Joe Walton, who died Sunday at age 85, presided over what I consider “The Jets Era That Never Was.”
He led the team from 1983 to 1989. There were times when they looked like the best team in professional football. And there were the doldrums when fans shouted “Joe Must Go!” roared.
In a way, his career is, I think, a cautionary sports tale, an arc of an American dream.
He was from Beaver Falls, Dad. – yes, same town as Joe Namath. And he played at the University of Pittsburgh as a receiver-tight end, a position he played after turning pro.
Walton wasn’t very big, but he worked very hard. And he was smart, not only in knowing the game. He joined the Jets in 1981 as an offensive coordinator under Coach Walt Michaels. The team had struggled constantly to return to its one and only moment — when it won Super Bowl III at the end of the 1968 season as an 18-point underdog. Since then, the club has often struggled, the lows being magnified as it played in the media epicenter of New York. No coach had left it with a winning career record.
Walton joined a team that had fallen to a record of 4-12 in 1980. But he implemented a complicated offensive system, and his quarterback, Richard Todd, his running back, Freeman McNeil, and one of his wide receivers, Wesley Walker, generated great seasons.
The defense roared through opponents, the defense line anointed with the title “the New York Sack Exchange” – Joe Klecko, Mark Gastineau, Marty Lyons, Abdul Salaam. The Jets went 10-5-1.
They received national attention and Gastineau later became a media celebrity for his romance with actress Brigitte Nielsen. The team even went to the American Conference Championship in a short-strike season the following year, losing to the Miami Dolphins.
But Michaels was fired by management after getting into a frenzied rant on the charter flight home after dropping that Miami game. He claimed that the home side Dolphins deliberately kept the field wet during a rainstorm to prevent the Jets’ vaunted running game from taking hold.
And so Joe Walton took over as head coach in 1983. His training sessions were strenuous and I noticed the players trudging off the field as if they had just played a game. Just before the season started, I heard that one of its key players, cornerback Jerry Holmes, was going to be going to the newly formed United States Football League.
I had Walton’s house number. I had called him there several times. At the time, most reporters had the house number of the head coach. But this was late at night – midnight actually. When he heard my voice and question, he said, “Jerry, I’m going to do two things – I’m going to hang up and tomorrow morning I’m going to change my phone number.” The next day at the Jets practice, I greeted Elsie Cohen, Walton’s secretary, and asked, “What’s new?”
“Very strange,” she said. “The first thing Joe told me this morning was to change his phone number at home.”
Years later, when I was writing a book about the (mostly) failures of the Jets, “Gang Green,” I called Walton and asked him about that call.
“When you’re a head coach,” he explained, “you have a lot of different pressures. There’s not just the pressure to win, but also the pressure to keep a team together and you’re dealing with over 40 guys and a whole staff.”
Walton’s first two years as Jets head coach produced 7-9 records, but then the club roared back with a few winning seasons. Then they went up and down and then went into the 1989 campaign.
When teams lose, the head coach is often blamed for doing the same things he did when he won. In Walton’s case, it was his obsession with perfection, for workouts, that often dragged the players down by the time the real game started. Injuries piled up on injuries.
Walton was wistful when he spoke of 1989. “I would still have had a winning record if it hadn’t happened last year.”
That was 1989 last year when the Jets went 4-12. It was over for Walton. But eventually he ended up at Robert Morris University, outside of Pittsburgh, where he created their football program and enjoyed a 20-year career. He was so popular there that the school named the stadium after him. Walton remains a legend there, not least because in Robert Morris’s first football year, 1994, he took the freshman squad to a 7-1-1 record.
I talked to him during his college days and about fame and winning. There are some cities where nothing less than a championship will suffice. He pondered that thought from his college dorm in a small town.
“If you stick around long enough and don’t win the Super Bowl, you’ll be fired,” he said. “And sometimes you get fired if you win the Super Bowl.”
At Robert Morris University, Joe wasn’t worried. He could be himself. I have often wondered how his career at Jets could have ended if he had allowed himself that luxury.
