Touchdowns may be its public brand, yet American football is ultimately more defined by brute force, broken bodies, and the battle of attrition that goes on at the line of scrimmage. And in the long run, no one beats Father Time.
That’s the version of the game experienced by professional linemen as related in Nose To Nose, the story of two such linemen who each played for over a decade on the same team, the New York Jets.
New York Newsday sportswriter Greg Logan weaves the stories of Joe Klecko and Joe Fields with his own reporting and some commentary about the highs and lows of the sport as experienced by the men in the trenches:
At close range, the brawling between the linemen is so utterly visceral that the path of the ball almost seems incidental. Living life at the point of attack, as lineman do, requires an absence of fear and enjoyment of contact and tolerance for pain that isn’t altogether rational.
Klecko anchored the defensive line; Fields the offensive line. Both emerged as key Jets as the team reached its first period of sustained excellence since the late 1960s.
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| Fields in 1979. |
Logan makes clear Klecko and Fields were regular Joes, not Broadway Joes like Namath. Klecko liked to drive trucks in his downtime, while Fields spent as little on his wardrobe as possible. While Klecko was the much bigger name between them, both men were more known and respected by players than by fans. And both were done in by injury.
In Klecko’s case, the injuries were both multiple and extreme. He suffered snapped tendons, torn cartilage, strained hamstrings, and injections of cortisone and Marcaine so nasty Fields recalls watching a needle bend as it was pushed into Klecko’s swollen knee before a game. Klecko even had a bolt put into his leg as part of reconstruction surgery.
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| Klecko in 1986. |
A two-time Pro Bowler at center, Fields was used to being underestimated, being smaller than most NFL centers. With the Jets, beginning in Namath’s last season with the team, Fields went from a long snapper prone to overshooting the kicker to the offensive team captain, helping the Jets emerge from inept losers to the third highest-scoring team in the league in 1982.
Over time, his body wore down, too, exacting both a physical and an emotional toll.
“When you get beat, you say, ‘I must have done something wrong,” Fields explains. “You never think, ‘It’s because I’ve got no strength left in my shoulder or my knees hurt.’ To survive, that’s the mentality you develop.”
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| On November 24, 1981, the four defensive linemen of the Jets, dubbed the "Sack Exchange" for crushing quarterbacks, were honored on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. From left to right, Klecko (#73), Marty Lyons (#93), Abdul Salaam (#74), and Mark Gastineau (#99). Image from https://nflspinzone.com/2016/08/07/former-new-york-jets-great-joe-klecko-belongs-canton/ |
If someone picks up this book already familiar with the New York Jets and particularly their tumultuous “Lean Years” of the late 1970s and 1980s, this is a treat. Nose To Nose is written very much for Jets fans of that era, offering insights about such things as quarterback controversies and bad coaching decisions of less interest to non-Jet fans. Klecko and Fields use the book to do a lot of dishing and bitching.
Running back Freeman McNeil is unreliably inconsistent. “At times, eleven men couldn’t tackle him, and at other times, Freeman would tackle himself,” Fields observes.
Fellow defensive lineman Marty Lyons sucks up to the coaches and backstabs Klecko, causing a rift between the two.
Head Coach Joe Walton is a clueless paranoid who calls his players “pea brains” and announces at one meeting: “The prisoners aren’t telling this warden what to do.”
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| Joe Walton. As head coach of the Jets from 1983-1989 he lost more games than he won but led the team to the postseason in consecutive seasons, an uncommon feat for the franchise. Image from https://1skillz-networksunited.net/nfl-2016-week-14-gameplan |
Another defensive lineman, Mark Gastineau, draws many of Nose To Nose’s sharpest barbs. A leader of the Jets – and for a time the entire NFL – when it came to sacking the quarterback, Gastineau did this by ignoring other facets of the game as well as his teammates. At least that is the contention here:
Gastineau always said sacks were like home runs in baseball. The problem was that Gastineau also committed a lot of errors on defense that were overshadowed by his sacks. Other players often had to cover up for his mistakes. Once offenses realized he didn’t play the run very well, they would run draw plays to his side or pull a tackle to trap-block him to the outside while the back ran behind a tight end who was trying to seal off pursuit from the inside.
