Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

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  For Kaari Pitkin

  “I knew something like this would happen.”

  “No you didn’t,” I said. “Not anything like this.”

  —James Dickey, Deliverance

  Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

  —James Joyce, “The Dead”

  PART I

  Before

  Prologue

  A FOOTBALL METABOLISM

  Success so huge.

  —Philip Larkin, “The Whitsun Weddings”

  Back before it all began, when the 2011 football season was just a lush, sweet section of future calendar for me, it was easy to imagine the path to a Super Bowl victory stretching out straight as a sideline before the New York Jets. A lot of it was that the Jets head coach, Rex Ryan, was always assuring me in his big, warm-blooded, exuberant way that the Jets were “going to win it all.” It was Ryan, and the Jets general manager, Mike Tannenbaum, who invited me to spend the year with their team at the Jets facility in Florham Park, New Jersey. They gave me a security code, a desk in the scouting department, a locker, and the freedom to roam. I was hardly any kind of football expert—I wasn’t aware, even, that football teams never tackle in practice during the season because it’s too dangerous—but I knew enough to be sure that Ryan’s gleeful, unbuttoned optimism was something rare in football coaches, a notoriously frowning and tight-lipped cohort. I liked that Ryan was different. I was there because Ryan was different. Nobody in modern professional football had ever let someone like me inside before.

  Not very long ago, the NFL had been the cushioned recliner onto which men collapsed, disengaging from life for “the feeling of being alive,” as Frederick Exley described his Sundays in A Fan’s Notes. Cartoons in the 1970s joked about the football-focused man; in one, he’s informed, “There’s a family reunion in the dining room”; in another, he dismisses his wife with “I doubt that Pat feels obliged to sit and watch with Dick.”

  Suddenly now football was the great spectacle of twenty-first-century America, the game of our time. The field’s squared-off dimensions, so compatible with the grid of electronic screens, and the stop-and-start pace of play, which accommodated replays and flickering attention spans, made it a better game on television than live. You could miss everything and miss nothing—football was an ideal activity for a distracted public. With every game now of national interest, the networks were doing land-office business. Sunday Night Football displaced American Idol as the country’s most popular broadcast. More women watched NFL games than watched the Academy Awards. (The Jets running-back coach Anthony Lynn had been divorced several years earlier after an eighteen-year marriage. He is now remarried, but he told me that the biggest change he noticed during his second round of dating was that women had come to love football.)

  And yet, was there an activity that Americans paid closer attention to but knew less about? That was what made football so different from baseball, the soothingly familiar national pastime. Baseball was nostalgia, past times; football lived in the ongoing moment. Baseball individuated; football, which Ryan always called “the ultimate team game,” huddled up and scrummed. Yet for all that exposure, football kept its distance, remained a closed society whose core inaccessibility increased its appeal. It was the national passion, the unrequiting sport—something graceful, thrilling, dangerous, and concealed in plain sight.

  That most fans had no idea what the players were doing was something of a point of pride within the game. Tom Moore, who had a long and distinguished offensive-coaching career primarily with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Indianapolis Colts, tells a joke about an older woman who attended a football game for the first time. Afterward, somebody asked her what she’d made of it. “It was delightful until some crazy guy kicked a ball. I never understood anything after that.” The Jets linebacker coach, Bob Sutton, compared players in their helmets and pads to armored knights on horses—“You knew there was somebody in there but you didn’t know who the hell it was!” Sutton likewise savored the fact that, to others, a coach was “a kind of mystical person.”

  The game thrived on mystery. Just as the equipment obscured the players, the mechanics of the sport were such that you were always trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Half the time you couldn’t locate the ball, tucked away as it was like a bean in a bowl of Bartlett pears, and even when it was spotted, each play took place so quickly that in postgame press conferences, the standard coachly response to any request for reflection was that the coach himself couldn’t yet say because he hadn’t reviewed the game tape. So much went on away from the ball that it was impossible not to assume that you were missing a lot of what was meaningful about football. In particular, what tended to pass by unnoticed was good defense, the intricate countermeans that disallowed the ends. If, like me, you considered defense to be the essence of football, this was a significant lacuna.

