Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  The quiet bus, then the quiet airplane. Beside me, Brendan Prophett was watching the comedy Old School on his laptop. The laptop had only one headphone jack. He offered me one of his earbuds “because everybody needs a little laughter after a day like this.” Then there was the quiet ride to the facility parking lot, where people fled, some car tires screeching, toward the exit. Several of the defensive coaches went out together for a beer, and I accompanied them. The defense had again finished in the top five in the NFL. They were proud of this. But winning was what they really cared about. It was now very late. O’Neil, not drunk but not wanting the season to end, returned to with me to Pettine and Smitty’s house, and we all went to sleep. Early in the morning, O’Neil awakened, drove home, and climbed into his own bed beside his wife, Stacy, where his three-year-old son, Danny, confronted him. “Hey! You’re in my spot!” said the boy. O’Neil told his son, “It’s the off-season. I’m home now.”

  PART III

  After

  Fourteen

  REX IN WINTER

  I attended the burial of all my rosy feelings.

  —A. R. Ammons, “Transaction”

  At the final team meeting on Monday, Ryan, in a vast cowl of hooded sweatshirt, raged against the dying of the light, telling his players that if they could force themselves to watch the playoffs they would see the Jets had more talent than some of those still competing, “but we didn’t have as much of a team.” Blaming himself for misunderstanding the levels of group tension, he talked about the corrosive effects of “selfishness,” the word he had so often used to describe opponents. His voice cracked as he declared, “I will get better. Will you?” Overcome, he left in tears. After a full year with the team, I suddenly found myself thinking back across all the strenuous sixteen-hour days that go into the sixteen weeks of a football season. Almost every person in that room resembled a man whose fiancée has broken up with him without warning. They were limping, red-eyed, and spent.

  Then a walk across the hall, past the many dispensers of Purell along the wall, to see Pettine say good-bye to his room. He was brief. He looked out on one of the NFL’s five best defenses and told the players, “It’s been a rough year physically, mentally, emotionally. Take some time to enjoy your families, watch the playoffs, and get pissed off knowing we should be there. We played our asses off. We were put in some ridiculous situations. Yesterday typified the year.”

  Sutton and others had warned me at the beginning that the end for a good team that didn’t win the Super Bowl was inevitably so abrupt, the season would seem to have vaporized. Now, in the still shocking moment, DT took the opportunity to offer his defensive backs one last life lesson, emphasizing his strong feelings about how to unite a team. His long view was that in football, the vanishing point was always near. For that reason you had to be candid. “When you play a sport by yourself, tennis, boxing, that’s you,” he said. “But when you play a team sport you rely on other people. At the end you have to grab the person you count on and hold them to the standard you hold yourself to. Champions hold people accountable to a championship standard. It’s hard to do. Winning the Super Bowl will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life because everybody wants the same prize.” DT had never won the Super Bowl as a player or a coach. The previous September, like Ryan and the others, he’d thought this might well be the year.

  It was an unnerving time. Nobody on the Jets had expected to lose and certainly not amid so much discontent. On a Rex Ryan team, mutual goodwill was supposed to be a given. Before the Miami game Bart Scott had cleaned out his locker in dismay. The others now did the same job, filling up garbage bags and cardboard boxes with their belongings and carrying them out to their pickups and SUVs in the parking lot. Holmes was escorted from the locker room by a team official; that way nobody would give him too hard a time. To Holmes, the problem was that Schotty had treated his players like “robots.” As he saw it, “Schotty gave us no freedom to have fun on the football field.”

  I had become accustomed to the exaggerated moments of strong feeling that pervaded football, the way it concentrated daily experience. Because there were few guaranteed contracts in the sport, all teams were annual teardowns, and with the arrival of the year’s last meetings, some of the players had the sudden, chastened feeling that they were orphans. Every player I spoke with said he hoped the Jets would want him back. Posey planned to work out all winter and maybe also take a songwriting course. “I rhyme from time to time,” he explained.

  In fact, Posey would become a member of the Dolphins practice squad. In Florida he rented a furnished apartment and then proceeded to move the couch, tables, and chairs out of the living room so that at night, after practice, he could perfect his technique at home. The young cornerback could feel himself getting better, he said, and his new team could see it. Toward the end of the season, the Dolphins would promote him to the game-day roster. Happy as Posey was in Miami, he found his time with the Jets stayed present with him. “I went to Defensive University,” he said. DT, Revis, and Cro had been “my professors” who showed him the attitude and the approach necessary to successfully compete in the NFL.

  Lankster was going to receive an award from a foundation that helped stutterers. Most people on the team had no idea that he had a stutter. As a kid, he said, “I was laughed at a lot. It was funny. I never let it get to me. I never had a fight. Yes, sir, I can read aloud without stuttering. I can rap a song without stuttering.” Upstairs in the management offices, Lankster and the others all knew, changes were already in motion. Lankster wasn’t going to sweat it. There was a quality of inner peace to him that, if combined with aggression, was ideal in a football player.

