Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  One player who felt that way was Scott. “I’m a classic old-school guy” was his explanation. “I don’t need that crazy-kazoo satellite helmet. I’m in proper tackling position. I have a twenty-inch neck. I never had a concussion because I know what I’m doing.” He said that he’d always been aware of his vulnerability in the world, and how he dealt with it was to hit back. “Everybody gets at least one shot to define themselves,” he said. “I came from Detroit, the most dysfunctional place in America.” When he got to the NFL with the Ravens, he said, “It was the Harvard of football. I went a hundred miles an hour, outworked everybody.” His eyes grew large at the memory. “The biggest statement you can make is to be physical. You knock the shit out of somebody, everybody’s excited—it’s the slam dunk, the knockout punch. People love football for the physicality. One guy gets three picks, another guy knocks the shit out of somebody, it’s, Did you see that? Football reveals you. My introduction was hitting the Detroit Lions legendary wedge. They had all linemen up there. I was the first man down and I took out two of them.” He pointed to the fullback John Conner, who by Ryan was called the Terminator and known for the punishing blows he inflicted. “Why’d Rex draft a fullback last year? He went to Kentucky to see a linebacker, saw that guy hit, and said, You come home with me.”

  Not everyone was as reckless as Scott. “Part of the game is to look past a lot of it,” Jim Leonhard told me. That said, while it was still crucial to prove your bravery to your teammates, Leonhard observed, there were now limits. “Used to be, you got a head injury, you were a pussy if you came out. Now it’s the opposite, the worst thing. In the old days it was seen as the easy way out—my head’s not right. It’s a huge thing now and that’s great because it’s not worth it.” Greg McElroy had the same impression: “At Alabama, the training room was a sign of weakness. I never said anything about aches and pains. I didn’t want to be considered soft. Here, guys are smarter about it. Do what you need to do to get your body healthy.” Such incremental concessions were, as the players said, new within football, and they carried significance. Out in the world, many people thought that if the game could not find a way to mitigate collisions, it either was doomed altogether or, at a minimum, would go the way of boxing, once perhaps the USA’s most popular sport and now in decline, banned in some countries.

  These conversations with Leonhard and McElroy took place during off-hours. Matters of gravitas were not for the practice-field sidelines. There, many people talked about the weather. The summer was hot enough to remind the defensive lineman Marcus Dixon of his Georgia home—“I love the humility,” he said, winking at his pun. The close air brought Ryan back too, to Oklahoma, where once, after a rainfall, he and his brother Rob were outside jumping in puddles when his grandmother came out and grabbed them both. As the screen door whanged behind him, Ryan looked back and saw the enormous cone of a tornado. The house had no basement, so Ryan’s grandmother had the boys lie down in the bathtub. Now Smitty was remembering a slow, steamy boyhood day in West Texas. Smitty’s brother lit a caterpillar on fire. (Smitty pronounced it “caller-pitter.”) The animal made a sound “like a human scream,” and Smitty couldn’t sleep for nights.

  Only twenty-two players could scrimmage at a time, leaving most of the team gathered along the sideline yard hashes, watching and talking. Always, they divided by unit. I stood with the green-shirted defense, where topics of conversation included toughness. There was Ravens guard Marshal Yanda, who played on despite all manner of gruesome injuries. But his reputation in this regard was really clinched the day when someone brought a Taser into the locker room and Yanda agreed to be shot. After absorbing a bolt to the chest, Yanda cried out, “That all you got?” Then he accepted two more. Said DT dryly, “It’s supposed to stop your heart, but it didn’t seem to affect him.” Yanda had grown up on an Iowa dairy farm where the electric cattle fences built up his resistance. Another Iowa farm boy was Jets lineman Matt Kroul, who had a tough mom. In their part of the state, there were hay-bale-throwing competitions, and both mother and son were champions.

  One day the nose tackle Sione Po’uha described in detail how to cook a horse Polynesian-style. You dug a pit, lined it with banana leaves atop hot lava rocks, and roasted the horse for many hours. Then you marinated the horse in coconut milk, chili peppers, and spices. “You’ll love it,” he promised. Po’uha was the only Tongan on the team. The other Polynesians were of Samoan ancestry. Something else separated him from them: The last time Po’uha spoke with his father, the father had touched Po’uha’s hair, and when his father died soon thereafter, Po’uha had decided not to cut his hair again in paternal memory. It flowed out from the nose tackle’s helmet like a shroud, and when Po’uha felt himself to be in stressful circumstances, he touched it.

