Joe Klecko's Hall of Fame induction honors a generation of Jets, fans
Joe Klecko, who played every position on the defensive line in his 12 NFL seasons, had 20.5 sacks in 1981, one year before sacks became an official stat. Credit: AP/Al Messerschmidt
PHOENIX
From a foggy, nearly forgotten era of Jets history, when the green-and-white uniforms were enhanced with the mud of the Shea Stadium infield, before the measure he excelled in — sacking quarterbacks — was even an official statistic, Joe Klecko has achieved the ultimate honor in professional football.
He is a Hall of Famer.
He wasn’t part of the swashbuckling championship team in 1968 with Joe Namath and Don Maynard, nor was he around for the technicolor era that produced fellow now-Canton-ites Curtis Martin, Kevin Mawae and, voted in along with him, Darrelle Revis. Instead, Klecko hails from a grittier time between those eras, when there still were plenty around who personally remembered Super Bowl III but before the “same old” label was even a thing for the Jets.
Nor was Klecko the biggest personality of the “New York Sack Exchange,’’ the defensive line that tormented opposing quarterbacks and hung as posters on many a bedroom wall. That honor belonged to Mark Gastineau. If there were a Hall of Fame for flamboyance, Gastineau would be in there.
There is a Hall of Fame for professional football, though. They finally picked the right guy for that one.
Maybe all of that is why it took so long for Klecko to get here. His greatness was too hard to define by the current standards and those set before him. He was sandwiched in the middle, overshadowed from the front and from behind.
Klecko’s inclusion feels like an honor for all of those Jets teams that played through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their fans, too.
Baby boomers got to swoon over Namath, millennials went viral for Revis. For Gen X fans of the Jets or the NFL in general, the group of kids who grew up pre-ESPN watching football through hazy aerial antenna receptions, Klecko was the ideal of a player and a man.
Mountainous and strong, but also fast and agile. He wore a facemask with fewer bars than Prohibition and shoulder pads that looked as if they were inflated, had a flowing mesh jersey that could be torn like tissue paper, and rarely sported any protection on his arms. He was a player for whom a clean uniform was a sin against humanity.
Klecko was asked if his induction vindicates the teams he played for, the ones that never were able to win or even get back to a Super Bowl.
“I don’t know if you could ever really vindicate it,” he said. “We were close a couple of times. You could taste it. We were almost there. But I don’t know if you would call it vindication.”
It certainly does honor that era, though, and all it meant. Klecko getting in brings back memories of Greg Buttle and Marty Lyons, of Wesley Walker and a young Freeman McNeil. They never did win a title with the Jets, they’ll never be Hall of Famers. Now, though, they have one of their own in there. Those who came of age with those teams do, too.
When the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2023 was presented on Thursday night, almost all of them were very young men by any measure other than professional athletics. Two of them, Revis and Browns offensive tackle Joe Thomas, were first-ballot inductees. DeMarcus Ware looked as if he still could come around the edge to sack Eli Manning. Ronde Barber was asked about this being the final chapter of his football life and shuddered. “I’m only 47!” he exclaimed.
Among them sat Klecko, age 69, his gnarled hands and slow-paced walk far different from the younger, fitter men surrounding him.
Inadvertently illustrating the age difference, Revis tried to pay Klecko a compliment.
“I told him: ‘I would have loved to play with you,’ ” Revis said, “ ‘but I wasn’t born then.’ ”
Klecko retired in 1988. Revis was born in 1985.
“You have no clue with this process,” Revis said. “We were talking backstage and you hear about some guys who waited this long, this many years. Joe Thomas mentioned: ‘I would be [ticked].’ That’s probably true. We all probably would be across the board. Guys who do have to wait a lengthy time, they’re class acts. They’re stand-up guys.”
Klecko has been that from the day he was drafted to this weekend, when he is being honored. There was never a speck of bitterness in the 46 years in between, the last 30 of them spent just outside the Canton city limits.
“No, you see, I don’t have that,” he said of any hard feelings. “I have a very strong belief in God. When it’s your time, that’s what I stood with. When it didn’t happen, I always said, well, next year. There are guys out there who want to take their names off the voting list and so forth, but I never did that. I just figured if it was to be and if it was God’s will, it would happen.”
Klecko kept coming back to the math. About 30,000 men have played professional football. Come August there will be 370 in the Hall of Fame.
“It’s unfathomable,” he said. “It’s very hard to put that in perspective. It’s less than 1% and that means it’s awesome. To be involved in that group of people is pretty damn good.”
To go in representing an entire era of fanhood that has always felt somewhat overlooked? That’s pretty good, too.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
