The collective-bargaining agreement permitted each team only fourteen padded practices during the seventeen NFL weeks. Today, the Jets held one of theirs. Three new practice-squad players took the field to join in. New players always meant hard hitting; on their first day, they all wanted to show what they had. It was now November, and the contact, heard from the sideline in the colder time of year, had a new sound to it, the loud and dull thuds bringing to mind a heavy drift of snow falling from a roof.
On the sideline, Pettine was astonished to learn that Wilkerson, MTV, and the other young linemen standing with them had no clue who Lee Harvey Oswald was. Pettine simply had no idea what to say. Jimmy Leonhard leaned in to help his coordinator bridge the generation gap. “He’s the guy who shot Tupac,” said the sly safety.
At the late-afternoon defensive meeting, after the mostly sleepless Tuesday night, Smitty was “struggling,” and I was right there with him. Sometimes on Wednesdays I was so tired I thought football had given me narcolepsy. Sutton advised us both to “make a commitment to enthusiasm that’ll get you through the meeting.” Revis, too, was weary. In the defensive meeting, DT ribbed him, the coach pretending to pick up a phone and saying, “Hey! What up! What time you get off? Midnight. Okay! I’ll be there. Ain’t got nothin’ to do but practice.”
Watching the Bills receivers on film with Cro, Revis wore his hood tight as a snood, and he departed for home earlier than usual, leaving Cro and me alone. In practice, Cro had been teased along the sidelines for being sensitive. Actually, he said now, he was just “sluggish” on Wednesdays. (Cro was sensitive about being sensitive.) In general, he’d decided he was overdoing it with the film review. DT had been telling him this for some time, but it always seemed important to Cro that he come to his own conclusions. “I’ve been overloading my brain. If I watch too much, I play the play before it happens. For the San Diego game I didn’t watch as much.” In football, he said, the danger was always the temptation to try something new and different instead of just refining what you did well. There was something koan-like in this observation. Coaches and players made it often, and yet each time they did, it hit me like a revelation.
In the Thursday-morning quarterbacks’ meeting, Schotty was thinking refinement also. “Trying to do the things we do well,” he said to Brunell; Kevin O’Connell, who was wearing a fashionable new scruff of beard; and McElroy. Sanchez was five minutes late. This occasionally happened and such was football time that those minutes passed like little generations. Today Schotty was considering locking him out. It was impossible not to feel fond of Sanchez and equally impossible not to throw your hands up sometimes. There was a still-teenage quality about his relationship to clocks and calendars that I would think about as he opened his morning Megatron energy juice by repeatedly stabbing the seal with a pen instead of just pulling the tab; as he sprawled in his chair, then stretched, then gargled the Megatron, then startled up from his slouch and looked around, bright-eyed, ready to pounce on the next pounce-able remark.
“Buy stock, men,” Schotty said. “Jeremy Kerley! Cav and I have.” Schotty was in a fine mood, and when Sanchez arrived, Schotty didn’t even rebuke him. Instead, Schotty amused everyone by narrating our inner monologues—“Greg’s thinking about sunny Alabama, Mark’s thinking about his Megatron juice!” Circled on the board was “Rex’s play.” Joe McKnight would take a direct snap and run. It was named 38 Special and had been triggered by something Seth Ryan’s high-school team ran. There were plays drawn everywhere in the office, plays on top of plays, even plays covering the thin escarpment of whiteboard under Schotty’s wall cabinets. A room without a view didn’t trouble Schotty. Like a lot of creative people, he found blandness in his surroundings inspiring.
By the middle of the meeting, Sanchez was saying “Yes!” to every point Schotty made. He was telling McElroy to shut up and asking me, “You get it, Worm? Freak!” When Cavanaugh began to review some Bills film, Schotty told him, “Go ahead, Cav! Coach your ass off,” and Sanchez chimed in: “Get ’em, Cav!” He was waking up.
