Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  At the end of the long Monday, Ryan sat in Pettine’s office with Smitty and O’Neil. They discussed, yet again, the burden placed on a defense when the offense didn’t score often—and scored so many points for the opposition. Brandon Moore’s fit of temper as Schotty called pass after pass during the game reminded Ryan of the great Raven Jonathan Ogden, that six-foot-nine hillside of a man who moved with rare agility. Ryan thought he was probably the best left tackle in history, an intelligent athlete “with a locker full of books.” The Ravens head coach Brian Billick respected Ogden so much that when Ogden felt the team wasn’t running the ball enough, Ryan said, Ogden would glare at Billick, make a pounding signal, and Billick would call a run. This Ogden later confirmed. “I’d throw my helmet halfway across the sideline every now and then if we got too pass-happy,” he told me. “You got to pound into them. This is a physical game.” Everything that was happening to the Jets had already happened to other NFL teams before and would happen to other NFL teams again.

  The Jets coaches discussed their slim remaining hopes of making the playoffs. The subject was changed to the North Carolina beach house Ryan rented and invited everyone to in the off-season. And then Ryan left for the press conference he always gave the day after games, promising “to be nice and humble.”

  There were so many people involved with a football team, and so much happened that most knew nothing about. Eventually the coaches learned that after the first play in the Giants game, Brodney Pool had lost the vision in one eye. What had happened to him, I asked O’Neil later. “Big hit,” he answered. On the bench, Pool seemed to his teammates to be completely out of it, but Pool insisted no coaches could be told because the team had run out of safeties. “He’s in misery right now,” said O‘Neil. “The Bradshaw run is all over SportsCenter. He’s crushed. Just crushed.” Jim Leonhard and I discussed the situation and Leonhard explained that to the players, Ryan “is like a dad,” and Pool “wouldn’t tell him because he knows Rex wants guys to be healthy. He knows it’s bigger than football. He doesn’t want to put people in harm’s way.”

  To Nick Mangold, the end of an NFL season felt routinized; by now, the center said, he was “programmed.” Ryan was not that way. As the season slipped away, the coach grew more emotional—filled with sentiment. He was a person who had benchmark stories, stories he enjoyed returning to. Like any excellent storyteller’s, his stories were present for him when he told them. He relied on them in times of trouble.

  As the Tuesday-evening game-planning for the season’s Sunday finale on New Year’s Day in Miami began, Ryan arrived in Pettine’s office and soon was regaling them with tales from happier times. Ryan recalled Bart Scott’s frantic hitting as a rookie. He recalled MTV’s first day as a Jet, when he got off a bus after two and a half days of constant travel from California, refused the offer of a hotel room and sleep, and, at over three hundred pounds, instead took and passed the team conditioning test right away by running twenty forty-yard dashes in under six seconds each. This story led Ryan to recollect his own svelte days in Arizona, when he weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds, not his current three hundred and fifty, and ran three miles before he went home, no matter how late he worked. “My jogs might not start until three or four in the morning.” Cheered, Ryan left to go ask Schotty about a blitz the offense hadn’t been able to stop, in case there was something there for Ryan to adapt for the Jets defense. But not before allowing Pettine to tease him about some of Ryan’s calls during the Giants game—“Stop it! Stop it!” Never was Ryan more appealing than when he laughed at himself—which was one of the two qualities he most prized in Jeff Weeks, the other being his nonnegotiable loyalty to all Ryans.

  In the Wednesday-morning quarterbacks’ meeting, Schotty explained that the Dolphins used so many coverages, “it’s almost impossible to summarize.” Then he looked at Sanchez and warned him, “Take care of the football; we’ll win the game. That simple.”

  At the team meeting, Ryan told the players how good he thought they were—“There’s not one team I don’t think we can’t beat”—and how proud and grateful he was for how much so many of them had sacrificed: “Guys who can barely walk, guys who need shoulder surgery,” had been there “for each other.” He congratulated Revis for making the Pro Bowl and told Harris he would send the linebacker to dancing school so Harris could call better attention to himself and be chosen as he also deserved to be. Harris blushed.

