Surely, there is plenty of cross-pollination at work across mighty Gotham. Surely, there are plenty of Giants fans who are also Mets fans, and plenty of Yankees fans who are also Jets fans. There’s nothing in the constitution that commands you to adhere to one party line. No law requires you to vote a straight ticket. It just seems that way.
“I wish someone would have told me that about 30 years ago,” Gary Kelly said with a laugh yesterday. “All I know is, when I was growing up in Kew Gardens, you were a Mets fan in the summer and a Jets fan in the fall. The rest was easy, because everyone rooted for the Knicks and the Rangers. But if a kid showed up on my block wearing a Yankees jacket or a Giants stocking cap . . . well, it was like wearing the wrong kind of gang colors.”
Kelly, now a paralegal in Harrington Park, N.J., laughed a little more.
“Nobody should be allowed to root for both the Mets and the Jets in the same lifetime,” he said. “Parents who allow that, they should be reported to the authorities.”
Kelly the Jets fan has absorbed all the familiar body blows, he wears the scars as proudly as every Jet fan does: Mark Gastineau roughing Bernie Kosar, and Doug Brien’s two blown field goals, and the fake spike, and the great collapse of ’08, and the Mud Bowl, and Bill Simpson’s interception in the end zone, and Leon Johnson. Jets fans can recite them all by rote with the slimmest prompting. They’ve been wounded. They’ve been scarred.
They remember 1993, last day of the season, Bruce Coslet’s last game. In the afternoon, the Jets were given life by a series of upsets rivaling what happened to them on Sunday. And in the evening, in the old Astrodome, the Oilers torched the Jets 24-0, even though Rex Ryan’s father and Tom Coughlin’s current offensive coordinator re-staged the Thrilla in Manila on the Houston sidelines.
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It speaks to the psyche of a Jets fan — especially those with dual loyalties to the Mets — that more than a few of them — more than a few million of them, as likely — instantly recalled that game yesterday, as the reality of Sunday’s largesse became more evident. All they have to do is beat the Bengals at home next Sunday night — give Giants Stadium the kind of fitting finale that the landlords were incapable of giving it — and they’re in. No need for an abacus to figure any of that out.
And it was everywhere yesterday, on Twitter and Facebook and in the comments of a whole lot of Jets blogs: the faithful wanting to believe one thing and fearing another, more than one reaching into their Mets-fan alter-ego closet of anxieties, likening this Sunday to Tom Glavine taking the mound on the final day of the ’07 baseball season.
“I hate that I feel this way,” Kelly said. “But what can I do? I feel this way.”
See, this is the biggest quagmire that’s faced every Jets coach going back to Weeb Ewbank, trying to shatter the culture of emotional carnage once and for all. They all face it. They all deal with it. Some even manage to tip-toe past it for a bit: as much as Jets fans talk themselves into believing that they’ve never won a big game, they’ve actually played 10 games since 1981 just like the one they face Sunday, games where a win got them in. They won six of them. And a seventh time (2004) they qualified despite losing thanks to getting help elsewhere.
And still, and yet, there is the Culture. Earlier in the season, Ryan even addressed it, saying, “I want to establish something here where people aren’t just happy when we win, they grow to expect us to win. That’s what Jets fans deserve.”
This is Ryan’s biggest challenge this week: take advantage of what’s in front of him. Beat the Bengals. Send that same message to a legion of Jets fans (and their Mets-fan twins) that they really haven’t chosen the sporting equivalent of hemlock-flavored Gatorade. And let Glavine get out of the first inning this time.