Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Revis began talking about Cromartie. Since October, Revis said, when Pettine had made his comments to the newspapers about Good Cro and Bad Cro, Cromartie had been brooding. “It was building up in Cro,” Revis said. “I told him, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ But it was building up in him and we were losing and he went off in the meeting. Crazy day. Shouldn’t have happened. Cro can’t take authority. DT’ll tell him something and it’s ‘Got you, Coach.’ Sometimes it’s ‘I said I got you, man. Why you keep coming at me?’ You have incidents with Cro from time to time.” Revis noticed that some days when Cro came into the dining hall at breakfast, even though all his teammates were seated at one of the round cafeteria tables, Cro would go find his own table and eat by himself. “He’s got five or six baby mamas, nine kids. You don’t know what goes on with him when he leaves work. Nobody knows what he deals with on the day-to-day. He could be the best corner in the league. I just gotta be positive with him.”

  As with everything else that upset him in his line of work, Revis talked over the meeting with his family. His grandmother said that she’d seen Cro on Hard Knocks, sitting there on camera naming his many children, and she agreed with Jim Leonhard that the moment, like the incident with Pettine, spoke to qualities that were fundamental in Cro. “It comes from childhood,” she told Revis. Revis said that the only man Cro really trusted was Ryan. “He has a lot of respect for Rex.”

  Just because Ryan preferred tough men with “armadillo skin” didn’t mean he couldn’t see virtues in more fragile people. “Cro has a big heart,” Ryan believed. A problem, said Ryan, was that “it became too much Pettine’s defense. It all comes from me. They think I have the serial number of the Unknown Soldier. They do. Pettine downplayed that, and there’s guys who don’t believe in Pet. Cro. Bart Scott. Pet’s telling them the truth, but they thought he was disloyal to me. Pet is my chosen guy and I thought I was being fair to Pet by not being in there as much.”

  The older defensive backs worried about the effect of Cro’s outburst on young Posey. Leonhard told Posey, “Now that you’ve seen that, you’ve officially made it to the NFL.” The day after the meeting, Cromartie himself sought out Posey and apologized to him. He said, “It’s not what I want to show to young guys and not the person I am.” Then Cro asked Posey what he’d thought of it all. Posey told him, “I thought you’re crazy! Tripping out!” Cro told Posey, “There were a lot of pent-up things and I snapped.” As Posey pondered it all, he said, “I thought, Why’s Cro so sensitive and high-strung? He’s in a high-stress situation. That’s why he’s so unpredictable day-to-day.”

  After the season, Cromartie remembered the day essentially the same way. “You get tired, fed up. You can be holding something in and it bursts out. Like I told our rookies, that’s not something they want to do. It was a mistake to do it in front of them. It happens more in other places than here. Pet can be sarcastic. Rex is more of a guy, you understand where he’s coming from. They both have a good heart.”

  With people like Cro and Tone, I occasionally found myself imagining what their lives would be like now if they’d had it a little easier as children, had childhoods like Revis’s. I noticed how many of the best NFL quarterbacks came from stable families. When a little less fell on you early, it seemed you could take more later. Cro could appear so fierce and sound so harsh and dismissive. But at the facility, he was generous to young players, and to me, watching film, patiently explaining the game. Then, too, there were times on the practice field when he was feeling relaxed and he looked so soft-faced and tender. Guys would come up behind him and tap his shoulder and then run away laughing. Or they’d find something innocuous to tease him about. They wanted to hold him there, didn’t want him to go off into himself.

  In football, maintaining order is part of the culture. When both units of coaches met later in the same Monday afternoon as the incident, Pettine described Cro’s “meltdown” but emphasized, “The room is strong.” Meanwhile, Holmes’s attitude was imposing a sullen drag on the offense. Even on his touchdown, Holmes wasn’t running full speed. He and Sanchez were barely speaking. Pettine suggested that Ryan make them game captains in Washington, and everyone laughed. Then Pettine offered to walk out to the coin toss with Cro. Ryan said, “It’s easy to me. ‘Tone, you’re not giving it to us on the practice field, you don’t play.’ ”

  The problem wasn’t the system. Tone knew his routes and everyone else’s. The problem was that successful football teams are a random family of people, a bachelor’s cutlery drawer of personalities. Whether individuals successfully found common cause or not depended on what football men classified as chemistry. Every team had moments of toxic reaction. The best teams ventilated them by winning. Schotty shook his head and said he admired Sanchez for getting angry with Holmes: “I like Mark when he’s pissed. He’s not afraid of anybody. Fucker’s not afraid of the devil.” Ryan thought it was “all in a day’s work.” Looking at Callahan, he winked and said, “Bill, you never had any of this in Oakland, did you?” Then he said, “Hell, we won!”

