Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Late in the afternoon, Cromartie and Revis watched film. Cromartie pointed out that the way the Baltimore running back Willis McGahee positioned his feet told you whether it would be a run or a pass. After Revis left, I asked Cromartie what he thought about before the snap. “To stay under control,” he said. “Slow yourself down. I don’t ever think about a receiver. There’s never a need to. If the technique is right, he can’t beat me.” On filmed play after play, he identified the route to come within an instant of the snap. After the season Cromartie would tell me he’d severely bruised his sternum in the Oakland game. “The entire year, it was hard to hit,” he said. “I shied away. You can’t breathe. You can’t lie on your side or your stomach. It was hard. It was straight hell. It was painful. I don’t wish it on anybody.”

  On Thursday, the loss had receded and everybody was suddenly feeling better, especially the linebackers. A linebacker named Eddie Jones had just been signed to the practice squad. Jones shaved his head in such a way that he closely resembled the intimidating appearance of the Jets Mike linebacker David Harris. Bart Scott said, “I wouldn’t let either of those guys within twenty-five yards of a school.” Westerman’s ear had somehow been sliced inside his helmet, an opportunity for him to peeve that “they don’t make Band-Aids for black people. Just another way the white man holds us down.” BT began making jokes about Megan Pettine, so Pettine told him he’d lost his privilege of deciding what time the outside linebackers’ meeting would begin. “I’m sorry, Michael,” BT said. Then he tried again. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pettine.” Soon the two of them were giving me advice on raising my own children. They said it was crucial to make my wife get up in the middle of the night when the baby cried. The way to do it, said Pettine, was to develop “a convincing snore.” BT suggested giving her “a direct order.” My thought was that I’d try, “Honey, would you do it? I’m so tired because these crazy football people keep such insane hours.” They liked that.

  Cro sat through the defensive meeting attached to a curative blood-flow-stimulating device the size of a small blast furnace. Afterward, at practice, he made two astonishing interceptions, which led to much commentary. “His arm looked like it came out of that tree he got up so high,” DT said. “Is he hurt? Is he hurt? Hell, yes! His feelings are hurt!” Cro, meanwhile, stalked the sidelines, windmilling his arms with intent.

  Baseball’s Boston Red Sox were completing a disastrous September collapse, and Ryan took note. He believed something was rotten in the state of Red Sox and the team should clean house. Several of the new Boston players obviously couldn’t handle the pressure of playing for a big-market team. That’s why, he said, he’d preferred Sanchez, coming out of USC, to Josh Freeman. Freeman was a Midwesterner. Sanchez had Hollywood glamour, would know how to handle New York.

  Later, Revis and I discussed the fact that because of film, football players knew better what they looked like as they did their jobs than any other professionals except possibly actors. Most people had ideas of their professional selves that rarely coincided with how others actually saw them. Football players had the chance to know exactly what they were. “You don’t think about being filmed,” Revis said. “You watch yourself get better and better and you can see that.” He was sweating copiously from wearing the several layers of sweat clothes over his football uniform. Throughout practice, nobody had caught a pass on him, as usual. He’d swarmed his receivers, bullying them from all sides, it seemed, like a cloud of insects tormenting a miserable heifer. I asked him why he wore so many clothes. “I want to be hot,” he said. “I want to fight through hard situations. Guys are so strong and fast in this game, you gotta prepare yourself for the worst. Playing football is a tough, hard life we have. There’s a lot of long days, a lot of repetition, a lot of perfectionists, a lot of people with high tolerance for pain. Then when your number’s higher on the scoreboard, it’s the best!” Revis practiced so energetically, people worried he might injure himself or wear himself down, taking years off his career. Revis had never needed any kind of surgery, and as for the overdoing it—without practicing the way he did, he said, he couldn’t play at the level he aspired to: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. No! It’s a perfect practice that makes perfect.”

