Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  In the team meeting, Ryan called for tempo, an admonition not received by Revis, who was late. Revis was an upset man again these days. Ever since Holmes had chastised the linemen, there had been bad feeling within the team. Holmes was respected by all for his ability, yet when Ryan had named him a captain, many players winced, because Tone had made it out of the sugarcane mostly by relying on Tone. In the past, veteran and inspiring offensive players like Tony Richardson and Brad Smith and Jerricho Cotchery had been adept at keeping the Jets’ collective offensive outlook tight and bright, but in their absence, Revis felt that more fell to him, not a natural role for the cornerback. “I don’t know everything,” Revis would say, looking back, “but I know a team that’s not together. Players were coming to me every day in the locker room. I’d say, ‘Just chill,’ but too much negativity.” When Revis finally arrived in the middle of the defensive meeting, he received a big hand.

  After the players split off into positional groups, Smitty asked Westerman what he would like the outside linebackers to watch from the archive of Bills film. Westerman chose Buffalo’s recent game against Miami—“Unless anybody wants to watch something else. I don’t want to monopolize.”

  “It’s all right, Jamaal,” Maybin told him. “Your world and we just live in it.”

  “It’s Revis’s world,” Westerman riposted, “and we all just live in it.”

  Breaking down practice, Ryan praised Sanchez’s throws, declared that everybody had done well, except for one thing: Revis had been late. “You know nobody loves Revis more than me,” the coach said, “but I’m gonna fine the shit out of him. I want to make sure all of us are pointed in one direction. You were wrong, right, Rev?” Revis conceded that he was.

  Then DT skipped the weekly crossbar game. He said he was jilting everyone because he didn’t have it today. “Got to know when to fold ’em,” he explained. “So medieval!” said Jim Leonhard, who vowed not to let that pass. DT of all people! This wasn’t tennis, where you walked off the court in the middle of a match that wasn’t going well and people said, “He withdrew.”

  From the outside, the Jets, at 5 and 5, appeared to be an eddying team. From within, the experience was vortical, their attempts to achieve a smooth football flow constantly interrupted by turbulence. Anxiety was such a big part of football, and every NFL game was so difficult, each player’s health and status was so tenuous. All a player or coach really had to fall back on was himself.

  All of which was to say, thank goodness for Brodney Pool’s new haircut. Pool’s hair went several inches high and was rounded off on the top like a stovepipe, and seeing it at the Saturday-morning meeting, Revis laughed and laughed. Revis’s laugh didn’t sound like anyone else’s. It was a deep, hearty, guttural, open-mouthed, head-back, boisterous, all-of-himself guffaw. How had Pool described such a look to his barber? “I pulled out my iPhone and showed him the picture my sister sent.” Because the cut made Pool resemble the Steelers hyperintense coach Mike Tomlin, famed for his Death Star gaze, Pool spent the meeting fielding requests to “make your eyes big!”

  At the walk-through, DT was handed a contract from the Crossbar Brotherhood that stated the Missing Man would never again skip crossbar, or else no soap operas, no solitaire, no California lollipops, and no barbecue-flavored 10:00 a.m. sunflower seeds for him. DT signed. Cro signed. Leonhard signed. Eric Smith signed. All the other participants signed, except Revis, who announced, “I ain’t signing without my agent.” Everybody looked perplexed. Sutton came to the rescue: “He’s got more at stake than the rest of you,” said Sutt.

  As this went on, the offensive coaches across the way were standing in a line looking like a council of concerned elders. Nodding toward the perpetual object of offensive fretting, Sanchez, Sutton said a quarterback had to be free, loose, and confident, “a tough thing with so much in your head.”

  In the quarterbacks’ meeting that night at the hotel, Sanchez was free, loose, confident, and also accurate, nailing every game-plan question Schotty threw at him, and Schotty moved the meeting along at no-huddle tempo. Afterward, everybody seemed in a good way, until out in the hall, heading off downstairs to the unit and then team meetings, I was startled when Burress said loudly to Holmes, “Waste of time.”