  Before leaving the facility on Monday, Pettine and Cro met in Pettine’s office for a heart-to-heart. Cro explained his inability to get past Pettine’s remarks to the newspaper. Pettine apologized for them and urged Cro in the future not to wait when something bothered him—the door was always open. He reminded Cro of the spirit in which football criticism was given. It sounded personal, but it wasn’t personal. The team needed him. It was decided that on Wednesday Cro would apologize to the defense, and Pettine would “ease his way, make it easier for him.” Nonetheless, the plan for Sunday’s game with the Redskins would feature a Boise personnel group with a series of calls in which Kyle Wilson replaced Cro.

  On Tuesday, in the field house, the front-office staff held an audition. The off-season roster would expand in the long run-up to training camp. Players in their midtwenties who’d starred for schools like Concordia–St. Paul and Cal State–Sacramento arrived. This was their NFL moment and they’d do anything to impress. The particularly muscular were shirtless; the particularly slow-footed spatted their shoes with white tape; the particularly Texan worked full cheeks of chaw. “They all have dreams,” said Tannenbaum. One of the eleven who came, University of Massachusetts running back John Griffin, would be invited to the Jets training camp. A few of the current Jets players walked past these proceedings, conspicuously aloof.

  In the Wednesday quarterbacks’ meeting, Schotty explained that the Redskins defensive coordinator Jim Haslett once coordinated the Pittsburgh Steelers and had brought to Washington much of the Steeler philosophy, which Sanchez then neatly summarized as “Blitzberg.” Schotty looked around at the breakfasting players. “You guys are slurping a lot today,” he said. “Settle down!” Said Sanchez, “We’re excited!”

  During the team meeting, Ryan told the Jets they had to practice better. Looking at Holmes, the coach said, “Tone, it starts with you. You have to lead from the front. You’re the number-one receiver on this team. You have to run full speed. He needs to know where you’ll be.”

  There were five games left, but Sutton leaned over to say that, really, only one of the six AFC playoff positions was still in doubt: “Nick, it’s like the NCAA basketball tournament. All the brackets are set, everybody knows where they’re going, except there’s one spot to play for and we’re playing for it.”

  At the defensive meeting, BT eased into his seat, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Play like a Jet.” Right behind him was Maybin, who was drinking carrot juice with wheatgrass, not the typical meeting-room eye-opener. Cromartie stood and faced his teammates. “I want to apologize to the defense for Monday,” he said. “I let some stuff linger. I should have been man enough to go talk to him. Especially to the young guys; don’t ever do any shit like that. Thanks.”

  Everyone applauded and Maybin yelled, “Way to be a man!” I asked him how his juice tasted. “Need to feed my moneymaker,” he explained. By now everyone had come around to Maybin. He wa
s the enthusiastic, rambunctious in-law who, over time, had been welcomed, his quirks now virtues.

  Pettine faced the room and said, “Don’t let things fester. Get it off your chest. Come see me. We’re all in this together. If there’s an issue, we’ll have an answer. Might not be the one you want to hear. We’re here to help you. Nothing’s personal. I like everybody in this room except BT. Now no hugs. We did that on Monday.” Then he moved on to another category of temper, the Redskins, a team with players so eager to mix it up that they got into fights with opponents at the coin toss. Reviewing the game plan, Pettine directed many positive observations in Scott’s direction. On Monday, you were put on notice. On Wednesday, they built you up.

