NY Jets #41 – Part 2

Almost 30 years ago, I came home from school one day and Mom presented me with Matt Snell‘s autograph. She had been having lunch that day with my Uncle Mike, and he showed her this little momento of an earlier night out. It was written on the base of what looks like the bill or bar tab, not even the size of an index card. Uncle Mike had held Jets season tickets at Shea with my Dad for years, and he certainly recognized Snell’s almost perfectly square-jawed face from across the crowded bar. He asked that it be specifically dedicated to his nephew, so the inscription reads, “To Marty – Go Jets – Matt Snell.”

I have just moved into my first house since leaving for college 22 years ago. Since that time, I have lived in dorms, in a rooming house in England, in a commune in St. Louis, in five different apartments in Philadelphia, and now here, in the East Falls section of the city, in my own house. Matt Snell’s signature has always come with me wherever I have gone. I can’t describe it. It’s not something I show to people, and if I do, my little framed companion elicits no more than a slightly bemused, “I see,” or maybe a polite, “How about that.”

I think I have unpacked everything. Lots of things still lay around in the dining room, waiting to be put somewhere. But my little framed detached base of a bar tab has yet to show. It’s impossible that it should have gotten lost. I’ve always had it. I would not have thrown it away, and I know for a fact that my wife would not have either. It does not make sense. It does not make sense.

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Here is Matt Snell on the cover of a program for a Jets home game at Shea against the Chargers in October 1966, which both Dad and Uncle Mike must have attended. The Jets won 17-16, and the player featured on the program scored the Jets’ first touchdown. Here Matt Snell emerges like a Marvel Comics character from what looks like a large gun, the barrel of which is obviously a gutted out football. Talk about mixed metaphors. Snell himself looks utterly impassive about the destruction he is causing, even without his helmet. And though all around him exists in color, Matt Snell’s face is apparently black and white. The artist is renowned sports cartoonist, Murray Olderman.

Snell was by this time a fixture in the Jets backfield. It’s interesting that he was the focus of this particular program, which makes me think it was probably drawn a year or two earlier. By 1966, Joe Namath was already starting quarterback for the team and the franchise player and the League marquee, all in the one, making him more likely to play the part of Thor, the Hammer God. Two years earlier, Matt Snell was the first bonus baby of sorts for the Jets. Drafted in the fourth round by the New York Giants, Snell nevertheless was taken in the first round out of Ohio State by the Jets in the 1964 AFL draft. This might explain a particular aesthetic choice made by Olderman. While it would make more sense for players of AFL teams to be shown thrown around the background by this football/gun, take a closer look and see that at least one of the sprawling figures looks suspiciously like a member of the New York Giants, right down to the stripes along his leg and on the helmet.

Matt Snell had a couple of firsts. He is the first running back to have gained over 100 yards in a Super Bowl. Throughout Super Bowl III he is seen lowering his head and placing one crushing blow after another on the heads of Colts defenders. Specifically, he knocked cornerback Rick Volk out of the game but apparently sent him flowers the following day, which was certainly a nice gesture. Snell also emerged like a bullet out of a human-sized football/gun in his rookie year since he gained 948 yards, which is somewhat remarkable by rookie standards. In a 16-game season, he would have gained well over 1,000 yards, which, I realize, is becoming less and less of a big deal. Successful running games are such a key to so many teams’ success even now that many running backs are simply worn down to a nub. This was true of Matt Snell. He would never again approach his rookie yard mark.

He would spend most of 1967 on the bench injured, and knee problems would keep him from his earlier efficacy for the remainder of his career, though he did go All-Pro in 1969. His last two seasons in the early 70′s would simply be in a uniform. But when I was growing up, my mother constantly reminded me that Matt Snell was always expected to block effectively for Namath, and block he did, like a lineman. I feel this was intended as a lesson in unselfishness and that no important role is too small for anyone. I’m not so certain Matt Snell thought of it that way, but I’m sure it worked on me.

In 1973, a year after he officially retired, Matt Snell was also the first athlete to be featured in a Lite Beer ad. In the history of marketing, this is the equivalent of the first hit of DiMaggio’s streak. Lite Beer ads were an institution for anyone watching a sporting event in the 1970′s and 80′s, and mostly, they were all worth watching every single time, no matter how stale they got. They were a reassuring reminder to me that I was not in school; I was at home on a weekend, watching sports on TV instead of, much to my Dad’s dismay, enjoying a beautiful day outside. As we see in a lot of ads today, not every athlete is funny, but Dick Butkus, Billy Martin, Boog Powell, Tom Heinsohn, John Madden, Bubba Smith and, certainly, Marv Throneberry could be almost as funny as Rodney Dangerfield. Yet while Snell’s ad may have featured the famous Miller Lite tag line for the first time, it was the only one (other than this one, I suppose) that was not written to be funny. Firsts do not remain famous for long.

NY Jets #41 – Part 1

Charlie Flowers was a casualty of the AFL’s earliest years, and because he was the first Titan to wear #41, he is our first point of discussion with regard to the characters from our beloved team to have worn #41. He played at fullback in sunny Los Angeles for the Chargers in 1960, and then in sunny San Diego the following year. He played at the Polo Grounds for the New York Titans the year after that, and his career ended there before he could become a Jet. A couple of hundred yards total. He was originally drafted in 1959 by the Giants, which might have meant he could have been Don Maynard’s teammate on the Giants before becoming Don Maynard’s teammate on the Titans. But he appears to have never actually played a down for the Blue (Giants’ blue, that is). Fate is fickle, odd certainly, perhaps even negligent.

But…

Where were you when Matt Snell #41 went across the line for the Jets’ first and only touchdown in Super Bowl III?

Well…

The founder of the Hare Krishna movement, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada was in Los Angeles, possibly writing a letter dated that day to his controversial protegee Kirtanananda Swami about further construction of seven new temples in the United States. On the same day that their first album was released in the U.S., Led Zeppelin was preparing to open a show for Country Joe and the Fish at the Fillmore West. Living in Tehran with her family, Christine Amanpour was celebrating her 11th birthday, possibly thinking about going to school later that year in England.