  Tannenbaum sprang into action. How had this happened? One of the GM’s many praiseworthy qualities was his desire to bridge the usually independent football worlds of upstairs and downstairs. Accordingly, he now met nonstop with veteran players, catching them before they left town, showing them a calm, sympathetic face but inside so angry and upset, so driven with vengeful purpose to make it all better, he could think of nothing else. In the hallways, people asked him questions about tangential matters and he’d say, “I haven’t given it a moment’s thought.”

  The search for control of things gone completely out of control possessed him: “We fell short—I fell short. Now I could have real impact for the first time.” He upbraided himself for the ways the team’s lack of depth at positions like center and safety had cost it. The moments of sectarian locker-room strife had been unexpected with Ryan at the lead. But they too would be addressed. The GM also thought that “maybe some complacency set in.”

  The final event of the season was an after-action postmortem during which the team’s senior coaching and personnel people sat in the defensive coaching staff’s film room and evaluated the roster one last time. Everybody in the room was coughing and sneezing. They discussed the veteran lineman with “old-man knees” and the younger lineman who “will go to Burger King and then come and eat salad in front of us.” Tannenbaum, hearing that, said, “We’re not asking you to be autobiographical, Rex!” When Pettine opined that Wilkerson had exceeded expectations, Tannenbaum zapped him too: “Of all people to say he exceeded expectations, your college report had him as Deacon Jones!” The coaches considered Marcus Dixon to be the most improved member of the defense. He’d been given the team’s award for character. By the following September, Dixon would be on the street.

  Moving on to the linebackers, the staff compared Bellore to Mike Smith, which led to the telling again, by Ryan, of the “you won’t be able to cut him” story, with Smitty smiling and looking at the floor. “Thank God we got him,” said Bradway of Bellore. Nobody spoke critically of Bart Scott. The only villain there was change, said Tannenbaum. It was now a league for linebackers who could thrive in pass coverage. Scott had achieved everything in life by believing in himself. How did a man like that adapt?

  Now came the defensive backs. The coaches and others affirmed thei
r love for Ellis Lankster, of how he expressed the raw, wild pleasure they all took in the game. They talked also of the fascinating way Cromartie could be shaken when what he’d seen on tape didn’t appear before him on the field. They wanted Leonhard to know how much they prized him. What more was there to say about Revis? Inevitably, there was more. He had revealed he was studying his own hamstrings, experimenting with weight loss to see if it helped his speed and health. Trufant too had shed a few pounds. “One hundred and sixty pounds and watch him run into two huge wedge-type guys and make a tackle,” said Westhoff, shaking his head at the valor of it all.

  The defense finished, and it was the offense’s turn. It was a dreary conversation. The coaches were people who got into the profession because they were optimists, celebrators of the skills of others. The offense hadn’t been good enough and they all knew that Schottenheimer’s job and those of others were under the blade because of it. Still, there was no recrimination and no attempt to justify. Sanchez had abundant physical ability and competitive spirit, but the turnovers and the poor reactions under pressure were going to cost him his job unless he improved. Sanchez himself agreed. Cavanaugh had written out an evaluation and showed it to the quarterback, who hadn’t disputed a thing in it. That’s what made it so hard to assess Sanchez; lodged in every deficit there were virtues.

  And that was also at the foundation of football—what made the game so popular. Nothing was ever sure; anything could or couldn’t happen. Around the NFL, there was acknowledgment that a quarterback’s fourth year was perhaps his most critical, the bellwether season. Members of the Giants management had publicly criticized their slumping quarterback Eli Manning’s abilities during his fourth season, before it all came together for him and he rallied the team to a Super Bowl. As they contemplated Sanchez’s upcoming season four, the Jets still had hope that Sanchez was more than “just a guy,” that with improved focus he could excel.

  This was something Cavanaugh thought was certainly possible. The quarterbacks coach always emphasized how challenging it was to be an NFL quarterback. “Mark is young, he’s still right on pace with the greats,” he said later in the spring. “You need to be patient with quarterbacks, and it’s an impatient game today.” In Cavanaugh’s years as a player, in the 1980s, he said, nobody would have expected an NFL quarterback to master his position so quickly. People were always trying to defeat the inevitable cycles of football, but rarely could it be done. Cavanaugh had won a Super Bowl as the offensive coordinator with the Ravens, and later a division title; the next year he was fired.

  Since Sanchez had arrived in the NFL, people around the Jets facility had treated him protectively, emphasizing his virtues, posting that media-relations staffer by his locker whenever he gave interviews. All this reinforced an impression that Sanchez, though playing the leadership position, was still a student. Now they wanted him to grow up. The real question seemed to be how to direct his whimsical personality to advantage on a field. Sanchez, I knew, felt the responsibility of their expectations, and yet he was who he was.

  In the meeting, the urgent practical question had become how to accelerate the most important player’s maturity in time to save him. And save themselves; their careers were tied to his and if Sanchez remained an unfinished work, he would finish all of them. The solution seemed to be the classic one: the goad of competition. “We have to bring somebody else in,” said Ryan. Schottenheimer agreed. “Guys will come here. They see him, they see an opportunity.”

