Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  At the facility, things began to happen fast. Asomugha surprised everyone by joining neither Ryan brother, instead choosing the Philadelphia Eagles. Since the Eagles already had two fine cornerbacks, the Jets coaches thought this was an odd choice, and they thought the same thing about Philadelphia’s decision to promote the offensive-line coach Juan Castillo to defensive coordinator. That was like asking a navy captain to lead an army’s infantry regiment—two different careers. With their big money unspent, the Jets now signed Plaxico Burress, a former star Steelers and Giants wide receiver who’d just spent nearly two years in prison after carrying a concealed handgun into a New York nightclub and accidentally shooting himself. Eric Smith was re-signed to play safety and special teams, placating Westhoff, as were the defensive back Donald Strickland, former Ravens receiver Derrick Mason, Antonio Cromartie, reserve quarterback Mark Brunell, and Callahan’s (and Ryan’s) man Wayne Hunter. The arrival of Burress meant nothing good for Jerricho Cotchery, who, to the dismay of his teammates, asked for his release and then signed with Pittsburgh. Cotchery wasn’t a receiver in the dynamic class of Holmes and Burress, yet on the team, J-Co was admired for what a first-rate person he was and for being the sort of comradely professional who brought out the best in others. “We’re all replaceable and sooner or later we all will be replaced” was Sutton’s reaction to the Cotchery news. Then Sutton was talking about practice, how some players tended to see it as something to get through on the way to the game, whereas in his view, it was the game. Sutton believed that if you watched someone practice, you’d see what he was as a player. No offensive player had practiced with more dedication than Cotchery.

  Training camp began at last on the final day of July, the first order of business a series of meetings in the team’s clean, well-lighted rooms. With their ample whiteboards, sleek AV equipment, and terraced seats and tables, the rooms could have been modern university classrooms. The players moved from meeting to meeting dressed like undergraduates, in shorts and T-shirts, and with backpacks slung over their shoulders, completing the feel of a college quad in miniature. (Pettine and others often referred to the facility as “campus.”) In the main team meeting room, everybody chose a seat and it was somehow understood that now that seat was his for the season. (The veterans and coaches kept the same seats from year to year.) The quarterbacks all sat together up front. Plaxico Burress and running back LaDainian Tomlinson were toward the rear, just in front of Sutton, A-Lynn, and, between them, me. Various Jets officials addressed the players on the danger of concussions, on treating the attendants on team flights with respect, and on playing “like a bad motherfucker.” That last was Ryan. He spoke spontaneously, without notes. Searching out rookies in the room, he said, “I’ll cut you on the spot if I don’t see you smiling.” He seemed miffed at the idea of unhappy faces. “Guys!” he said. “Have fun. Talk shit! It all goes so quick. When guys poke at you, it’s because they like you.”

  At the first defensive gathering, the players sat in the reverse of their on-field formation. Linemen filled the back, linebackers were ahead of them, and the defensive backfield was up front. I took a chair against the wall next to BT and not far from Smitty. Across the room was Revis, angled slightly forward in his seat, just as he stood on the field. Even at rest, the great player had something about him that claimed the eye. He seemed to gleam with posture and intent. He looked carved from a tree. He looked like an Egyptian king. “How many guys in here have a Super Bowl ring?” Pettine asked. None did. That settled, Pettine said that exertion was expected—“We don’t coach effort”—and so was (here was that phrase again) “skin like an armadillo.” Players who took themselves too seriously would receive sensitivity fines. Fights happened on football fields during training camp, and Pettine’s (and Ryan’s) rule in those situations was that defensive players were allowed to pull only an offensive player away from the fray.

  They went outdoors and ran conditioning races, all of which were won by rookies. The rookies always won for the first few days. Tannenbaum was there, looking very Soviet Bloc penal colony. His eyes were crimson and his face was puffy. During the player-signing period, he’d spent thirteen out of fourteen nights sleeping on the couch in his office, alongside his humming fish tank and glowing telephone. Because of the business coming through the latter, he’d done very little sleeping. “It’s good to be outside,” he said, rasping.