  The course of play depended on stratagems conceived ahead of time, in the game plan. During games, coaches chose these play calls from sheets that on a television screen resembled the neoplastic grid of black lines and colorful cubes in a Mondrian painting. You could see the design so well because the coaches held them before their faces as a bulwark against opposition lipreading. The whole idea of a game plan intrigued me to no end. I imagined something on the tactical order of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson drawing up between midnight and dawn the brilliant flanking maneuvers for Chancellorsville. But how a game plan came to be, what a finished plan looked like, I had no idea. I’d heard that all copies were shredded as soon as the game was over.

  The sixteen one-hour games that each team played in its regular-season schedule at stadiums were brief interludes from the serious work of football life, which took place almost year-round at the team facility. The facility! The invincible, love-minus-zero / no-limit red-dogging perfection of football terms! There was the image of a secure, vaguely forbidding workplace, a gleaming safe house–cum–laboratory for covert football experiments. True, throngs of journalists covered NFL teams during the season, but at the facility, they were monitored by team officials, led in columns, like state visitors to Pyongyang, into the locker room or out to the practice fields for their few furtive glimpses each week. They saw how competitive the games were; they didn’t see how competitive the process was. The real day-to-day passed them quietly by.

  So did the terminology on which a playbook depends. Football’s was an abstruse, constantly evolving jargon with confidential local vernaculars—a thieves’ cant for coaches. “Collision low crossers,” for example, was a particular favorite of mine. The phrase, virtually unknown outside the facility, was used in their playbook by Jets defensive coaches to describe players, usually linebackers, making legal contact with any potential pass receiver who was crossing the field within five yards of the line of scrimmage. Beyond five yards, collisioning someone became a penalty. Since football is a game of precise timing and geometry, the point was to disrupt the pass route by diverting the pass receiver from his appointed course. If you knocked the hell out of him, all the better. It was challenging to collision a
low crosser because the pass receiver knew where he was going and the defender didn’t. Also, most players who ventured into the lowland were nimble, shifty, and moving very, very fast. The real inspiration of the phrase was how instantly it evoked the most basic elements of the game—speed, aggression, the interplay between space and time, plans that likely would not come to fruition, and the essential calamity of what goes on out there. How there was always someone lurking, ready to ruin your life.

  In the end, the significance of it all seemed to be that in an age of exposure, the thing Americans liked best operated in almost total seclusion. Maybe the exotic pull increased the pleasure, and perhaps also those who watched were afraid of what they’d see if they got too close.

  The tension between speed, design, and aggression made football an exciting sport, but as much as those in football might love the game, love wasn’t what gave football its magnitude. This was a hugely expensive undertaking. In addition to the $120 million salary threshold per team for players in 2011, each of the thirty-two teams spent anywhere from twenty to thirty-five million dollars a year on overhead expenses. Airline tickets alone might cost upwards of two million. And as the game grew to a nine-billion-dollar revenue industry, with more to lose, the NFL seemed increasingly uncomfortable with the nature of what it was. Revelations about the long-term effects of concussions had recently tarnished the NFL and made it seem to some like the Big Tobacco of sports. The discovery that the New Orleans Saints had created a system offering cash bonuses to players who injured important opposing-team players left a similar queasy feeling. Were people truly surprised that bounties existed in football? Probably not; more likely, most had suspected something of the sort but preferred not to have it confirmed. Which, in turn, led a wary organization already known as the No Fun League, for its aversion to nonconformity, to grow even more skittish about public perceptions.

