In the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly said, "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought we had a little more time."
It’s probably a bit of a stretch, and maybe even a reach into the realm of the perverse, to bring that chestnut out into the light on this almost bizarrely cold winter’s night, to trot it out into the opening minutes of a discussion about the Jets and their stomach-churning, bitterly disappointing loss in tonight’s AFC Championship Game.
But whatever, I thought of it after the game ended and I caught sight of my boy Bailey laying on my bed, in front of the TV in my room, stuffing his tears of heartbreak into the outer reaches of my comforter.
“I told you, Bailey. It’s the Jets. It’s what they do. They get your hopes up, and then they break your heart. They’ve been doing it since I was a kid. It’s what it means to be a Jet fan. You just have to learn to live with disappointment, with heartbreak. It’s in their nature. It’s gone on for decades now. It’s who they are."
No matter how nuts your kids can sometimes drive you, and make no mistake about it, Bailey has an uncanny ability to sometimes drive me to the edges of temporary insanity with his antics, well, still, no matter how nuts he can sometimes drive me and no matter how seemingly frivolous the situation, it does kill me to see him have his dreams dashed, and tonight, his dreams got dashed, but good.
When the hated Steelers raced out to a 17-0 lead near the end of the second quarter, I turned off the living room television, and my brother stood up to head upstairs.
“I can’t watch anymore, time to get the kids to bed.”
Chris just shook his head in resignation and turned to me and said, “I just wasn’t feeling it tonight. I just knew it.”
“I know,” I said. “They blew it all last weekend against the Pats, they got nothing left.”
I called my boy Dan and left him the obligatory I-officially-give-up voice mail. We had chatted briefly once or twice before that, as the game slipped away barely after it began.
“Don’t give up!” he exhorted.
I tried not to, but when it hit 17-0, the Jets looked absolutely pathetic on both sides of the ball, I just couldn’t see any logical scenario under which they would win the game.
I got Evie and Riley into their pajamas, sang them their good-nights songs, tucked them in. Sheila left for home, despite my intermittent attempts at getting her to stay the night; she’s got a very early doctor’s appointment tomorrow near her place, and it just made more sense for her to go home, and she’s moving in next week anyway, but I still wanted her to stick around. Seemed like an avalanche of unwanted stimuli: ridiculous cold, cranky kids, a long day of sitting in a stiflingly overheated conference room tomorrow discussing a massive, intricate database conversion process on the docket for Monday, no girlfriend in the bed tonight, heartburn from eating too much homemade pizza, and a putrid, shit-the-bed effort from my Jets.
After Evie and Riley went down for the count, I sat down at the computer and started reading the Great Orange Satan, aka, Daily Kos. I heard the sound of the TV coming from my room, the muffled sound of crowd noise emanating from out behind the closed sliding French doors. I went in and saw Bailey sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Well, you’re not gonna believe this Dad, but Sanchez just crushed and he’s hurt and he fumbled and the Steelers ran it back for touchdown. It’s 24-0.”
“Bailey, just turn it off. Turn it off. Don’t be a glutton for punishment. It’s over. Be realistic. They’re getting their asses kicked. It’s over. They’re done. It was a great season. Crushing the Patriots last week was as good as winning the Super Bowl. They just don’t have it tonight. You’re just gonna get more and more upset watching this. Turn it off.”
I genuinely thought I was doing the right thing. He’s twelve years old, he’s a die-hard Jet fan, he takes it seriously. Well, who am I kidding, so do I. But he takes it seriously in the way that only a twelve year old boy can. I just wanted him to cover up and protect himself, limit the damage.
“WHAT KIND OF JET FAN ARE YOU? HUH? YOU’RE GONNA GIVE UP NOW, DAD? YOU’RE GONNA GIVE UP NOW? THE FIRST HALF’S NOT EVEN OVER! THEY COULD STILL COME BACK! YOU SAID THEY HAD NO CHANCE AGAINST THE PATRIOTS LAST WEEK AND THEY WON. C’MON!!!”
