Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  The facility mores were conservative. In the locker room one day I’d overheard someone talking about the television show The Wire, specifically about Omar, the badass stick-up man who carries a huge shotgun and preys on drug dealers. “Omar,” the person said. “He killed me. He was my favorite until I found out. I couldn’t believe it. It ruined it for me.” The character of Omar is gay, which was not yet an acceptable thing to be in football. There had never been an openly gay NFL player or coach. Over time, I was sure, this would change, because football always ends up being receptive to anybody who is good enough to help a team. When that acceptance happens, it would be easy to project how a gay player’s heterosexual teammates would be: they would make up the wedding party at his marriage and speak out against prejudice. There were a couple of players on other NFL teams who were already supporting gay rights. For the time being, though, the taboo in the game was still such that if teams had an indication a player was “light in the loafers,” they were reluctant to draft him because of what the effect might be on the other players in the locker room.

  Americans were increasingly accepting of gay rights. Why were gay men still so ostracized here? Like the military, the game required virile men to achieve a level of closeness that felt very intimate. The preoccupation with muscle, strength, and manly deeds amid all that bonding could seem homoerotic, and the homophobia appeared to me to have to do with the worry that the intimacy could go too far and the parallel concern that the presence of an openly gay player might “queer the group,” creating distance and unease, infecting the team with a kind of weakness. One day when I took a sauna with the coaches, I was surprised to find everyone dressed in shirts and either shorts or sweats. I asked if they knew that most people around the world wore either no clothing at all into a sauna or else just a towel, and they were horrified. The buffer of clothing was, in its way, really no different from the usual football greeting between two men who hadn’t seen each other in a while: the two led with a handshake, and the hands remained clasped between the greeters as they came in for a hug. When the defensive coaches disliked something they saw on the film, they might dismiss it as “gay porn.” Truly objectionable play was “gay-animal porn.”

  During the course of the year, these attitudes would create situations of a like I hadn’t encountered since high school. Once, before a defensive meeting, I walked into a bathroom where there were four urinals along the wall. The first and the third were in use, by players. Without really thinking about it, I walked to the closer urinal, the one between them, rather than the one down on the far end. Immediately I could feel I’d done the wrong thing. In such an assertive culture, it was hard not to think about your own assertiveness. This is football, I thought. I have to not back down. One of the two players was the linebacker Aaron Maybin. “Dude,” he asked me after we’d washed our hands, “haven’t you heard of the one-space rule?”

  “Dude,” I replied. “I’m a married man with kids and I’m very comfortable with myself and other people. You should learn from my example!” Maybin had studied art and was among the most open-minded of the players. He was vibrant, extroverted, endearing, and, I noticed, currently wearing a hot pink T-shirt. “And dude,” I went on, “what’s going on with that shirt?”

  “Read it! Read it!” he told me, jubilant. The front of the shirt said “Don’t Laugh. It’s Your Girlfriend’s Shirt!”

  We strolled into the meeting room, where the eye of Pettine found the chemise of linebacker. “Maybin!” he said. “Somebody give you a Forever Twenty-One gift card?”

  Headband concerns addressed, the coaches in Tannenbaum’s office now turned the discussion to how much could be expected from veteran receiver Jerricho Cotchery going forward. J-Co’s speed and reception totals had been flagging; he had back problems and dropped-pass problems. He was, however, among the most popular players in the Jets locker room, and his good standing had only improved during last season’s Cleveland game when Cotchery tore his groin muscle in midplay, stayed upright, got free by hopping along on one foot, and then hurled his body into a fully outstretched, groin-muscle-shearing first-down catch before crumpling to the ground in agony. Clinkscales, who’d played wideout at Tennessee and then briefly for the Steelers and Bucs, said that the first thing that an older receiver lost was not foot speed but hand-eye coordination. As an example he cited Jerry Rice, the former 49er who holds the NFL record for receptions. Then, considering the unwelcome but perhaps prudent possibility of drafting a J-Co replacement, they all projected how late in the draft the various college receivers they liked would remain available for the taking. Every team ranked players differently, and the trick of winning the draft was selecting players in a later round than you had slotted for them. The men ran through Jerrel Jernigan of Troy University and Jeremy Kerley of Texas Christian, predicting how long they’d last. When they got to Denarius Moore of Tennessee, Clinkscales was effusive about his fellow Volunteer—which raised alumni concerns. Tannenbaum led the charge and then forgave Clinkscales by saying it was a good thing for Tannenbaum there were so few Jewish players in big-time college football. Jets scouts emphasized that one of the things every talent evaluator had to watch for was the propensity to see himself in players, to overvalue in others what he valued in himself.

  Visiting days began on April 11, two and a half weeks before the draft, and the college players arrived at the facility for a full day of interviews with the coaches, Hickmann, the strength and conditioning staff, the trainers, Tannenbaum and Ryan, and their “special assistant,” me. Tannenbaum and Ryan had invited me to help them assess the characters of the visiting players. Everyone looked forward to finally meeting these players, whose biographies they all had been poring over day after day. More than other sports, pro football was an office job, so it followed that there were these job interviews. Tannenbaum’s questions would be disarming, designed to relax the players enough to overcome the buffed gloss of the agent prep sessions that the Jets assumed every player had been through. The GM planned to ask about hidden talents, pet peeves, what the player would choose if he could rescue only one thing from his burning house, something kind he’d recently done for someone else, and the player’s most embarrassing moment in high school. I had the idea that before Tannenbaum got married, he was very good at first dates.

