Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  A few NFL officials were assigned to every team during training camp for some live preparations of their own, and the contingent of officials who were to spend time with the Jets held a meeting to introduce themselves and explain their priorities: safety and fairness. They cautioned against players launching themselves at one another and decried blows to the head. Eventually they asked for questions. There were none. The officials would have liked questions. It was their appreciation for the game that had put them in stripes. Watching Revis in coverage drills, one of them shook his head: “It’s all true. He’s glue.”

  When you saw the players practice every day, you sometimes forgot how rare were their abilities. Many were learning their place in the scheme, and because all were marvelous players, there was a leveling effect. This was not true with Revis. Everyone enjoyed watching the cornerback practice to see the combination of unmatched skill and unmatched intensity. Said Leonhard, “Rev’s not only the best player I’ve ever seen—day in day out, he’s the best practice player I’ve ever seen.” Even on a hot summer Tuesday, Revis abhorred the idea that any of the Jets receivers should catch a pass against him. They seldom did.

  During one-on-one passing drills, which were refereed, a receiver pushed off Revis to create space, and he made a catch. When no flag was thrown, Revis exploded. He followed the official as the man tried to continue his adjudications, arguing, “He was pushing me! We can’t do that!,” then expanding his appeal to whoever would listen, protesting on statutory grounds, ethical grounds, and finally philosophical grounds: “They’re trying to make it an all-offensive game!” Giving up the discussion only when it was his turn to drill again, he lined up against Santonio Holmes. At the snap, Revis roared into Holmes, pushing him, beating him, administering such a marauding martial flurry that Holmes never left the line of scrimmage, three flags fell to the ground, and everyone, including Holmes and the official, burst into laughter. Everyone except Revis.

  Revis was intense even about the daily noncontact walk-throughs in which, like actors pacing off their stage blocking, the players slowly rehearsed the plays they had just learned in the classroom. The cornerback used the time to master his position in relation to the yard markers, the sideline, and the other players so that, always, he had a perfect sense of where he was on the grassy districts of the grid and where everyone else was and could soon be. His peripheral vision was such that walking along the facility hallways, he’d appear to have his head facing forward and yet greet you when you were still steps behind him. On the field, most defensive backs, including Cromartie, had to slow to look over their shoulders and find the ball in the air. Revis could look back both left and right while sprinting, but he never did it unless he was within a step of the receiver, which was the proper technique.

  His movements were not liquid, like Holmes’s, but carbon solid. On a field he was canted low and slightly forward, and he gave the impression that he was running without ever placing one foot in front of the other, that he was moving, somehow, in a single full-body-forward thrust. As a result, on film the receivers sometimes appeared as though they were covering him. When they swayed, he swayed. What the coaches most appreciated was that playing his high-stress position, Revis did not panic. Even if he bought a fake, his recovery was instant because he was in rhythm, had an inner quiet, sprezzatura even. He was a cruising instrument securing the perimeter.

  On a field Revis was all business, and yet he never seemed to be putting himself above the others. Far down the sidelines, you could hear his head-thrown-back laugh, and after practice he sometimes played invisible football, pantomiming the game sans ball with Cromartie and Leonhard, each successfully completed play culminating in leaps, bounds, and celebrations. “You can do amazing things in invisible football,” he said.

  To the others, Revis was the consummate team player, a modest virtuoso playing defense, the less decorated side of the ball, who expressed the pinnacle of the sport, an action hero in a football suit. Wayne Hunter, the introspective tackle, said, “As a player we put him so high on a pedestal because the guy can live up to it. I never saw a guy on the number-one receiver every game, never heard of it. He’s Michael Jordan!” Leonhard thought similarly. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the safety said. “If he struggles, he’s truly hurt. You always hear about Michael Jordan, how ultra-competitive he was. That’s Rev. Guys don’t want the number-one corner diving during practice. It’s that he wants to win so much. I’ve been around a lot of truly great players, Ed Reed, Ray Lewis, and I’ve never seen anything like it, a man so physically gifted with all the intangibles. It’s the craziest thing I ever saw. You just don’t expect anybody to catch a ball against him.” The coaches were in agreement. They wanted to hold him in time.

