I know it's coming.
“Boland, you don’t deserve a vacation.”
“Boland, your whole life is a vacation.”
“Boland, you cover sports AND get vacation time?”

All fair points, I admit.

However, company rules are company rules and I am obligated to take a certain amount of time off during the course of the year and once late July rolls around, that won’t happen the rest of 2008 and into 2009. So I am on vacation all this week.

To where?

Cleveland, of course, which should give the witty amongst you – pretty much everyone from what I’ve seen on this blog thus far – plenty of material. Time to visit the parents and other family members in the C-town area, along with several golf courses.

However, Cleveland does have the Internet (surprising to some, I know), so if there is Jets news in the next week I’ll still post it. And I’ll continue to answer questions and/or offer sarcasm in the comments section as is necessary. So really the only difference with the blog this week is I’ll be doing it from Cleveland rather than New York. To calm any frayed nerves I suggest continual gazing at the fish picture (you choose).

7/24 8:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m.
7/25 1:30 p.m.
7/26 8:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m.
7/27 1:30 p.m.
7/28 8:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m. (Closed to Public)
7/29 8:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m.
7/30 1:30 p.m.

I talked to Ferguson on Thursday about his foundation - its slogan is "Building Communities One Brick At a Time" - and it was clear he is as passionate about that as anything in his life. And, he made clear, it's important for him to be as involved as possible, lending not only his name but his time.

I talked to Ferguson about his off-the-field activities Thursday but also collected some things that I'll be writing about during training camp. I have said here that I thought Ferguson, during the OTAs, looked stronger in his upper body than he did last season - not to mention very motivated - and he confirmed it.

"I've been working out for a while and it's really paying off," Ferguson said. "Yeah, I'm bigger. I've made some strides in the weight room, set some personal records for myself. I'm really trying to do my part."

My favorite parts of the Giants announcement are the respective comments of co-owners John Mara and Steve Tisch. Both sounded almost apologetic for the decision.

"It’s both an emotional and complicated process to establish the price structure in a new building that has an evolving manifest,” Tisch said.

Nothing like a little "I feel your pain" insincerity by multi-millionaires. But more important, when Tisch strings together the words, "in a new building that has an evolving manifest," he sounds like a lawyer with no case trying to confuse the jury with impressive-sounding, yet meaningless, terms and phrases. In this corner you have the Jets comparing PSLs to "taxi medallions", and in the opposite corner the Giants are babbling about a building's "evolving manifest." Sounds like the building has some kind of bizarre personal problem.

Last chance, Mr. Johnson, to boldly go where too few NFL owners have gone and say no to this heist.

But there was Gholston earlier today on the Eisenhower Park driving range launching – and sometimes not launching – golf balls off his driver, Phil Mickelson-like, meaning left-handed.

“We got a lot of talent,” Gholston said of southpaws. “We can do anything.”

[NOTE: It is June. It’s either this or absolutely zero blog updates or, worse, another LENGTHY letter to Woody Johnson and I don’t think anyone, least of all Cliff or Bryan or Woody - the man himself - wants to slog through that. And yes, this means I spent another day at a golf course. Oh, and Randy Lange, of newyorkjets.com did mention Gholston was left-handed in a late April story I just now came across. Figures. The man is other-worldly when it comes to NFL/Jets trivia].

So anyway, Gholston, along with the rest of the Jets rookie class with some veterans sprinkled in, were at Eisenhower taking part in a golf clinic – to show athletes the value of golf – conducted by area Met PGA assistant professionals. One of them, Jamie Kilmer from Meadow Brook Club, said, in so many words, the players took to coaching better than most people. Even those players with little golf experience, which was most of the players.

“They understand the coach/student relationship so they do exactly what you tell them,” Kilmer said. “And then there’s just their natural athletic talent. If you just start them in the right spot, they figure it out from there.”

Dustin Keller seemed to, after taking just a handful of pointers on posture and stance, ripping some 200-plus yarders that had some nice right-to-left movement. He also, of course, produced some shots with very little movement and even less distance, but no one is perfect, particularly when it comes to golf, which nonetheless has proven over the years to be an addiction for athletes, including Erik Ainge. Ainge, with his 14 handicap, is one of the better golfers on the Jets. Eric Smith, also there today, is also pretty good.

“I love golf,” Ainge said. “I play as much as I can play.”

[An aside: yes, while Jets players cannot discuss injuries, you can probably conclude from Ainge being at the golf course that he'll be ok for training camp].

Center Nick Mangold is among the veterans still on Long Island. Many have departed for what amounts to a brief summer vacation before training camp starts in late July, but, “I heard ‘golf’ and I was like, ‘sign me up,’” Mangold said. “I heard golf and figured I’d come running.”

