There was talk on the Vets chat before last Sunday about pressure. In particular, the inability of the Rooks to bring any. And the unstoppable amount that would be brought by the Vets. This pressure inequality would surely carry the day for the Vets. So it was alleged.
How this turned out – we know.
But there was pressure Sunday outside of that related to line-play. Pressure for the Vets to continue a winning streak that spanned three years and made the Revolution a Jewball era that welcomed in many Rookies, but at the same time kept them in their place. And the pressure was felt by the Rookies to break that chain, stem the tide, stop the trend – and flip the script.
Now there is the pressure on this recap writer to do justice to a Sunday that would defy Homer and Virgil to tell such epics within the physical limitations of the page, let alone the screen. But here we go-
I took some time this week to look back at the origin of Vets Rooks and listen for its echo to inform anything I may come up with here. Not only did I find the very day in 2006 where the idea was born and presented, I found the recap and results of 11 contests. If they were played every year since 2006, I guess we played Vets Rooks XVI a few days ago. Whether its number 14 or 15 or 16 – it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that – like everything in Jewball – we make it more than a game. No, not a cult. A family. A family tradition. A family tradition where half the family leaves inspired and the other half leaves miserable.
Of course what gets to me most reading the old Vets Rooks recaps is the names. I recalled the sting of many many losses. The disappointment with my contemporaries who seemed to be slowing down and couldn’t go next gear to compete. I recalled the excitement leading up to the game and the good spirited but venomous trash talk that always ensued. Sure, all that was apparent and felt afresh. But…it’s the names that really blow my mind. Klink, as he mentioned – was a Rookie in the first game. But by Vets Rookies II he was with the Vets. And he was with me and Rabin on Sunday. As he was in 2007. That’s fifteen damn years ago if you are counting. FIFTEEN years ago, the Vets team featured 3 of the same 7 players that played last week. That’s almost half the team! God Bless Jewball! And as I read it’s like a montage of moments being played – feeling at the same time imminent and ancient. Uri is perplexing the Vets. Yoni bests his brother Yirmi. Doggy can’t keep up with Yehuda. There goes Joey…bye. Mighty and Zez dominate for the Rooks for a decade. Bye Yakir. Bye Yoni. Bye my generation. Snow and Singer add to the Vets’ endless woes. But you live long enough and you are merited miracles. You stick around and put in the work and there are rewards…Rewards that are satisfying because on one level they feel earned.
But just as much they feel overwhelming and very much stolen. Like there must be some mistake. How am I playing on a Sunday with Vets like Steveo, Mighty, Singer, Kut, Munch, PJs, Tom, Daveo, even Gronk. Gronk feels new to me. We’ve been playing together for 5 years! The rest of em….my God! I remember the first time they stepped on the field with us. I remember sizing each of them up, analyzing what they might be, writing them up in some recap. Never in my wildest dreams did I think they’d be running it back with me year after year with the Vets like Doggy and Yoni once did. I know this is becoming about me and that’s not my intention. I’m just trying to convey the enormity of what we are accomplishing together. If Vets Rooks is about anything it is that we are all in this together. Whether this is the game or THE GAME – it’s together. It. Is. Together. Who is with me? We are in this together. We push each other to (our version of) greatness. That is the theme. Vets Rooks is Vets telling the Rooks you will have something to offer even when you are up here with us and it is the Rooks telling Vets you cannot underestimate anything or anyone. We must grow. We must strive. And we do that by pushing each other. It’s support by way of contest. It’s also of course storytelling. It is another chapter in the great and infinite Jewball mythology.
So, let’s get to legendizing:
I will get the hardest part out of the way. The Rooks won the day. That can’t be argued. Two games were played. The Vets won neither. The Rooks won one and tied one. So the won the day. Period. I compliment the Rooks and I temper my bitterness. This will not be a recap of excuses – although I would not be completely out of line to go there, since…well….I’m not – like I said.
Vets Rooks has never been a double header but The Revolution is all about new awesomeness. Over the years, we have done V/R as an age cut off thing and a years of service thing – last Sunday we did both. Game 1 was Vets being over 31 and Rooks being 31 and under. Game 2 was Vets being 5 years of service and Rooks being 4 and under. We have reached an unimaginable stage of this moed (time/holiday) that even with many prominent Jewballers failing to make the pilgrimage, we still had two games of 8s with only Pray playing both. Let that sink in. God Bless Jewball.
