Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  In entrancing contrast at practice was the sight of Po’uha scoring a practice touchdown. “It’s a win-win, Bo,” Pettine told him. “You scored and you took two minutes off the clock.”

  Along the sidelines, Eric Smith said that he’d hurt his sore knee when somebody stepped on his foot at the same time another player hit the side of his leg. “It’s a torn chunk of meniscus. It can lock up on me.”

  This was a Wednesday of many challenges for DT. He was minding his own DT business, critiquing the defensive backs as he always did, when Kyle Wilson suddenly asked him, “My brother, why must we put one another down?” DT had no idea what to say to that. Then, when DT sought an explanation for something from Ellis Lankster, Lankster wrinkled his brow in the funny way he had, said, “I ain’t got time,” and disappeared to meet obligations back on the field. I was wearing a cap. The cap was yet another affront to DT. I defended my “perfectly nice cap.” Said DT, “Some people can look good in a hat, Nick. Others put on a perfectly nice hat and they look like they work at a gas station.” After that, DT referred to me as Gas-Station Man.

  It could have been much worse. The temperature was warm for December, and as Bart Scott watched Cro high-stepping around in shorts, leg sinews rippling, Scott told him, “You a specimen. A top-ten slave. You’d work the lower field. You’d pull the plow.” Cro just laughed.

  Revis and Cro watched Michael Vick play on film with more excitement than they’d displayed for any other player. Said Revis, “Look! He just threw sidearm around the rusher. That’s talented!”

  “You want to see somebody who really believes in his arm strength,” Cro said, “Vick really does. He’ll try and fit it in anywhere.”

  It was a good Wednesday afternoon for Smitty. Pettine had postponed his talk with Ryan, moving it from Monday to Wednesday. That morning the defensive coordinator had awakened in a sweat at 5:00, filled with anxiety. But, from Pettine’s perspective, the talk had gone well. After he informed Ryan that Smitty was planning to leave, Ryan said he would officially offer Smitty the outside-linebackers job. Ryan also told Pettine that Weeks wouldn’t be returning. Then Smitty received an e-mail from Tannenbaum telling him, “You’ve done an incredible job for us.” Washington State had offered Smitty twice what Ryan told Pettine the Jets could offer, but Pettine wasn’t worried about that. If need be, Pettine said, he would restructure his own contract, taking less so the team would have the money to keep Smitty in New York.

  Sutton’s persistent texts finally worked, and BT limped into the Thursday defensive meeting. The room applauded. BT looked over the skinny free-agent safety Tracy Wilson, who’d vowed not to cut his (frazzling) hair until season’s end. “Got a crackhead,” said BT. The room laughed. BT opened his playbook. The room concentrated.

  When the defense broke off into position groups, in the outside-linebackers’ meeting, BT told the others, “Big fantasy week for me, boys. Don’t let Michael Vick get shit!” Then Smitty detailed the unit’s Secret Santa rules. Everybody participated. Nobody could spend more than $250. And no Rutgers gear, Westerman. And put some thought into it, Westerman. “Mike,” said Westerman. “What do you want?”

  “Sacks for you guys and BT back,” said Smitty.

  “I want you guys to go to the Super Bowl so I can be in on field-goal block,” BT announced.

  “You stank at field-goal block!” Maybin recalled.

  “Don’t matter,” BT said affably. “I want that one Super Bowl play.”

  At practice, Joe Yacovino, one of the retired officials the Jets had hired to work their practices in stripes, flagged the offense for a penalty. Revis nearly leaped out of his six layers of sweats. “Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe! My man Joe! That’s right!”

  On the sidelines, Cole, a lithe cornerback, and DeVito, a three-hundred-pound lineman, were discussing their knee injuries in too much detail for Pettine. “You’re comparing a brontosaurus knee with a jaguar,” he told them. Po’uha walked over. “I quit Steve Jobs on page four hundred and thirty,” he announced. “I decided he wasn’t innovative.”