And speaking of running, I asked Mangold how much he and the rest of the offensive line had improved this offseason. [For the record, my transition to ask Mangold football questions wasn’t that awful or cornball. Bad, just not that bad].

“It was great to be able to pick the brains of those two guys,” Mangold said of two veterans – Damien Woody and Alan Faneca – the Jets acquired and with whom Mangold got to work with for the first time during OTAs and minicamp. “They bring in different experiences, different viewpoints.”

Mangold was particularly effusive in talking about new assistant Bill Callahan, who has been working extensively with the line.

“It’s exciting being able to work with him and get a feel of what are things to come,” Mangold said. “He brings different viewpoints to existing techniques that guys do, but he also brings a new sense of ways to do things and gives you, really, another tool in your toolbox that you can bring out and use effectively throughout the year.”

I’ll repeat what I’ve said here before and it’s been reinforced after talking with some of the O-linemen this offseason: I think getting Callahan is going to, by year’s end, rank as one of the Jets best offseason moves.

Woody Johnson could make it better with a follow-up letter/email such as this:

"Dear Jets season ticket holders,

It is after careful consideration, of both my bank account and yours, that I have decided that this franchise will NOT use PSLs to help finance the new stadium.

I reached this decision not to curry favor with you but simply because there’s always been something kind of untoward about this whole PSL business. It’s time an NFL owner stood up and said, “no.”

I’m sure just about every season ticket holder was concerned recently when we sent out a survey that said, among other things, “The Jets have taken a substantial amount of debt to finance the construction of the new $1.3 billion stadium. Like other teams that have built stadiums in the recent past, the Jets are required to pay back this construction debt quickly. The Jets are surveying different types and terms of Personal Seat Licenses (PSLs) as one of the ways to help achieve this requirement.”

The point has been made elsewhere that this stadium is being funded entirely via private means and the implication of the above passage is because of that, the public should share some of the costs for this private enterprise. If I was a fan and I read that, my response would be this:

So if we as the public have to help subsidize this “private venture,” does this give us even partial equity and therefore the ability to share in some of the profits?

Of course, any owner would have a simple answer to that:

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Anyway, in the survey, we describe a PSL as “an asset, like a taxi medallion, that is purchased in addition to the ticket that give the holder ownership of the seat. This holder can then sell the seat license in the future, including for any profit, to someone else if the holder no longer wishes to purchase season tickets.”

That was an affront to your intelligence and an overall clumsy comparison. Did you know that a retiring NYC driver, who had been a cabbie for 25 years, sold his medallion in 2007 for a reported $600,000? According to what I read, the gentleman paid $30,000 for it in 1981. But individuals don’t really buy taxi medallions anymore the way individual fans buy PSLs. The city has just over 13,000 taxi medallions and most of those medallions, because of their high price (we’re talking mid six figures here) and the infrequency in which they hit the open market, are owned by investment companies, THEN leased out to individual drivers.

The medallion analogy fails on so many levels and here’s another: a taxi medallion gives its owner the right to operate a licensed vehicle for continuous profit (basically, the fare charged for driving someone from point A to point B). Where is the continuous profit in a PSL? Sure, you can sell your tickets on a week to week basis but a season ticket holder can do that now, without a PSL.

Most important, let’s be honest about something else here. No fan looks at season tickets as an investment or an asset. Terms like that didn’t enter the sports vernacular when it came to season-ticket discussions until the Carolina Panthers started peddling their PSLs in the mid-90’s and introduced the “investment” concept as a misdirection play to what was really happening: a con and a hustle for an easy influx of cash.

The reality is, those of you who have had season tickets with us since those wind-swept days at Shea or have gotten them since we moved to the wind-swept Meadowlands, you have those tickets because you are rabid fans of your team, some of the most loyal fans in the NFL. Simply put, you love your team, living and discussing it 365, 24/7. The investment you make is emotional with the dividends paid in the form of bonds established between fathers and sons – daughters, too – and/or the friendships forged through the shared experiences of arriving in a parking lot before sunrise and knocking back a few while grilling meat over an open fire.

Believe it or not, sometimes when I watch those scenes on my way into the stadium on Sundays, I’m jealous. Ultimately, pricing those kinds of fans, who repeat that Sunday ritual even in the snow and bone-chilling winds of December, out of seeing their favorite team isn’t the right thing to do.

What was also unfortunate in regard to that survey was its timing. I mean, some of you received it around the same time you read that Anheuser-Busch had joined MetLife as a “cornerstone” sponsor for the new stadium. As we finalize the deal for that money – in the neighborhood of $10 million a year from each cornerstone (and there’s four of them) - you get hit with this prelude to what amounts to a forced panhandle masquerading as a “survey.”