For the Seniors: Yaron at QB, E, Munch, Sam, Beast, Tom, Steveo, and Singer. Let’s talk about Singer for a second. To begin with…I love this guy. I told him I am desperate for him to win an MVP so I can soliloquize about him for a few pages. He is always right there, but something goes awry – which is of course so Singer. The guy is such a special player and person….well….I’m gonna save it. Wait for that MVP announcement whenever it comes. Another reason I can’t retire yet. On this particular day he did something remarkable – perhaps with that MVP in mind….He is in Florida for the weekend for a family simcha…..HE FLIES BACK IN FOR VETS ROOKS – He leaves for the airport from the field after doing everything he could in Game 1 to give the Vets a W. So…some might say…he’s crazy. But….it’s never crazy to live a great life. How can anyone think that? We should all aspire to greatness and Singer is showing us how that is done. Life has rules, sure. But so many of the rules we live by we place upon ourselves and they are based on expectations of others. Whenever you think you want to do something great but can’t….think of Singer getting on that flight on Saturday night, coming to the field bright and early, and playing his ass off….then racing over to JFK. And don’t think about how funny it is or belittle it as being a quirky anecdote. That’s an insult. That’s self-defeating. Instead, think about how life can be lived on terms that are transcendent! And f***ing achieve that!
The Juniors were lead by the embattled Feit and comprised of Bert, MK, Effie, Tabak, Zada, Pray, and Solo.
The bottom line is these teams are stacked. Incredible assemblage of talent. I will say that the old v. young game is naturally going to favor the young because…y’know….they usually can move a lot faster than their elders. But we have a Hulk! Well two Hulks. One named Munch and the other named Singer. That gave the Vets a punchers chance. Add to that an all around talented team. Yaron is a hot and cold QB (usually within the same game) who can throw passes of pure fire and just as readily burn his team. Steveo has something forever Rookie about him. You just always believe he is some high school kid who can run for days. Tom has been on a tear. E is just super competitive and angry and that always plays. And Sam can rip off your arms and replace them with realistic other arms.
Yaron and Feit are similar in a way. The problem is never their arms or their play calling. It’s always their decision making. They don’t take what the defense gives them. They scan and scan for something great perhaps, but on 1st or 2nd down sometimes you should just take what is good.
Early in the game Yaron had one thing working very well. Passes to Singer. They hooked up for big yards a number of times, but when he looked elsewhere the result was disappointing. Feit was struggling similarly. He could get a few completions, but was unable to sustain drives. Twenty minutes into the game it was scoreless when disaster struck for the Vets in about 4 different ways. Munch injured his thumb and pulled himself from the game to assess the damage. Yaron dropped back to pass from the Rooks’ 10 yard line and got clobbered by….maybe Bert…and threw a pick to MK who easily took it in for the score. Rooks took the lead while Yaron was on his back. It was deflating moment and the Vets had to consider whether this was going to get ugly fast. It did get a bit uglier. Yaron’s offense was still flailing. Feit looked good in the first half. He had a beautiful fade to MK in the right corner to set up a Zada TD. The Rooks were off and running with a 2-0 lead. Steveo of course made a vintage Steveo pick and the hope was that it was the sign of a turnaround…and it kind of was.
Munch came back in and – although he was not 100% – he was effective in chasing Feit and making him really uncomfortable. Munch would stay in and Feit would not put up another score for the remainder of the game. Meanwhile, Yaron and Beast started to put their differences aside and create some magic. For a good two drives it was the Yaron and Beast show. Beast was taking the Rooks to school with great hands, speed, shiftiness, and stiff arms. Although Yaron did his best to squander Beast’s efforts by going impotent in the red zone, Pray decided to drop a pick and tip the ball to Tom…who caught it for a TD. Vets trailing by 1.
Like Munch, Steveo took himself out for a thumb injury, but unlike Munch, Steveo is human, so he remained on the sidelines for the remainder of the game. Jordan, PJs and Mighty rotated in, with Mighty being the most effective. Basically, he came in and it looked like a different team. Fresh old legs in a game that was an hour and fifteen minutes old. At some point Tom kicked Bert – which everyone liked. We will learn more about this in our recap of Game 2, but Mighty was took the Vets Rooks game as an opportunity to go old school assassin. He picked Pray and nearly took it all the way. With the dynamic duo back together, Singer stepped up and made the catch that tied the game with minutes left. With that….our hero…Snow Pup Singer dashes off into the sunrise – his aura bright and radiant. In OT, Feit still could not rediscover that first half magic and Yaron had the ball last with an opportunity to win the game and give the Vets their 4th win in a row. A spectacular drive ensued of which I can tell you nothing about other than that I was sh***ing in my pants the whole time. Once again, the red zone became his kryptonite and the a 1st and goal stunningly turned into a 4th and goal. As Mighty jumped for a laserbeam in the back of the endzone, the hearts of every Vet from B-sh to BD to Zez to Spira jumped along with him…..but as his cleats landed at least partially on the white strip that marks the back of the endzone….the hopes of a win died. But it was also a non-loss. It was left to the Vets of Game 2 to make seize the day…or not. But that tale is for another day.
