The training-camp days had scarcely any downtime scheduled, and what there was sometimes resulted in antics that were sophomoric at best. A player would open his playbook and encounter a cardboard dildo inscribed “I’ve missed you.” Bumper-sticker raids were carried out in the parking lot and vehicles plastered with messages like “I Stop for Gay Bars” and “I Like Gay Porn,” adornments that sometimes weren’t discovered (and removed) for days. It was the sort of thing that so many people I knew expected of football players. Pettine once asked me if I considered football people to be the worst homophobes I’d ever met. I told him my theory on the subject, and he nodded and said that football culture was homophobic but that when gay players began identifying themselves as such, they’d be accepted and the sport would lurch forward.
So much that went on in August was about achieving group closeness. Because Garrett McIntyre had played in Canada after his college career at Fresno State, people at first thought he was Canadian and that his name was McIntosh. Even when his biography was clarified, he continued to be known in the defensive room as O Canada, just as Matthias Berning, who really was from Duisburg, was called the German. Gradually it became clear that McIntyre had, as they said, “the good awareness,” and he was also tough and physical. As he proved himself to be one of them, O Canada fell away and he became Mac. Berning, not quite as good a player, remained a foreign element, the German.
When the players had a night off coming up, which was rarely, you could hear them talking with excitement about Manhattan, the trendy meatpacking-district dance clubs, the upscale hotel bars. The team’s staff did what they could to keep the players informed about and safe from the trouble that could find them in the big town, even providing a telephone number for no-questions-asked transportation home at any hour. And every day, there walked Burress, living proof of how badly a night out could go. Still, for them, young men of means posted to the tranquil Jersey suburbs, the city loomed out there, glimmering and dangerous.
And then there was Revis. Usually he went home and slept. One night an uncle of his, former All-Pro lineman Sean Gilbert, went with him to a movie. Nobody recognized either of them.
The defensive coaches had different kinds of leisure dreams. A huge Powerball jackpot led each of the men to speculate what he’d do if he won that much cash. O’Neil would rent out a resort and take all his friends. Not DT. “I’d be long gone,” he said. “None of you would ever see me again. You’d never be able to find me. I’d be somewhere in Africa, where I’d blend in. I’d put a bone in my nose and a big earring!”
O’Neil said, “But what if I have a question about press coverage?”
“All of my materials would be right here for you!” DT told him.
Nobody believed a word of this. DT was the sort of coach who printed up T-shirts for his players that said “Keep Yo’ Eyes on Yo’ Work.”
DT, DT, DT—there was nobody quite like DT. Before a rookie and second-year defensive-backs meeting, DT was teasing me about how football was turning me into a negligent father. “Your child won’t remember you,” he said.
“You sound like a man speaking from experience,” I told him.
“That’s it!” he cried. Then he faced the seven corners and safeties in the room and continued working the theme. “Do what I tell you, I’m like your daddy!” he said. “I got seven kids! Maybe soon only six.” Then he looked at a baby-faced cornerback and suddenly became literal. “How many kids you got? Three?”
“Just one, Coach.”
“That was my way of finding out!”
“I know it, Coach.”
One of the seven young defensive backs was Julian Posey, the undrafted free agent for whom the honeymoon had indeed ended as soon as he’d signed on with the Jets. In the meetings DT gave him constant corrective advice, and it was the same on the practice field. “Son, stop fucking holding,” he told Posey. “You develop bad habits, you’ll bring them to the game, and we can’t have that. Use your eyes and your feet.” Whenever DT rebuked him, Posey’s huge, round eyes would get big as soup bowls, and he’d nod furiously at everything, make affirmative sounds, affirmative notations. Sometimes in the face of all that, DT would have to turn away so Posey wouldn’t see him smiling, occasionally even shaking with laughter. Recovered, DT’d growl, “Okay! Get your minds right. Don’t be looking at your damn phones. You all need to improve.”
