnership with ex-Dolphin Howard Twilley. He advocated - when the market still somewhat stronger - the age-old philosophy of chance: "...be patient. Time will determine the risk and the return." It sounds hopeful. Or does it? Time will determine it all. Be patient. It will come for you.

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Marty Wetzel #58 suited up for five games at linebacker in 1981. There is nothing available that I can see other than a discussion of his exploits at the Wikipedia site for East Jefferson High School. Adding this one note: "An interesting fun note: The current principal of East Jefferson High School James Kytle was Marty's position coach!" Perhaps as we look back without anger we can find any number of different things - however remote they are from our persons - that give our lives their permanent definition.