That evening Pettine and the defensive coaches did not rest as they normally would after building a game plan. They stayed at work on three hours of sleep and spent another lengthy night building a Wildcat game plan to respond to those snaps when Brad Smith replaced Fitzpatrick at quarterback and might run, pass, or hand off. Smith had recently been a potent part of the Jets offense, but the Bills scarcely used Smith, making it a mystery to the Jets why Buffalo had signed him. Still, whatever the Bills had done to this point, the Jets defense had to be ready for Smith. The basic idea for Wildcat deterrence was, as Mike Smith put it to the outside linebackers, “Don’t be in a hurry. Slow play—feather it.” He meant that, yes, you pressured the ball carrier, Smith, but not until you’d set the outside edges. As Smitty detailed the paths forward Brad Smith could offer the football, I had a sudden flashback to Schotty’s wall, all those blank spaces filled with little drawings of dramatic, well-ordered future events just waiting for someone like Smitty to drag a thick, black marker right through them.
Scotty McKnight would have knee surgery when the swelling went down. He’d been hurt on Monday. On Thursday, he said, “I was depressed. But then I just decided to focus on getting better.” McKnight was receiving ample sympathy from the other players. The feeling among them was that he’d joined the team under difficult circumstances and handled himself well. As for his knee, it was no secret that around the league many injured players used human growth hormone to help them heal faster. McKnight had heard as much, but he said he had no idea what HGH looked like or where to get it if he wanted it, which he said he didn’t. One of the most challenging aspects of injuries for players was filling the sudden surplus of hours. BT had begun stopping by the facility more frequently, and he was the first to say he wasn’t handling so much time at home well. It was a good thing, he said, that his wife had an accounting job. A player without a team to go to didn’t know what to do with himself.
During the Thursday practice, Revis tipped a pass in the back of the end zone and kept his feet inbounds while he found the ball in the air and caught it, and then, as his momentum took him across the end line, Rev whipped a no-look, behind-his-back pass to Brodney Pool. The long, live tracking shot continued with Rev now confronted by a tall pile of equipment someone had stacked back there. Still in the same motion, he hurdled over the entire pile. The plays Revis made in practice led even men like Westhoff and Devlin, who’d seen it all, to talk of feeling privileged to watch him. Terry Bradway walked up to Revis later. “That was the kind of play I used to make at Trenton State,” he told Revis.
“Did you?” said Rev.
“In my dreams!”
“Dreaming is good!”
Nobody could one-up that, but Cro came close. During a field-goal block drill, he vaulted over the entire offensive line.
Coaches, like players, had their good and bad weeks, and Schotty was, it suddenly came to me, running his best week of meetings. There was an art to it, creating a relaxed yet focused room, managing the shifting young personality currents, ignoring the wide receivers when they spaced out, quietly changing your speaking timbre when you were going to ask the room for something different. Schotty was also responsible for the players’ weaknesses; he had to assess them and protect their flanks without admitting to anyone, most of all the players, that he thought they had any weaknesses. The quarterbacks’ meeting had never felt more confident and high-spirited and close. Sanchez even asked McElroy if the rookie hazing was wearing on him. McElroy looked pleased to be asked and demurred. When Schotty reminded everyone that, in his Jets-specific field geometry, “The money zone starts at the twelve-yard line, not the fifteen-,” Sanchez said, “At the twelve! Oh no! That’s why I throw all those picks down there!” In such moments, it was possible to see how Sanchez could become a genuine leader.
In the defensive-line meeting, Marcus Dixon noted that one of the new Jets scout-team players, tight end Shawn Nelson, had
begun the year with the Bills. “He got some line stuff?” Dixon asked Weeks.
“No… I don’t think so,” answered Weeks.
“Got to check,” Dixon said.
“Whatever,” Weeks replied.
“Whatever,” one of the players repeated.
To lighten the mood, Po’uha pointed at rookies Wilkerson and Kenrick Ellis and said, “Fresh money in here! We got a number-one draft choice and a number-three. Hammer: what do you want for Christmas?”
“New iPad,” said Carrier instantly.
From the back of the room came Wilkerson’s low, easygoing voice: “iPad Nano!”