  Every day at training camp, there were guests along the sideline. Team owner Woody Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, might bring along several guests, men and women who were dressed as though for a regatta in linen, straw hats, and sundresses. Kenny Chesney, the diminutive country singer, visited practice one day. Ryan asked Donald Strickland if he knew who Chesney was. BT didn’t give Strick time to answer. “Rapper,” said BT. “Little Kenny.”

  I watched several practices with Senior, Pettine’s dad, and we’d sometimes talk about his time coaching his son. The day Pettine had quit and then stripped off his equipment and clothes as he walked through the parking lot, Senior said, he’d looked at his speechless assistants and told them, “Guess I better change my approach.” After that, he said, “things got better.” During the season, Senior often sent Pettine critical memos on the defense. He brought them to training camp as well, in an envelope. “Good toilet reading,” said Pettine when he was in receipt of one. And yet Pettine also would say, “My dad’s in the stands with sixty thousand people, I hear his voice. It’s a frequency thing.”

  Presiding over it all was Ryan. Wherever he was out on the practice fields, Ryan was hard to miss. All the diets (and lap-band surgeries) later, he remained an immense man whose thick foothills of neck and haunch swelled into a spectacular butte at the midsection; he possessed a personal geography that, from first-and-ten distance, assumed a form that followed his function—Ryan looked like nothing more than an extra-large football. By nature appreciative, the head coach meandered through the panorama of players, marveling at these “big uglies,” these “mighty men.” He thrilled to be the one on their side when others were in opposition. Upon taking the job, he’d been told that BT was a problematic person, and Ryan delighted in contradicting that: “He’s been one of this coach’s favorites from day one.” Marquice Cole wore his practice shorts so low on the posterior that they appeared to be a gravitational anomaly. Some, said Ryan, objected to this sort of look in a football player, but not him: “Hell, he’s a great kid. Funny eyes: half-closed. Looks like he was up all night or something. Smart! Northwestern!”

  Now Ryan watched his new receiver Plaxico Burress. A machine flung footballs at Burress, and he absorbed them; it was like seeing a row of nails being gunned into drywall. Ryan was excited that he now had three receivers who wanted the ball in crucial situations. On the field and around the facility, Burress was a distant presence, always out wide and alone. Because he was not in shape and day after day missed parts of practice, others were critical of him, calling Burress Plaxiglas and Plaxitive. Receivers were considered the prima donnas of football, but this behavior was a little extreme. Maybe, Ryan thought, prison had made Burress wary of adults. He’d noticed how comfortable Burress seemed around children.

  The one Jet Burress clearly liked was Santonio Holmes. Holmes was small for a football player and had such an innocent way about him that you’d find yourself thinking of him as Little Tone—until suddenly such an experienced expression crossed his face that you’d catch your breath. He claimed to have learned his position by playing video games, and sure enough, he could emerge so suddenly from a series of cuts that there was the temptation to look for th
e joystick manipulating him, to check and see if he’d left his shoe behind with foot and ankle still inside. One day Ryan watched Holmes go by and shook his head. “Amazing, that kid, where he’s been. Belle Glade, Florida, is the AIDS capital of the country. It’s swamps and cane fields and incredible poverty, but he made it out of the sugarcane.”

  Holmes himself described a horrific childhood, a bullet-riddled apartment, without enough beds, that was constantly broken into; the sound of police sirens every night; a dead body outside the window. “It was according to who you decided to be around which allowed you to survive,” he said in his soft voice. “The friends I started out with are still in the same spot standing on the same corner just happy to be alive, with no ambition.” Belle Glade is famous for its “muck,” the rich, ink-dark soil in which the sugarcane thrives but not much else. “There’s no opportunities for jobs in the area,” Holmes said. “There’s just a lot of guys who want to be in gangs. Nobody wants to be an individual. I was too busy taking care of my little brothers. I watched the kids and tried to keep them out of trouble.” In the summers, Holmes traveled north with his mother, babysitting his siblings while she worked in the cornfields of Georgia from midnight to 11:00 a.m. as a migrant worker on the mule train, a massive, moving staging area for sorting and packing. One year Holmes joined her; his job was lifting boxes. He drew me a picture of the mule train. Beside one tiny figure he wrote, “Me.” The work was arduous—too much for a boy.