Admittedly, that’s a bit unseemly.

Additionally, and I really should have read this stuff more closely before it went out to you folks, there was this poorly phrased justification:

“PSLs have been sold in virtually every new NFL stadium built in the past 15 years as a way of paying for the construction costs. For example, the Dallas Cowboys have announced a PSL program with prices ranging [from] $2,000 to $12,000 for general admission seats and from $16,000 to $150,000 for club seats.”

But you know what? The “everyone else is doing it so that’s what we’re going to do,” reasoning stinks. It stinks because that’s not how my family built the company it founded in the late 19th century into one of the world’s great corporate juggernauts. And it’s not how I became one of the nation’s sharpest businessmen. I became who I am by knowing that it’s possible to go against the grain, to take calculated risks and still succeed. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is not a path and leave a trail.’

Just one small example: Over 30 years ago when I was starting off in Florida, I invested in this new fad known as “cable” television. This, when banks wouldn’t touch the stuff. Sold it off, too, at a tidy profit when I was ready to tackle other interests. The unconventional aspect of who I am extends into my personal life as I’m one of the few of the super-wealthy who, when lobbying Congress, has done so for philanthropic purposes. That’s how six years ago I secured a guaranteed $750 million in funds for diabetes research.

‘go instead where there is not a path and leave a trail…’

So that’s what we, the New York Jets, will do, regardless of the Giants’ plans, which though not yet announced, are to sock their fans with PSLs at to-be-determined prices. I will let the Giants turn themselves into all sorts of verbal pretzels in attempting to dress the PSL porker up into something aesthetically pleasing, tossing around words like “asset” and “investment,” to make it sound like a benefit to fans when it only benefits ownership.

I can tell you parking and concessions will still be high, and there will be gradual ticket increases, but those things have been going on for years in professional sports and, I think, most of you grudgingly accept that as the price of doing business. It’s the concept of paying a user’s fee for the right to THEN pay those outrageous prices that disgusts you, and understandably so. Seriously, do I have to pay a PSL on my owner’s suite? That’s ridiculous and I’m not going to ask you to do something I myself wouldn’t do and certainly wouldn’t want to do.

In short, the debt issues are real but guess what? A lot of my success in life can be credited to this adage: there’s always more than one way. And I intend to find it.

Go Jets!

Sincerely,
Robert Wood Johnson IV

"The Jets have taken a substantial amount of debt to finance the construction of the new $1.3 billion stadium. Like other teams that have built stadiums in the recent past, the Jets are required to pay back this construction debt quickly.

"The Jets are surveying different types and terms of Personal Seat Licenses (PSLs) as one of the ways to help achieve this requirement. A PSL is an asset, like a taxi medallion, that is purchased in addition to the ticket that gives the holder ownership of their seat. This holder can then sell the seat license in the future, including for any profit, to someone else if the holder no longer wishes to purchase season tickets."

I put in a call to the Jets this afternoon to see if the survey meant that PSL's were a foregone conclusion because no official announcement, at least in public, had been made on them relating to the new stadium, which is being built by private financing.

Here's what I was told: "We are still exploring financing options for the new stadium and have not made a decision regarding PSLs."

But PSLs are the only "financing option" that has been mentioned to this point so the conclusion you're apt to draw is probably the correct one. There, to be sure, will be more to come on this topic but I - at no charge - humbly suggest to the Jets to drop the, "A PSL is an asset, like a taxi medallion," sales pitch from future PSL justification literature.

It's insulting.

No, this is not an intended as a message for Chris Baker. Felt it necessary to put that out there.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, which for me means covering tonight's Yankees game (brutal life I have, I know). For those of you who are Yankees fans, they just signed Sidney Ponson, he of various off-the-field issues in Texas, to bolster their starting rotation. Really.

That means new titles for some of the Jets hierarchy: Matt Higgins is the Executive Vice President of Business Operations, Thad Sheely is now the Executive Vice President of Stadium Development and Finance, and Mike Tannenbaum adds Executive Vice President to his current General Manager role. There is no replacement for Cross, whose duties are essentially being distributed amongst the three individuals mentioned above. Overall, this seems to be an indication that owner Woody Johnson intends to be more involved in the day-to-day operation of the team.

Not as exciting as a practice report, I know, or beach photos for that matter. Just passing it along.

“I've gone as far as I can,” Specter said.

As I’ve written before here, I’m torn on this. I can’t make a logical argument for spending tax dollars on a Congressional hearing. At the same time, after watching Arrogant Bill pull his “What? Who? Me?” act on the CBS Evening News last month, I wouldn’t have minded seeing him and some other Patriots personnel having to raise their respective right hands in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Moving on, Brian Bassett once again turned up a winner on thejetsblog, referencing something I didn’t know existed – the NFL Cheerleader Blog. I feel I let down readers by not disclosing this fabulous league resource sooner. The picture to the right is but one example [it was either that or a photo of Sen. Specter].