  “Football’s a hard game,” DT mused afterward. “Tom Landry used to tell us that by the time you really learn to play it, you’ll be too old. Quarterbacks improve as they get older because they stop relying on their physical gifts and they compensate with preparation and study. That may happen to Cro,” he reflected. “Cro may have to start playing the game a different way. Cro grew up in a rough part of Tallahassee. No father. Never knew him. Just his mother. That’s why he’s resistant to criticism from male authority figures. He never had it.”

  Cromartie was not unaware that his childhood might have cost him as an adult. The previous off-season, Cro’s business manager, Jonathan Schwartz, invited Cro to stay with his family in Southern California while Cro trained for the season, and Cro enthusiastically accepted. Schwartz had been married for eighteen years and had three children and a dog at home. “He saw a family environment,” Schwartz said. “You sit down, have dinner together, have conversations, you clear your dishes. We’re all converging at similar times in the morning. He really took to that. He saw people go off to school, go off to work, he saw us discipline the kids. He walked my son to school.” Schwartz knew that many football players never had “a strong, positive parental support group. Not to make an excuse, but you have to understand his challenges.”

  Cromartie said he was trying to do that. Of his stay at Schwartz’s home, he told me, “I saw the importance of a husband and a wife in the household.” Cro said his wife, Terricka, also came from a single-parent family. Of his many children, Cro admitted, “It wasn’t meant to be like that. Something that happened. I love my kids to death. I could care what anybody else thinks. It’s just up to me to take care of them.” He and Schwartz had arranged Cro’s finances so that Cro could always provide well for all of the children. Said Cro, “I’m getting a better understanding of what I’m supposed to do as a father and a husband.”

  December arrived, and with it a cold for Sanchez and then that time-tested elixir Tom Moore. Cavanaugh told Sanchez that the Redskins defense was a secret system that Sanchez could decrypt if he only took the time: “When you see enough of the tape, you’ll think it’s easy. Look at it again and again and suddenly you’ll realize you’re gonna kick their ass.”

  Sanchez then told the others, “Cav made me stay here until one last night.”

  “Cav’s such a grind,” said Brunell.

  “All for you, Mark,” Schotty said magnanimously. Then he told the quarterback, “Cav’s point is, as we sat and studied this thing for ten hours, it’s really easy once you see it.” Then he asked Sanchez many questions and Sanchez didn’t miss one of them. “Man on a mission,” somebody said.

  Things flared and then they receded. During practice, Sanchez and Holmes drifted off alone to work on a play together.

  In the defensive backs’ meeting, DT asked, “What do we need to do?”

  “No deep balls, tackle, and communicate,” said Cro.

  “I’m gonna get you a whistle!” DT told him.

  When Ryan distributed the game balls for the Buffalo win, he told the team, “Sanchez throws four TDs and gets booed. Everybody boo!” Dutifully, the team booed. Sanchez received his ball. Then Ryan awarded balls to all the youngest coaches.

  Before practice, Ryan was in Pettine’s office discussing the day’s guest kicker—himself. The team’s owner, Woody Johnson, would snap, and Tannenbaum would hold, which made Ryan worry about the possibility of a kick getting no lift and hitting the boss. “If I get let go, I’ll say that it wasn’t that we underperformed. It was that I booted one into the owner’s butt.” On Monday Tannenbaum had been talking with Ryan about soothing the rift between Sanchez and Holmes “or we’ll be gone.” Less than a year ago, the Jets had been the team of their time. Now job security was on their minds.

  Out on the field, Johnson asked Ryan about his accuracy, and Ryan told him, “You’ll be fine.” Ryan laced up his old Lou Groza 1950s-style square-toed kicking shoe, which he referred to as Lethal Weapon, and then he “snuck one in” over both owner and crossbar. Pettine watched these proceedings with MTV, who wore his hair in long dreadlocks. With them was Jamaican-born Kenrick Ellis, who was clean-cut. “You bringing back your dreads?” Pettine asked him. “What would people think of me?” said Ellis, whose court case was still pending. “With all the things I’ve been through? That was the young Ken.” Ellis was twenty-three. After the season, he would resolve his legal problems by reaching a plea agreement to serve a forty-five-day prison sentence on misdemeanor assault-and-battery charges. Woody Johnson, Tannenbaum, and Ryan would all visit him at his Virginia jail.