  Mike Tannenbaum used to worry about my expectations. The Jets general manager supervised Rex Ryan and supplied him with football players, a hiring-and-firing job that, I always tried to keep in mind, required a willingness to be the person others blamed for everything. Somebody had to make the hard calls, the decisions that might not work out. Because Tannenbaum was just enough of a romantic himself to have a gunmetal dread of romantics, he wanted me to understand the full implications of what I was getting myself into with the Jets. “Anything can happen,” Tannenbaum warned me in a tone of voice that reminded me he had a law degree. “Things can go very badly.”

  In football, everything was complicated by the presence of thirty-one other teams that were trying just as hard to win as yours was. In September, no team really knew how good it was. The process of finding out was the season. Since, in the end, only one team won, the dominant culminating experience in the NFL was always disappointment. Probably a lot of disappointment. Disappointment struck me as the foundation stone of football. The emphasis out in the world was on touchdowns and victories, but my strong impression was that the visceral appeal of the game had to do with its relationship to losing.

  Loss seemed so prevalent. The average career lasted only three and a half years. “You know what NFL really stands for,” the players were always telling me. “ ‘Not for Long.’ ” If you were put on waivers, released by your team, and unclaimed by another team, you were “on the street.” I never got used to the finality of that industry expression for the end of something barely begun. Football had few guaranteed contracts, no tenure, no stable tomorrows. In their perpetual effort to upgrade the roster, NFL pro-personnel directors made their livings by bringing in yet another week’s worth of free-agent prospects to sprint around the orange cones, hit the blocking sleds. Walking by these auditions, current members of the roster feigned superior indifference, but they saw. Pro football players live close to their bones. The physical costs are so extreme—the game has a 100 percent injury rate, Ryan always said—that football players are men with an intimate understanding of pain.

  When most people thought of the Jets, they thought of losing. Competing in New York against the blue-chip, gray-flannel Giants, the Jets had long struggled to hoist themselves out of forlorn waters—the perception that they were a doomed, even tragic lost cause. Their early years as members of the American Football League, an insurgent association that competed with the NFL, had climaxed in 1969 with a Jets Super Bowl victory that Joe Namath had personally guaranteed beforehand, the Battle of Saratoga that brought credibility to the parvenus. The AFL joined the NFL the following year, and ever since, the Jets legacy had been defeat. This was the team that rented, did not own, that was behind on its car payments, and that felt a little class rage every time it saw the Giants pulling another string to get their kid into private school. The endlessly afflicted quality of Gang Green was something Vivian Johnson noticed in 1999, when she asked her son, Jets receiver Keyshawn, “What’s wrong with y’all?”

  Tannenbaum, who had been with the Jets organization for fifteen years, told me about the wages of football disappointment with reference to Bill Parcells. Everybody in pro-football management was once somebody else’s protégé, and Tannenbaum’s senior mentor in professional football was Parcells, who led NFL teams to three Super Bowls, winning twice. None of these championships came during Parcells’s term with the Jets, in the late 1990s, when Tannenbaum came to know him. All these years later, the two still spoke frequently by telephone, and on occasion Tannenbaum would share with me things Parcells said. “This sport’s not for the well adjusted” is among those that made the deepest impression on Tannenbaum. Another was Parcells’s revelation that losing football games was a far more potent experience than the satisfaction he got from winning them. Parcells told Tannenbaum that the reason he finally stopped coaching was that he could not handle the losses.

  That so much effort went into something likely to end abruptly and painfully was, to me, the signal aspect of the game. By giving himself completely to such a difficult cause, a person would probably lose, but he might also find understanding.

  At the moment, however, in early 2011, winning was in the air at the Jets facility. That January, I had been in the stands in Foxborough, Massachusetts, when the Jets achieved their greatest victory since Namath, defeating the heavily favored New England Patriots 28–21 in an AFC divisional playoff game. The Patriots were the Jets’ primary rivals. Just five weeks earlier, in December, the Patriots had humiliated the Jets on the same field, 45–3, harrying their twenty-four-year-old quarterback Mark Sanchez into three interceptions. Meanwhile, the Patriots All-Pro quarterback Tom Brady had thrown four touchdown passes and played with such masterly precision it was possible to imagine he’d solved some deep riddle of the profession.