  The Rocky III theme song, “Eye of the Tiger,” was pumping through the huge practice speakers when boxing broke out. Aaron Maybin had been getting a quick jump off the snap, and in response, Wayne Hunter had been offering what Maybin later called “some extra shit.” So Maybin returned the lagniappe. Bad idea. “I’ll break you in half,” Hunter screamed. An unwritten rule in the NFL was that you never backed down from a fight—unless your opponent was Wayne Hunter. When Hunter got angry, “better bring a knife and a stun gun,” advised Steve Yarnell, the security director. Two years ago, the Jets kick returner Justin Miller was teasing Hunter for having to run punishment laps after being called for a practice penalty. Hunter asked Miller to cut it out. Another Hunter penalty and more argy-bargy from Miller and suddenly Hunter wanted to maim him. After Hunter was sent off to run his laps, Ryan told Miller to return to the locker room, grab his stuff, and not even bother changing, just leave for the day. This time it took several men to subdue Hunter. Said Joe the ref, “That’s one guy I never seem to throw flags on.”

  For the rest of practice, an uncracked cup of players and coaches formed around Maybin. At one point, Sanchez came over and gave Maybin a pat and then stood quietly for a while with the defense. Tom Moore joined him and the two chatted about the great Lions running back Barry Sanders’s legendary pregame meal, which Moore said consisted of one apple. After practice Rex told the players not to fight, that they were a team, and though they didn’t have to like one another, they did have to respect one another.

  In the ice-cream social that afternoon, Holmes was reflecting on Asante Samuel, who would cover him. Tone said Samuel was “big.” To which Tom Moore countered in that deep, quavery voice, “He’s five ten!” So Tone told him, “But he plays big.”

  On Friday morning, Schotty was firing questions at Sanchez and slyly worked in “Try not to use a time-out on this one!”

  “Try to have the right personnel group out there!” Sanchez retorted, referring to the John Conner mix-up against Kansas City.

  “Ohhh!” cried Schotty.

  “First play of the game!” said Sanchez. “A-Lynn was so crushed.”

  Walking down the football-field-length main facility hallway could be awkward; you might find yourself facing off with someone for seventy or eighty yards. Today Wayne Hunter and I came slowly together. “High Noon!” I said, and, thankfully, he smiled. Later I asked him about fighting. Hunter said that the grind of the season could wear on you, make you so tired and irritable you might behave under a helmet in ways you almost immediately regretted. “Everyone has days you don’t want to practice, don’t want to go to meetings, go on a field and have to be aggressive,” he said. The Maybin confrontation was, he said, “one of my days. I try so hard to keep it at bay. I’d been doing so well and that was the day for me. Maybin is so loud, talking so much. He was coming so hard, I snapped. But me and Maybin are cool. Maybin’s a unique and special guy.” That playing good football could occasionally seem almost an overwhelming challenge for a man as huge, strong, fast, and intelligent as Wayne Hunter sometimes made me wonder how anyone could expect to excel at it.

  Pettine kept “tweaking” the game plan all week. He took out edge blitzes because he wanted to “pincer” Vick, and in one call he placed an outside linebacker at nose tackle. At the Saturday meeting, he detailed all this for the players. Then he showed the room a photograph of DeVito asleep in front of his locker. Next came an image with Mully napping beside him in the locker room.

  At the walk-through, Julian Posey told of going ice-skating at Rockefeller Center the night before. He affected a blasé tone. “Just chillin’ with my lady,” he said. But he couldn’t fool anybody.

  Scott was describing himself. “I got two modes,” he said. “Stop and go. I don’t jog. I walk lazy. When I come home, my wife hears me come in and first thing she says is ‘Pick your feet up!’ ” Scott was wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m Wearing My An
gry Face.”

  Every week, the defensive coaches created hand signals for their new calls in case the Motorolas failed. Dime Spike 1 (Vegas), for instance, was a shake and a roll of the tumbling dice. Now Pit Bull Bonus, it was decided, would be a tug on a restraining leash. During the walk-through in the field house, the team seemed loose. A pass play had been designed for the eligible lineman Vlad Ducasse. His big walk-through moment came: a pass was sent to a completely uncovered Ducasse, and he dropped it. Sanchez threw his hat. Holmes rolled on the turf in dismay.

  Speaking to the team on Saturday night at the hotel in Philadelphia, Ryan informed them that when Nnamdi Asomugha interviewed with the Jets, he’d asked Ryan, “What would you do special for me?” This was typical of the current Eagles, Ryan said. They were a white-collar team in a blue-collar town.