“Bailey, they’re not comin’ back. It’s over. Give it up. You’re just gonna get more and more aggravated.”
The first half was winding down. The Jets had the ball, and they were moving it.
“C’mon, Dad. They might score here. There’s the whole second half. You gotta believe. How many times this year did you tell me they were gonna lose and they came back and won?”
He had a point, they had won several games against the odds, in the final seconds. But this didn’t feel like a comeback in the making. They looked hapless, pathetic. They had a second down and a yard to go as the half wound down. They passed on second and third downs, and Sanchez misfired. I stood next to the bed, hands on my hips.
“What’d I tell ya? It’s over.”
The field goal kicker barely snuck a short attempt through the uprights. Pathetic, I thought. Even an easy field goal provokes a coronary. Hopeless.
I started to walk out of the bedroom.
“C’mon, Dad.”
I looked at my boy’s pleading face.
“C’mon. Watch the second half with me. Please?”
I didn’t want to watch anymore. I’d had enough of the 2010 New York Jets. All the shit they talked, and in the biggest game of the year they come out and lay an egg. I didn’t want to watch the second half, I didn’t want to watch another half of the Jets getting pasted, of the Steelers running the ball down their throats, of inept offense, shit, even their damn punter performed pathetically in the first half, shanking one kick after another. When you can’t even punt the ball right, well, things are not going well.
“C’mon, Dad. C’mon. Watch the second half. C’mon.”
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I gave in, how could I ignore the pleas from the boy.
The Jets scored a quick touchdown to make it 24-10. Still a blowout, but I thought, well, it’s making my son happy that I’m sitting here with him, so what the hell. Guess I’ll make a night of it.
The tide of the game seemed to slowly turned toward our side. The Steelers offense couldn’t do a thing. We stopped them once in the third quarter in three plays, made them punt. On the punt, a Jet defender broke free into their backfield. Bailey and I both stood up and yelled: it looked for all the world like our guy would block the kick, it looked for all the world like the laws of physics would have to be defied for the kick not to get blocked. And somehow, the laws of physics were in fact defied, the kick did not get blocked, and a roughing-the-kicker penalty ensued, giving the ball back to the Steelers.
“This is how it goes for the Jets, Bailey. This is how it goes. They get your hopes up, and then they crush ‘em.”
I felt like I was trying to give him a crash course on the inherent disappointment involved in being a Jet fan, in being the child of fatalistic, superstitious Irish and Italian upstate New York Catholics.
We almost always lose, in the end, I wanted to say. The good guys almost always lose. You get your hopes up, and something goes wrong. The sun shines for awhile, and then the earth quakes, or the tornado blows through, or the volcano erupts. That’s the way it’s gone for centuries. And it’ll go on that way for centuries to come.
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The Jets get the ball back, deep in their own territory. A series of smart, gutsy plays has our guys down near the Steelers end zone, on the verge of a score that would make it 24-17 with loads of time left. Bailey, I realize, has gotten under my skin: he’s gotten me to believe. Though I wouldn’t have admitted it, not to him, not to anybody, in those moments as the Jets moved the ball down the field, I started fantasizing: a touchdown here, a defensive stop there, get the ball back, then we got them on their heels, another drive for another score, a tie game, hell yeah, I had the fever.
I thought they were going to do it.
“Bailey,” I said, “I gotta admit. If they score a touchdown here, I think they have a shot. They could do this.”
He was engrossed in the game. The belief was spread across his face, childlike, angelic. I realized I wanted it for myself, yes, I am the very definition of a long-suffering – are there any other kind? – Jet fan, but I wanted it for him more. He, not the Jets, had drawn me back into this game.
My sister Deb calls in the midst of this, leaves a message: “Yeah, baby! We’re gonna shock the world, Bailey! We’re gonna pull off the miracle!”
They get the ball down to the one yard line, they throw a pass on third down, a misfire, then they run on fourth down, get stuffed.
I storm out of my room.