  Sports for Holmes were “my way of seeing something other than the streets.” In high school, he said, he took AP calculus and biology. Ryan always talked about how smart Holmes was. Ryan knew that as a Pittsburgh Steeler, Holmes had had brushes with the law. But the coach remained all about the present. He was expecting a lot out of the receiver, felt that by virtue of his large new contract, Holmes could no longer “lead from behind” but had to be “out in front.” Holmes, he said, “has responded.” During training camp Ryan told Holmes he was going to name him a captain and that he’d retire with a C on his Jets jersey. “The kid had tears in his eyes. By making him a captain, it’s about making him accountable.”

  Seated near me in the daily defensive meeting was linebacker Brandon Long, who, since he’d quickly sustained that leg injury, had never practiced. Long always brought a capacious sack of sunflower seeds to the defensive meeting, which annoyed Pettine because of the noise the plastic bag made whenever Long touched it and, probably even more, because it was hard for Pettine to watch someone who did not play enjoying snacks in his meeting. Long always had his monthlong training-camp schedule with him, and every day he’d make a big X through the current date. He was a perfectly inoffensive fellow, provided a daily hillock of seeds to anyone who expressed interest, but the Jets seemed suspicious of him. A common NFL phenomenon was the injury settlement. Because a team couldn’t release an injured player, and because players lost via injury counted against the salary cap, all NFL teams were leery when someone who obviously wasn’t going to make the team got hurt during training camp. Every player who was cut from a team was required to sign his health release, and some players would take that opportunity to bargain for a financial settlement. At times, their afflictions were legitimate; at times not. So what the front offices did was retain a player, treat his injury, and then play him at practice just long enough to get his healthy movements on tape. Then they’d release him.

  When teams signed players who’d previously been injured, sometimes these players agreed to waive parts of their body, meaning that if they reinjured those areas, they wouldn’t hold the team responsible. One linebacker on joining the Jets waived over half of himself.

  Through the early days of camp, the offense seemed generally out of sorts. A source of discontent was the loss of Jerricho Cotchery. Ryan was aware of this and met with the players to tell them that Cotchery had requested a trade and then, when there were no takers, his release. The Jets had very reluctantly accommodated him. A great guy, Ryan told them, a guy everyone loved who wasn’t any longer the player he wanted to be.

  The concerning issue for the offense was that day after day, the defense was manhandling them. “You want to be physical, we’ll be physical, and you’ll have a long camp, bitch,” Scott would yell across the line. The Jets new strength coach, Bill Hughan, just hired from the Atlanta Falcons, was incredulous: “I’ve never seen a defense so totally dominate an offense. The O needs to get it together.”

  No defense wanted to add its own team’s offense to the year’s list of opponents, but there were first-down markers out there, and on every play, somebody won. Pettine was a ferocious competitor. “Hammer,” he might say to Carrier, “is the D-line ready to stem yet? That way we can fuck with them.” (He was asking if the defense was familiar enough with one another and with the offensive cadences that they could smoothly shift from one front to a confusing new presnap look.) In the film meetings, he and the other defensive coaches took pleasure when the cameras caught the offensive coaches wincing during that day’s beat-down.

  Competing against one of the best defenses in the league, the offense was—well, what was the problem with the offense? For one thing, the quarterback wasn’t playing effectively. If a defense allowed even an average NFL quarterback to set his feet, follow through, and lift his back foot off the ground, he could pass with impressive accuracy. Not Sanchez. The quarterback threw interceptions in seven-on-seven drills, typically dominated by the offense. His two-minute drills lacked urgency and precision. “Hey, somebody better settle down Sanchez,” Jim Leonhard yelled on the sidelines one day. “He’s confused out there.” Sanchez made so many feckless decisions that when he finally sailed a pass far and safely out-of-bounds under pressure from DeVito, Leonhard said, “If he’s throwing it away, that’s a big step for him.” Some of this discontent with the quarterback was taken out on Sanchez’s friend Scotty McKnight. When the rookie receiver made a mistake in a drill, Westhoff shouted, “You’re still here? It’s a miracle you even got here.”