  I used to ask the coaches if it was possible to invent a play or a pass route or a defensive look that nobody had ever seen. Mostly they were dubious about the possibility and claimed it had all been done before, under different names, in slightly varied iterations. Still, they were always trying for invention. In this way, a coach was like any creative person taking on a legacy of masterworks; as Goethe had said of Shakespeare: “He gives us golden apples in silver dishes. We get the silver dishes by studying his works, but, unfortunately, we have only potatoes to put into them.” One person who always wanted to devise new lines and directions for football players was Ryan, and that was because, when it came to football, he had an artistic temperament.

  Often when Ryan entered Pettine’s office, creative things seemed to occur. The two men were collaborative by nature. One morning before practice, Ryan was messing around with Smitty in Pettine’s office, playing pepper with a tiny souvenir Phillies bat and a golf ball, when suddenly the head coach put the bat down, went to the whiteboard, and drew up a way for a safety to relieve an outside linebacker of coverage responsibilities in an early-down pressure called Under Bear Fire Zone. “Save that,” said Pettine, and he got up and circled it for emphasis. Frequently plays came to Ryan in the middle of the night and so he kept the pad and pencil on his bedside table. He’d learned, over time, to make sure he was awake enough to write the notes legibly.

  Another day in Pettine’s office, Ryan declared a training-camp weight-loss competition among overweight coaches. Their names and weights—Smitty: 240; Pettine: 256; O’Neil: 232; Ryan: 292—were listed on Pettine’s whiteboard, circled for safekeeping, and the salad days began.

  Everyone called training camp a grind, and it was an exhausting experience. The first meeting of the morning began at eight and often the day ended well past ten at night. Those hours made it difficult for me to travel back and forth to my home in Brooklyn, so often I stayed at Pettine and Smitty’s place. Pettine lived like the bachelor coach he was, in a sparsely furnished town house. We’d come home, go instantly to bed, and awaken with just enough time to make it back to the facility. I slept on the couch in the living room, beside a tall, dead brown plant that I developed a fondness for. That famished plant seemed to say it all about the life, more even than the stove on which no meal was ever prepared or the refrigerator whose only contents were a few condiment jars and a couple of forgotten beers. The football immersion was such that Smitty and I relished our one-mile drive to work together when we could listen to the radio. He may have been the only NFL coach who began his day with folk music.

  One night, the late meetings were canceled, and Smitty and I decided to go to the movies. Outside the theater afterward, a demolished-looking man was asking everyone for food money. Nobody gave but Smitty; he reached into his jeans and produced a fistful of bills. “I don’t know what he’ll spend it on,” he said. “Probably booze. But at least he’ll have one nice night.” Smitty, making an intern’s wage, with a sick, broke father back in Texas, in winter had given five-dollar tips to the men who filled up his car at gas stations, explaining, “It’s cold and rainy out there.”

  Smitty’s attempt to quit chewing tobacco gave him a constant headache and also, at times, a balky
stomach. In a meeting, Pettine looked at him. “Did you burp?” Smitty frowned and denied all. Five minutes later Pettine told Smitty, “Get out of here.”

  “What?” said Smitty, eyes wide.

  “Five minutes ago you said you didn’t burp. And now I just heard you burp and it smelled the same as five minutes ago, so leave.”

  “I didn’t know I burped five minutes ago,” Smitty protested. He was permitted to stay. Nobody could resist Smitty.

  By the middle of August, David Harris, the linebacker, could no longer keep track of what day of the week it was. Much as they liked to play football, the players thought of training camp the same way coaches did—something to endure. “It’s a blue-collar sport,” the guard Brandon Moore said while walking off the field one day. “Got to bring the lunch pail. You do a lot of things you don’t like to do. Uncomfortable things.” Moore’s father had worked in a Gary, Indiana, steel mill for forty years: “Wake up every day, one hundred and something degrees in the casting room. Come home dog-tired.” Watching that, Moore said, had prepared him for football. “Nobody loves practicing. It’s repetition—over and over. Besides Sundays, the fun is the one-on-one battle, doing your job and winning more than you lost.” Like Moore, David Harris felt that his father’s work—he was a die-caster at an auto-parts plant in Grand Rapids—had in some way readied him for the sport.