  But here, in January, my seat was on the Jets side of the field, high above the team bench. As the teams warmed up, I watched from that bluff-like vantage, and my eye was drawn to the decision-makers, to the Jets trench-coated general manager, Tannenbaum, and to the team’s rotund head coach, Ryan, midfield, whatever yard line he stood near. Across the way was Brady. Even from afar, I saw there was something in his carriage that exuded complete confidence. He was famed for his tuxedo poise.

  The game began and I could see the Jets defensive coaches below me substituting groups of players, moving them on and off the field—a fresh down, a fresh corps. Sometimes a group of Jets substitutes started onto the field and then, after a few yards, turned heel and raced back to the sideline. A personnel feint? I had no idea what all the to-and-fro meant, but it was obviously the expression of creative decision-making. Clearly the Jets had devised an aggressive situation-by-situation dossier to redress what had been done to them five weeks before, and just as clearly, the game plan was working. The Jets defenders intercepted Brady once, sacked him five times, and sufficiently harassed him that, from the heights, I could see that Brady looked different than before the game. He was playing raggedly because he was uncomfortable. (Mark Sanchez, meanwhile, displayed a level head and a cool hand, throwing for three tou
chdowns, remaining “clean”—no sacks—and committing no turnovers.)

  What had the Jets done to worry Brady’s feet? I’d detected a few clues. A Jets safety, Eric Smith, had spent the afternoon making tackles in numbers usually reserved for linebackers. An actual linebacker—the team’s best tackler, David Harris—seemed to have been given a day pass that allowed him unlimited visits out to the shallows of the secondary. It was Harris who intercepted Brady. But what had really taken place down there, I couldn’t say. After the game, I watched the Jets coaches walk off the field together, and I wondered what they knew, wondered how, out of the ordinary football metal, they’d forged an intricate mousetrap for Tom Brady. Looking at the coaches together, I saw that there must be a fascinating interior football world they inhabited as they pursued the game at its most competitive level. They had a whole life together, and I wanted to know what it was like.

  A month later, I came to the Jets. Even though they’d failed to reach the Super Bowl in 2010, losing in the AFC championship game to the Pittsburgh Steelers, around the league they had respect and cachet. It was a moment when players all over the NFL were telling their agents that they wanted to play for the Jets and, in some cases, that they’d be willing to do so for significantly less money than other teams were offering them. It was fair to say that what made the players want to come to Florham Park was the same thing that had attracted me—the coach. Rex Ryan had become the ascendant figure among headset-and-ball-cap wearers, renowned for his progressive defensive-game theory (which he called Organized Chaos), as well as his swashbuckling dialogue and impressive silhouette (he weighed 348 pounds).

  In particular, Ryan had become famed for his pronouncements. In 2009, at forty-six, after ten years as a defensive-line coach and then defensive coordinator with the Baltimore Ravens, he left that hard town by the sea and came to New York for his first head-coaching job. Many people defer to others for a time when beginning a job, taking the measure of things, but no sooner had Ryan arrived on the new waterfront than he let it be known that he had it covered. Up in New England, Bill Belichick, the dour, relentlessly on-message dean of football coaches who had led the Patriots to three Super Bowl wins, was the recipient of these first-day-on-the-job felicitations from Ryan: “I never came here to kiss Bill Belichick’s, you know, rings.” From afar, I found this raising a dust hilarious. I began to think of Ryan as one of those vivid characters in the great American Out There and to look forward to what he would say next. To me, Ryan was happy hour, a gratifying lift to ordinary moments, especially during the shorter, chillier days of the year. Many others were less charmed. Ryan was rebuked as an arriviste, a buffoon, and, most commonly, “a big blowhard.” And those were the professionals speaking.