  Carrier was looking forward to watching DeVito play the line after his poor performance against Oakland. For good veteran players like DeVito, a game like that often indicated a health problem. And indeed, before playing the Raiders, DeVito’s shoulder had been bothering him so much that for the first time, he had accepted a soothing injection. “We all have fallbacks,” Carrier said. “His is power. His shoulder will never be better because of what we do. So for him, it was his first time taking a needle. It bothered him, and mentally he wasn’t right. Now he’ll be better because he’s gone through it.” Some players, Carrier said, got a trial shot for the Wednesday practice, so they’d have the experience behind them before they got the needle for a game.

  At the Friday linebackers meeting, it was the job of a selected rookie to supply the veterans with outside refreshments. This time, the linebackers required fried chicken, and Nick Bellore arrived with several boxes from Popeyes and a contribution to the field of aphrodisiac studies: “I must have been hit on by six black ladies!” said the white linebacker. “ ‘Hey, where you going? You smell nice!’ ” Everybody cracked up. “That chicken!” Bart Scott cried.

  The game had completely changed in its relationship to race, and Westhoff had that in mind one day when he showed me his old yellow-and-black Wichita State helmet, from his college playing days in the late 1960s. His team had black players, and on the schedule were Southern schools that he said still didn’t have them. In 1969, Wichita State played at Arkansas, and Westhoff remembered that he wore the helmet every moment he was in the stadium because the Arkansas fans were hurling bottles and other missiles at the Wichita State team. Westhoff’s helmet was patched and looked rickety, a jalopy compared with the Humvees the players now used. “This piece of shit,” said Westhoff fondly. “A wonder we didn’t get killed.” Then he said, “It was a different time.”

  Sanchez threw poorly in Friday’s practice, annoying the defensive coaches, who continued to believe he was being babied by the organization. A problem for Sanchez against Baltimore was there’d be no Mangold again. It would be the rookie substitute Colin Baxter in the middle. Tannenbaum had claimed him off waivers a few weeks before.

  On the practice sideline, Bart Scott was excited about the game against his old team. He planned to mess with the Ravens by calling out signals from their own defense that were meaningless in the Jets scheme. Scott was going to be crucial in this game, Sutton thought. Ray Rice, the Ravens running back, was their best offensive player, and if the Jets could stop him, they’d win, because Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco was such a low-percentage passer.

  DT and I had begun a private after-Friday-practice crossbar-game competition that one of us—not him—had named the Main Event. This day I hit the bar from thirty yards twice before he did, which, combined with Cro’s injury, nearly exploded DT’s head, because I threw, he said, “the ugliest ball you ever saw.”

  Everyone was as loose as ever at the Saturday-morning meetings and walk-through, moving Leonhard to remark, “You’d never know that this is a very big game and that we lost last week. That’s not good or bad. Just the way it is.” What the safety said was true. Yesterday Eric Smith had made three interceptions in practice, a very rare event. Watching film of these three picks led the black players to rename him Smit-Dog and posit that if one cut Smith open, he’d be black inside. Mulling over the broader implications, Pettine said thoughtfully, “Might be the opposite of you, Westerman.”

  David Harris, man from Michigan, had just bought his parents a new house in Grand Rapids. His family had moved there in the 1960s because there was no work in their poverty-stricken part of Mississippi, whereas in Michigan, Harris said, “You could lose a job in the morning and find one in the afternoon.” Harris’s country-boy un
cle still grew okra and greens and made the moonshine that the coaches had enjoyed so much before the Jacksonville game. Among the Jets, Harris was considered Revis’s equal as a serious professional, the caller of the defensive signals and “a tackling machine,” as everyone always said. He’d just signed a lucrative new contract, and they all were happy for him, giving him an ovation in the defensive meeting room on the day it was publicly announced, though nobody ever knew how landing the big money would affect a player.

  After the walk-through, the team traveled to the Newark railroad station. The chartered Baltimore-bound train they would ride was six coaches long. At the quarterback meeting in the Baltimore hotel, I was awarded a rookie nickname by the players.

  “Hookworm?” I said in dismay upon hearing it. “Bookworm,” they yelled. And just for that, they shortened it to Worm.