Even as a coach, DT remained a cornerback. He was tough and charismatic, yet he was also a loner who was very comfortable on his own in a far corner of a bar, sipping a drink and thinking his DT thoughts. To the players, he was what they wanted out of a football coach. “DT, I love him to the bottom of my heart,” said Revis. “He’s gonna tell you the honest truth. He bites his tongue for nothing. He’ll say, ‘I’m fifty-five, why lie? Did it in the past, but why?’ ”
Standing in front of a roomful of rookie defensive backs, the large cross hanging from his neck, DT would slip into ministerial elocution: “Playing pro football is harder than anything you’ll do in your life. You are playing to stay in the NFL. You all ought to die trying to get it. You know what Shannon Sharpe said when he was an undrafted rookie free agent out of Savannah State? ‘Me not making it is not an option.’ That’s you. If you’re not gonna commit to it, don’t play. Because of the sacrifice you make to play, I hurt every day when I get up in the morning. It’s from this game.” He paused and looked out at them. “That’s my first speech. My next one will be a Come-to-Jesus. As far as you’re concerned, I’m one of His disciples.”
Suddenly we were two and a half weeks into camp and it was time for the first exhibition game, a trip to Houston to play the Texans. Ryan gathered the team after the last practice and told them all to wear sweatpants on the plane and be on time for the team bus, “because we won’t wait for you unless you’re a really good player, and if you’re not sure if you’re a really good player, you’re not.”
At the Florham Park field house, TSA officials set up and supervised a security screening checkpoint: players and staff walked through and then boarded buses that drove, with a police escort, directly into a hangar at Newark Liberty International Airport, where they boarded their charter. The players and coaches got on first, and then, once they were settled. everyone else followed. Sutton had warned me that if I brought my playbook with me, I shouldn’t leave it in my hotel room because “they have a way of disappearing.” The fine for losing your playbook was nine thousand dollars, and the shame far more expensive. On the flight, I sat beside one of the Jets security men, a former New York police department organized-crime task-force member who told stories of setting up fake chop shops to bust Mafia figures. “Hey, Carmine! Next time, don’t forget the fucking cannoli!” they’d yell at the mobsters once they had everything on tape.
During the flight, food was served more or less constantly. Chips, cheese, fruit, and pretzels were waiting on our seats, and then came burgers; chicken fingers; beef fillets; grilled chicken; more chips, cheese, and crackers; a snack tray teeming with everything from chocolate to Slim Jims; trail mix; a final chips reprise; and a steady supply of Gatorade and water to wash it all down.
In Houston, a group of hotel ballrooms was reserved for the unit and team meetings. Everyone took his seat, as always, in a positional cluster. Standing before his team, Ryan, so mellow through all the camp afternoons, began speaking in a sudden rush of intensity that I was unprepared for. It was as though, like an actor, he was suddenly in character. Glaring out at the room, he said that not everyone would make the Jets or the NFL, but they had better fucking do their best to. Their job was to beat Houston’s ass and make his and Tannenbaum’s decisions difficult. It was crucial that they score a lot of points to serve notice, because the rest of the league would be watching.
At breakfast on the morning of the game, some of the coaches were discussing the early days of steroids, how bad some players had smelled when they sweated. It was understood that the league had mostly moved on from the juice to huma
n growth hormone and that some number of players were probably taking a lot of HGH to aid their recovery from injuries and help them stay on the field. Across the league, such was the supposed prevalence of HGH that when you heard of a player recovering from a severe injury in no time or when a hard-hitting career lasted well beyond the usual duration, it was impossible not to wonder if He Got Healthy because He Got Help. But who on the Jets might be doing it was only a matter of speculation. Around the facility, where the Purell stations were plentiful, the training staff urged the players to put only safe, approved substances into their bodies, but the players weren’t telling the trainers anything about their experiences with the darker aspects of football medication. The coaches occasionally had their suspicions; they assumed the players discussed HGH among themselves behind closed doors, but the players never brought it up with the coaches.