  The daily practice schedule was always distributed to coaches and front-office people at least an hour in advance. All the play calls and down-and-distance situations were printed on them, though the offense and defense were not supposed to see each other’s scripts. A few minutes before a session’s start, the coaches would put on shirts and shorts (their lockers were stocked with official green-white-and-black gear). Then they’d pass through the bathroom, where there were big, sweet-smelling jugs of sunscreen. Following liberal application, they’d run out onto the field, Ryan usually in the lead, sometimes in black Converse high-tops. When they reached the field, the offensive and defensive coaches would fan out to await their players, who were stretching as a team. Pettine often wore black overshirts on even the hottest days, and whenever he did, so did Smitty. A year ago Pettine had bought a North Face vest, and a few days later, there was Smitty in the freshly purchased identical garment. “Little brother,” explained Pettine.

  After stretching, the players retreated to positional groups for drills, the defensive linemen driving at their padded buckboard blow-delivery drilling sled, kicking up clumps of sod like bison, hitting the buckboard again and again with such rapid urgency that from a distance, you might think you were hearing an old Teletype machine. To instill in their linemen the need to keep low, the coaches had them run at a crouch under a mesh-covered device that resembled a huge bed frame on wheels. Interception practice for the defensive backs was footballs fired at them at close range by Thurman and O’Neil. A drop meant ten penalty pushups. Though DBs were said to play the position because they were receivers who couldn’t catch, drops were rare.

  The kickers, punters, and long snappers were ceded their own field, and the sight of them over there, like deer on a neighbor’s lawn, emphasized that they were something apart, not really football players, as Ryan liked to tease Nick Folk, the incumbent kicker. Westhoff believed in annual kicking competitions, so there were two kickers, two punters. Eventually the punters would be called over, and you could hear the velvet corner-pocket thwock as returners Kerley and Leonhard secured punts against their chest pads. Sometimes a returner held a ball in one hand and fielded the punts with the other—one-handed. One day, Antonio Cromartie joined Kerley and Leonhard in this, and as the punt descended, he threw the ball he was holding up into the air, caught the punt with one hand, and then resecured the second ball with the other. It was a remarkable thing to see.

  On a field full of gifted athletes, Cromartie fascinated everyone. People were always comparing Cro to long, slender, arresting things: an antelope, a principal in the Paul Taylor Dance Company, an oboe, with its fragile reed. To Revis, Cro was “the most athletic freak of nature. He’s six three, two hundred pounds, can run like a deer, can jump like Kobe Bryant. He’s a creation! A player on Madden!” On the sideline, Cromartie would stretch his long legs by kicking them over his head, Rockette-style. Out on the field, when he started moving, there was a sound to it, like the rustle in the woods just before a bird in the underbrush bursts away to safety. He’d accelerate, and it was a blur of long strides. How fast did the Cro fly? “I let everybody else talk about how fast I am,” he said. “I don’t know how fast I am. I don’t know my true speed. Nobody knows!”

  There was something frangible in him, making it surprising to many that Cro was a defensive player. He grew up in Tallahassee with a single mother who worked multiple jobs, and the family “moved so damn much from age five to sixteen I went to twelve different schools. We were evicted, couldn’t pay the rent, the lease was up—always something.” I asked him once how often he went
back to Tallahassee, and he said, “Never. I’m not going back there. Life for me was better anywhere else. Why would I go back home?”

  He could play cornerback because for such a tall, long-legged man he possessed an unusual ability to change direction at high speed. But to watch him live was to see that the tape hadn’t lied, that he didn’t relish rough contact. When he drifted back before the snap instead of crowding the line of scrimmage and using his long, sinewy arms to disrupt his receiver’s pass route, the coaches couldn’t understand it. “He should play angry,” they would vex. “The way Revis does. Revis plays angry.” But it was rebuke that made Cro seethe. He didn’t take male criticism well, except from Ryan, who periodically would try to explain that the coaches were on his side; they just wanted to help him improve. “You gotta swallow your pride a little bit and be coachable.”