  And what to do about Holmes? “It’s not us you have to worry about,” Schotty told Tannenbaum and Ryan. “We’re grown men. We can roll our sleeves up. In this room we have soldiers. We’ll fight on. It’s the guys in the locker room we have to worry about. It’ll be del-i-cate.” Or maybe not. “People might have crowned him the villain but he’s not that type of guy,” Revis would say later about Holmes. “The frustration of the year was when you’re not winning. This was just an upsetting year for a lot of guys. When I’d talk to him every morning, he’d say, ‘All I want is a couple of touches, I want to make plays for the team.’ He wanted to make things happen.” The coaches all knew what Tannenbaum now said, that in the NFL you won with talent, and Holmes had rare talent.

  Tannenbaum took copious notes on a yellow legal pad. Then he went back to his office and reflected further on how organized chaos had lost its fragile balance. Among Parcells’s analects was the belief that “You are what your record says you are.” The Jets had been 8 and 8. The Giants, who’d finished at 9 and 7, were in the midst of a galvanizing late-season run that would end with them winning the Super Bowl. Many of the issues that afflicted the Jets had touched the Giants as well. An unpopular draft choice, rancor among players, rancor between coaches—they seemed to matter only when the team wasn’t winning. It wasn’t possible or necessary to change everything. You just had to fix the right things.

  With the meetings done, with the future uncertain, the coaches’ days now quieted. They were often alone in their offices, suspended in a state of reflection. “This time of year we have the realization of how challenging it is to get a group of people to truly believe in one objective,” Sutton said. “I’m not sure how you quantify what a unified team is, but when you have it, it’s electrifying—it pulsates through your whole organization. And when you don’t have it, it’s like carrying around a sack of bricks. There’s always something weighing on you and what happens is you get tired. All the things that came up at the end,” he went on. “They’re typically bubbling below the surface on most teams.”

  It was impossible not to think about how the year had treated Ryan. Bart Scott thought that “Rex was a little more distant, more disconnected.” The effect of that on the team was “we leaned too much on what we’d done before. We didn’t have a sense of urgency.” Had Ryan been distracted by sudden fame, had he misplaced his connection to what brought him fame in the first place? He was always a vibrant presence at practice and when running team meetings, but otherwise during the long football days, the meetings were rarely inflected by the head coach’s personality. Ryan himself freely admitted that he’d “lost” the team’s “pulse.” During the year, at times he’d seemed drifty to me; when he sat working alone in his office with his television tuned to the Discovery Channel to keep him company, I imagined him engaged in searchings of his own. It was also in those partially removed Ryan moments that I sensed people wished for more of him. Tannenbaum knew it. He was always pressing Ryan to help Carrier with the linemen, to visit more with Schottenheimer. But Ryan liked to let people perform their roles; hands-on supervision did not come naturally to him. Pettine’s careful opinion was “becoming a head coach changes every man. The good ones are those who can recover their former selves—recover what about them made them successful to begin with.” What did Ryan think? “Our season shows how hard it is to get there year in, year out, consistently,” he told me. It also showed the difficulty of getting the outside world to validate one’s own internal narrative.

  For the moment, the coaches were left with the losing. January was the restless time of year, when other teams played big games and the leaders of those teams that didn’t sat in their offices, working desultorily on the upcoming February Combine, but mostly waiting. Since every team save one was going to lose, some just more slowly than the others, NFL coaches should have been masters of losing. And in a way they were. They were all trying to control the uncontrollable, and losing was the inevitable result. They lost their sleep, they lost their pleasures, they lost their homes, they lost their cities, they lost their children’s childhoods, and they lost their marriages. And for all that, they also lost their players and their colleagues and their jobs. All they kept was the satisfaction that, while everyone out there in America was headed for defeat, they knew defeat and could stand it. In America, land of happy endings to feel-good films, this was the truer entertainment; to fail is human.

  Some of them now were going to be fired. There were times that season, as
I sat in the tense meeting rooms after the big losses, that I’d wanted to disappear into the fabric of my seat. No matter how much experience a person has with losing, he’ll find it hard to be observed in his adverse moments. That was the entire team, however, a shared disappointment. This was personal, out of mutual context. Accompanying people who were waiting to discover whether they still had jobs felt almost lascivious. I couldn’t bear to do it, so I got my own garbage bag and filled it up. As I was carrying the bag to my car, I ran into Devlin, who smiled and said, “Isn’t it a shitty feeling, cleaning out your locker?”

  I had been with the team for what everyone seemed to agree was an emblematic NFL season. “You saw how much goes into it,” Patrick Turner said. “The highs, the lows, the drama, the mental aspect, the cerebral aspect is really what you saw. It’s a grown man’s business at the end of the day. A grown man’s business. There’s nothing like it. It exposes you like nothing else.” In my year, they lost as many as they won, experienced a crushing finish, and had an abundance of the little autumnal moments of vision along the way. Revis would tell me, “You probably saw some things this year that were surprising to you, maybe even upsetting, but what you have to understand is what an emotional and passionate thing football is.” I saw all that, saw also that Joe Gibbs and Bill Callahan were right, that football was a game of process and the arrival could never be as meaningful as the approach.