My father was sitting in his in-laws’ living room in Brooklyn, watching his beloved team take the lead in the Super Bowl after an impressive first half drive lead by Namath and Snell. My mother sat with him, watching on her parents white Zenith black and white, excited no doubt as well; she is the most ferocious sports fan I know (read: Mets fan). As yet two months from my own birth, I resided comfortably on the other side of conscious existence, perhaps hearing sporadic sounds of excitement, my mother’s heartbeat, the bright tenor sound of my grandfather’s voice occasionally calling to his wife for a cigar, and my grandmother possibly asking my father if he wanted more to eat. I remained as unaware that the Jets would become a source of obsession throughout most of my life as I probably did about the fact that soon my relative comfort would be rudely interrupted at St. John’s Hospital in Woodside. One sensory experience adds on the other, though, and knowing what things transmit by osmosis to an unborn child, it is possible that I registered the audible cheers they gave to Matt Snell’s 4-yard touchdown in the manner of a schema, a building block for later learning.

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Where we you when you heard that Apollo 11 landed on the moon?

It’s strange how memories work. I was a little over four months old when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, so just as with Matt Snell’s touchdown, there’s nothing actually there about it in my memory. In fact, for many years as a child, there would little or nothing in the world at large (or in Jets’ history) to make my mind take that snapshot. I remember having a sense that Richard Nixon was in trouble because I watched Mom do her ironing in front of the Senate’s Watergate Hearings on TV, but I don’t even remember his resignation the following year. I remember staring at a cover of the Daily News when I was eight years old the morning after Elvis died. I remember when I heard that John Lennon died in 1980 and when the pope was shot a year later. I remember when I heard about Columbine. I even think I will forever recall the moment I heard that the King of Pop was dead.

I remember where I was and who gave me the news about the planes hitting the Twin Towers, an event that went instantly from the cosmic to the personal in its horror because my brother worked across the street from the World Trade Center. He made it out, thank God, and ran for his life, like everyone else who had the opportunity.

I suppose it has been a long time since we’ve heard about moments of happy, glaringly awesome achievement like the moon landing – an event so expansive that NASA and its international equivalents would be hard-pressed today to know how to do it, or how to pay for it. Excluding the ending of our various wars, I cannot think of another historical moment of happiness that is equivalent to Apollo 11, other than the U.S. Hockey Team’s victory in 1980 over the Soviets at the Lake Placid Olympics.

Sports are good like that. Sports provide records of small and slightly larger individual achievement that, in a way, shield us from thinking very hard about how our society lurches forward most of time without a mark of achievement like the kind three Americans made (and their government with them) in July 1969. Most of the snapshot memories I mention above are marked by death and destruction. Consequently, I’ve grown up with the notion that I missed out on something even more than a moon landing or a Super Bowl. In 1969, my family had the distinct pleasure of knowing that their football and baseball teams were the champions of their respective sports, and that, yes, their beloved nation had also conquered the moon. The amount of overtime work done to clean up the refuse thrown from buildings in celebration during that year must have been staggering for New York City’s sanitation department. Their life in New York was swelled with justified pride. Sports and life coexisted in a singular time of joy.

Such are my delusions. I forget that Mom and Dad were probably most of all happy that I was born that year. Knowing my parents, the arrival of a child probably eclipsed even the moon for them. How like me to feel as though that by being born in a momentous year I was therefore born unlucky. It should be comforting for a Jets fan to remember that one’s life is marked by the individual experiences we have with family, with work and people, and not necessarily with a historically troubled football team. Yet it’s always been a challenge for a fanatical fan born in the year of his team’s greatest triumph. I feel I missed a moment by which I could mark time.

And that’s why this entry on #41 finishes midway through barely starting on Matt Snell. We freeze the mental snapshot at a single moment from a game, the actual snapshots from which Matt Snell is asked to sign all the time. We will return to him. His touchdown has an immortal place in sports history, in American football history, in Jets history, and in mine own. Such is the nature of being a fan. It passes the time, but it allows a lens through which, for better or for worse, you measure time’s passage.

NY Jets #11 – RIP JJ Jones

One thing we don’t do well at this blog is updating. We are always looking ahead, which is actually looking behind. So we stand still. But this came to my attention at the end of last week. J.J. Jones #11, backup quarterback for the New York Jets in 1975, died in a house fire in Seattle on July 9. The fire is suspected to have been arson, and a nephew is in custody.

At JetNation, the news was joined with an update that Jones himself gave back in March 2008 in reply to the question, “What happened to JJ Jones?” What may have made Jones unique enough to the questioners was the fact that he was the first African-American quarterback for the Gotham Football Club. We recalled him here when we were at #11. To the left you see Jones in relief for Namath in a 37-6 rout of the Jets by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1975. Dad was at the game. According to lore, Jones also took over at quarterback for the last game of the season in 1975 when interim coach Ken Shipp benched Namath for missing curfew (I’m sure that’s the only time that ever happened.) But Jones himself, when replying to JetNation’s all-points request, made a provocative comment about Lou Holtz that’s worth reading.

Our thoughts go out to JJ Jones’ family.

NY Jets #40 – Part 2

But there are some questions you cannot answer, no matter how many trips you make to Wikipedia or to its equivalents on the Internet’s AM dial. Like what happened to Hank Bjoklund? How many people could possibly be named “Hank Bjorklund” outside of the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota? We know that on Long Island someone by the same name, a person listed as “retired,” made a contribution to the Barack Obama Presidential campaign last fall. Is this the same Princeton grad #40 Hank Bjorklund, who was a running back for the Jets from 1972 to 1974? It doesn’t really matter. (Did I actually say that?) What matters is that he is not the Bjorklund who made an identical contribution to the campaign of that lunatic Michelle Bachmann, Republican from Minnesota, whose theories on the census have even made cretins like Glenn Beck shake their heads.

