Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Smitty’s thirtieth birthday was celebrated at his favorite local restaurant. Many libations were brought to him ranging from lemon drops to vodka tonics to tropical rum punch to eighteen-year-old scotch. Soon Smitty began to look like four lanes of bad Amarillo highway. Someone mentioned what a fine player Nick Bellore was for an undrafted free agent, and O’Neil, with a subtle look in Smitty’s direction, said loudly that Bellore was “unbelievable.” Immediately, Smitty, who took all references to long-shot linebackers personally, corrected O’Neil. “Jimmy, he’s good,” said Smitty. “Unbelievable!” repeated O’Neil. “Good,” Smitty insisted. Back and forth they went, until an assortment of desserts arrived on a plate that was inscribed in liquid chocolate, “Happy 30th Birthday AGAIN.” As even Smitty realized, it was futile to hope you’d convince people of things at a party commemorating the birthday you’d forgotten. Better that the defense should rest.

  The quarterback meetings were now all about the Cowboys, the first team the Jets would play that season, and in one of them, Schotty told the quarterbacks that Nick Mangold had confided that “things are getting confusing,” and because “Nick’s a smart guy,” Schotty had decided to simplify the offensive package a little bit.

  Every game week, the Jets pro-personnel department prepared an opposition scouting report so thick with information that Schottenheimer referred to it as War and Peace. After the coaches read the report, the person who’d written it (in this case, Scott Cohen) sat in with the coaches, briefing them. Cohen believed the Jets were clearly superior to the Cowboys, but “the thing about the NFL is, the first game, it’s always a mystery.” The difference, Cohen thought, between the NFL and college football was that in college football, the better team virtually always won. In the NFL, “weird things happen.”

  A week before the Dallas game, Pettine had his game plan 90 percent finished. It was “heavy volume,” he said, because they’d practiced so many calls through camp. As the season went on and the team developed its personality and its play preferences, calls would drop out of the rotation. Five days before the game, on Tuesday night, when NFL defensive game plans are traditionally completed, the defensive game plan being built in Pettine’s office still featured fifty calls. An ideal number was somewhere in the low thirties. “Pet, you got too many calls in?” Ryan asked him.

  “They’ve all been repped so much,” Pettine said.

  “It’s all bread and butter!” Ryan cried. “The back of our hand!” Ryan looked across Pettine’s conference table at me and said that in Baltimore, “Pet and I did the whole game plan, just the two of us. We were never home. You wonder why he got divorced.” Ryan stretched and got up. It was very late. “As my father used to say, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  In his third year as a head coach, Ryan was still defining his role. He had given Pettine the same full control of the defense that Schottenheimer had with the offense, including play-calling, but the head coach hadn’t quite thought through how he should spend his own hours during the season. When he’d hired Carrier to coach the line, Ryan had promised to help the former safety, but somehow he hadn’t got around to it. He occasionally dropped in on the various defensive-position group meetings, but again, it wasn’t in his nature to hover over coaches he believed knew their jobs. Ryan had also meant to look in more frequently on the offense, but those meetings still felt alien. It was the classic NFL problem Ryan had taken up with Joe Gibbs, how the master of one side should assert himself to manage the other.

  Ryan sat in at the defensive-game-plan install meeting on Wednesday morning, listening to the coaches talking with the players about not letting Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo set his feet, promising them that Romo would eventually get flustered and make a mistake. Sutton compared him with former Packers quarterback Brett Favre: “Another gunslinger. There’s no play he doesn’t think won’t happen.” Pettine told the defense the game plan was broad and would be trimmed down across the week. “Any play you’re not comfortable with, it’s out. We want to play fast. It’ll be an emotional night. We’ll be geeked up, but a controlled passion. We can’t go out of our minds.” He paused. “Bart!”

  “I can change!” said Scott.