  Mostly the defensive game plan consisted of adjusting familiar calls so that the Dolphins wouldn’t recognize them. Because the Dolphins were susceptible to nickel blitzes, Pettine had drawn up a new one. For a name, he had chosen Nicky Read Tracy. Afterward, Kyle Wilson, who had overcome his freshman falterings to become a solid pro at the nickel, told me to have faith in him for “your” call because he’d been working on his blitzing technique, and “I really want a sack!” To have a call named after you, I saw, made you feel more invested, responsible for it.

  At Wednesday’s practice, Tannenbaum was grave, still upset about the Giants game, upset about his quarterback and his offensive coordinator. The GM considered the loss “a microcosm of the season. We were the better team and four or five plays cost us the game. Some of it was coaching. Something’s not working between Brian and Mark. Mark’s getting worse.”

  DT looked at the ragged practice film and saw “little hangover, little malaise. You got to fight it or you’ll get knocked off the following Sunday.”

  Late in the afternoon, I watched film with Revis and Cromartie. Still with us in the linebackers’ room was a small Christmas tree spangled with lights, and beside it sat Posey, himself a little lit up just by being there. Revis didn’t think the Dolphins had significantly changed their approach since the first time the two teams had played, in October, so he left pretty quickly and Cro soon followed. Posey stayed on.

  For Posey, finishing college in Ohio and coming to the Jets was, he said, “like the Indians leave the tribe and go to the woods and spend a couple of weeks out there in the wild with all the skills you’ve learned, and you come back with a bear. I definitely caught a bear this year and I am tired. But I love it here in this building.”

  Innocent as he might seem to the others, Posey had seen his share of life. At Ohio University, he had majored in health-service administration so that after football he could care for the sick and also so that he could, in retrospect, better understand his father. His father had been a heroin addict; he’d contracted HIV from a dirty needle and died in California when Posey was ten. “Crazy,” he said. “Really crazy. You know what it’s like, being the son of a guy who had AIDS? That word speaks. People look at you differently.” But not on a football team. His mother, Julie, moved the family from California to a poor neighborhood in Cincinnati when Posey was four. When he was older, he tested into Saint Xavier High School—“It’s the Harvard!” he said. The all-boys predominantly white Catholic prep school was “too much of a culture shock for me. Poor kid in the neighborhood doing his thing in the streets. Too much of a jump.” So Posey left for La Salle, another Catholic high school. He kept Saint Xavier in mind: “Seeing those rich kids with their dads. I didn’t have one. It motivated me.”

  Football, he said, “has been my father in life. Not exactly each coach, but football has replaced my father. It’s taught me to be disciplined in whatever I do, be tough, be physical, be mentally tough. It taught me what is a man, because there are so many men within it. You decipher who is a good man and who puts on a front. Football is my father.” He mentioned his respect for Brandon Moore and for Revis and Cro and Scott and DT and then he began talking about Jim Leonhard. He admired Leonhard for being “a walk-on at Wisconsin, wasn’t drafted, defies the odds at five eight, a buck ninety-eight with wet nickels in his pocket. It’s perseverance that makes him play ball with the best of them. You lose Jimmy Leonhard, you lose the confidence in the back end.”

  Posey had come to feel “appreciative” of his father. Although he never really kne
w him, he knew what his father’s life had been like, and so “what he did, I did the other. I had a negative example.” That was why the rebuke the Jets had given Posey, cutting him, in part because he seemed to be enjoying the nightlife too much, had so affected him. He feared he was throwing away what he most wanted out of the world for the sake of pleasures that meant nothing to him.

  Later, Posey and I got a copy of the movie Undefeated and watched it in a meeting room. It was about a group of Memphis high-school football players whom Posey described as “hood as hell, all hooded up.” The film’s premise was that football doesn’t build character; it reveals it. A kid in the movie had a pet turtle, and Posey said, “In a second life I’d be a tortoise.” I asked him why. “They live a hundred and fifty years!” But, I said, they also live in shells. “We all live in shells, Nicky.”

