Green Smoke

By Scott Edney

You’ll find me down the Hippodrome watching the games with many others, including Alasdair, Jon, and Nic. With the last one being he who is essentially Green Smoke and the ‘nuisance’ who’s been badgering me for almost one year for this bit of writing. Thankfully he won’t be there this Sunday bugging coz he’ll actually be at the MetLife to watch the Week 11 game. Yeah, at the time of writing this piece, it’s November 2024, and even with Aaron Rogers and the greatest depth of talent we’ve had in years, we still truly suck. Nic is definitely a glutton for punishment for going out there, but ain’t we all? We’re fans of Gang Green, and we seem to have been in a constant and miserable rebuild since 1969.

Let me introduce myself. I’m Scott, a Londoner and sports fan who loves the Jets and Millwall FC (a London-based soccer team that always gets the shit refs)…. Oh yeah, I swear a lot too, so be warned. 

Nic asked me to write this as I have a truly amazing missus who has blessed me with three boys, two of which are fans of the Jets too. The elder is Jay, a chip off the ol’ block, who you might have even seen in a photo bandying about wearing a Chrebet jersey when he was only two years old. He too knows the pain and once asked me in the car after a defeat, “Why are we Millwall and Jets fans, Dad?!” And I s’pose that’s the million-dollar question: Why do we make our kids like the teams we do? Why don’t we spare them the pain and suffering we’ve had? And admit it, if you’re a sports dad or mum reading this and have a favourite team, then I bet you’ve also passed down that lineage to your offspring too. Don’t lie now; you know you’ve gone and told them, “We support [team] in this house, and I’ll show you why we love them.” You could’ve thrown a load of names into a hat, picked one out, gone to more games, and had ‘a house divided.’ Unless, of course, it’s a local team like Millwall around my part of town, which means by law that you have to support them if you live around my area (also not based in any English law at all, by the way).

My boy Jay has a pukka knowledge of the game, plays Madden, and can call out plays before I even see them. He knows how much I loved Braylon Edwards and how I thought Stephen Hill was the worst draft ever, and yet he will carry this bane around for the rest of his life, and he’ll probably pass that down to his kids too. With religion, you can tell your child what you are and teach them some core beliefs but also tell them they can choose what they believe or if they believe anything at all, but in sports, we tell them what’s right and make sure we indoctrinate them enough so they stay with it. And now bizarrely I’m doing the same thing with my other son Max too.It’s worth mentioning that there’s also my son Leo who has seen how emotional me and his brothers get with sport, just doesn’t get it, and decided it’s not for him, and he’s much happier for it. And he laughs at us.

Recently the Jets were in London to play the Vikes and once again, just like in 2021, the whole buildup weekend was mustard until the game. And then it was dog shit. That team pisses me off, as there I am at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium with my two lads feeling the hope late into the fourth quarter before Rogers cocked it all up, and of course we came away with the L. Sighs of despair and talk of “there’s always next year” as usual as we leave, but we walk out, and not before long we enter the Jets fan’s hype cycle and get eager to watch them the next week. Rise and repeat.

It’s said that the lottery of the location of your birth determines your loyalties, and you support the local team, and this is true where Millwall is concerned, but my boys are neither from the Big Apple nor NJ, and I didn’t want them to end up as glory hunters blindly following the recently domineering powerhouse that was the Pats. Such bandwagon jumping also goes against the spirit that defines the fan experience too; you need to suffer through the bad times, refereeing cock-ups, and last-gasp defeats. You do it in order to appreciate the good times when they finally come… but as a fan of Gang Green, I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting, and now it would seem they will too. It’s not ideal, but that’s the thing about fatherhood: sometimes you just have to do your best.