  The Cowboys pass-catching tight end Jason Witten was a player they feared, and because, said Pettine, Witten was a “build-up-speed guy” who preferred “finesse” football, the plan was to place rugged obstacles in Witten’s path as he sought to accelerate. For Romo there was Jet Mike Mix, a heavy pass-rush bluff that would be used in an obvious pressure situation. The call, if properly applied after a sequence of blitz calls from similar formations, should worry Romo enough that he’d hurriedly throw into what was actually thick coverage. “Don’t be the safety who bails early from the look,” Pettine warned.

  At practice, Ryan was still his old self. Tannenbaum had brought in for a tryout Mardy Gilyard, a shifty receiver the Rams had just cut. Gilyard had a grille full of gold teeth, and Ryan told him, “Hey, you make some big plays, maybe I’ll cap my teeth.” Then he rolled up his pant leg, displayed his calf tattoo, gestured to Wayne Hunter, and said, “See this? I got it so Wayne would come back. Hell, I’ll do a lot to get a good player.”

  During the defensive walk-through in the late afternoon, Revis and Cromartie were excused to watch tape on their own in the inside linebackers’ meeting room. Cromartie ran the film from the back row. Revis was up front. Cromartie’s immersion in the game was complete. He’d studied Romo’s pump technique and how he looked off defenders, noted Romo’s preference for throwing outside the numbers. Jim Leonhard stopped by. “You guys doing extra credit?” Revis’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “Just trying to win,” he said. Cromartie was feeling optimistic. “Playing against somebody as big and quick as Plax and as fast as Tone means that when we play other guys, it slows down for us!”

  DT’s response to all this was “Show me Sunday, Cro.”

  Some of the players liked to wear their best clothes when they went to the stadium on game day, and already on Thursday they were discussing haberdashery. Jamaal Westerman noted that wide receivers generally dressed well. “Bart’s pretty good,” Calvin Pace countered.

  “Except for the problematic Thurston Howell ascot,” said Pettine. Having grown up in the shabby Detroit slums, Scott wanted to surround himself with beauty. Outdoor landscaping was important to him and so was cloth. His closets contained more than a hundred bespoke and designer suits made of fine fabrics from wool to linen to a silk of such luminous sheen that in it, he resembled the interior of a conch. Scott favored accessories such as pocket squares and Yves St. Laurent red-and-tan high-top sneakers. How would Scott describe his sense of fashion? “I like to wear things my teammates don’t wear and don’t know about,” he said.

  During Thursday’s practice, the young reserve tight end Matt Mulligan, who was running Jason Witten’s favorite patterns off the coaching cards for the defense, scored a touchdown and proceeded to celebrate. But in order to break open, Mully had deviated from the assigned Witten route. O’Neil said something about Mully being a “card killer.” Mulligan said something tart in reply. Instantly, Pettine was screaming at him. The words “slapdick who has done nothing in this league” were used. DT was likewise outraged. He said the rule for NFL rookies and backups, whom DT called ROYs, was “Be seen and not heard.” What did “ROYs” mean? “Rest of Y’alls.”

  After practice, DT walked up to Posey and told him, “Hey! I haven’t heard you asking me to stay late after practice and work on your man coverage!” Posey, who had been staying late on his own, was thrilled by this offer. “Time for him to take ownership of his career,” DT purred.

  Smitty spent much of the day downcast. A computer hacker had infiltrated his private e-mail accounts and his voice mail, sending it all into disarray, and now the hacker was leaving him triumphant, taunting telephone messages. Finally Smitty called up “my hacker” and told him, “Okay, dude. You got me. Look, it’s 9/11 on Sunday. My father just had a stroke.
This is America! Let’s come together.” The hacker was moved. “Dude, I feel bad,” he told Smitty. “I’m sorry. I’ll restore it all for you.” And he did. It was noted that only Smitty would befriend his hacker. Had Smitty offered the hacker game tickets? Smitty said he might have if he’d known where the guy was.