  My own childhood had some similarities to Posey’s—single mother, little money—and I told him about it, told him also about how, as I was walking in from a practice one day, Ryan had asked me about my father, who had suffered from such severe mental illness that he’d wander the streets before another stay in the wards. I rarely saw my father, and when I did, I was always afraid of what he might do. That day, Ryan wanted to know if this had made me nervous about having children of my own. Few people I knew well had ever taken this subject up with me, but in football, so many of the players came from troubled families that Ryan was used to having such conversations. And, as Sutton once said, Ryan was fundamentally “kind and generous”—he concerned himself with the aspects of life that were difficult for other people. I said to Ryan that conceiving children had made me nervous both because I didn’t know what I might pass on and because I had no firsthand knowledge about what a good father did day after day. After relating all this to Posey, I told him how fine a thing I thought it would have been to be a part of a football team when I was young.

  The last of the regular-season game weeks passed the most quickly. The Jets could still make the playoffs if they won and if several other games went their way. They yet had something to play for. “Good plan, really good plan,” Schotty told the quarterbacks on Thursday. “Just got to execute third-down completions, stay manageable.” He looked at Sanchez. “And just so you know, couple of guys went to Rex about what happened with Tone in the meeting. And so Rex is meeting with him. You should be prepared to play with him or without him.” In a players-only meeting, there had been a spat between Holmes and Sanchez, the sort of thing that “happens,” as Ryan later said.

  At practice, Eric Smith was unable to run and Brodney Pool received a new nickname. Ryan was calling him Ole One Eye. During the afternoon defensive-backs’ meeting, Lankster and Trufant were called to diagram plays at the board by DT. They did well. In those small triumphant moments, everybody could tell what a sentimentalist DT was underneath the coat of mail. It shone all over him.

  To the last Friday-morning meeting Schotty wore a battered ball cap, a rumpled sweat suit, sneakers, graying socks, and a “positive energy” band on each wrist. Behind the huge tankard that held his energy drink, he looked small. He had ink all over his hands and creases all over his face. The man had essentially eliminated sleep. Of the Dolphins he said, “They have absolutely nothing to lose. This is playtime for them. They can do whatever they want.” They looked at some Miami film, and in reference to a woofing defender on the screen, Schotty said dryly, “I love it when a guy makes a tackle and then feels a need to tell everybody all about it.”

  Sanchez was nodding enthusiastically, “He says, ‘Excuse me, gentlemen! Everyone! Did you notice that it was I who made that fine tackle!’ ”

  On the field, when the offense suddenly shifted to a no-huddle, hurry-up mode, Revis quickly lined up the whole secondary and then broke up a pass play. He was, as someone observed, “better than a movie.”

  During the defensive linemen’s last Friday-practice buckboard competition Pitoitua became distracted by an insect that had alighted on the football and lost his round without moving his hands. Then, in the finals, Wilkerson finally defeated Po’uha; his hands leaped from ground to board. Then the rookie toured the field declaring himself the new champ, and was undaunted when Po’uha claimed to have been bored into defeat by having had so many consecutive victories. I could see, in the moment, how I’d always remember both of them.

  Eric Smith remained in such pain that, to kneel, he had to place his helmet on the ground, clamp a hand to it, and lower himself.

  Along with the disappointment of how the last games had gone, there was a feeling of unraveling. I asked Wayne Hunter if I was seeing an unusual season. “This is the way it is,” he said. “Nothing out of the ordinary.” He compared all football seasons to roller-coaster rides. This year, he said, things were especially volatile—“Nothing seems cohesive, in sync. I was with the Seahawks for three years,” he said. “We went to the Super Bowl. But we weren’t as aggressive or as passionate. This is the perfect team for passion and aggression. Some teams have passion, but it’s not as authentic as it is with Rex. He’s pure passion.”

  In Miami on the New Year’s Eve Saturday night, the team hotel hallways were crowded with revelers. At the quarterbacks’ meeting, Schotty didn’t require a copy of the call sheet as Sanchez read from it. Schotty lived the plays. He also now drank strong coffee at 8:00 p.m. Sanchez, wearing a white sports jacket, a black T-shirt, and gray linen trousers, was teased for affecting Miami Vice clothes. On the whiteboard was written, “Kevin drinks his own pee.” Sometimes Sanchez gave you the feeling that he was an old-souled guy watching some other goofier version of himself do puerile things just for the fun of seeing how they hit everyone. For unknown reasons, several portable IV machines were lined up against the meeting-room wall. Property of Brunell, it was suggested. The next day, Bru, the classy old pro, who’d been in the league since 1993, would dress for an NFL game for the last time.