At the stadium that night, I watched the game from the coaching booth, where Pettine called the defensive plays with O’Neil and Brian Smith on hand to assist him. The booth was up on a suite-level concourse, high above the field. Pettine liked being in the booth for its lack of distraction; there he could be sealed off from the sounds and the emotion he’d experience if he stood on the sideline. Schottenheimer preferred to call the offensive plays from the sideline—he wanted to feel the currents of the game. Mike Devlin and Lance Taylor from the offense were always up high to provide Schotty with a longer view. Scott Cohen, Tannenbaum’s efficient, observant deputy, was also there serving as the team spotter, calling out the Texans’ personnel groups so the Jets could counter if they wished to. Everyone wore a headset. Offense and defense each had an open channel for its own unit and a second, private channel the coordinator could switch to for conversations with individual assistants. Ryan was on both the offensive- and defensive-group channels. There were also telephone lines connecting the field and the coaching box. If the telephone receiver was picked up on one end, it rang on the other. Should Pettine or Devlin up in the box want to talk with a player after he came off the field, he’d tell whoever was monitoring the bench telephone to send word. The other tools of their in-game work were sheaves of statistical charts and an abundance of colored pens and energy beverages. A video assistant provided intermittent still photographs of the game.
Pettine made his calls by radioing them down to DT, who relayed them out to the inside “Mike” linebacker—David Harris when the starters were in. (Harris, like Sanchez, had a microphone inside his helmet.) Before and after calling the plays, Pettine carried on a conversation with Ryan down on the field. Sometimes he switched channels or picked up a telephone with a sideline connection and spoke with other coaches and occasionally even players. Most of what was said related to mistakes. What was most impressive was how quickly Pettine saw the game. The Texans would come to the line: “Alert Woody Boot,” the coordinator would cry, and sure enough the backs crossed, and the Texans quarterback sprinted out opposite the blocking flow and flipped a pass to the back. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Pettine would cry when a long gain ensued, and then he was past it. The linebacker’s responsibility was edge containment, either to collision the back or drop off and cover him, but once, then twice, neither of those things happened. The third time the Texans’ Woody Boot worked against the Jets, Pettine waited until the players came off the field and then called down by telephone for outside linebacker Jamaal Westerman. When Westerman got on the line, Pettine told him he was better than that.
Mostly the offensive and defensive coaches in the booth ignored each other, concentrating on their jobs. When the former Arizona Cardinal kicker Neil Rackers lined up to attempt a fifty-yard field goal for Houston, Pettine predicted he’d miss because “he’s got some Cardinal in him.” Rackers made the kick, and Devlin, who’d played for Arizona as well as Buffalo, said, “Hey, Pet, what do you mean, he’s got Cardinal in him?”
“Dev,” said Pettine. “You’ve got way more Bill than Cardinal in you.”
After all the months of waiting for live action, the game went rapidly past, a 20–16 Jets loss. When late in the game the defense finally stopped the Woody Boot, Pettine cried, “Hey!,” and Lance Taylor, his eyes still on the field, said quietly, “Halftime adjustments.”
Before I took my first football road trip, I imagined them as adventures for the players, youthful forays for small-town boys to exciting new American places. That was the way it often was for baseball players because they traveled so often and remained in each city they played in for several days. In football, road games were modern business trips, and the stays were brief and tightly scheduled. With all of the meetings and curfews, few of the players saw anything of Texas except the hotel and the stadium, where the sudden encounter with Houston summer air after all the time indoors came as a thick, hot welcome to NFL competition. When games ended, no matter how late, the Jets always flew home through the night. After the Houston game, we landed back in New Jersey shortly before dawn. Rob Turner had broken his ankle during the game, and as he crutched his way off the airplane, you could tell how important to him it was to do it without assistance, and that such was expected of him.