  Ryan received an unexpected communication also—a big, flat package roughly the size of a picture window. After unwrapping it, he discovered an enormous signed and framed photograph of Heather Locklear, still and forever “my celebrity crush.” Up it went on Ryan’s office wall. Pettine came in to inspect. “Only one thing missing,” he mused.

  “I know,” said Ryan. “She has her shoes on!”

  Thursday evening, after the last heavy practice of the week, is traditionally when NFL players go out. How these evenings are spent, “we coaches don’t want to know,” said Pettine. “It’s a don’t-ask, don’t-tell.” I never heard about these adventures either. Life inside the coaching area of the fluorescent-lit facility revealed little of the bright lights beyond. “Listen, Robert Frost,” BT informed me once, “you have to tell it like this. Make it all drugs and prostitutes or nobody’ll read it. Don’t worry about the football. You got to have hookers and cocaine in there!”

  The favorite work day, other than Sunday, was Friday. The game plans were installed, the hay was in the barn as people liked to say, there was everything to look forward to, the game to imagine, and Friday practices were light and full of Ryan fun. The position groups held little contests, the big defensive linemen running routes catching passes and also competing to see who had the fastest hands, raising their hands from the grass to touch the buckboard drilling sled. I was asked to judge this contest one week; it was nearly impossible to tell whose hands rose from the ground to the board faster. A guest kicker—someone who was not in any way a kicker—was always invited to try a twenty-yard extra point in front of the entire team. If he made it, he tried a twenty-five-yarder from his chosen hash mark on the field. Ryan offered a small reward for making the shorter kick, like a better seat on the team charter, and a double-or-nothing wager for the longer try. This day, Jim Leonhard made his first kick, then attempted the second and missed. After practice, the veteran defensive backs, along with Pettine and DT, stood thirty yards from a goalpost and competed to see who could throw and hit the crossbar first. Rookies like Posey were positioned beneath the goalpost to retrieve the errant throws and throw the balls back to the competitors. They played three rounds and took this very seriously, keeping track of the season standings. Invariably, DT was the man to beat.

  Up in Prophett’s office, Mardy Gilyard was receiving a plane ticket home. In his chair, getting the bad news, he looked very small. Down on the Jets practice field was Isaiah Trufant, all five-foot-six and one hundred and sixty-five pounds of him, claiming a spot with the team again. By football standards, Trufant was not just a small person—he was a micro-person. Still, he had, as the players said, big hops. One day while he was a student at Eastern Washington University, Trufant had passed by the court in the gym where students were dunking basketballs. Trufant was wearing flip-flops at the time, but they did not interfere with his ability to walk out onto the court and slam home a reverse. During his brief 2010 stay with the Jets, he’d been a water bug, a pond skater skimming all over the field on special teams. And when he hit you, Trufant carried a surprising payload. As the coaches liked to say, he hit you Tru.

  After lunch on Friday, the players scattered, and the defensive coaches reviewed the practice film. In one play, offensive flow to the right had lured Bart Scott away from his responsibilities covering the young Jets end Jeff Cumberland, who was playing Witten on the scout team, and Cumberland then leaked out underneath and across to the left to receive a swing pass for a huge gain. “This Bart guy!” Pettine burst out in frustration. The call was known as the Oh Shit—for what the linebacker thinks when he sees what’s been done to him. “I love Bart,” said Carrier. “But he keeps you coaching.” Later in the film, there was Trufant leaping up after an end-zone play and putting his hand over the top of the crossbar. He looked as though he’d bounced off a trampoline, and Pettine ran it several times as the coaches marveled at the little player soaring so high. For them, even with the first game approaching, film was an ongoing conversation, their way of taking in the world.

  The Saturday before the Sunday-evening Dallas game, there were midmorning offensive and defensive gatherings and a new look for Revis. All week Revis had played harder and harder. In meetings, his eyes bored deeper and deeper into the film. During training camp, he had allowed his hair and beard to grow thick. Now that hunting season was about to open, he’d been to the barber and was shorn high and tight. When the defense watched the practice film with their coaches and saw the Oh Shit, BT put a towel over his head because he was giggling so hard, and Pettine made a reference to “Bart chasing rabbits.” Scott stayed buried in his playbook until Pettine moved the film to the next play. Then Scott said, “I can change.”