If you rooted for the Jets between the years 1978 and 1985, then you know who #40 Bobby Jackson is. These were my most formative years as a Jets fan and as a human being. Therefore, Bobby Jackson remains a key player on a series of teams that nearly drove my barely developing brain into a cavernous oblivion of despair. It was the first time since the 60′s that the Jets were actually winning almost as often as they were losing (sometimes more often). But they couldn’t help themselves often enough. Above, you see him in his rookie season, being asked to cover future Hall of Famer and future Republican Congressman from Oklahoma Steve Largent in a frustrating 24-17 loss to the Seahawks. This game typified the Jets of that era. The Jets won the first two games of that season, then lost the two that followed the Seattle loss.

But back to Bobby Jackson. He intercepted five passes at left cornerback in his rookie year, something he repeated in 1982, a year when the Jets went to the AFC Championship. The only difference is that the latter year was a strike season of only nine games, making Bobby Jackson tied atop the interception leaders for the AFC in that category. And yet, did he go to the Pro Bowl? No.

He also scored two touchdowns that year, both in the same game against the Minnesota Vikings in a 42-14 Jets win. Three weeks before, Dad had taken Charlie and me to Shea to see the Jets rout Baltimore 37-0, but it wasn’t until the Vikings game that I knew for certain that my team – my freaking beloved football team – was actually a bunch of blood-thirsty monsters straight out of Polanski’s version of Macbeth. Bobby Jackson blocked a field goal and ran it back 80 yards for a TD, and then beat the Vikings with their own dismembered arm when he intercepted Tommy Kramer for a 77-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter. I remember the sense of being 13, powerless to everything an emotional adolescent boy in his freshman year of high school is meant to experience, seeing Bobby Jackson’s touchdowns as proof positive that being a fan could in fact satisfy a person’s desire to be empowered on a molecular level. Then the Jets would lose to the hapless Kansas City Chiefs 37-13 the following week. Of course.

But then (see left) perhaps even Bobby Jackson had aspirations (if not perspirations) well beyond his own understanding, too. Or ours for that matter.

(Gatorade is thirst-aid! For that deep-down-body thirst!)

Well, anyway, I know Dad had a Bobby Jackson-moment-against-the Vikings, only it was a Mike-Battle-against-the-Giants moment. It is difficult to do this moment justice without providing actual video evidence, which can be seen on the NY Jets Historical DVD, but I will try. The facts are these. Forty years ago, while Woodstock was happening in upstate New York, the New York Jets and Giants played one another for an exhibition game at the Yale Bowl. The game is more important to us than it is to them because it was when New York fans were finally exposed to the uncomfortable – albeit brief – truth, that the New York Jets were the better football team in the Tri-State area – something rumored to be true but only feared as such since January 1969, six months earlier, when the Jets won the Super Bowl. Dad went to the game with his off-duty cop ticket holders and sat in the blazing sun as row after row of drunken fans from both sides fought in uproarious brawls that tumbled down the length of the bowl itself. It was a hootenanny, a donnybrook, a scrum, both on and off the field.

But the Jets never really were behind, in some measure because of an outstanding opening kickoff return for a touchdown by #40 Mike Battle. Here, you see that Battle’s legs are in a blur of speed as he races down the center of the field for the Jets’ first score in a 37-14 win. But it was the manner in which he took the ball at first and then leaped several feet in the air over the first Giants defender with a dancer’s awesome sense of grace, and then went untouched, that stays with many fans even today. The first time I saw it – on DVD, no less – I gasped audibly, just as I did when I saw John Riggins score the knockout touchdown against Miami in Super Bowl XVI, or saw Michael Owen score against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup. You are breathless, in awe. Dad’s reaction was sort of the same, but the game itself gave him that sense of empowerment I mentioned above. This is my team, and they kick everyone’s ass. Like Henry at Agincourt, and just as short-lived.

NY Jets #40 – Part 1

I did not play organized football beyond the fourth grade, and like a lot fans, I compensate for my limited experiences in sports with an almost childlike obsession as a spectator. I did play a sport in high school during my freshman year, and I was pretty good at it. I was a varsity letter cross-country runner. It did not pull the honeys.

The point of mentioning this, though, is that while trudging back from yet another five-mile practice run with the team, I would spy the high school football squad going through the motions. Their football coach was a towering, lugubrious looking figure with a cold, sneering, cruel face, yet with an accent just short of sounding like one of the Three Stooges. To add to it, he had a fu manchu mustache more appropriate to Ming the Merciless than Joseph William Namath. His team did not like him.

Let them hate; so long as they fear. This is the essence of Machiavelli’s rule of leadership, I suppose. We have not evolved far enough as a species to really produce leaders of a pure moral essence, so Jean-Luc Picard wasn’t exactly my high school’s football coach. Neither was he particularly self-conscious. I find that tyrants are often not. A very talented player on his team went to the trouble of producing a very good likeness of the coach dressed as Darth Vader, wielding a light saber, and hung it outside his office. When I asked the coach – callow kid of 14 that I was – why he didn’t take the picture down, he replied, “Because I want the bastard who did this to feel ashamed of himself for what he did.” Somehow, even so young, I knew that coach’s plan wasn’t going to work. Displaying his work under any pretext will only embolden your average artist, and so I had my first real taste of dramatic irony.

The real point of mentioning this, though, was that (as I began earlier before Truth broke in with all her matter-of-fact) as I fumbled back into the locker room at high school, I passed by football practice one day and saw the coach blistering three players on the sidelines for sitting on their helmets. “I told you idiots once, I told you a million times I don’t want to see that.”

But why? If it was OK for John Riggins, then why not for the chubby boys of my high school? Did they seriously weigh that much? Was the coach worried about replacing equipment that would go cracked under a lineman’s buttocks? Could he actually have been worried for their brains’ fragile cages? Was this just a peeve? A peeve, probably. One that #40 James Hasty evidently would have had no problem deflecting. Hasty and Russell Carter are two secondary players I was sorely unhappy to the Jets let go.