Back at the facility, the defensive coaches brewed coffee and went to work, watching the game film. What they saw was sloppy, so sloppy that there was the same line repeated: “An NFL player’s got to make that tackle.” The coaches invoked the league so many times—“Now, that’s an NFL throw!”—that with a little change in the wording, they could have been a group of Princeton admissions officers: “He’s certainly good, but he’s not Princeton good!” Ellis Lankster had played so fiercely he’d become Lancaster to all because, said Pettine, “He’s been great since Westy malapropped him.” Posey—now known as Buster, because every rookie needed to be known by something other than his given name—had been singed by Houston receivers. The consensus was that the cornerback needed a year on the practice squad to get NFL tough. Posey himself said later that the most shocking part of the experience for him was that when the long-imagined, long-awaited, long-rehearsed-for first NFL game finally came, there was no time to think, only react.
The coaches assessed as a unit the things they’d done well and the things they’d done poorly, then sent the two columns of information on to Ryan and Tannenbaum for the after-action meeting they held with their top assistants the day following every game. Then Pettine instructed his staff to do what they could to help the offense. “We’ll wear ankle weights, let them get some success this week,” he said. “It’s all about the team.”
Eight
DIME SPIKE 1 (VEGAS)
Life is to be lived, not controlled.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
A week later the Jets played the Cincinnati Bengals in MetLife Stadium, the neon coliseum in the New Jersey Meadowlands that the Jets shared with the New York Giants. The night before every home game, the Jets checked in to the team hotel near the stadium. The offense had been sluggish in the barbecue air of Houston, and they had remained that way all week in practice. At the hotel, in the meeting room the defense used the night before every game, Pettine discussed the Bengals and then offered some thoughts on the Jets offense, as if to emphasize that the offense should not become a second adversary. “There are some issues over there,” he said. “It’ll take them a while to work some things through. Let’s be the rock-solid foundation that this team rests its Super Bowl hopes on.”
Yet it wasn’t in the defense’s nature to nurture anybody. The defense players excelled because they aspired to hurt you “right in the feelings,” as DT put it. All week during practice they were as vehement, scowling, and ornery as ever, full of feistiness, sending backs and receivers sprawling in shorts-only drills; taunting Sanchez when, under pressure, he made wildly inaccurate throws by yelling, literally, “Ha, ha, ha, ha”; talking relentless smack. You could see it all getting to the veteran receivers, who were used to a more even competition. “I’m not saying anything,” Derrick Mason told Sanchez after a play went terribly wrong
. “I just want to know, what did you see?”
“That defense is pretty good,” Greg McElroy said to Tannenbaum along the practice sidelines.
“Better than Auburn?” was the GM’s reply. Welcome to the big leagues, son.
No players on the offense would have enjoyed the thought that the defense was spending preparation time talking about them. During the Texans game up in the coaching booth, you could feel the resentments between the offensive and defensive coaches who were there together. In the elevator down to the locker room, the coaches said nothing, and the tense lack of conversation spoke all. The defense seemed to want to have things both ways, enjoying its practice-field dominance over the offense and yet growing impatient with the offense for struggling. To be rivals with shared ambitions was a delicate proposition.
The offense played better against Cincinnati in a 27–7 win. When the team did well in a preseason exhibition, the coaches didn’t spend time afterward thinking over the game. In the Jets weight room, a countdown clock displayed, to the second, how much time there was until the regular season began; the Cowboys were the prize the players’ and coaches’ eyes were on. Most of them said they thought of preseason games as “glorified practices.”
Not BT, who questioned the minuses on his grade sheet. BT’s grade sheets were rarely without a couple of WTF comments, like “Be more disruptive” or “Fake it, dummy” or “Release more violently,” because of Pettine’s belief that players had to be pushed and pushed or they’d regress; that the better they practiced, the better they played; that it was crucial for the older players to show the younger ones that a high daily standard was necessary if they wanted to play well on an NFL Sunday. For all his outrage, BT was the only player who left his grade sheets behind after meetings so that anybody could look at them.
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