  Ryan looked out at the entire team, irate. He said that if the defense still wanted to be considered an elite unit, they needed to finish games. Then he went one by one along the offensive line, telling each player what he expected of him. “Son, I know, two hip surgeries,” he said to Moore, “but I need you to be you.” The frank urgency in the coach’s voice was experienced by others the same way Revis’s laugh was, as something physical. It shook into you. Ryan said little about the Bills, the point seeming to be that too often, his team’s real rival was itself.

  On the stadium field before home games, some of the coaches frolicked with their sons. Devlin now had his redheaded son Zachary working on long snaps. Zachary was getting very good grades in high school and was an excellent high-school center, but he was undersized by collegiate standards, and so the long snapping was a fallback, a football sinecure in case he failed to grow. Every team these days needed a long snapper. There was one other “problem” with Zachary, said Devlin: “My son’s such a good kid. I just need him to be a prick on the football field.”

  Ryan, meanwhile, threw bombs to one of his own progeny, skinny, sunglasses-wearing Seth, whom Ryan fondly called Slugs, even though Seth could really run. Seth had it in mind to someday attend a school like the University of Alabama or Clemson, a school where he could play and study football at the feet of a sophisticated college coach—as Schotty had done at Florida under Steve Spurrier.

  Meanwhile, Schotty’s father, Marty, winner of two hundred NFL games as a head coach, was over on the sidelines talking football. He said that he became a coach because it enabled him to keep playing “vicariously.” His playing position had been linebacker, and he thought that watching over everything from back there as it developed and then came toward him had been excellent coaching training. He talked of coaching Bernie Kosar in Cleveland, not much of an athlete at quarterback but intelligent enough to devise a means to succeed within his limitations: “His passes were puffballs but they floated in perfect alignment with wide receivers, so catchable and yet elusive to defenders.” As I was thinking about those smart little puffballs finding their way, a Bills player, Ruvell Martin, came by and thanked Marty for encouraging him to stay with football when he cut him from the San Diego Chargers. “The next year I had that confidence,” Martin said.

  To all of them, football was the family business, and it interested me that these sons, who doubtless saw less of their fathers than most kids did, were attracted to the lives the fathers led. That made sense; football had such obvious importance for the fathers that of course the sons would be drawn to it. Either that or repelled by it, as Ryan’s other son had been as a teenager. How much of a guy’s guy was Ryan? “If we had a girl, it wasn’t mine,” he once joked.

  The scene was what you’d expect from a bunch of football coaches on a field with their sons. The air was full of instruction, advice, and encouragement. Into my mind came Ellis Lankster, so beloved among the coaches, and his description of growing up with his mother and sisters in Prichard, Alabama, the roughest part of Mobile County, where the air base and the paper mill had closed, where sneakers dangled from the wires. “I stayed in a house, older dudes on the corner shooting dice, smoking weed, drinking, weed all day. People get drunk and end up just shooting. There were gangs. The Crips. You had to wear blue. At eight years old I wore white and red to school and the older dudes told me, ‘You better go home and change or you’ll get in trouble.’ It was rough, now.” Lankster’s father was a roofer in Detroit. His mother, Sayinka, had worked twelve-hour days at an Alabama chemical factory and then at a Coca-Cola plant. Eventually she married a truck driver named Billy Jackson. When I asked Lankster how he chose his junior college in Mississippi, Lankster said, “Because it’s
in Ellisville.”

  The locker room at MetLife Stadium never felt very familiar to the coaches and players because they visited it so seldom. In the coaches’ dressing area, the TV was on and the crawl asked, “Do the Jets need an offensive identity?” Callahan paused, read this aloud, shook his head, and said, “Brutal.” On the shiny coffee table beneath the television was one magazine. On the cover was the beatific face of Tim Tebow.

  In the game, the Bills and Jets traded touchdowns. And then, with the Jets backed up near their goal line, as soon as Tannenbaum said, “We can’t win the game down here but we can lose it,” Sanchez threw an interception leading to a short Stevie Johnson touchdown against Revis. It was 14–14 at the half, and in the GM’s box, the conversation had to do with why every last thing seemed to be so hard for the Jets right now.