  Next, Ryan would show the players clips of the Jets in action, including Cotchery’s heroic catch against the Browns, and ask the players for their reactions. Ryan would always conclude by telling the player, “What I want from you is everything you got.” (They all promised him that, of course, but Ryan swore that by looking into players’ eyes, he could sense their souls.) Last would come my questions, mostly about predicaments they’d found difficult to overcome in life or had failed to overcome. I also planned to ask them what they’d do if the Jets followed Google’s company policy of allowing employees to use 20 percent of their work time in any way they chose. When the players left, the three of us would grade them with a plus, minus, or neutral. What Tannenbaum and Ryan most hoped for was to find a kid who had qualities that would inspire others—“specialness,” as Pettine called it.

  The players arrived, and as they made their appointed rounds of the facility, you could see them from a distance, steeples and spires in a low-roofed landscape. Some of the candidates wore designer neckties; a few were dressed in ways that suggested they had never in life been able to afford a discount-store suit. One supremely nonchalant pass rusher wore shorts, which the defensive coaches considered a promising sartorial choice. Most of the players who sat down in the white office chair opposite Ryan seemed disarmingly frank, particularly a couple of self-disparaging linemen. Brandon Fusco, a burly center from Slippery Rock University, talked about his bad luck with women—“I’m not the best-looking guy.” Ray Dominguez, a University of Arkansas tackle, evaluated his own draft standing and admitted, “I’m not a hot commodity.” When Dominguez described the crowded Georgia household he’d grown up in, Tannenbaum said,
“You know what Sanchez told us: You draft a bean, you get the whole burrito!” So Dominguez talked about being a Hispanic kid in the rural Deep South, and how “rough it was to walk down the street sometimes.” The insults shouted at him by strangers during his small-town childhood were still, he said, what motivated him.

  Who wouldn’t root for these kids? I’d have been a terrible GM; I fell for player after player. The Temple safety Jaiquawn Jarrett wore a sharp suit and tie. He said he’d like to have lunch with Jack Tatum, the old Raider safety known as the Assassin, a disclosure that led Ryan to gleefully describe several Tatum secondary brutalities. Jarrett, it turned out, didn’t know jack about Tatum, but after he described his own football mind-set as “I’m gonna bury you every time” he earned double pluses all around.

  Muhammad Wilkerson was dressed to kill, if the victim was to be an ex–line coach. He wore jeans and an untucked white dress shirt consisting of so much cloth that had you sheeted it up to a spinnaker, it would have luffed just fine. Sure enough, Ryan took one look and announced enthusiastically, “Here’s a real one!” Tannenbaum’s questions led Wilkerson to say that he’d lived for a while in a homeless shelter and that he had a father who’d been in and out of jail and a mother who was “hard on me,” so he would travel a different road. Wilkerson hoped some day to counsel inner-city kids and had recently bought a younger sister some shoes. He raised the heart of the matter himself: “I didn’t have a motor on every play,” he admitted, and then declared that his football attitude needed improvement. Ryan, on the player’s side by instinct, told him that Haloti Ngata had said the same thing in his long-ago Ravens interview. How many years had Ngata been an All-Pro? Three years running! When Wilkerson revealed that his secret talent was for bowling and that he’d once rolled a 206, the coach was nearly out of his chair. Full abdication of seat was achieved when Wilkerson was asked what he most liked to do and he answered, “Bang into trees!”

  The NFL draft had become such an exercise in scrutiny that in the age of search engines, few crimes were secret. Arrests were not as common among football players as was their incidence among the general public, but both the intimate culture of the game and the fact that NFL players were public figures meant that teams were tenacious in their character reviews. The peccadilloes of the best college players could be discovered, and given the salaries paid to rookies, a team that did not perform its due diligence flew close to the sun. The Jets scouts were everything casually dressed private detectives ought to be. They understood what it took to play professional football, and they were aware that in aggressive young men, impulses were often stronger than scruples.

  If you’d helped your family clear out of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and driven them to sanctuary in Texas, the scouts knew it. If you’d failed to pay a speeding ticket, dated underage girls, suffered from sleep apnea, shoplifted a DVD, caused a car accident while driving to your DUI hearing at court, they knew it. If your “extremely hot” girlfriend broke up with you, they knew why. If your parents were getting divorced, they knew it; if you were an honors engineering student at a top university but couldn’t remember football plays, they knew that too. If you had a “sister” seventeen weeks younger than you were and you believed the two of you had the same mother, because that’s what you’d been told all your life, they knew this. They knew that a top college pass rusher whom the Jets were thinking about drafting had, in anticipation of his big NFL signing bonus, already gone out and bought both a Bentley and a Range Rover. They had seen enough scofflaws, hooligans, tomcats, rabble-rousers, libertines, and second-story men to recognize one at a hundred yards. Taking part in a frat-house brawl might be a virtue or a flaw in a football player, but if you were involved because you’d jumped in to help an outnumbered teammate or because you had drunk too many Long Island iced teas and been the instigating fool, they knew.

