For 13 seasons from 1984 to 1996, the New York Jets were a better team because Kyle Clifton was on it.
Initially, however, that was easier said than done.
During the 1984 NFL Draft, Clifton – a second-team All-SWC linebacker at TCU who led the conference and set a school record with 189 tackles (17 per game) as a senior – received interest from some teams. The thing is, they only reached out once.
"San Francisco called, I think they were the last pick in the second round, and said, 'Hey, you didn't sign with the USFL? Well, we're getting ready to draft you here with this next pick,'" Clifton said.
"So I'm like, 'Oh, I guess I'm going to San Francisco.' And then they picked John Frank, the tight end. The next pick was Tampa Bay. They called and said the same thing, and then picked a DB. And so I'm like, 'Well, I may never go in the draft. I don't know if it's going to really happen.'
"Then the Jets called (in the third round), and I'm like, 'Hopefully, I go.' And then it dawned on me, 'What am I going to do going from Bridgeport, Texas to the Big Apple? It's going to be a little bit of a change from 3,000 people to quite a few more than 3,000.' So it was kind of scary after it all settled out."
Making the trip between the almost polar opposite locations – Clifton's past and future – was not what you would call a Sunday Drive, even as part of a two-car convoy with Ron Faurot, a defensive end from Arkansas, who was one of New York's first-round draft picks that year.
"I was scared to death," Clifton said. "I had my little paper map driving up to the city and, of course, going over the bridges, I was like, 'Oh my, this may not turn out too good.' I'm trying to figure out where I'm supposed to be going and have zero idea. And I was like, 'I hope, I pray, I make it.' I left early enough not to be late and get fired on the first day."
After beating the clock and keeping his job, Clifton found himself and the other rookies alone in the Jets' training camp for the first few days. And when the veterans reported, the first-year players were introduced to a new experience. A slowed-down experience.
"When the old guys got there, they would stand in the line for the individual drills and say, 'Don't go too fast. Drag it out,' so they didn't get too many reps," Clifton said. "Of course, I didn't want anybody to tell me, 'Hey, you're not hustling,' I needed to get up there. And they kept saying. 'You're going too fast.'
"And then we went where the D-line was, and they had a kid, he was like a GA, running the drills for (defensive line coach) Ray Callahan. He tells them to do monkey flips and, of course, it's (Joe) Klecko and (Mark) Gastineau and Marty (Lyons), and they look at him like, 'Are you kidding me? We're not getting on the ground today.' And they just walked to the back of the line.
"I got the biggest kick out of that. Of course, as time went on, I learned that that was the rule of thumb for those guys, especially because they were pretty good and didn't need a whole lot of jumping on the ground to make them any better."
Clifton had a couple of veteran linebackers, Lance Mehl and Bob Crable, who tried to not only make him a better ballplayer, but also to see that he didn't go hungry.
"They're still to this day, some of my closest friends. I don't know if they took me under their wing, but they told me to go get them sandwiches every day so they didn't have to do it themselves," he laughed. "But they didn't make me pay every day, so that was my hazing, I guess from them."
From the time he started playing peewee football as a kid, Clifton's desire to do as well as he could while also being reliable on the field was important to him. When he moved into New York's starting lineup 10 games into his rookie season and stayed there for the next nine years, that desire didn't change.
"The fear of failure drove me all the time," Clifton said. "The press guys would ask me every year, what about blah, blah, blah? And I said, 'I don't know if I'm going to be on the team or not. I've got to make the team for any of the rest of this happens.' And I truly believed that.
"I remember Rich Cimini asked me one time after I had led the league or whatever, 'Well, you led the league in tackles, you're probably going to be on the team next year.' And I said, 'I don't know. We'll have to wait and see.' He used to get a big kick out of when I'd tell him that, and I actually meant it.
"Again, it was back to the fear of failure that I wanted to do as good as I could. We didn't win as many games as we all would have liked to have, and I didn't at TCU either. We won in high school – didn't win a state championship or anything – but winning was terribly important to me. But I think doing the best I could was even bigger than winning."
Unfortunately for Clifton, winning wasn't the norm during his years with the Jets, as the team finished only three seasons over .500. What also wasn't the norm during the second half of his career was coaching stability. After playing under head coach Joe Walton for six seasons, he played under three others over the next seven – Bruce Coslet, Pete Carroll, and Rich Kotite.
"They were all different, and I can't say I didn't enjoy playing for any of them," Clifton said. "But that was hard because you had to figure out what they wanted to see in your game or how you conducted yourself on and off the field. So that, you had to learn, and it was always changing. But for some unknown reason, I was able to stay around with different philosophies and different people.
"And so that was hard. Yet, in fairness, I had no other thing to compare it to. That was just how things worked. You wish you had the same guy all along to give stability to the organization and to your team, but that's sort of a pie-in-the-sky theory, I think."
While the Jets lacked stability with their coaches, Clifton defined the word as a player. Suiting up in 204 consecutive non-strike games – the most for a linebacker and the third-most in team history – he compiled more tackles (1,484) than anyone who ever wore the Green & White.
"I remember when I was a kid, I was a huge Cowboys fan," Clifton said. "I knew every player, where they came from, what position they played, how tall they were, how much they weighed, because there was zero turnover in those days.
"I was a little ahead of the free agency part where nobody moved around. So I was lucky that I stayed with the Jets. I was really lucky that I stayed. Period. But that I stayed with the same team was even more special."
Clifton was a special player himself. Admired for his positive attitude and dedication by coaches, teammates, fans, and opponents, he was honored in 1996 when the Jets established the Kyle Clifton Award, also known as the Good Guy Award, which is presented annually to the player who best embodies his selfless approach to the game.
"I mean, that's as good of an honor as I could ever imagine," he said. "Every year, I try to check and see who wins it. Of course, it's been 30 years since I played and I don't know any of the people that get it. But it's very special to me, very special."
Making their home in the Fort Worth suburb of Aledo, Texas, Clifton and his wife, Jodi, share five adult children: Hayden, Hunter, Ryan, Hannah, and Todd; and a four-month-old grandson, Judah Cruz, whom grandma has already affectionately nicknamed, Chunks.
In 2000, he founded a company – Aerobi-Tech.
"I'm in the poop business," Clifton laughed. "It is an aerobic septic business, and that I know that doesn't make sense, but because of the poor rocky clay soil conditions in and around North Central Texas, they developed this technology.
"It's oxygen-enriched bacteria that will clean the water. It passes through the tanks and into a pump tank where it goes across chlorine and gets disinfected. Then it drops in and sprays out on top of the ground to keep the septic system going.
"When it was at its peak, we had about 3,500 customers and were rolling pretty good. We had, I think, 15 people working to try to keep up with it and I was one of the workers. I used to say, 'Maybe we shouldn't ever have gotten this big because it's a lot of work, six or seven days a week. Maybe we should try to cut back a little.'
"And so I used to work there every day but in the last four or five years, I only go in maybe once or twice a week. The girls at the office are better at running the business than I was. They'll ask questions or say whatever problems that they're having, and I try to help them with that. But I don't do any more day-to-day work. Now I'm just sort of mowing and weeding, and not liking any of that even though I don't have to do it very often."