Wilkerson was going to be a terrific player. The upside of the relaxed demeanor that had worried everyone before the draft was that nothing seemed to ruffle him. His mind was uncluttered out on the field, leaving him free to relish the game. When Wilkerson made fine plays, the other players saw his uncomplicated happiness in what he’d just done, and that enthusiasm, coupled with his great ability, kept the first-round draft choice from being resented.
During the previous Friday’s practice, O’Neil had taken an accidental hit and the team had played well, so Cavanaugh told him to go absorb another one today, just for luck. Which O’Neil did. There was far less superstition in football than in many other sports, but the appeal of what there was made sense because it emphasized both the necessity of repetition in football and the fact that anything could happen, that it was all, on some level, out of your control. No matter how good your habits were, you needed the luck. Following the loss to the Ravens, Greg McElroy, aspiring as always to contribute, said that he and I should switch chairs in the quarterback meeting—“Superstition,” he explained. So we had.
After practice, while playing the crossbar game, somebody threw a ball back toward me, and as I reached for it, Revis decided he wanted the ball and was instantly in front of me, abruptly, violently intercepting it by grabbing the ball and pivoting off my extended index finger. There was a splintering sensation. The index finger quickly resembled a tie-dyed sausage casing, a swirl of red, green, yellow, and purple. I didn’t tell anyone. Mindful of Strickland’s pinkie, keeping it to myself seemed the thing to do.
Maybin’s role had increased in the defensive game plan from ten plays to forty. That afternoon, Smitty created a new wristband for him that held so much information it looked like a stock-market page. The two of them now spent entire defensive meetings whispering back and forth, albeit Maybin’s whisper a rumble. The coaches were expecting big things from him against the Bills, the team that had drafted him in the first round and then cut him.
By Saturday morning, my finger was a line of Karakoram ridges. I went to the training room, where I was given a cup filled with ice and slush. The cup attracted attention. Soon all the players in the training room were showing me their digital manglings. Rob Turner had a finger bent into a left-turn arrow; it turned out Scotty McKnight had been catching passes with curled tree-sloth claws. At the walk-through, these demonstrations continued. Carrier came bearing semaphores. Matt Slauson had dislocated every finger at one point or another and said he had fingernails torn off “all the time.” Devlin, who in retirement reserved half his desk surface as a staging area for bottles of Advil and Aleve, said that over the years, he’d suffered so many injuries playing on the lines of Iowa, Buffalo, and Arizona that sometimes he’d overlook a new one and his wife would discover it, like something under the couch cushion. Devlin had once entangled a finger in an opponent’s face mask. It rotated completely around so that “I was staring at the point.” Alas, Brandon Moore informed me that proper NFL hand protocol was not to ice anything short of a ruptured tendon or ligament. I hung my head. “There’s a difference between being hurt and being injured,” Pettine added.
Others were more forgiving. Henry Ellard recalled that when he was a collegian, a freshman quarterback threw a short pass at him so hard that “I got a compound fracture. No blood. Just a bone sticking out. It was pearl white. The trainer told me, ‘Don’t look.’ I got a lot of stitches and played Saturday.” Then Ellard warned me not to believe everyone about fingers, especially linemen. “They’re a bunch of teddy bears!” Revis agreed. He explained that the lineman’s tactic was to walk into the training room on some pretext—“Ahhh, my leg hurts!”—and then, said Rev, casually mention, “There’s this funny thing with my pinkie. Take a quick look at it?” Head trainer John Mellody was with Revis. “They need their hands,” he said. “They come in with what you did.”
On Saturday the team flew to Buffalo and that evening, Tannenbaum and Scott Cohen invited me to join them for dinner at a steak house. Tannenbaum pointed out how many couples were on dates at the restaurant. He then expertly evaluated how each date was progressing, who had sufficient desire, who was a player. In his own single days Tannenbaum himself had been very strategic about dates. For example, he had a first-phone-call rule stipulating that it should last no longer than ninety seconds. The point was to make a date. Why waste further time? You might not like each other. Life was short. The one time he had violated this protocol involved a friend of an old friend, a woman he began talking to only so as to arrange their blind date. But before Tannenbaum knew it, over an hour had passed. He enjoyed the conversation so much, he decided that there was no way he was going to like anything else about her. But at least they’d be friends. Which he and his wife, Michelle, remained, in addition to everything else.