Gastineau also drew attention to himself by hopping around the field after nailing the quarterback, which became famous as his “sack dance.” Klecko obviously saw it as a sack of something:
“Mark always wanted to be on a pedestal…He’d stand apart from the huddle, sometimes with his helmet off, to attract attention from the TV cameras. In later years, I did get on him about getting in the huddle during games.”
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| Mark Gastineau. The knock on him not stopping the run, expressed often in Nose To Nose, may be overstated, but his showboating was undeniable, and annoying. Image from https://www.espn.com/blog/new-york-jets/post/_/id/62858/draft-plight-of-the-jets-second-and-long-on-misery |
By the later 1980s, Nose To Nose notes, Gastineau’s “look-at-me” act was becoming more of a detriment. The final straw came in a 1986 playoff game against the Cleveland Browns, where in the last minutes of an apparent victory, Gastineau flagrantly roughed the quarterback and was flagged, giving the Browns the opportunity to get back into the game and then win in double overtime.
“Our two most recognizable players in team history were Joe Namath and Mark Gastineau,” Jets kicker Pat Leahy says in Nose To Nose. “One drove the franchise to the Super Bowl, and the other drove it crazy.”
The book is fun in this way, but rather limited. Neither Klecko nor Fields reveal much empathy for their fellow players, or anyone but themselves. Their insights in the game are at best superficial and too often self-serving. The more I read, the more I felt they were beefing too much and reflecting too little.
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| Klecko at his typically unstoppable. A leader and star on defense, Klecko endured more than his share of injuries, as related in Nose To Nose. Image from https://elitesportsny.com/2017/06/28/new-york-jets-gang-green-report-62817-joe-klecko-hof-vince-young-trashes-ryan-fitzpatrick/ |
In fact, Klecko comes off as an unlikeable and brutish fellow, talking at one point about having a tough father who “kicked my ass” not for stealing another boy’s go-cart, but for getting caught. No one seems to have taught him anything that helped him play football; his favorite coaches are always the ones that stay out of his way.
Fields is more sympathetic; in large part because he and his wife adopted a special-needs child and became committed to helping the boy overcome his physical and mental limitations. All the while, Coach Walton ragged on Fields that he wasn’t cutting it on the Jets, adding an additional layer of anxiety to his life.
Fields also gives the best takes of football life, not deep but revealing. He recalls his surprise making the team after witnessing much bigger and stronger-looking players fall by the wayside in tryouts.
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| Fields prepares to snap the ball to quarterback Matt Robinson in a late 1970s game. Robinson was brought in with an eye to replacing the inconsistent Richard Todd, which caused clubhouse turmoil Nose To Nose discusses in detail. Image from https://forums.theganggreen.com/ |
Fields also discusses taking steroids, something Klecko admits to as well. Both men say it was a short-lived experiment that did nothing for them athletically (what would you expect them to say, right?) Give them and Logan credit for addressing the matter, though, which hasn’t gone away and probably was instrumental in a lot of bigger careers.
“I saw how many guys were using steroids, and I wanted to see if they would do anything for me,” Fields notes.
I found Nose To Nose intriguing but limited. If only Logan had written it himself and given Klecko and Fields less prominence, the result could have been a richer narrative about a team that managed to exceed expectations while simultaneously underachieving.
Some of that tale does poke through. Hard-driving, hard-drinking Head Coach Walt Michaels got the Jets to the AFC Championship Game in 1983 only to crack up after losing it. Confidence-impaired quarterback Richard Todd found sustained excellence in 1981 and 1982, only to fall apart in that same game. Gastineau at times dominates the book more than anyone, just from the dishing he gets in it.
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| "Someday, all this will be yours, son." Klecko recovers from knee surgery with his son Dan, a future pro football player himself. While not the legend his old man was, Dan did get three Super Bowl championship rings. Photo by Thomas R. Koeniges of Newsday from Nose To Nose |
Klecko is at least as interesting as any of those guys, given the career he had and the injuries he overcame, but in his own book he whines and seethes too much. Fields had more to say, but his was the lesser career.
My suspicion is that Logan started this book as a broader examination of the New York Jets in the 1980s, but found Klecko and Fields too interesting – perhaps because of their candor – and devoted large chunks of the book to their story.
As
a fan, I find the 1980s Jets more interesting than any individual player, so
what I got here was a bit of a trade-off: solid if not spectacular
sportswriting about underappreciated players on a team that fell a little short
more than once but made for something exciting beyond the failure.
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