Sometimes I play a little game with myself in which I imagine what if…. There’s so much in Jets history from which to choose. There are too many examples. Suffice: what if James Hasty had not left the Jets secondary to join the Chiefs in 1994? If he had stayed a Jet, he would have endured Kotite and then Parcells’ grinding mill. How would a high profile defensive player have been received by the Tuna Overlord? I mean, Otis Smith, Ray Mickens, and Aaron Glenn all played for the ’96 squad and then for Parcells, so maybe Hasty would have been able to play for the Great Manipulator. He might not immediately have been painted as a prima donna. For the Chiefs, Hasty earned Pro Bowl seasons from 1997 to 1999. Had he been on the Jets during that time, would Parcells have told him to get up off his hemlet? I believe not, though it might still be a good idea for my old high school coach and Parcells to be in group therapy.

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According to Mark Kriegal’s biography of Namath, the Franchise’s best pal, Ray Abruzzese #25, was cut in 1967 to make room for a defensive back rookie who lead the nation with 11 interceptions the year before at Utah State. This meant nothing to Namath, whose bodyguard, manservant, pal and general wing man was now sent off to play actual football somewhere else. Namath bemoans this move in the book, noting that Henry King #40, Ray’s replacement, was just “some rich rookie,” which two years before was how people described Joe Willie. Irony abounds in this entry, I guess. Even when he was nearsighted on such issues, Namath appears prescient. Randy Beverly #42 eventually took King’s place by the end of 1967 and was instrumental in nailing down the Jets Super Bowl Championship with some key defensive plays. Henry King left football at the end of ’67 and was never heard from in the NFL again. I still say that you cut Ray Abruzzese, though.

It certainly looks as though Dainard Paulson #40 wants us to say something about him, doesn’t it? And why not. There’s a little surprise here for some of you unfamiliar with the early history of your beloved club. King replaced Dainard Paulson in #40 in 1967. Originally a New York Titan, Paulson came out of Oregon State and eventually caught 12 interceptions in 1964 as a Jet, a statistic placing him not only in the AFL All-Star Game but in the all-time annals of the game itself – tied at #5 for all-time single season interception records. Paul Krause did the same in the NFL for the Redskins in ’64. The only person afterwards to approach this single-season record was Lester Hayes in 1980 for the Oakland Raiders, but remember that Hayes did it in a 16-game season. Dainard Paulson was just two seasons away from having the same distinction as Bill Mathis, Larry Grantham, Curley Johnson and Don Maynard – as both Titans and Jets in Super Bowl III – but Paulson’s career ends without statistical distinction at the end of 1966. The rest is silence.

If Dainard Paulson was that good – and he was – where did he go? To vanish irrevocably from the game must have been traumatic for him. Or was it, all the same, just a boy’s game and not a man’s endeavor to him? Maybe it was just time to return to his childhood home in California, to begin his life as a surfer, to discover bliss in the warm ocean and under God’s sunshine. These are the mysteries that keep me awake at night.

NY Jets #39

Thirty-nine is thirteen three times. Does this explain its general absence from the annals of the greatest? I conjure Larry Csonka’s bruised spirit, one so dedicated to life’s coexistence with pain that he actually made a teammate vomit in the huddle when the unfortunate glanced at Zonk’s gruesomely bloody nose. In the modern era, Laurence Mulroney and Steven Jackson have some claim on the number’s voodoo, such as it is. But number 39 will not be joining football’s House of Extravaganza. He will not be opening any cologne lines. He will not be changing his name to “Tres Nueve.”

So we begin with Roderick Bryant #39. It’s become a kind of a cliche on these pages to talk about the short-lived career of the average player in the NFL secondary. He comes and goes with the success of the receivers he covers. At the beginning of his rookie season in 2004, in his first play as a pro, Bryant broke up a crucial pass thrown by Peyton Manning. It was an auspicious start.  He played 13 games that year, but then he was never heard from in the professional game again. He’s out there, somewhere. “Roderick Bryant” is the kind of name you might find on the marquee of a late 40′s studio film: Roderick Bryant, as you’ve never seen him before. The next thing you know, he’s lucky to make a guest appearance on The Love Boat while Fred Astaire gets the handoff (of a cat) from O.J Simpson at the end of The Towering Inferno.

Jehuu Caulcrick #39 is somewhere out there, maybe even still on the squad. But among Thomas Jones, Leon Washington and Shonn Greene, is there any place on Rex Ryan’s Jets for the Winner of the Booth Lustig Award for #39? Born in Liberia, a child of that nation’s civil war, his father was a member of the 1992 government there and was murdered. Jehuu Caulcrick was something like a folk hero and embodiment of the American Dream at Michigan State, but will he be with the Jets in September? His first name means “Yahweh is he.” Caulcrick isn’t He, but if Yahweh could come back as anything he wanted, why wouldn’t he come back as a short but powerful running back? Does that mean Leon Washington is God?

If your name is Saladin Martin, who played in #39 in 1980 for the Jets, are you more likely to be like your namesake, one who apparently vanquished his Crusader enemies in the 12th century with a sense of chivalry for which Medieval Crusaders were supposed to have been known? Please, I don’t know.

Regardless, Andrew Davidson played part of the 2002 season at cornerback for the Jets in #39. Perhaps if he had an interesting name, we could say more. We, meaning I, can’t.

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Fred Julian is at least one player in the history of the franchise whose career was interrupted by the Cold War. At 5’9″, he lead the New York Titans with six interceptions in 1961, even when competing with Dick Felt and Roger Donahoo, each of whom clearly has a funnier name than does Fred Julian. He remembers Harry Wismer fondly – checks arriving on time, first class travel – and he remains not at all bitter that the Titans cut him when they anticipated that Julian would be called up by selective service to face down the Soviets over the Berlin Wall. Call him a happy revisionist. Call him content. He appears in his photograph as exactly the kind of square-jawed member of the generation that did not identify themselves as casual free spirits. Though Michael Vick may be trying to return to the NFL, Fred Julian never did. For better or for worse, he is an object example of the difference between the past and the present.