And this non-football note just because we try to be all-encompassing: Enough with the collective media wailing and indignation about the manner in which Willie Randolph was fired by the Mets. It was, no doubt, done poorly but what organization, in any sport, fires its coach/manager and gets a resounding, “Boy, you guys really handled that wonderfully,” pat on the back?

Exactly.

That said, a strong argument for Omar receiving his walking papers, too, can be made. Just not here.

Anyway, I saw and met a few fathers yesterday (Saturday) who were watching their sons and daughters - more than 200 overall - participate in the Generation Jets Club Clinic over at Hofstra. A good portion of the Jets rookie class served as instructors at the various stations set up on the Jets training camp field.

Quarterback Erik Ainge, besides showing great comfort dealing with the kids - pretty much all the rookies did - appears to be better as he wasn’t wearing the soft cast we saw him with during the OTAs and minicamp. I say appears to be better because he gave me a “you’ve got to be kidding me” look when I asked him about his recovery from the surgery on his throwing pinky. I was kidding, knowing how Jets players are, let’s say, strongly discouraged from talking about injuries. But I always like to see if guys have a sense of humor. Ainge does.

Ainge did say it was difficult sitting out all of those practices – he went through the drills in terms of footwork, but threw no passes – but that mentally there was plenty to keep him busy.

“There’s so much I can learn from the shoulders up,” Ainge said, referring to the playbook. “It’s like learning a new language.”

Dustin Keller, who also participated in Saturday’s event, said after going through a round of OTAs and the minicamp, the biggest adjustment he had to make related to what Ainge talked about: the amount of information rookies are hit with.

“I reached out to some of my friends in the NFL [before the OTAs] and they let me know that everything’s going to go real fast and that they’re going to throw a whole lot of information at you in a small amount of time,” Keller said. “You have to absorb everything and just be focused with no distractions.”

And that continues even now, the so-called “down period” in the league – the 1 ½ months before training camp – that Keller said isn’t a down period for players, or at least for the rookies.

“It doesn’t seem very down lately,” Keller said with a laugh. “We still go in there [the practice facility], us rookies, and we study together, we study a few hours every single day. We go in there, work out, have some meetings. We’re still working five, six, seven days a week. We’re always doing something in there.”

Though on a day “off” last week, as part of the league’s rookie orientation program, Jets rookies toured the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“It was awesome,” Ainge said. “I had never been there before. Getting to go into the room with the busts, seeing the Joe Namaths and all those guys…it’s unbelievable to see all those faces and names and it’s kind of like, ‘this is what we’re all trying to do.’”

Keller, who had never been to the HOF either, said he gained an appreciation for the players who were part of pro football's origins, thinking about what it might have been like to take a shot over the middle wearing minimal equipment, including a leather helmet.

“Those guys, they were still ruthless back then so I couldn’t even imagine what that felt like,” Keller said. “It was really cool, just to see the evolution of the sport. To see how it started and how it evolved into what it is today. Those guys didn’t have it as good as we do, in every way.”

The most significant of these moves is the addition of Cohen. Cohen spent the last seven seasons as the Eagles' director of pro player personnel, an area of the Jets' organization GM Mike Tannenbaum had wanted to strengthen.

No legal analysis here but I'll ask this much more important question instead: what could the picture below possibly have to do with this story? There is no direct link but in a general-theme sense, there is a connection. Major points awarded to whomever gets that connection. Keep it clean.

Bryan, as to your question in the previous comments section about Baker: He has not specified - and neither have his agents - exactly what kind of $ he is looking for. Kendall last season was very clear on the dollar figure he wanted -- the $1 million dollar raise he claimed had been promised to him. Baker has not, in public, said anything more than wanting his deal redone to, as he has said, a "number that is fair" to both him and the Jets.

Coming this weekend, some more on the rookies.

The Jets rookie class toured the Pro Football Hall of Fame earlier today (Wednesday), part of the league's rookie orientation program. The Jets were the 18th team to send its rookies to Canton since May 28 and the remaining teams will visit over the next six weeks. This is the first year the HOF visit has been part of rookie orientation and was an idea that came from a conversation between Michael Irvin, a 2007 inductee, and Commissioner Roger Goodell last August.

The picture, admittedly not as, um, thrilling as some of the others posted here in recent days, is from the Hall's home page, profootballhof.com. For those who haven't seen much of the Jets rookies, that's Dustin Keller and Erik Ainge featured prominently in the photo.