  The game was one long Jets downsizing. Ryan had been sure the Jets could run on the Eagles, and right away that ATV of a halfback Shonn Greene was gashing through their linebackers. Then came a routine completion to Holmes, which he inexplicably fumbled after making the catch. The ball was run back for a touchdown. Later in the quarter, after an Eagles fumble deep in their own territory, a short Sanchez puffball to Holmes floated through the receiver’s hands and Samuel intercepted. On the sidelines and in the box everyone was wearing his angry face—except Holmes, who, weirdly, was smiling. He seemed in some kind of bizarrely altered atmosphere. In short order, the Jets edges crumbled, their discipline frayed, Pit Bull Bonus was blocked, the secondary without Leonhard appeared off compass, and when Pettine called blitzes, his subsequent refrain was “We flat fucking missed him.” Soon Vick ran for a touchdown. And then came a Sanchez fumble. It was 28–0 midway through the second quarter. The Eagles were swollen with emotion. For the Jets, the game had burst like a pillow; there were feathers everywhere. Up in the box, you could feel the disappointment, the mortification, and the blame.

  A Holmes touchdown catch made it 28–10. And what was this? Tone placed the football on the ground, put his foot on it, and flapped his arms. An Eagle. The Jets were assessed fifteen yards for using the ball as a prop. By the end of the first half, the team had been called for eight penalties and had committed three turnovers.

  After the half, Pettine and Ryan’s tempers shortened: “Rex, you tell me to come after him, so I come after him. Now we give up a play, so you say zone. Which is it?” So Ryan took over the play-calling. That had never happened midgame with them before. Down on the field, listening on the main defensive radio channel, Smitty was horrified. Pettine had made the plan and Ryan didn’t know it well, so now Pettine had to guide him. Pettine’s tone remained even, composed, as he told Ryan, “Can’t call that, Rex, because…” and “Closest thing we have, Rex, is…” The game ended 45–19. On the bus back to New Jersey, there was silence up and down the aisle except for the sounds of eating and tinny fuzz from headphones. Jim O’Neil leaned in to say to me: “Two years in a row, we lose Jim Leonhard and in the next game we give up forty-five points.” I suddenly recalled something Sean Gilbert, Revis’s uncle, had told me about how it was “too easy to let down in football.”

  On Monday, Smitty went from office to office saying farewells. He was moving on to coach college football, “because of the way he treated you,” he told Pettine. But Pettine counseled him, “If I went by the way I feel right after a loss, I can’t count the number of times I’d have handed in my resignation.” In fact, as they had on many mornings-after, Pettine and Ryan had it out. Pettine told Ryan, “Look, if you have that little faith in me, I’ll resign now,” and Ryan told him “No, no, no,” and they discussed Ryan’s propensity during games to revisit what had just happened when the need was to move forward.

  The good news was that if they won their final two games, they’d still make the playoffs. The Jets would play the Giants on Saturday, Christmas Eve, so today they needed to build another game plan. Ryan and Pettine decided to join forces: Pettine would make the first- and second-down calls, Ryan would handle third-down calls, and together they’d get back to their old blitzing ways. Immediately they began cooking up some new things for Maybin. After each idea, Smitty would say, “I’ll get with him right away to make sure he understands!” The others began to tease him—“Oh, but Mike, you’re leaving!” They worked him over about his “last night in the NFL” and his future “on the other side of the rope,” how he’d be like the rookie who gets cut, goes to a game, calls out, “Hey, Darrelle!” from behind the security barrier, and Revis has no idea who he is. “Look,” Pettine told Smitty, “you’re a young guy, barely begun coaching, and you’re about to be making pretty damn good money already. You’re young and the NFL’s emotional. But once you leave, you’ll realize what you let go.” Then Ryan took Smitty aside and praised him, told him his salary would be made “right,” and Smitty suddenly was snagged back, suddenly couldn’t imagine himself in Pullman, Washington. For the first time in many weeks, Ryan stayed all Monday night with Pettine, O’Neil, and Smitty, making the plan. When Ryan did that, there were more old stories and more new calls. When Ryan did that, to Smitty he was again the forever guy.