In season, during the week, Tannenbaum considered his job to be problem-solving. On Saturdays and Sundays, the GM said, he was “the last person who can help. By then I can’t do anything.” Now Burress had an ailing back—the rare weekend opportunity for Tannenbaum. He found a well-recommended Buffalo chiropractor and also had a special mattress delivered to the receiver’s hotel room. Tannenbaum said that when Burress learned that the Jets had bought him a bed, “in his face you could see where he’d been and where he was.”
Before the evening defensive meeting, I got another cup of ice for my finger. As I walked toward the meeting room, O’Neil intercepted me. His voice rising, he told me to get rid of the cup. “You’re not bringing ice into a team meeting and spreading your softness.” It hit me that you never saw an NFL injury report with a player listed as “Doubtful—Finger.”
All week, it had been difficult for the coaches to get the team sufficiently worked up about the Bills. It was challenging to demonize a team who year after year lost more than they won. Hence Ryan’s Harvard angle. Now in the defensive meeting, Pettine gave it his own college try, noting the Bills’ fast start, telling the Jets the world loved an underdog, calling the Bills “the darlings of the NFL.” He predicted the first Buffalo play would be the Woody boot.
In the team meeting, Ryan selected players to stand and give their thoughts about the upcoming game, assess for everyone else what needed to be done. Tight end Dustin Keller said, “The big thing is ball security.” That was a very offense thing to say. The defensive take was offered up by reserve safety Emmanuel Cook, who asserted, “This week we want to bounce some motherfuckers out!”
That night, Maybin dreamed of touchdowns scored by himself. Bob Sutton, however, joked that he’d been kept awake by thoughts of Maybin failing to set the outside edge. In the morning, during a special breakfast meeting with Smitty, Maybin was so overexcited that when Smitty quizzed him on his calls, he became instantly stricken, like a kid in a spelling bee. Gently, Smitty reminded him about the wristband he was wearing and then told the high-strung linebacker that Buffalo was a dish best served cool.
In the locker room before a game, I always made it my business to dress and clear out as quickly as possible. This week, I walked in with Smitty. He paused to speak with David Harris, who wanted to know what music Smitty was listening to. I didn’t know where to go in the visitors’ locker room, so I waited for Smitty. They began discussing the songs of Brother Iz, the Hawaiian singer. After a couple of minutes of waiting, I said something about how big Iz was and immediately he
ard a shout: “Don’t talk to the players on game day!” It was Tannenbaum. He grabbed my arm. I was stunned, humiliated. What I had done was inappropriate, of course. But still.
Out on the field, there was the usual relaxed pregame pageant of men playing catch and greeting one another. Kotwica and Brad Smith met on the field and hugged up as former coaches and former charges often did before and after games. Back at the bench, Kotwica said he’d told Smith, “I understand you guys are running a lot of Wildcat today.” Smith had denied all before saying, “What does it matter, you guys’ll just blitz it anyway.”
I was still preoccupied with Tannenbaum and could not locate my armadillo skin. And though I reminded myself that none of this was about me, and I said nothing about it, I was grateful when Smitty leaned back on the bench and said to Kotwica, O’Neil, and me, “I’d rather be with you three guys right now than anybody in the world.” I was also grateful when O’Neil, distributing pregame candies, asked, “Who needs a pick-me-up?” and then, without waiting for an answer, handed one to Smitty, looked at me, and said, “Nicky, take three! And the next time Tannenbaum puts his hands on you, jack him up!”
Down in the end zone, Ryan was determining whether DeVito’s knee was well enough for him to play by lining up opposite the player, putting his hand down, and testing for himself DeVito’s movement off the snap. DeVito could scarcely budge Ryan. DeVito was impressed by Ryan’s technique. Ryan wasn’t impressed by DeVito. He told DeVito he’d play next week. Nearby, Cavanaugh and O’Connell were throwing Burress passes for the same evaluative purpose. It was decided the mattress had done its job.
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