“That’s it, kid, it’s REALLY over now.”
“IT’S NOT OVER, DAD! ALL THEY NEED IS TWO TOUCHDOWNS, THEY GOT PLENTY OF TIME! C’MON!”
Magical thinking, I think. Only a twelve year old boy could believe now. I come out to the computer, throw on the headphones. I feel a tap on the shoulder.
“C’mon, Dad. The game’s back on.”
Again, I don’t want to watch anymore. I’m forty-four years old, I’ve seen enough bullshit from the Jets over those years, and I’ve seen some bitter disappointment from life itself. I KNOW it’s not going to end well. I KNOW there’s no hope.
I take out the headphones and follow my son back into my room.
The Jets wind up getting a safety to make it 24-12, then they score a touchdown to make it 24-19. There’s enough time, they have timeouts and the two-minute warning. Shit, I think. They COULD do this. Do I dare believe?
I let it go. I look at Bailey, grinning from ear-to-ear: he KNOWS his team is going to do this.
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In the end, they didn’t.
All they needed was to stop the Steelers from getting a first down or two, and they couldn’t do it.
And as the clock wound down the final seconds, Bailey buried his face in that aforementioned comforter and veritably spit out a few tears, spit them out like nails.
I know it is dangerous to try to extrapolate too much in the way of life lessons from a sporting contest, especially in this day and age. The Jets had a receiver arrested for drunken driving during the season, and another one suspended for four games due to a violation of the league’s substance abuse policy. The Steelers quarterback, well, as much as this bleeding-heart liberal likes to believe in innocent-til-proven-guilty, he has been under suspicion of rape charges twice in the last three years, and where’s there’s smoke, there’s all too often fire, isn’t there? I'll just say that I hope and pray that this is not the kind of guy my daughter will ever have any real exposure to.
But I patted Bailey on the shoulder and tried to comfort him.
“Hey, buddy. Listen. Most teams, down 24-0, in a hostile environment, they would have just laid down like dogs. The Jets got back up and they fought back.”
“ROETHLISBURGER IS A DAMN RAPIST!” he shouted through the tears. “HE SHOULDN’T EVEN BE PLAYING!!! IT’S NOT FAIR!”
Well, I suppose it’s not. I’ve been telling him life’s not fair for awhile. Someday, he’ll hear me and he’ll make the necessary internal adjustments to deal with that.
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I checked my email messages an hour or two ago, after I finally got Bailey calmed down and into bed. In the end, I got him to buy into the Jet comeback as some sort of inspiration, as a mirror of the fight we fought in this very own household after his mother died, when, for two years or so, it felt like we were always down 24-0 with no hope of coming back, we’d take a step forward and then, before we even understood why or how, we’d take four steps back. We could have given up, and I suppose sometimes I did, but me and the kid, in spite of everything, always seemed to get back up off the floor for another round.
I checked the messages. One from my sister. Deb. It reminded me of the one she sent me a couple of Christmases ago, when, at the end of a long and draining year that saw me go about as low as a man can go, she simply said, “well…to quote the Killers…we are gonna turn this thing around.”
She was right: we did turn this thing around, eventually.
Tonight, her message was to Bailey…she knew he was disappointed, and that he needed some encouragement.
“Bailey,
We still have Mark Sanchez and Rex Ryan and they can't be duplicated...
so we got what other teams don't so THERE...
we got guts and character and when WE do win a Super Bowl it is going to be soooooo sweet...”
I fully realize that in a such troubled world with so many luckless innocents suffering so many ill fortunes, it is patently ridiculous to care much about the fortunes of an enterprise as crass and commercial as a professional sports team. But we’re all in around here, me, my sister, my brother, and my son. Maybe it’s silly, but we’re all in, and tonight I’m just thinking that I hope to live to see the day where we’re all sitting together somewhere and I get to turn and look at the smile on my boy’s face as the final seconds of a win so sweet wind down, and either way, I think there’s things to be learned along the way, and I think I learned some tonight, and I think my boy did, too.