Three reasons why Vets Rooks matters (or at least feels like it does). 1.) The Challenge: Everyone has something to prove. 2.) The Tribalism: Like Leagues, the feeling of being part of a defined group rallying united. 3.) The Trash Talk: Every nerve-ending is at attention responding to the digs and barrage of provocations. It heightens the drama like no other game.
But, that is all in the pre-game analysis. Once the ball is snapped, the game itself will dictate whether it mattered or not. This past Sunday, Vets Rooks mattered; both in the pre-op and in the postmortem.
The challenge was real. Gronk v. Pray. Two MVP contenders with pride – going head to head. The Vets being Mighty, Jordan, Rabin, Klink, PJs, Daveo, and Kut. Each bleeding Vet pride more than the next. Wanting to prove that they still got it for themselves and for the Vets of today and yesteryear. The Rooks being Prime Storm and Salem representing a more experienced brand of Rook. Irv, a bit seasoned himself and the standard for talent for the next decade. And true Rooks, Ernie, Waldo, and the namesake Rook himself. Trying to prove that they belong and are going nowhere. That one day they will battle for the Vets. That they will not fade away like so many pretenders have before them.
The Tribalism was real. The Vets were breathing as one. A single organism with so many games and years of Jewball under their belts. Each one knowing how much it meant. Each one knowing exactly what the others were thinking. The Rookies as well, bound by their up and coming status. The chip being large and heavy but shared and resting with its weight divided evenly across their shoulders. The Rookies are usually weakened by their inability to get on the same page. To find common ground. To think like a team. The elder statesmen Rooks made sure that wasn’t going to happen. There was something different about this Rookie team because of what Prime, Pray, Salem and Storm brought to the table this year. Vets Rooks is always about youth v. experience. Well, look the f*** out when the youth HAS experience.
The Trash Talk was real. There are no hard feelings in Jewball. It is all love. But there is healthy competition. And there is aggression between certain players. A desire to best the other. And the Rookies had to eat it for the past three years. They did so. But it had to have been frustrating to take the boasting from the Vets year after year and leading up to the game. They could not respond. They could only think – maybe whisper – “you’ll see…”
To the game.
If it wasn’t on the very first drive that Pray and the Rooks scored, it was the second. Throwing screens and blockers, mostly to Jordan’s side and with Pray running when he needed to….the ball just moved on the Vets. It was a sort of bullying tactic that set the precedent early on. A wise move to make a statement: We may be Rooks but we will not be intimidated. We will impose our will. First downs came very easily. In the end, with Pray at the 5, he does his usual thing running ten yards back and to the right side. The defense shifts over to bottle him up and cover his commitment to the right side of the endzone. But…Pray does something a bit different. He swivels his shoulders and spots Salem wide open at about the line of scrimmage on the opposite side of the field. Pray guns it cross body and Salem makes the catch. Only Klink was patient enough to stay home on the rollout by Pray so he is still there, between Salem and the goal line. Salem at the 5, Klink at the 3. Mano a Mano. Rook v. Vet. Salem ducks in, then out, Klink falls. Salem takes it in. Rooks take a 1-0 lead.
Vets got the ball and did the very same thing the Rooks had done. Marched down the field quite easily. We didn’t use screens because we have Mighty to just run around defenders. And we have Gronk who just finds people open wherever they may be. With Jordan and Mighty running deeper routes, Daveo was open a lot in the first half and making big yard catches. Gronk is also a master of the hips (a hipster) and he can evade flag grabs with a shimmy. Whereas Pray closed the deal on his opening drive with a TD, Gronk feeds the burgeoning Rookie Beast by throwing a pick in the endzone to the Rook himself. Talk about a bad omen. From there it got worse. Vet drives were fruitless when it came to scoring and the Rooks were piling up TDs. Prime was so good on Sunday. I’ll tell you right now he’s not getting Jewball, but I feel like Jewball would not be good enough for what he was on Sunday – if that makes sense. He was the soul of his team. There is no award for that. He (with Salem also very much in that supernatural realm) made sure of the result. The result late in the 2nd quarter was 3-0 Rooks because Prime and Pray had put up 2 more unanswered points.
The Vets called a Time Out! The Defensive scheme wasn’t working. The Rooks were going shot so Mighty at safety was taken out of the game. The line wasn’t getting to Pray. Gronk rushing from the LB was too little too late. New Defense: Mighty plays middle LB. Gronk spies QB and doesn’t rush. PJs and Kut will go after the QB. It changed everything. All of a sudden. Screens were being blown up. Pray couldn’t run (as much). And PJs and Kut were getting real pressure on the QB. At one point PJs put his league QB on the turf with Vet-geance! The Vets knew that Gronk would eventually put up TDs. He always does. So it was a matter of getting stops. The Vets got a stop. Gronk found Kut underneath and Kut made a move with a stiff arm and took it to the house. Vets are on the board 3-1 going into half time.