  Tannenbaum was planning for the arrival at the facility of Colorado cornerback Jimmy Smith, a wonderful college player who’d grown up in gangland California and had had several brushes with the law, including drug infractions. When Darrelle Revis was a college senior, the van driver who shuttled the players to and from the airport said that Revis was easily the most well-mannered player he’d ever met on the job, and Tannenbaum never forgot it. Now he hoped to learn how Smith behaved in those moments during his visit when he thought nobody important was watching.

  To more formally assess the backgrounds of high-risk players, the team relied on its security director, a former FBI major-crimes agent named Steve Yarnell who was beginning his fourteenth year with the Jets. With his hooded eyes, pomaded hair, and taciturn gaze, Yarnell was the sort of man who made other people feel he already knew everything about them. He’d been a relentless defensive end for Bill Parcells at Army and liked football players, even as he saw them clear. “The faster they are, the more propensity they have to get into trouble,” he once told me. “If an offensive lineman gets into trouble, he’s lumbering into trouble. Wide receivers and DBs find it at full speed.” Tannenbaum considered Yarnell to be an unusually interesting person. Yarnell was, the GM said, an excellent dancer, and I believed it, even after Yarnell shook his head and denied all. Outside his office, Yarnell left a spread of candy bars. Anybody could help himself, but Yarnell especially enjoyed it when the players he’d once vouched for would stop by and renew acquaintances over a Snickers.

  And yet how difficult for anyone, even Yarnell, to know anybody; how faint were the impressions of the players’ former selves. And what a strange job market, where aggression was such a virtue. There were not many jobs out there that required potential employers to weigh how much risk they could live with when considering highly coveted candidates, that called for the hirer to imagine how a shattered childhood could be transformed into a flourishing future. Georgia linebacker Justin Houston’s home did burn down; he helped family members to escape. During his childhood in the Chicago projects, Illinois linebacker Martez Wilson said he’d made it through winters in an unheated apartment by warming himself with cup after cup of cocoa. In football, nobody held who your father was—or wasn’t—against you, and it could well be an advantage to have come up from nothing.

  If football’s draft was in no way a blackguards’ ball, one of its unique qualities was that it inverted so many conventional ideas of what constituted a promising young man. True, those players, like Purdue pass rusher Ryan Kerrigan, who had grown up in two-parent households always mentioned this in their interviews. Tom Brady, Peyton and Eli Manning, and many other offensive stars had, after all, come from “intact” families. That Texas linebacker Sam Acho’s father was wealthy, however, made Tannenbaum, Ryan, and, by now, me wary, as did Acho’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Chaucer. As it happened, Acho won the room with the most sophisticated understanding of defensive football yet displayed in these conversations. “How do you bet against him?” asked Ryan later.

  Jets scout Jay Mandolesi told me once that the interviews mattered so much because so often player incidents came without context. He mentioned Jets safety Emmanuel Cook, who’d been arrested for possession of a concealed weapon while he was a student at the University of South Carolina. At the South Carolina pro day, Mandolesi asked Cook about it. Cook told him, “Look, where I’m from, I didn’t have a choice. Sometimes you’re at a party and a guy wants to show you his gun and you have to look at it.” During the brief moment Cook was holding another guy’s weapon, the police walked in.

  To many out there across America assessing the upcoming draft, Kenrick Ellis was the picture of the thug-life football player. Around the facility, his story was told this way: Ellis grew up in Jamaica and played football at the University of South Carolina, where he smoked enough ganja to fail team drug tests and was invited to matriculate elsewhere. At Hampton University, a friend harassed Ellis’s girlfriend. Ellis wished to discuss the situation. The friend brought along his baseball bat. Ellis told him he didn’t want to fight, but if it had to
be that way, better to take it into the alley. In the alley, Ellis broke the friend’s jaw. Felony-assault charges were now pending. All this, but Michael Davis swore by him, and so here Ellis was in Tannenbaum’s office, the sort of talented player a team with low draft choices might hope would fall to them because of his “issues.”

  No players denied any points of biography that Tannenbaum or Ryan asked them about. It was pretty much all out there, after all, and so in interviews, they owned their pasts and used the opportunity to explain. Kenrick Ellis said that when his mother suffered a heart attack, he’d changed his ways. Ellis looked at Tannenbaum. He seemed near tears: “You have to understand, I’m the only member of my family ever to smoke, ever to get in trouble.” He said that when his mother had told him, “I guess I’m gonna die and not see you do anything with your life,” he was overcome with remorse. Again he looked ready to weep. Once a line coach, ever a line coach: Ryan had easy rapport with all the defensive linemen. He consoled Ellis now by describing the fistfight he had had in Maryland as well as all the coaching opportunities he’d missed out on “because of that.” Tannenbaum then looked Ellis right in the eye. “Kenrick, I’m telling you, it’s no joke here.” Ellis could only nod. After Ellis left, Ryan said, “Very few people on the planet that size.”