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Three times an unlucky number makes 39. Three men who wore #39 for the Jets have one particular nominal trait in common – alliterative names:

First, Harry Hamilton #39 for the Jets from 1984-87 at safety. He was memorable, hard-working, tough player and among the smarteest of Jets to have ever played, which means that he had to be cut by the team. As this 1988 George Vescey article from the Times points out, “Any way you look at it, the way the Jets lopped off this solid citizen and solid tackler demonstrates the transient and anonymous nature of pro football.” Sounds like something I’d say, George. He also points out that it’s easiest to blame and shortchange the secondary for giving up a touchdown instead of going after the defensive linemen for giving the QB the time to find his man. Harry Hamilton’s dad infers that the color of this scapegoat in general cannot be ignored. This is all starting to sound familiar. There have been several unhappy stories among former Jets players in the #30′s.

Then, another Harry. Safety Harry Howard, #39, who played for us in 1976. There are intangibles here, as they say. Intangibles can be items about a player that are not statistically quantifiable, like a locker room presence, an intimidation factor on the line, or an ability to distract your opponent. But what if your identity itself is an intangible. In the Jets’ own online All-Time Roster, Harry Howard is literally “an intangible without a name,” which is also how Lou Holtz in 1976 described a player named “Louis” in Harry Howard’s write-up. This means that the Jets organization is currently mistaking Harry Howard for Louie Giammona, a running back drafted out of Utah State, whom we will meet when we cover #45. All we know about Harry Howard is that he was drafted out of Ohio State in 1972 by the Rams but played only one NFL season as Giammona’s teammate four years later on the dreadful 1976 Jets squad.

There aren’t many players who get the NFL in-action figure – the kind that Dad picks up at Kennedy Airport when he realizes he still hasn’t bought anything for the kids on his business trip to New York – but #39 Johnny Johnson did before the 1995 season. The only trouble was Johnny Johnson wasn’t there by the start of ’95. He had enjoyed five successful seasons as a tailback in the NFL, first with the Phoenix Cardinals, then with the Jets from 1993-94. In that deranged 6-10 season in ’94 with Pete Carroll, Johnny Johnson ran for 953 yards on the ground. Then, while the Jets fell deeply into the mire of Rich Kotite’s uniquely depressing leadership, Johnny Johnson vanished from pro football as quickly as an ambitious government minister in Stalin’s inner circle. And in the midst of the gloom that followed, we fell under losing’s ponderous spell. History was rewritten. Adrian Murrell kept us amused, but our memories became unreliable. Did we ever have a Johnny Johnson? Didn’t we used to have a big, powerful backfielder once? Where did he go? The Cardinals? Wasn’t that where he started? Was his name Jimmy Johnson? No, that’s the Cowboys’ old coach. Oh, never mind. Just end the season. Where have you gone, Johnny Johnson?

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Maurice Tyler had four interceptions in his first season at defensive back for the Bills in 1972, but then after that his career was a long succession of packing and unpacking, town to town, up and down the dial. Who will ever speak for the traveling secondary player who’s only as good as the imagination of the the coach will allow? Look, the game has changed a great deal, and defenses have evolved, but it didn’t change quickly enough for Maurice Tyler. He was marked by that most anonymous of distinctions in his career – he changed his number each time he moved to a new city: #42 in Buffalo, #23 in Denver, #25 in San Diego, #27 in Detroit, back to #25 for the Giants after playing in #39 for the Jets in 1977. Nary a winning season the whole way. I’m not sure if that’s the way he looked that particular season the Jets went 3-11, but the combination of the afro and hearty mustache is, by definition, unbeatable – even if Maurice Tyler’s career was not.

NY Jets #4

In one of my classes last Fall, I had a student who had been transplanted from a little town in Wisconsin. To her, Brett Favre was immortal. How could he not be? When she found out I was a Jets fan during the Fall 2008 semester, she looked at me as if I were her old flame’s new girlfriend. By semester’s end, she gave me a commiserating expression.

I never had as much time with Brett Favre as a fan to think of him as a personal Jets icon the way Namath is to me. He is just Brett Favre, football legend, like countless other legends who made their name with another team, and not with the Jets. But after the Titans game last year, I really did see five fingers and not four. I believed in something that made me forget all the other bleak Decembers of my past. Only Brett Favre could have done that. I can’t say I’m grateful, but I can’t help but see the whole thing now as a unbelievable story formed at the expense of my witless team. What bothers me is the stone cold truth that for a long time afterwards, Patriots fans were laughing themselves into a stupor every night.

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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 in the NFL? At one time, Brett Favre himself ranked in the catalogue of What If’s in our world of the Jets. Onetime Jets executive Ron Wolf was interested in the rookie quarterback from Southern Mississippi. 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 as a young man. The Jets would probably have dealt him away just as Atlanta did.

But then he did come to us, many years later after rewriting the history books and making himself a kind of rugged, quixotic, romantic hero on the field. 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 on the American scene. Outside of Ronald Reagan, he is the lone American icon who has been able to attract the attention and love of peoples both north and south of the Mason-Dixon. If you want to include various NASCAR people in that, fine, but I don’t follow such things.

Did he belong here? The real question was, after all of the years, records, playoff games and various dramatics on MNF, did Brett Favre really still belong anywhere other than in a fan’s mythic imagination, where all of us are still young and beautiful, charismatic and new? The answer turned out to be no. No. Not at all.

But like all mythical figures, Favre triggered our capacity for wonder. With a confident offense, he lead the team to an 8-3 record. 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. (I can prove it in my other blog’s Brett Favre Chronicles, or in the 2008 Season Diary.) Now we know the rest of the story. The team went 1-4 the rest of the way, pulling out of the playoffs so quickly that it felt like whiplash. They were never so good as they were in the season’s games against the Pats and the Titans. Our current worry is that they never were even that good. But Favre’s magic is his bravado and sense of fun. Perhaps it was infectious. Maybe we were that good.