  Early in the third quarter, DeVito led the line in denying the Bills on third down and he received a massive hug from Matt Mulligan as he came off the field. Tannenbaum, noticing, said, “I wish somebody cared about me the way those two care for each other.” A touchdown to Dustin Keller led to a Tannenbaum boomer fist-knock coming my way up in the box, a real red knuckle-splitter. A moment later the Bills punted, a punt that Cromartie muffed and fumbled. Ryan Fitzpatrick, an economics major, thought he knew a soft market when he saw one, and he went right at Cro on the next play with a scoring pass to Brad Smith. Cro’s coverage was actually too good. He was in position to make an interception, and Smith was trying to prevent that. Smith swiped at the ball; it popped into the air and settled serendipitously into the receiver’s arms.

  Both the Jets cornerbacks had trying days as Stevie Johnson ran slants for short, productive gains against Revis. “Stevie Johnson is the shiftiest motherfucker there is and so Rev can’t come up and press him” was Posey’s analysis. DT said that Johnson’s “herky-jerky” way of running was difficult to read. On the Jets bench, the joke was that Stevie Johnson was in a beach chair with a lime in his Corona and his feet cozy in the toasty sand on Revis Island.

  The whole team seemed out of rhythm. Ten Jets were on the field during one play; for another, there were twelve. The Bills took the lead. Another dreary facility Monday seemed imminent. And then Sanchez played some of his best football of the season. Burress made one of those tollgate one-handed plucks and Holmes followed it up by catching the touchdown with a minute left. A big drop by Stevie Johnson, open again, saved the day at the end. The final score was 28–24.

  After Holmes’s touchdown, he and Sanchez didn’t even bother to congratulate each other. The year before, when a similar late throw to Holmes beat the Browns, Sanchez had gone running down the field to celebrate with the receiver. Tannenbaum saw them turn away now and was so upset he stayed awake thinking about it deep into the night.

  The locker room was subdued. During the customary reciting of the Lord’s Prayer, I knelt beside Sanchez. He looked forlorn, as though the team had lost and he’d failed. What more could an American athlete ask for than to throw the game-winning pass and earn millions of dollars for doing it? Everyone wanted to throw the game-winning pass. Later on for the ice-cream socials, I thought. These guys need some Outward Bound. Put them in a canoe together.

  DeVito was on the training table. He’d reinjured his knee and was in considerable pain. Mulligan arrived to bury him in a long embrace.

  “Wins and losses come in all shapes and sizes in the NFL,” said Pettine on the way home, “and it’s hard for us when Rev has a bad week. Everybody has matchup difficulties. This is his.”

  Revis was far too competitive to see it that way. “He caught like five slants!” the cornerback protested. “We can live with that. He’s good at jerking a lot. Lot of herks and jerks. But I’m playing zero coverage with no help. I’m not concerned with people catching a ball on me. I have some games, my guy gets one catch and five yards, but the game’s too good. These guys study me too.”

  Against his former team, Aaron Maybin had played his best professional game. He’d hit Fitzpatrick six times, sacking him twice. His sack celebrations were a one-man cancan. Cro, however, remained adrift. When he was supposed to press at the line, he retreated, allowing so many yards of cushion it looked terrible on film. Even worse was the contact he avoided. His heart right now didn’t seem to be in all that football required of a player. Ryan and Pettine agreed to leave it to DT to decide if they should bench Cro and start Kyle Wilson. “No problem,” said DT.

  At the team meeting, Ryan told the players he’d begin shortening the practices to keep them fresh for the final quarter of the season. Then Pettine met with the defense. Their fundamentals were slipping, the coordinator said. “This isn’t going to be a bitch session,” he went on. “This is being men. Treating you like men. But the tape doesn’t lie and we’re gonna put the best guys out there. Sounds cold. That’s the business we’re in.” Lest they forget they’d won, he said, “We did some great things. And,” he added, “some horrific things.”

  Bart Scott was told to be in his stance and ready when the ball was snapped. You could talk to him that way. Scott was sensitive, but he was also a pro and a realist, knew how it all worked. Cromartie’s defenses were thinner, but Pettine tried. He praised Cro’s coverage on Brad Smith’s fluky touchdown. Soon enough, on the film, Cro was four yards off the line of scrimmage with his back turned to his man. When Pettine chided him, Cro said, “Shut up.” Then he said, “Fuck you.” Pettine told him quietly, “Don’t lose your cool. We’re all in this together.” DT spoke up. “Players play and coaches coach.” The rest of the session was quiet.