  During practice, Eron Riley caught a long touchdown against Cro. Afterward, Sanchez broke the team down at midfield and everybody booed.

  In the Saturday defensive meeting, Pettine asked David Harris this: “Dave, of their first fourteen screens, how many went to the boundary?” Replied Harris, “Twelve.” If Harris had answered a question from a coach incorrectly that year, I couldn’t remember it. During the review of Friday’s practice film, Cro got up and walked out of the room just before Riley’s touchdown catch against him.

  Instead of going to Washington with the team, I decided for the first time that season to stay behind so I could watch on TV with BT, who invited me to his house. (Injured players did not travel.) Given the mess BT left behind after meetings and given his ravine of a locker, known to Pettine as the Science Project, I was surprised to find that the home BT shared with his wife and children not far from the facility was spacious and impeccably neat.

  BT wore black sweats. An ice machine was working on his injured foot, and he had an iPad on his lap. “Wake up, fellas!” he called when the Redskins took a quick 7–0 lead. Then he began discussing Cro. “I wanted to get in a fight with a coach my rookie year,” BT remembered, “but a veteran told me, ‘It’s not worth it. They just want to help you.’ ” Cro was playing well today. Boise would scarcely be seen.

  Unable to participate himself, BT had become an avid Fantasy Football GM. That was what the iPad was for—update checking. When Rashard Mendenhall scored for the Steelers, BT groaned. He’d decided to sit Mendenhall for the week. “That clown! I play him, he does nothing. I sit him, he’s got two TDs.”

  Turning his attention back to the Jets, he said, “We should do more no-huddle. New England does it to us and it’s so effective.” I asked him how much the success or futility of the offense really affected the defense. “It pisses you off when they don’t do well against a defense they should be doing well against,” he said. “And you can get fatigued if you’re on the field too much. But other than that, it doesn’t change anything because when you’re in that meeting room watching the film, you’re not watching the offense.”

  He began talking about life after football. “I couldn’t sit home all day,” he said. “I’d go crazy. My wife’d go crazy. I have rental properties and stuff, but I need something to fulfill me.” He said he thought he’d make a good football scout. “What about Mendenhall?” I said. He laughed, but the pathos of it struck me, this big powerful man with his wounded foot on ice whose career might be over. Football brought so many little deaths so early in life.

  Sanchez had figured out the Redskins and was playing well. He’d finish the afternoon 19 for 32 with a long touchdown to
Holmes. The Jets defense was intimidating the Redskins quarterback Rex Grossman into a 19 for 46 day. Maybin had another sack. Gradually, the Jets pulled ahead to win, 34–19. As they did, BT raised his arms. “But why y’all got to make it so close?” he wanted to know.

  Grading the Redskins-game film the next morning, the coaches were worried about Scott. “The Bart I know would be goring that guy like a heat-seeking missile,” Pettine said at one point. “Head-scratcher.” Scott seemed logy to them. Later Scott made a pass deflection and thereafter was seen racing from sideline to sideline. “This looks like the Bart we know!” Pettine said as they all rejoiced.

  In the Wednesday-morning quarterbacks’ meeting, Sanchez looked at Tom Moore and said, “You’re mine today.” Moore gazed back at Sanchez with steady eyes and told him, “I hope you have a long career.” Sanchez was wearing a red and gold sweat suit. Moore asked him if that was Stanford Cardinal red. “Mission Viejo!” replied Sanchez, whose loyalty to his old high school was a powerful thing. “Vince Ferragamo was from around there,” Moore, the old Steeler, remembered. “He took the Rams to a Super Bowl, then Jack Lambert picked him and he was never worth a shit after that.”

  On Schotty’s desk was a boxed toy truck. These were distributed annually at holiday time for the coaches and other employees to give their children. Sanchez began unwrapping Schotty’s truck. Then he drove it on Brunell’s back. “Well, my son won’t be getting that now!” said Schotty blandly. To which Sanchez said, “I’ll rewrap it!” And then he did, after which he said, “Now it’s a Mexican present.”

  Schotty shook his head and fell back on football. Of this week’s opponent, the Kansas City Chiefs, he said, “Men, they win games because the corners make plays.”