The team never really did take to him, though. Hurt or healthy, Chad Pennington was loved 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. Maybe he had wanted to play in Green Bay, Minnesota or Tampa Bay instead. When he said, “We’ll see” to the question of whether or not he would stay with the Jets, we knew, instinctively, what it meant, even if we looked the other way. It was the kiss-off. Like Beckham to the Galaxy. See ya.

One of the problems of starting Brett Favre is that you had to start him, or else you are violating a sacred, self-evident code. There was no choice; I can’t imagine a professional coach who would want to be saddled with such a thing. Now it’s become acceptable to criticize Favre around the league in the way that fans of his NFC rivals always have. They’ve been saying many of the same things I’ve always wondered about him, even before he came to the Jets: to what degree is being #4 really just about being Brett Favre and not being quarterback for his team? The criticism among Jets players was that he was not a team player. We’ve all known that for a long time; it’s just that the lilting platitudes about how lovable Favre is superseded everything else. Everybody needs to believe in a ridiculously talented, self-reliant, self-assured and flawed protagonist. Such is the character description of an American archetype. So we released Chad Pennington and took Brett Favre. Who wouldn’t have done the same? And when the magic flared brightly by week 12, we all believed in the myth. And when it burned out, we remembered what we had always been told about him.

And when Favre’s games of toss with players from the nearby high school in Mississippi started up in the following spring again, none of us were convinced of it, nor were we amused.  We merely nodded our heads in acknowledgment.  A man is entitled to do what he chooses, even if he strings along the hopes of a team and their fans.  Brett chose to hem and haw as if we didn’t know what he was doing, becoming embattled in his private Greek drama, never really intending to join practice.  He just wanted to do his thing.  Only now he has gone from being the icon about whom everyone had a wondrous story to being the town’s lost soul, throwing footballs at phantoms in broad daylight as onlookers pass by and shake their heads.  Pay no mind to Brett, they now say to newcomers in town.  That’s just what that silly old fool does.

***

Louie Aguiar #4.  And is there any reason to remember Louis Aguiar, except if you’re a budding punter? You can attend his Aguiar Kicking Academy in Missouri. He played well for the underachieving Shottenheimer Chiefs after playing reasonably well as a Jet in the early 90′s. Like a lot of punters, Aguiar looks less like a football player than a public school principal.

But then of course there’s Glenn Foley. In the dark days of the mid-1990′s Glenn Foley was a distant hope for the future. Boston College grad, New Jersey native – he seemed like a Jets fan’s ideal underdog. Finally the good day came for him when the Jets played the Patriots at home in 1997. Neil O’Donnell was taken out and Foley was put in.

That day, an old friend of mine named Jeff had come back into Philly for a visit, and I tried to persuade him to watch the Jets-Patriots game with me. Jeff is a college professor with whom I’d done graduate work, and though he knew how much the Jets meant to me, he refused to go to a sports bar and watch it. I suppose he had a point; the Jets were on every week while he and I hadn’t sat down together in months. But the Jets were 4-3, going into a key division matchup. He wanted me to act like a grown up and forgo the juvenile compulsion to be a sports fan. At first, the choice was a little agonizing, but I gave Jeff the greater benefit of my time.

In the end, it was one of Glenn Foley’s two great performances. He came in and threw 17 for 23, 200 yards and two touchdowns, and the Jets won, 24-19. The Jets were 5-3, decisively over .500. To me, the game was the beginning of the new, modern age of the Jets franchise – a time when we were allowed to have higher expectations for the team, year after year. It was also the last day of my friendship with Jeff. An idealist, he felt that it didn’t matter if the Jets were my team; he felt a coach as Machiavellian and goonish as Bill Parcells should have made me reconsider.

“Parcells is a such a fascist,” Jeff said, as we sat drinking in a wine bar. “How could you be so careless as to root for a team he coaches?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” was all I could ask. It’s like our longtime friendship suddenly seemed empty. The scales fell from eyes. And what was I doing in a wine bar?

He seemed aghast. “You could root for a publicly-owned franchise like Green Bay. Try being a more progressively minded fan.”

What was he suggesting – that I abandon my football team so that I could help encourage some imagined socialist impulse in the bloated corporate business of professional football? I dismissed his misgivings.

“Well, that’s disappointing, Marty,” he said.

“Jump off a bridge, chump,” I said, tossing down my cabernet before leaving.

So I have good memories of Glenn Foley. When the Niners beat the Jets in the opener the following year, Steve Young made sure to give Foley extra words of encouragement. But by week three of the 1998 season, he was replaced by Vinny Testeverde, and his years with the Jets were pretty much done. But his victory made me realize how hungry I had been as a Jets fan, having endured three previous seasons over which the Jets had won a total of ten games. Some things were more important than reform in sports. Some things are just too precious for friendship to spoil.

NY Jets #38 – Part 2

Mike Zordich played for Penn State at cornerback, and now his son plays linebacker for Penn State, which makes me feel pretty old. Zordich played in #38 as a rookie for the Jets during the “lost” years  – a time where I became disenchanted with the lusterless play of my football team because I was busy trying to pick up women at hopelessly crowded house parties or maybe trying to understand Roland Barthes’ S/Z. It was not to be.

For himself, Mike Zordich came to the Jets in the strike year of 1987, and he played all 16 games the following year. In 1988 he scored on his first pro interception, a long return against the Houston Oilers to top off 45-3 win. If I had been paying attention during this one year in the lost ones, I might have thought of Zordich’s interception as part of a big win in what would be a big season in a big career for Mike Zordich as a Jet. None of it was to be.

I knew Mike Zordich more by his play in #36 for Philadelphia, where he became a popular Eagles player in a city that loves its highly physical defensive backs. But obviously he most important thing here is Mike Zordich’s faint mustache at left, which I too possessed in and around the time that Mike Zordich first became a professional in the game he loves. It’s just a hint of hair under the nose.  Like the mullet, these mustaches were regarded without irony or critical abstraction. These was intended to attract females which, as I mentioned earlier, it did not in my particular case. Nor did it help me understand French poststructuralist theory.