  This settled, they began discussing that day’s Florida (Schotty’s alma mater) versus Alabama (McElroy’s) college game. At Florida, Schotty recalled with a wry smile, as the backup quarterback who stood on the sidelines during games, “I was the signalman. Everybody has a role.” Then he looked at Sanchez. “Say something,” he said. “Say something. We’ll run the ball all day long!” Because the Ravens played tight coverage, “squatting on the sticks” to prevent first downs, Schotty planned to move them back by throwing deep on the first play.

  When you were awaiting a Sunday-night game, the hours passed slowly, and Pettine had urged the players to go for walks rather than spend the day lying around their rooms “getting stale” watching football. Revis, with his sweatshirt hood on, moved so slowly through the hotel hallways, he seemed like an elderly druid with sore joints. Rev was saving it all for the game. In the locker room, Callahan brimmed with enthusiasm, eager for the game to begin, impatient to show that the loss of Mangold could be overcome.

  When at last the game started, the inexperienced center, Baxter, could not hold. Neither could Mulligan, the tight end who’d been inserted to provide extra blocking. On the Jets first offensive play, Sanchez faded to throw his deep pass, did not think uncle, did not sky the ball out-of-bounds, was sacked, and fumbled. The Ravens recovered and took it in for a touchdown. It was a violent way to begin, and the violence bore in on Sanchez again and again. The Ravens defensive players would confide in Jets coaches afterward that they thought some of the Jets offensive players had looked “scared” out there. Baltimore’s defense played with propulsive ferocity, pummeling through the Jets’ weakened line, cuffing Sanchez, jarring him, making him appear a small boy gone off to sea too young. He fumbled four times in the game and threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown—the dreaded pick-six. The Ravens defense would score three touchdowns.

  Where the visiting GM sat was at the discretion of the home team, and the Ravens gave Tannenbaum not a box to himself but a seat with the press, where he kept silent except to pound the table surface at every new adversity as all around him New York reporters reveled in the massacre.

  At halftime Schottenheimer was livid, threatened to bench the long-faced players in front of him. Mason, the former Raven, was equally angry and again railed at Schottenheimer about the play-calling.

  Lost amid the 34–17 disaster was how well the Jets defense played. Many of the things Pettine had imagined for his defense, they achieved. The Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco was held to 10 and 31 passing by Cromartie (who did play) and the others. In the second quarter, Flacco threw ten times and completed not one. DeVito and his fellow linemen limited Ray Rice to only 2.6 yards per carry. The Ravens offense scored only one touchdown. These were Pyrrhic victories; they seemed only to increase the defense’s frustration with the offense.

  Afterward, as Tannenbaum and Jets owner Woody Johnson greeted the team at the locker-room door, Callahan kept apologizing to them, his long face stricken, while across the room, Pettine looked like a gull who’d flown into a window. He was crushed. He hadn’t seen any of it coming, especially not the loss of the player he most depended on. During the first quarter, BT had fallen to the ground, his Achilles tendon torn, his season ended. Ryan consoled the team, told them things would improve, promised they’d see the Ravens again in the playoffs. Unlike most NFL coaches, Ryan urged his players to freely express themselves because, he said, they were “men,” and because he trusted in the reciprocating goodwill of those who were on his side. Thus, as Ryan tried during his press conference to explain why Sanchez was the man for his job, Holmes was telling other reporters that such a loss “starts up front with the big guys,” while Mason was describing “cracks” in the Jets’ sense of well-being. These were quickly forged opinions that, after the heated moment, might have been just as quickly disregarded. Instead they would gain a virulent traction within the team.

  It was a shaken contingent that walked through the Baltimore railroad station well after one in the morning. Limping down the steep platform stairs, shouldering into the train, they seemed attenuated, reduced by their recent experiences from what they’d been two weeks before when they were 2 and 0. I’d heard many songs about the railroad blues, and words from them kept coming into my mind on that late-night ride rolling back from Baltimore. Although the Jets’ humiliations had just been watched by millions on national television, I was their witness, and it’s hard to be witnessed when somebody just took your baby, when all your love’s in vain. When you ain’t had nothin’ but bad news, you got the crazy blues. So I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. Not that there was anything much to see as the silent train went north.