  Among the team members, there was an ongoing Sanchez dialogue. It went something like this:

  He’s just a guy.

  He won four playoff games in his first two years!

  He’s an immature kid who did it with training wheels.

  He beat Peyton Manning and Tom Brady back-to-back and he’s had a better first two years than Eli Manning.

  And so on.

  That Ryan had named Sanchez a team captain bothered some people, those who considered him neither a proven player nor a leader. What constituted a football leader? I asked Ben Kotwica, Westhoff’s assistant, who’d studied leadership at West Point, about some of the preferred qualities. He listed prior accomplishments, skills, the respect of others, and the ability to inspire teammates to a higher level of play.

  But if there was tension between offense and defense, it was hardly all Sanchez’s fault. Offensive players barely knew their defensive teammates, and during training camp and the season, the coaching staffs tended to be similarly Balkanized. Greg McElroy called it “the natural tension in all of football. Players get frustrated with the other side. It’s natural; they’re so divided.” This was an ongoing conflict in the history of the game: one aggrieved group on a team feeling that the other group wasn’t carrying its share of the burden. It was possible to be successful under these circumstances. The 1986 Chicago Bears won a Super Bowl with defensive players who told their head coach, Mike Ditka, “I don’t play for you.” Those players answered to the team’s defensive coordinator, who happened to be Buddy Ryan. When Rex Ryan, Pettine, Thurman, and Carrier coached the Baltimore Ravens, their defense collectively seethed in the same way. So did John Rowser and his Pittsburgh Steelers defensive teammates in the early 1970s: “With our offense, anything we got was a bonus,” Rowser told the writer Roy Blount. On the Jets, where the defense was not only tough but original, there was the growing feeling that Schottenheimer and his offensive players were holding the team back from winning a championship. In 201
0, the Jets had begun their season with a game against the Ravens and lost, 10–9. The Jets offense was one for eleven on third down and secured a franchise-low six first downs. The game had been personal to the former Ravens coaches on the defense, and before it they had given Schottenheimer many suggestions regarding the Ravens players they used to coach. None were taken. Afterward, Pettine was so upset he could barely speak. “We knew them,” he kept repeating.

  Ryan was aware that the reason the Ravens hadn’t hired him as their head coach was that they considered him one-dimensional, purely a defensive coach. Every head coach specialized, but most head coaches had offensive backgrounds. Among the reasons was that if one unit was going to intimidate the other, it would be the defense doing the bullying. Ryan believed that to the offense, he could offer “my presence,” could engender a joyful team-wide sense of purpose, toughness, and physicality. And yet, it was now two years into the Ryan administration, and much as offensive coaches Callahan, Devlin, Matt Cavanaugh, A-Lynn, and Schottenheimer liked working for Ryan, the head coach himself admitted that he was “uncomfortable” with the offense because “they’re different.” Feeling not a part of things in the offensive meetings, he retreated, ceding everything to Schotty. And by giving Schotty the room, Ryan gave himself license to feel the old pride in the defense he had created.

  During training camp, he’d walk into Pettine’s office and tell him, “I think we gave up a first down today!” Watching film one day after another defensive pummeling, he mused, “We should probably give the defense a day off tomorrow.”

  “Because the offense took one off today?” Sutton asked.

  “Imagine if this happened to us,” said Pettine.

  “We’d be here until two in the morning,” Ryan said.

  The defense’s superior attitude, Pettine knew, “chaps some asses across the hall,” but this was the way football teams worked. It was an emotional, aggressive business, and if Pettine gave too much quarter, his defense would slip. He liked Schottenheimer, considered him “a great, great guy,” and he knew that with a young, erratic quarterback and such an accomplished defense, “Schotty’s in a tough spot.” If Pettine had been the head coach, he might have sought Schotty out, tried to help. Pettine hoped someday to be a head coach. But now he was the defensive coordinator, and “I never want to farm somebody else’s land. That’s how you get in trouble.”