****

During my junior year of college, I was given an opportunity to study at Blackfriars College, Oxford for entire school year. This may be news to you, but 20 years later, it’s apparently not news to my students, one of whom inferred that I mentioned decades-old experience a little too often today. The following exchange took place recently:

“Mr. Roche?”

“Yes?”

“I ran into one of your former students the other day. Do you remember (name omitted)?”

“Why yes, I do. Does he remember me?”

“Yes, he did. In fact, he asked me, Does Roche still talk all the time about the fact that he went to Oxford for a year of college?”

“Ah. And what did you say?”

“I said yes, he does.”

It took a couple of days for me to silently, quietly and humbly recover from that one.

Safety Todd Scott wore #38 for the Jets in 10 games during the bleak 1995 season. Three seasons before he had gone to the Pro Bowl as a Viking for the first and only time in his career. He was also named to the All-Madden team that year. Did he mention his lone year in the sun as often as, apparently, I do mine? Well, I know I don’t mention Oxford anymore – except in my blogs, which no one reads anyway.

****

A simple search online for former 1996 Jets safety, #38 Kwame Ellis produces an interesting result. It was bad enough that Ellis did not even play all the way through the New York Jets’ worst season in record, and while he would play in NFL Europe, he would never play for anyone else in NFL United States.  But he was also arrested in Mexico last November for stiffing a cab driver the equivalent of $26! The age of immediate worldwide access to information should encourage all of us to behave better, if only to save us from the worldwide embarrassment that a reported misadventure might bring us. Even a non-celebrity former athlete like Kwame Ellis is that much more likely to be humiliated online by a site like YouBeenBlinded, which suggests that Ellis may have stiffed the driver in order to save his money for a pickup with a lady of the evening on the strip. The site seems to specialize in reporting on athletes breaking the law. It’s a rich ground to till.

And finally…Jon McGraw #38. No, he never sang with Elmo, but I remember when McGraw was drafted out of Kansas State – a college walk-on turned pro. Stories like that resonate, of course. Now that he’s with the Kansas City Chiefs, he has his own web site. Why?  Dunno.  But enter the site and hover over the headings at the top. It makes this sort of weird sound, like what a bumble bee makes when it brushes against a screen door.

NY Jets #38 – Part 1

Into how much of futurity?  My wife and I are buying a house, work has been hell, and I’ve gone through one of my occasional, tidal, deep swells of depression that come and go unannounced, like a visitor you had little time to even consider. You try to welcome it, even as it punches holes in your living room walls and windows, and just when you think to call the police, it is gone, hopefully for good.

Good riddance. Meanwhile, we have to pack the apartment, and before that, we have to clean, which is enough of a task that you might even think to never move, ever. Think of the famous Collyer brothers, one of whom was found dead behind an impossible network of boxes, newspapers and gathered stuff. The other was found crushed beneath a booby trap of detritus and clutter. Sometimes the mind makes itself believe that wherever you are is the safest place to be, even as something better waits for you on the other side of town. My Mom would often invoke the Collyers when she saw my piles of magazines and newspapers in my room as a kid. I’ve always, always had problems with letting go.

Which kind of explains what I do here. Perhaps by gathering things from the past, constantly bringing back names and numbers, I’m building the protective pile around which I can seek a defense from the world outside the windows. Perhaps they will find my lifeless body after days of digging past Phil Wise, W.K. Hicks, Scott Dierking, and Steve O’Neal. Or not.

Or Ed Taylor, #38 at free safety for the Jets from 1975-79. Not a single winning season in the mix. The Jets existed in the same realm as Archie Manning’s New Orleans Saints during the time. Things didn’t get better for the Jets until 1981, at which point Ed Taylor was finishing up his career in #45 for the Miami Dolphins, the Jets’ biggest rival then as now (speak not of Those Of Whom We Do Not Speak). To be honest, playing as he did for a team that won 25 games over the five season he saw for them, I don’t remember much about Ed Taylor, and even then he played in the shadow of Burgess Owens and, later, Bobby Jackson. He wasn’t a Mormon like Owens, but he was born in Memphis, and went to college at Memphis State. Oh, wait. I do recall that Taylor took the field in his latter Jets seasons wearing shades that were pretty slick, in a late 70′s sense. Headband, beard, honey-shaded game time shades – there are worse things for which to be known. Yes indeed.

Where are the Giants fans who remember running back Billy Taylor? He graced the cover of Big Blue’s 1980 yearbook after gaining 953 total yards the season before. By the following year, he would wear #38 for both the Giants and the Jets. He was cut from the Blue a few weeks into the 1981 season and picked up by the Green to gain one yard total over two games.  He was handed the ball once against New England and took the ball once in a predictably frustrating loss to the Seahawks (Dave Krieg’s first start as I recall), both games at Shea. He didn’t even start in the home thumping of Buffalo in between. He gained two yards in the Patriots game, then lost one yard against Seattle. History always provides such things as a retrospectively pat examples of how minutiae reveal truths about big things, as if Jets fans needed such clarifications. But did Billy Taylor spend the rest of the season on the sidelines thinking about how his performance for the Jets was merely a metaphor for the Jets’ record in those games he played? No, probably not.

George Floyd? Yes. Is that the name of a supporting actor in a Marx Brothers film? No, it is not. He is an inductee in the College Football Hall of Fame (how many former Jets are inductees?), former Jets safety in #38, and I have absolutely no statistics on him, though his Wikipedia entry mentions, his ability to level “vicious hard hits,” which might mean he wrote the entry.  No harm, no foul, George.  After all, Billy Squier was known for hard hits too, but then George Floyd would probably have had enough common sense not to ruin his singing career by prancing around in his video for “Rock Me Tonight” like a very silly, silly man. No, sir.

NY Jets #37 – Head Shots Pt. 2

I don’t have anything on #37 Skip Lane, New York Jet cornerback from 1984. He sounds like a character from My Three Sons. There’s that. And I have no head shot of Skip Lane, either. I do, however, have a picture of a skiplane, a small airplane with skis for landing gear. So, there’s also that.