  As soon as Pettine left and the defense split into positional units, Cro said loudly that Pettine was “a high-school coach” and declared he wasn’t “gonna take it” from him. The other defensive backs were tense. It didn’t help that Emmanuel Cook, a popular player, had been released earlier in the week. DT again urged them to stay together as a team, not to pick at one another. He told Cro to go talk with Pettine if something was bothering him. “If I talk to him, I’ll punch him in the face,” said Cro. On the other side of the room, O’Neil looked shocked. DT told Cro that Pettine had a job to do. Revis raised his hand. He said he wanted to play receiver. Everyone laughed. Marquice Cole raised his hand. He looked at Strickland and said, “Fuck you!” Then he went into a long riff parodying DT: “I done things in this league…” This did not lighten the mood. It was strange, as though Cole had started out trying to be funny but then gave way to his desire to release a little of his own rage. Revis could understand that. Cole had lost a brother that summer. “I think he was just trying to find some joy in his life. He was close with his brother. Losing his brother was deep for him.” The meeting moved on deathlessly. The subject under discussion was the Washington Redskins’ passing game. Nobody could concentrate on that. After a while, Pettine sent word that Cro should come by his office. The team needed Cro.

  Right afterward, O’Neil marveled at Pettine. “I would have lost it,” he said. “Pet was perfect. He handled it perfect.” When the season was over, Leonhard said he still thought it was the “craziest thing I ever saw. Cro’s not mentally tough, and if he feels attacked, he flips out. He felt attacked. Everybody in the room agreed with Pet, but Cro felt attacked. All they’re trying to do is help him. They see that, physically, they don’t make them like that. He fights what’s good for him. It’s obviously a core issue with him. It may hold him back his whole life.”

  Revis thought the same. Revis’s childhood appeared to bear similarities to Cro’s, but it was different in crucial ways. Revis grew up poor in a single-parent family with a working mother in the boarded-up city of Aliquippa. “It was a rough town,” he told me after the season, when I visited him there. “Mills closing. Then just the corruption of the people. The violence. The drug dealing. Probably prostitution. Politics. Anything you think of in a negative way. Gangs. I was never part of that stuff. My family kept me out of it. But I’ve seen some harsh things. I always ran away from that. One reason is my family
finding God. Another is I wanted to be a Michael Jordan, a Sean Gilbert, a Mark Gilbert, who instilled in me if you sell drugs, you can’t be a professional athlete.”

  We were in the home of Aileen Gilbert, Revis’s grandmother. Gilbert for a while had worked in the steel mill, first operating a jackhammer and then serving as a bench man, in steel-toed boots, helmet, and shield. Later, she had jobs at Head Start and in a women’s shelter. She was a force of accountability for her children and grandchildren. Aileen Gilbert said now, “Darrelle was never a bad kid. We hovered over him to make sure he was good, and if not, there was consequences.”

  “Two big uncles!” said Revis.

  “Jamal probably took you places you didn’t belong,” Gilbert said, giving Revis a long look.

  “He did. The ghetto!” Revis began to describe the fate of kids he’d known from the heights housing projects: “Some got shot. Some on crack. Some now just getting out of jail. There was some stuff. I never got into it. My uncle would say, ‘No. Go shoot hoops.’ Or we’d play football with the bigger guys, and they’d rough us up, make us tough. I used to be around those guys until high school, then they’d get guns and I’d be, ‘No, thanks. I’m cool.’ ”

  “Darrelle’s always been polite, he’s always listened,” said Gilbert. “I never had to whup Darrelle.” Revis spent boyhood summer vacations with his father, who lived in another state.

  Revis had his family, and he also had football. “Growing up, you loved to have a team,” he said. “All together, a lot of passionate people working for a goal.” And although Revis described Aliquippa as a place where there “ain’t a lot going on,” he always went back, which was not at all the way Cromartie felt about Tallahassee.