  Ten

  DISPATCHES FROM A LOSING STREAK

  I find the games you lose are the ones you can’t forget. Victories fade, but defeats bite their way into your heart and stick there.

  —William “Pudge” Heffelfinger, This Was Football

  Football people often talked of big losses feeling like deaths, and the requisite periods of mourning had to follow. Others—wives, outsiders—might expect (or dread) defeat, but football coaches never did. The conviction that they would find a way, no matter what, was part of what made them football coaches. The statistics and the clichés bore out this attitude. Well before Allie Sherman, the Giants’ inventive coach of the 1960s, had put it in so many words, NFL coaches were committed to the proposition that on any given Sunday, any team could win. The losses were excruciating because they always seemed to come as a surprise. The game had been successfully played and replayed so many times on paper before the spectacular high of kickoff that the disappointing realness was a steep dive. “You can remember every loss” is what Rex Ryan, perhaps the most optimistic man I have ever known, told me. “I can tell you what happened. I can’t do that with wins. Look at all the time you lost with your children. You never get it back. You have to win or it’s not worth it.”

  The morning after the return from Baltimore, many of the defensive coaches sat before the film and went directly to Kübler-Ross stage two—anger. They blamed Sanchez: not tough enough, not a leader, an “immature Californian.” They blamed Schottenheimer: he should have simplified the game for Sanchez. They blamed the officials: “How can you miss two guys moving before the snap?” They blamed shanked tackles, missed interceptions, deficient edge setting, poor alignment, Bart Scott’s declining speed, and less aggressive play, and they blamed the offense for not accepting enough counsel, for failing to score a touchdown across two games in two years when taking on “a system we have intimate knowledge of.” They even blamed Mike DeVito for not blaming anybody. “Does he ever get mad?” Pettine wanted to know. Most of all, they blamed themselves for putting their players in poor positions to succeed.

  Then they accepted and moved on. There was sympathy for Bill Callahan, who spent so much of his day working with reserves who “don’t belong in the NFL,” sympathy for BT, whose shredded Achilles could mean his career was over.

  And finally there was praise. Cromartie had played inspired, physical football. Joe Flacco was given his due: his percentage had been awful but he had
threaded important completions through the narrow eye of rush-hour coverage. Joe McKnight not only returned a kick for a touchdown but had been inserted in at cornerback for a play and had harried Flacco into throwing a pick-six to David Harris. Calvin Pace was a linebacker who’d moved like a back, shadowing Flacco all game long. As for Revis, in two weeks he had not given up a single reception. Had they not seen him do it, the coaches would have refused to believe a cornerback could accomplish that playing-man coverage against NFL receivers.

  The coaches walked down to the meeting room to listen to Ryan go through the same range of reactions. At first he was irate, as though he’d been bilked, persecuted. “Lot of smart guys coach in this league,” he said. “I’m not the smartest guy but I’m observant as shit. Don’t think I don’t see what’s going on. Somebody doesn’t want to do it our way, they’re gone. We are going to run the fucking football. This team used to knock guys off the line. We are going right back to where we were. We’re gonna have our identity back.” This now out of his system, Ryan smiled and became again his genial and certain self. “I fucked up. I will fix it. We will never get beat like this again. Guys will have to sacrifice. Tone. Plax. We may not be able to throw it ten times this week, but we will be who we are.”

  I found the rawness of some of the things the coaches said unnerving. Nobody else in the meeting rooms seemed so affected. When Ryan called out Schottenheimer or the defensive coaches groused about him, Schotty said he aspired to overlook such aspersions. Schotty saw criticism as one more challenging part of the game he could choose to handle well; he believed “losing tests your mettle.” As for the players’ take on the defensive coaches’ frustration with the offense, Jim Leonhard explained that coaches were of the game, not in the game, and that players accepted that the coaches had to burn off their aggression the way airplanes did extra fuel before the soft landing. The offensive and defensive players, Leonhard said, were always competitive, and yet amicable.