***

My family temporarily moved to a small town called Millwood in New York when I was ten. We lived in a funky-looking 1970′s contemporary house with a strange tower. We were Long Islanders up until then. My little brother thought he saw a giant mouse on the steep grassy hill leading up from the back deck of the house. What he saw was a deer. Until then, the closest thing to a wild animal on the South Shore of Long Island that we had ever seen had been Mr. Fennessey from down the street, a small-time lawyer who enjoyed getting drunk and driving through people’s backyards on his motorcycle.

Instead of the white noise of the Southern State Parkway, there were the sounds of crickets at night. This was the Shady Hill suburbia of John Cheever’s imagination – the wooded areas of Westchester County that inspired him to create a wobbly postwar mythology of sorts. This world was different. The Jets provided a quick reminder of timeless things. One additional novelty was having the Jets on Monday Night Football in October 1979, playing the Minnesota Vikings at Shea.

Anyone who wonders why the Jets had only that one Monday Night Football at Shea in MNF’s history might consider that the television crew were threatened that evening and that and equipment was stolen from ABC, too. Crime was a stain on the whole city, and both Yankee and Shea were like household blenders with cockroaches hiding inside. It was a bad scene. My old friend from the Island, Eddie O’Fallon, reported that his father had gotten into a bottle wielding fight at the game with a bunch of young guys who had jumped him and his other sons.

Here’s the only thing left of the game that I remember. I do remember the Jets won 14-7. However, I also remember a turnover in the first quarter that lead to the Jets first touchdown, a Richard Todd bootleg. On both the recovery and the score, I remember the shots of the menacing-looking, steamed crowd. Even at the age of ten, I knew that I was looking at people in altered states consciousness. Shea was drunk in a hard, sometimes ugly way that Jets fans get. According to the Jets’ all-time roster site, #37 Tim Moresco, special teams’ man, was responsible for the fumble recovery off that first quarter punt that set up the touchdown.

And considering the unhappy life among many of the Jets Among Men after football, I am impressed by how well maintained Tim Moresco seems as a Senior Vice President for Richard Bowers and Co., an Atlanta-based real estate company, with lots of suits in evidence. No yellow polo shirts there. What is it about retired football players and real estate? The game itself is a preparatory extended metaphor for the real thing in turnover recovery.

Donnie Elder #37 never scored a touchdown in his career. He never scored on an interception, a fumble recovery, a punt or kick return. He never went to the Pro Bowl. He was drafted deep in the third round out of Memphis State in 1985, and he only played that one year for the New York Jets. Yet the second-to-last former Jet whom Leon Washington passed last season on his way up the list of overall punt and kick return yardage was Donnie Elder, who ranks 154th on the list. He’s not the last to pass Donnie, though. With one additional yard gained, that honor goes to Lou Piccone. (I would like to use that last sentence in as many postings as possible.)

Jake Moreland #37 played both running back and tight end for the Jets in 2000, which was a slightly surreal season. It was the Al Groh year. It seems to show on Jake Moreland’s face. Jake’s head shot seems to capture a weary man’s thousand-yard stare – the look of one who has seen too much and needs to be sat down, given some water. Someone needs to hunker down near him and occasionally try to catch his eye, keep repeating his name gently, ever so gently. This was probably a picture taken by the team photographer at the start of the season – Moreland’s rookie year – but it looks like the expression he might have had at the end, too. Certainly it was my look at the end of the 2000 season, when players fizzled out from Al Groh’s intense practices and just plain old refused to play for him, compelling my beloved football team to fall out of the playoff hunt. Jake? Hey. Jake? Jake…

Oh, there you are. For a minute there,…well, never mind. You look great. After two seasons in the NFL, Jake Moreland became an assistant coach for his alma mater of Western Michigan, thus reminding us that the other saving career after pro football is coaching. By putting on a suit and taking on the general tasks of a responsible life, Jake looks a little less traumatized by the madness of the war without end. Now he’s ordering other men into unseasonably hot summer practices. I was worried for a minute there.

It’s possible that Marv Owens #37 was part of a deal that brought Don Maynard from the New York Jets to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1973. Ascertaining the truth of this is a little problematic for those of us whose knowledge of Marv Owens is built around the sole fact that he is the brother of defensive Brig Owens, who enjoyed a long career through some pretty exciting seasons with Vince Lombardi and George Allen on the Washington Redskins. Marv Owens’ career by comparison was brief. Thanksgiving must have been interesting- that is, when Brig wasn’t playing. But if he had to carry the weight of taking Don Maynard’s place at receiver, then imagine how uncomfortable it might all have been, and it appears that his expression almost conveys this. Marv’s NFL career ended in 1973, the same year as Don Maynard’s.

Finally, behold Allen Smith #37, halfback for the New York Jets in 1966. According to what records there are, Smith passed up final year of eligibility in college to play professional football. His toughness seems to have earned him the nickname “Little Jim Brown,” which probably signified something having to do with a similarity to JB’s toughness through defenses and whatnot. From little Findlay College (now University) in Ohio, Little Jim Brown was one of the most respected players from among small colleges at the time. Apparently, according to the Jets All-Time database, in his first game of his last year at Findlay, Smith “rushed 20 times for 286 yards, and in season finale scored seven touchdowns against St. Joseph’s of Indiana.” Seven.

He was beloved in Toledo, a town I know mostly for Max Klinger, who isn’t even a real person. He studied art at Findlay. By the time he became a Jet, he was already married with a one year-old. His life had just begun. But apparently his entire AFL career consisted of only one game, without statistical content.

His obituary indicates that life went on after the AFL for Allen Smith, as it does for all of us, despite our lies, our mistakes, our brief joys and late epiphanies. Parts of our lives end, but then something else begins, too, even when it seems hopeless. Did he ever finish his degree?

Allen Smith’s one year-old did grow up, and she had other siblings, too. I wonder if, as his obituary seems to indicate, Allen Smith lived the right kind of life, one without regret.