  After the meeting came the Saturday-morning team walk-through in the field house. Music played as Sanchez rehearsed his calls. Up on an observation balcony stood a group of hard-looking men with tattoos and piercings, their caps askew. They were Hunter’s friends from the old neighborhood in Hawaii. Taking them in, Sione Po’uha said, “Wayne comes from the Compton of Hawaii.”

  Since D-Lo had been traded to the Jaguars, I hadn’t heard him mentioned. He’d spent three years with the Jets. “Cold as it sounds,” Leonhard said, “that’s the business.” Sutton offered a kinder take. “I think of the NFL as a corporation with thirty-two branch offices,” he said. “He just got transferred to Jacksonville.” Replacing D-Lo among the Jets defensive-backfield corps was Andrew Sendejo, claimed off waivers from the Cowboys. Sendejo had attended Rice University. Any player who’d gone to a fine school like that was assumed to be smart and slow. The Jets had heard that their claiming Sendejo had led Rob Ryan, down in Dallas, to junk his whole game plan, a rumor that gave Rex Ryan much satisfaction. That was the point. Even so, the Jets had debriefed Sendejo on the other Ryan’s defense, which could make a man feel just a little mercenary. Sendejo, no matter how smart he was, couldn’t yet contribute much in New York because he didn’t know the Jets system. So he stood and watched the walk-through.

  Even though there was a game the following night, running through Sendejo’s mind right then was the fact that the younger Dallas head coach Jason Garrett had been “much more old-school than Rex.” As the players along the sideline sang along with Archie Eversole’s “We Ready (for Y’all),” Ryan, out on the turf, was keeping things loose by stepping in for Sanchez at quarterback to throw passes to the receivers. He also practiced his punting. It was impossible to watch Rex Ryan bend over a football, study it, and then stand and unfurl his vast leg without smiling. “There’s nobody like Rex,” said Sendejo.

  Nine

  THE WORLD CHANGES

  I’m a steady rollin’ man, I roll both night and day.

  —Robert Johnson

  In a football season where each of the sixteen games is the brief and fraught climax of a long waiting, the first game, months in coming, is only more so. Ben Kotwica compared the prelude to his experiences in the military. “That was the thing about the army,” he said. “The endless battle drills, the occasional feelings of what am I doing all this for, and then suddenly the world changes.”

  Even by the usual fervid standards, the Dallas game was suffused with strong feeling for the Jets. They regarded playing as New York’s home team on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 as a serious civic responsibility.

  All football teams, even one as relaxed and player-friendly as Rex Ryan’s Jets, maintain their composure through rigorous adherence to routine. Because football people know that they are spending their lives at the mercy of random events, their intense relationship with schedules and plans is what keeps them from thinking too much about the inevitable chaos to come. You can only control what you c
an control is the sport’s tautology, and as game days approached, members of the Jets spoke it with frequency.

  By early Saturday evening, every Jets team member had checked in to the hotel near the stadium, all of them ready for a familiar medley of meetings that, year after year, were always held in the same rooms. There were separate chapel services available to any Protestants and Catholics who wished to worship, and these were followed by quarterback and special-teams meetings. At the latter, Westhoff used an overhead projector to display a series of return and coverage diagrams on a screen while narrating in one continuous riff. He was an overhead-projector bluesman playing his slides, the inimitable Westhoff cadences now oddly soothing. You could hear them as free verse:

  We could pop one right away.

  I don’t know.

  We could do it.

  We could.

  Be smart.

  Make a move.

  Or knock ’em right in the face.

  That’s fine.

  We got a million things we could do.

  Kickoff return.

  Hell, they’re not gonna score many times anyway.

  The whole package.