  Halfway through August, the fields were looking worn, and so were the players. Sometimes their eyes grew heavy in the afternoon meetings, and if Pettine saw that he’d say, “Get up and throw a couple of jabs if you’ve got to. Fight it.” Scott, who claimed that he’d missed only three practices in his life, sat one out. “My legs are getting tired standing here,” he said. “I’m dehydrated. Bees are stinging me. My mind’s not right. I can’t take it!”

  Football was, as the linebacker Jamaal Westerman put it, “a job, but you don’t want it to feel that way.”

  Of all the coaches, it was Jeff Weeks who found the eighteen-hour training-camp days the most trying. He considered them “overkill” and “unnecessary,” said he couldn’t understand why, “when they didn’t do a thing all day against our defense, we’ll have to be here until ten at night.” Weeks thrived in the football outdoors, and sitting hour after hour in the unremitting meetings where he almost never spoke, he seemed trapped.

  One night Ryan canceled all the evening meetings and announced that he was taking the entire team bowling. The offense would roll against the defense. When linebacker Calvin Pace learned of this, he couldn’t wait. “You can give football players so little, make them a T-shirt, and they’re so happy,” he said. “That’s something Eric Mangini never understood, how important it is to bring players some happiness.”

  Tannenbaum wouldn’t be going bowling. The GM had promised his children that he’d come home that night and tuck them in. Tannenbaum said that not seeing your family was a suffering that football people “got used to absorbing.” Such choices, he said, were “very tough—football’s not all roses, not even close,” and that phrasing seemed perfectly to express the GM. Ryan would go bowling, and—you could count on it—he’d wear a colorful shirt, woof about his skills, give out “gutter-ball prevention tips,” and have the time of his life, and everyone around him would too. For Tannenbaum, it would have been work, partly because around Ryan, Tannenbaum somehow seemed stiffer than he really was.

  The GM often stood alone on the practice sidelines, rocking back and forth, scowling balefully, shifting his weight, a dealer in costly commodities vibrating with wary anxiety. Every day is the opportunity to improve, was the sort of thing you could see he was thinking during a messy practice. Why aren’t they taking that opportunity? Tannenbaum inevitably wanted more from people, would sometimes stroll alongside a younger player and give him an impromptu playbook quiz or offer him admonitions about working hard. Tannenbaum was the boss in the organization, the authority figure who made people nervous when he walked into the room. There was the sense that he liked the role but that he might have wished not to project his authority so emphatically, that he did so because Ryan left him no choice. It was in Ryan’s nature to get along with everyone, to exude a sense of well-being, and that relentless conviviality left Tannenbaum the role of de facto taskmaster, the dogged one, the one who worried.

  Cuts had begun almost immediately. Three days into camp, the team decided to part ways with Tom “Langer” Ottaiano after practice. When the session ended, before anyone from management could approach Ottaiano and lead him upstairs to the pro-personnel director Brendan Prophett’s office to receive the bad news, Ottaiano went over to the family area to visit with what looked like his parents and girlfriend. Watching this from the second floor, the pro-personnel guys were horrified. The last thing they wanted was to embarrass a player in front of his family. When the girlfriend gave Ottaiano a big kiss, everybody winced. And then when a local reporter strolled up to him and requested an interview, there were groans of “oh no!” Joey Clinkscales spoke up. “I don’t feel bad for him,” the chief of scouting said. “He got to play pro football for three days.” When Ottaiano was finally brought upstairs, he didn’t quite see it that way. He was angrier than any cut player Prophett could remember: “Are you shitting me? Three fucking days is all I get?”