  Even if you hadn’t seen Cro haltingly naming all his children on Hard Knocks, to be around him for any time was to sense that his life away from football must be very complicated. He just wanted to play. More than any Jet, he exuded a love for practice, an unwillingness to leave the field. He thought of football, he said, as “a getaway. Football is a different, more relaxed home. You can be comfortable with yourself, stepping into a better world.”

  The daily defensive meetings featured what were called installs; a series of defensive calls from the playbook were projected, one by one, onto a movie screen and explained to the unit by Pettine while everyone followed along in his playbook. The room smelled faintly of chewing-tobacco mint—the players would spit into water bottles that slowly filled, the way sap buckets did under tapped maples. There was a lot of football jargon, like “tango,” “poison,” “reduce,” “rip,” and “liz,” and full sentences where I had no idea what was being said. The more Pettine installed every day, the more the complex pathways of football spread out before me, like a diagram of the subfamilies of some Finno-Ugric language. Then would come something that opened up the game a little more: “You have to know the location of the quarterback at all times,” Pettine told his linemen. “If he’s under center, it’s going to be quick and short. You don’t do slow-developing rushes. You knock ’em back and get your hand up. This is a thinking man’s game. You’ve got to make decisions quickly and communicate them.”

  Every year, Pettine reinstalled the entire defense. For masters of the system, like Leonhard, BT, and the signal-calling inside “Mike” linebacker David Harris, this was redundant, but they understood that Pettine and Ryan wanted all of it to be second nature to everyone. You could hear Leonhard and Harris murmuring to young teammates, untangling confusions. After the installs, the players would divide into positional groups with their coaches, who’d explain the finer points. Then they’d walk through the calls in shorts. They’d lift weights, eat lunch, get taped, dress, grab their helmets, and go out and stretch. Finally, at the afternoon practice, they’d run the calls live against the offense.

  It was a life of meetings for the players and even more so for the coaches. After practice, while the players showered and ate, the coaches would review the film of what had just happened, grading every player’s performance on every snap with a plus or a minus and a comment along the lines of “good pop” or “soft shoulder.” Then the players would watch the film with the coaches. Pettine narrated, mixing instruction with quips and badinage. Dressed in black, wielding his red laser pointer, Pettine’s affect seemed to imply, I’m on your side, but only as long as you don’t fuck up too much. He could be very sarcastic. Kenrick Ellis was told, “If you’re gonna be this bad, just fall down. Maybe someone’ll trip over you.” The coordinator was always a little gentler with Cromartie’s mistakes: “Cro, every year we put together a clinic tape on pressure rushes and that one’s not gonna make it.”

  Since football was taught by daily correction, it was essential for Pettine to have a player who could demonstrate how to take criticism. That player was Bryan Thomas—BT. Pettine liked to call BT “a blue-collar football player.” Out there on the fringe, not quite a linebacker or a lineman, BT did the understated jobs that made the unique Ryan scheme flourish. He knew how to shed blocks so as to hold his ground, forcing the flow back toward Harris in the middle, and he knew how to tackle in space. Three receivers would line up close together in a so-called bunch, and BT would get his hands on each of them in succession, disrupting the timing of three routes. This was a crucial skill. Pettine and Ryan had discovered that because their reputation was for pressure, opposing quarterbacks tended to get rid of the ball early against them. The result was few sacks and few completions. With the receivers jostled off course, those hurried passes tended to land harmlessly.

  What Pettine admired so much about BT the other players also respected—that he was a good-natured character who didn’t take himself too seriously and was “country-smart.” He’d sit there squinting at the screen and then be taken to task for being a big, ugly, old, bald half-blind man who was still too vain to buy glasses. BT would giggle and in a rising tone of voice that made everyone laugh, he’d admit it was “all true, baby.” One minute after the meeting start time, if Pettine hadn’t begun speaking, BT would tell him, “We on the clock.” If the meeting went one minute too long, he’d noisily rustle papers. One day, BT was a minute late. “Penny holding up a dollar,” Pettine said as BT hurried in. “BT, I should do to you what my dad used to do to me. He’d turn the projector off and say, ‘Stand up and explain to your teammates what you were doing.’ ”

  “That’s degrading!” BT said, horrified.