As the second half started, the Vets had some hope. And that hope went into overdrive when Jordan picked Pray on a deep ball to Ernie and ran it back to the Vets 26. Gronk and Mighty quickly cashed in the turnover with a TD. Mighty, like Prime, came to play on a level that few Jewballer can touch. It’s something some players just have – are born with. Big game fierce. If Gronk put the ball anywhere near Mighty he caught it and turned into bonus yards. And he always covered – just mattered if it was single or double. All of a sudden with 40 minutes to go it was a once score game. The momentum had shifted way over to the Vets. But it still didn’t feel comfortable. The Rooks had a fire that would not go out – and certainly not while they held on to the lead. And as momentum in sports tends to do – it swings in an instant. That instant was an inexplicable pass from Gronk to Waldo. I don’t know what Gronk saw. I mean, Waldo was wide open, but still….he was on the other team. He wears a very unique hat. Every Vet is short. Whatever they case, Waldo with the pick. Perhaps it was another one of those bad omens. Perhaps it was a day where a madenning Waldo pick needed to be foreshadowed. The Vets are barely recovered from the shock when Pray somehow does what he always does – rolls right – and gets past all defenders for a score. It is 4-2 Rooks.
The Vets strike right back but now the clock is at 30 minutes to go. It’s Mighty again. Just making crazy catches and crazy runs and refusing to be denied greatness. He returns the score to a one point Rook advantage with 25 minutes left.
Pray scored again, I don’t really care how, but it made it 5-3. Gronk was under a lot of pressure from Salem and he could not really do as he pleased, but MIghty was always reliable throughout the game. Like I said…throw it to him…he will catch it. When the Vets needed him most in the waning minutes of the game, Gronk tosses a ball to Mighty who was covered stride for stride by two Rooks and he made the catch and left them in his dust. 15 minutes left. 5-4 Rooks.
The Rooks were driving to ice the game with 10 minutes to play. The Vets defense was doing a good job keeping the Rooks from the big play, but the clock was ticking. Vets would get ball last either way, but a score by the Rooks would make last licks meaningless. At midfield, the Rooks faced a 4th and short and decided to go for it. Go for the W. Pray rolls left and looks to dump the ball to Salem underneath, but then decides to run. Of course he is way back because…that’s what he does. Jordan bolts in from the corner and evades Salem’s late breaking block. He meets Pray a yard before the line and manages to get the flag for the 4th down sack and hold. 3 plays later Gronk finds Rabin – the VET of all VETS – to tie the game!
The Vets hold the Rooks to a quick 3 and out. With 3 minutes left, Gronk and the Vets have the ball and with a single drive can win the game and keep the streak alive. Can provide an amazing capper to the recent run of the Vets. And everything came crashing down right away. Right away. On the first snap of what was poised to be a step toward greatness, Ivry rushes and gets a hand on the ball…it sinks instead of zips. Mighty can’t adjust in time. Waldo can adjust in time. Waldo dives for the ball while somehow staying on his feet. I guess that’s a tall person thing. He picks it off his shoe tops. He dashes into the endzone which is 6 yards away. Waldo races through the back of the endzone and spikes the ball in celebration with his teammates racing in behind him like fireworks into the night sky. It is astonishing. For this Vet, it was beautiful and tragic.
There is still time on the clock so the Vets get another drive. But much like when Zada scored that TD in a similarly awesome and hyped game last month when the Cronies faced the Lionhearts…you just knew. Waldo had won the Rooks that game. Whether it was in OT or regulation – you knew. Gronk and Jordan made it interesting, twice converting on 4th downs with desperation throws (pitches). But, like I said…you knew. In the end, the Vets got to about their 22, but failed to tie up the game and send it into OT. The Rooks pulled it out and made their statement. I didn’t even have the heart to remind them to take a picture.
Jewball is not easy. As I said…Pray, Prime, Storm, and Salem lead by example – showing the kind of commitment that is needed as well as playmaking. But…when I look at that game, when I remember that game, there is only one play that is gonna shatter me to my core. There is only play that didn’t make any sense in the flow of the narrative. Every single play in that game I can process. Except for what Waldo did in that final Vet drive. That he got that ball, didn’t fall on his face, and lead all the Rookies out the damn back of the endzone to an after party that they hadn’t even earned yet. If you are a stat-head he also had 2 sacks and the other stupid pick. Jewball to you Waldo. Love that you are now part of this family. As well as your other true Rookies. Congratulations again to all the Rookies who played this year. From the Veterans: We give you a hard time, but we know you are the future. One day this will be yours and it will only continue and be able to do great things if you stick to your craft and our traditions. We really want to beat you next year but in the meantime….thanks for joining us and making it feel like it was meant to be.
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