  Cuts were part of the game, and most of the players accepted it. Some of them might say “No hard feelings,” and a few even looked relieved when they were released. One of those was a linebacker who’d worn a T-shirt that said “Running Sucks” to meetings, which was deemed by the defensive coaches to be the worst camp-wardrobe decision in anyone’s memory. Most, of course, were there to make the team, and they worried a lot. Martin Tevaseu, a friendly three-hundred-pound nose tackle known to all as MTV, said, “We have no idea what they say about us in meetings. We come out here, and we love football, but we also hate it because it’s so stressful. You never know what they see.”

  In the middle of August, the coaches began emphasizing how soon the first game—on September 11, against Dallas—would be upon them, which meant that reps for players competing for the team’s final roster spots, like MTV, would be sparse. He was an unlikely player, loose and boxy (he looked somehow like a dresser with its drawers left open), with long, flowing black hair and a far-seeing expression. MTV’s unpromising appearance first worked against him, but then from his nose-tackle position he’d make a rat drop, retreating into low coverage looking to collision somebody, and the sight of him hurrying across the field would bring cheer to his coaches. Day after day, his grade sheet was filled with pluses: he was difficult for blockers to dislodge, he played hard, and he knew his responsibilities, making him, said Pettine, “found money.”

  That was also Nick Bellore, who quickly learned the playbook and, unlike most of the other defenders, also mastered the reasoning behind the calls. He was the player who, in a defensive meeting, could answer a Pettine question by saying, “Motions and shifts primarily happen in the first quarter because offensive coordinators script the whole quarter.”

  Ellis Lankster, a physical cornerback who had spent his two years since college on the penumbra of pro football, living on and off NFL and Canadian teams, was a new favorite of Westhoff’s. Everybody could tell this because Westy called him Lancaster. Lately Westy had been calling Marquice Cole Maurice, another good sign. To the German—as Westy called the rookie linebacker Matthias Berning, who’d grown up in Germany—he said, “The way you’re playing now, fifty years ago you’d have been killed.” This was thought not to be a compliment, though nobody was sure. Still, it was better to be the German than simply “my man,” Westy’s way of referring to those who remained only a face to him. Since the roster had been filled and camp had begun, the special-teams coach was in improved spirits. “I’m loyal,” he said. “Hell, I fight and fight, but once it’s done, I work with what I got.”

  In the heat, with players desperate to make an impression on the coaches, things between two players could get “salty,” as the coach
es liked to say, and fights would erupt. You’d hear a cry, and the organized scrum of football would devolve into a different kind of violence, loud punches banging off the hard plastic of helmets until the combatants were quickly tackled and restrained. Then, as everyone milled around, running back Joe McKnight would dart among the huge bodies and slap BT’s helmet before dashing away. This was very amusing to watch on film in the meetings, and the players loved it, especially the day when BT responded with a blind mule kick that missed Little Joe by two feet.

  A reserve offensive lineman named Rob Turner, who had an important role on the team because he could play many positions, had a reputation as an impressive brawler, which suffered after he appeared to get the worst of it in practice bouts with Kenrick Ellis and Ropati Pitoitua. After several days of this, Ryan told the team, “Okay, guys. We’ve had enough fights. Somebody’s gonna break a hand.”

  One day soon after Ellis and Rob Turner fought, the coaches noticed that the two were now buddies, working out together after practice. “That’s what happens,” said Ryan. He said he’d heard that among Polynesian kids in Hawaii, there was competition to be the so-called bull of the school, the toughest fighter. The bull of the Jets would be either Ropati or, he thought, Wayne Hunter because of his “switch.” Sometimes when tempers rose, Ryan said, you could see Hunter turn away and put his head down to avoid the angry impulse. As an offensive player, Hunter was an exception, Ryan said, because “offensive guys get the high Wonderlic [an intelligence test] scores, but defensive guys are mean, nasty, violent sons of bitches.” As Ryan was speaking, Smitty came up. Ryan put the question to him. Wayne or Ropati? “Well,” said Smitty, weighing Hunter’s fearsome temper against the six-foot-eight Pitoitua’s strong resemblance to Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “It would end with both dead, ears scattered everywhere,” he decided.