  On Tuesday, everybody still seemed so sapped from the road trip, the loss, and the night of game-planning that even if the team did qualify for the playoffs, I couldn’t see how they would have anything left to give. When I asked around about this, I learned about the greatest energy drink of them all—making the playoffs. There wasn’t, everyone said, a second wind that could compare.

  In Schotty’s office, the coordinator had his old leather Bible out on his desk. Sanchez had been hit numerous times during the Eagles game and he sat there swathed in wires and beeping machines. Cavanaugh asked him how his neck was. Sanchez was coy. Cavanaugh told him, “I hear they tried to make you go to rehab and you said no, no, no.” I always wished there was time for Cavanaugh to say more in those meetings. He was an ideal cabinet member for Schotty; the old quarterback had a natural toughness, unpredictable bite, and unflappable composure, and he could take the been-there, done-that long view. Everyone in the room was so tired that Schotty let them leave early for the first time all year.

  In the team meeting, Ryan praised the Giants defensive line and then he stepped back: “In a nutshell, here’s what we got in front of us. We have six workdays left in the regular season and two business days. But you got a lifetime of memories. You’ll remember those games all your lives. Don’t do this game a disservice and say it’s just another game. These guys think they’re better than you.” He went on to describe the way wealthy kids looked down on poor kids. Then Ryan said it would be special to beat the Giants. He wanted to do it by running the ball.

  Pettine told the defense that because Nick Bellore “is having a Pro Bowl year on special teams,” he’d earned a personnel grouping. Chippewa would feature two outside linebackers, two linemen, and four inside linebackers.

  At practice, Brodney Pool was teasing Eric Smith, so Sutton told Smith to ask Pool about his first NFL play. Smith did. “I was knocked out on teams,” Pool confessed. Then he added, “But I knocked myself out.”

  Carrier and some of his linemen stayed on the field after practice for further work. Tannenbaum had sent word he was displeased with the lack of development from some of the young players, specifically Kenrick Ellis.

  At the afternoon defensive meeting, the players and coaches learned that when Pettine grew truly weary, he lapsed into erudition. Speaking of a Giant receiver, the coordinator referred to Newtonian law, saying that unless there were unbalanced forces acting on a receiver, “an object in motion tends to stay in motion.”

  This week Revis and Cro watched film together with aggression in their hearts. Of the Giants receivers’ release, Revis said, “They’re going to have to do better than that because I’m gonna be up on the line hitting them.” When the film from a Giants game against the Eagles showed Asomugha beaten on a fade, Cro, whom the Jets had re-signed after the failed Asomugha courtship, allowed himself last-laugh satisfac
tion: “He’s getting embarrassed this year.”

  Revis left and Posey arrived. Said Cro, “I look at these films and it’s ridiculous. Nobody puts their hands on them. You have to disrupt their timing.” Then he told Posey and me, “See, here’s what they do. They put all three receivers on this side so Eli can read them, one, two, three. Our offense doesn’t do that. They distribute them across the field, and it’s impossible for Mark to look at them all.”

  “Why don’t you say something to the O?” I asked Cro.

  “They’d never listen.”

  Sanchez arrived at the Wednesday quarterbacks’ meeting, and instead of the usual fist-knock greeting, he faked a knock then engulfed my entire hand in a grab and said, “Starfish!” None of that today for Kevin O’Connell, who had a sore finger. For this he received much abuse, until he was bailed out by a film clip of Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers bursting into a sprint against the Giants. “Mark, can you run that fast?” Schotty asked Sanchez.

  “No way! I’m caught there. But Bru could!”

  Brunell demurred: “My calves would fall off.”

  “If we gave you the right supplements?” inquired Sanchez, who, despite his Golden Grahams, was a big proponent of healthful nutrition.

  “Kev could!” said Brunell.

  “Except for his finger,” concluded Schotty.

  The defensive-line meeting resembled an army infirmary, all the wrapped knees, heat pads, casts, sacks of ice. The list of players who needed off-season surgery was not short.

  At practice, MTV was speaking of his longtime girlfriend, Leah, the former class president. On her birthday, he’d sunk to a knee and offered her an engagement ring. Which was accepted. “Got to be traditional,” he explained.