Leon Hess finally showed up Thursday to announce he was firing one coach and hiring another and gave a charming, feisty performance in the process. Hess got almost as many laughs as his football team usually gets. He also acted like a real owner at last, and got mad. It is disgraceful that it took him this long. If Leon Hess ran Amerada Hess the way he runs the Jets, he wouldn’t own all that oil. He’d be wearing green-and-white Hess overalls and asking if you wanted him to check yours.
“I’m 80 years old,” Hess said. “I want results now.”It is a little late in the game for that. At least Hess acted tough. That hardly ever happens around the Jets.
But what has Hess been watching season after dreary season, with one nobody after another coaching his football team, one mediocrity after another picking his players? The Jets have won one playoff game in the last 10 years and five in the 25 years since Joe Namath and Super Bowl III, and in the last two Decembers have officially turned into a football joke: The New York Jest. All of a sudden Hess has decided there might be some kind of problem here. It doesn’t make him a hero today, just very slow.
It was some show at Weeb Ewbank Hall, funny sometimes, ultimately sad. It was as if the Jets were being hidden behind an 80-year-old owner, a general manager ill with cancer named Dick Steinberg and a popular ex-Jets assistant named Kotite. And offstage, a rookie coach named Pete Carroll was supposed to take the fall for just about everyone.
Make no mistake: Hess got himself a good football coach in Kotite, the first Jets coach in 20 years with head-coaching experience in the NFL. Carroll got a bad deal, but the Jets got a better coach in Kotite. He still inherits a mess in the locker room, for all the wonderful talk we got from Hess and Kotite and even Steinberg about this big, happy Jets family.
“I unilaterally made the decision [to fire Carroll),” Hess said, when asked about the decision to hire Kotite, fired two weeks ago by the Eagles.
Then Leon Hess, whose voice would sometimes rise up into a shout, said, “I’m entitled to some enjoyment out of this team.”
For years, he has acted like a sap about this team. He went seven years with Joe Walton. Then he let his friends in football talk him into Steinberg as general manager. He let Steinberg decide about Bruce Coslet. Leon Hess let Steinberg talk him into Carroll last January. Now Hess has watched another December turn to junk, and it was one too many. He wasn’t going to let Steinberg talk him into anything ever again.
Hess was told of Steinberg’s illness, he said, the week before Christmas. He wasn’t ever going to fire Steinberg after that. Hess spoke about “Dick and his condition,” and then followed that by saying, “I decided to make a change with the coach.”He really was saying this: Somebody had to go.
Steinberg still has the title of general manager. It is an empty title as of Thursday. The Jets are now Kotite’s show, that is plain enough. Hess told a story about sitting in the Bahamas and watching Kotite’s firing on television. The firing seemed to surprise Hess. If he was surprised, he was the last person in all of football not to know Kotite was gone in Philadelphia, especially after his team lost its last seven games. No matter. Leon Hess looked at his television set down in the Bahamas and saw the best pro football coach to come out of Brooklyn since Vince Lombardi. And that coach was available.
“[Kotite’s) a fighter, a builder, a ‘dese-and-dose’ guy, a leader,” Hess said. “He’ll bring our New York Jets back to where we’ll all be proud of them.”
There was something touching about Hess Thursday, as he showed the kind of fight his team hardly ever shows. There was an old man’s impatience about the whole thing. Kotite is not only a good coach, he is a good man. Maybe he is the one who can put Leon Hess in the Super Bowl before he dies. Hess would have had a better chance, and a lot sooner, if he had managed to wake up years ago and smell the Jets.
Every time Hess got up and moved to the microphone in the auditorium at Weeb Ewbank Hall Thursday, it took him a while. It was a symbol for everything.
