Opinion> Lenore Skenazy> Nothing Super For Jets Fans

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Nothing Super for Jets Fans

"Go, Giants … I guess."

That's the rousing cheer New Jersey native Frank Spina is practicing for Super Bowl Sunday. He's looking forward to the game as eagerly as a prisoner who gets to choose between lethal injection and a firing squad.

Such is the fate of the New York Jets fan.

The problem, for Jets fans, is complex. (Besides the problem that we now associate them with the guys yelling at women to take off their shirts. And the problem of a 4-12 season. And the problem of having a nickname that sounds like a festering disease that often leads to amputation — Gang Green.)

Anyway, the problem for Jets fans and this particular Super Bowl is this: They hate the Patriots the way Yankees fans hate the Red Sox. But many of them also hate the Giants the way Mets fans hate the Yankees.

Got that? Hate-hate, hate-hate. Or put it this way: Brooklynite Bryan Pope said, "If there's one team that I absolutely would not want to see win the Super Bowl, it's the Patriots. The No. 2 team I wouldn't want to see win? The New York Giants."

"For me, it isn't Super Bowl XLII," 20-year-old fan Nick Fargione agreed. "It's Catch-22."

The roots of all this animosity go deep. For starters, the Jets are just a much newer team than the Giants, thus reminding folks of the Mets and their relationship to/resentment of the storied Yankees. From 1963 till 1984, the Jets even played at the Mets' Shea Stadium, which is how they got their name. The jets from nearby LaGuardia Airport were flying overhead (and it rhymes with Mets).

When they finally left in 1984, it wasn't to a home of their own but to New Jersey's Giants Stadium.

Really makes a team feel welcome, right? But one suspects that what really rankles Jets fans is even simpler: The Giants have won two Super Bowls and will be playing in their fourth, while the Jets, as Mr. Pope put it, "haven't even been to a Super Bowl since Joe Namath was dating Raquel Welch."

To make matters worse, the Jets' AFC rivals — the Pats — have won three Super Bowls in the past six seasons. And Jets fans remember that the Patriots' coach, Bill Belichick, was supposed to be their coach.

Back in 1999, long-suffering Jets fan Jerry Walsh explained, the Jets' coach, Bill Parcells, was stepping down, "and he announced that Belichick was going to be succeeding him as coach. But two or three days later, the Jets had a press conference announcing Belichick as the coach, and he proceeds to walk up to the podium. And he had a little crumpled up note in front of him saying, 'I'm announcing my resignation.' That was his welcoming press conference!"

So it's not as if the Jets have had it easy — at least not since 1969, when they won Super Bowl III.

"I wasn't alive then, but to console myself, I bought a ticket stub to that game on eBay," Robert Tuchman, president of TSE Sports & Entertainment, said. "If they ever go again in my lifetime, I will be sitting on the 50-yard line going nuts."

And if it takes a little longer?

"I'll watch from the grave."

Optimistic. Resigned. Spoken like a true Jets fan.

Better luck next year, guys.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at The New York Sun and Advertising Age. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.