  “Now you know why I’m so twisted,” Pettine said, an admission he made for everyone’s benefit, and one he’d have made for no other player.

  “That’s how everyone’s dad was,” said BT. Moments like that were how you “built a room,” as Pettine liked to say.

  BT had been brought up by a single father. Stanley Thomas was an Alabama coal miner in the pits near Birmingham. “He used to beat me, mostly for grades,” BT told me once. “But I appreciate everything he did for me. He’d come home, a cold in his chest.” Stanley hadn’t wanted his son to “go down there,” and BT never did.

  Every practice field had a scoreboard, and the various practice periods were all governed by the blinking red minutes and seconds on the scoreboard clocks. Each time the clock wound down, the equipment manager, Gus Granneman, would sound an air horn, and the team slowly assembled in larger and larger configurations until the offense and defense were complete units. Whereupon they ran plays, sometimes in shorts and helmets and some days in full regalia. Most players, with the exception of running backs, wore no body protection other than helmets and shoulder pads, even in games. Leg pads, they claimed, inhibited speed, and as David Harris explained, “If you’re an NFL player, you shouldn’t get hit in the legs.” Though players grabbed at and collided with one another in practice, they did not ever make full tackles; the risk of injury was too high. Once in a while, somebody couldn’t resist throwing an opponent to the ground, and while the coach’s reproof was instant, it wasn’t always convincing unless it was somebody like Santonio Holmes or LaDainian Tomlinson who had been planked. You had to be pretty worked up to hit a quarterback. They all wore red noncontact jerseys, and the penalty for tackling a quarterback could be expulsion. I never saw it happen.

  Standing along the practice sideline, you could hear the everydayness of football life. There was always pre-snap commentary from Scott: “You scared, motherfucker? You so crazy. Kill yo’self!” When Greg McElroy, late of the University of Alabama, took his snaps, Scott would scream, “Hey, Fourteen, this ain’t NASCAR, this ain’t no SEC Roll Tide, this is faster.” He’d even call out references to the movie Any Given Sunday to the Alabama rookie—“Goddamn it, Cherubini, quit flinching!” The defensive backs also communicated with their adversaries: “Where you going, baby?” Then came the tectonic boom of the initial padded collision. When receiver Santonio Holmes made a difficult catch, he might explain to the defense, “You gotta make
it look easy.” Reaction came from Pettine (to a linebacker: “If you ever get blocked by a wideout on the edge, go sit on their sideline. They’re a bug on our windshield”). And reaction came from Schottenheimer (to Pettine: “I’m in your head, Pet!”). And then the positional coaches swarmed in with their own thoughts. They were like studio art teachers, those coaches, making their way through the group, taking care that everyone’s work was critiqued. At the end of every practice, the team gathered around Ryan at midfield and he offered his own assessments. Then he’d call on someone, usually a player, to break the team down, leading everybody together as they all yelled out something on a three-count, such as “Jets!,” “Team!,” or “Family!”

  Even without tackling, football was a very rough game. During one practice, linebacker Calvin Pace hit Matt Slauson so powerfully the huge guard toppled and landed hard, like a glass bottle falling from a high countertop to a stone floor. “That shit hurts so much it goes straight to your legs,” said DT. To many of the players, the game was elemental, a way to explore yourself in terms of force—what you could inflict, how much you could take. Because football was so permissive of violence, it did have qualities of being in a state of nature, a place where you could be someone else, feel immortal. Even though helmet technology improved every year, some veterans continued to use the headgear they’d worn when they came into the league. They claimed the new models resembled space helmets, but beyond the stylistic concerns, and as with the disdained leg pads, there was the belief that conceding anything to safety meant conceding also some sense of self.