  You could hear the sound of exploding New Year’s firecrackers somewhere outside as Pettine told the defense, “Tomorrow has the makings of a very emotional day.” He said he suspected all the games tomorrow would break the way the Jets wanted.

  The last Sunday was instead yet another day to regret. I stood on the sideline, and when the offense scored the game’s first touchdown to take a 7–3 lead, you could feel the defensive spirits rise. Soon the Jets were back to punting, and after one of his kicks traveled only twenty-two yards, TJ Conley was disconsolate. “Don’t worry, TJ,” said Ben Kotwica, a realist. “You’ll have many more chances.” Alas, one reason for this was the offensive line’s lack of harmony; there were many false starts. When the offense was flagged for their fourth, Marcus Dixon got up and told himself, “Better walk around.” Then the offense was called for a fifth. Just before the half, Sanchez threw an interception to Randy Starks, a three-hundred-pound defensive lineman, and a Dolphin field goal made the score 10–6, Jets. A lineman making a pick was rare to see. Schottenheimer spent much of the break telling the offense, “The penalties have to stop.”

  Late in the third quarter, the Dolphins began a twenty-one play, ninety-four-yard touchdown drive that consumed more than twelve minutes of playing time and that felt to those on the sidelines like the embodiment of what the season had come down to. All year, the pattern was that the defense would hold off trouble for a long while and then at last that retardant would give way to the burn. It was 13–10, Dolphins. Then Starks made another interception, leading to a field goal and utter disbelief on the Jets sideline. Why did these things happen to Sanchez? With three minutes left, and the Jets behind 16–10, Sanchez drove his offense to the Miami ten. Holmes had still not made a catch. He had glided through the game in what looked like a trance of personal remove. Maybe now he would come through and redeem himself. He had never gone through an NFL game without making a catch. Great players, Ryan and Tannenbaum both liked to say, made big plays in big moments. “We’re gonna win!” shouted a coach.

  Sanchez threw his third pick. Quickly came a Dolphin
field goal and it was 19–10. Miami won 19–17. The Jets would lead the NFL in opponent points scored off their turnovers. Afterward, Callahan reflected on the killing sequence of plays. “That late drive in Miami,” he said, “typified our season. We’re coming down the field. There’s hope. There’s energy. We’re rolling. We’re gonna beat the Dolphins, end the season on a positive note, and then doom! Death! Again! When you live this life, the highs are higher and the lows are lower. They are low.” That night when he finally reached his home, Callahan poured himself a tumbler of Jack Daniel’s and sat in silence for a long time. “I was numb and number.” He would leave the Jets to become offensive coordinator of the Dallas Cowboys.

  All manner of strange things happen in football huddles. Players told of spotting enormous bugs in the grass, of players puking, of players saying they couldn’t feel their asses after absorbing big hits. Nobody had ever before seen a player evicted from the huddle by the other players, however, and when, in the waning fourth-quarter moments, this had happened to Holmes, it took a moment to register that the linemen were sending him off. He sat by himself on the bench, head up. Looking over at him, a lineman said, “He’s a selfish pussy and it should have been recognized a long time ago.” The only reason I saw all this was that it happened right in front of me. There were so many people on the sideline, each absorbed in his own responsibilities.

  In the locker room Ryan praised those who had played “not just hurt but injured.” He asked the players to take a good look inward. “Did you give everything you had? Are you a good teammate? That,” he emphasized, “should be the easiest thing.” Then he told the press, to whom he’d promised a Super Bowl many months ago, “I’m not a loser.” Revis said later he found the whole thing dismaying, most of all because this was the first time in his Jets career the players didn’t stick together as a team. “One article gets out. Santonio says the linemen need to block. That was our season. The linemen bark back. It happens again. Then it starts with Mark and Tone and we couldn’t ever get out of it. You can’t be negative. Come together. Be supportive.”