Ed Anzalone, the spirited fireman who has led the very creative “J-E-T-S Jets! Jets! Jets!” chant for 26 seasons, this weekend announced he would no longer be the team’s unofficial mascot, and would quit leading the chant at home games.
Fireman Ed or Economist Ed will continue his journey in the Nation’s Capital – Ed Mulholland/US PRESSWIRE
Officially, he wrote on metro.us, that he was tired of increasing tension and hatred among Jets fans. But a source close to “Fireman Ed” told SportsJerks.net that the top Jets fan is not actually a fireman, and that he quit because he is actually a leading Ivy League economist who was summoned to Washington, D.C. to help broker a deal on the so-called “fiscal cliff” that lawmakers and President Obama must handle in the next month.
The news rocked the already desolate Jets, who were called to the team’s practice facility in Florham Park, N.J. to hear a spirited Rex Ryan pep talk.
“Fireman Ed quit on you; he left before halftime of the Thanksgiving game, and frankly I don’t blame him, because we got beat in every aspect of the game, we embarrassed ourselves” Ryan said, who cut short his soaring rhetoric amid a growling stomach. “Now let’s get a goddamn snack.”
Jets Owner Woody Johnson referred questions about Fireman Ed to Tim Tebow so that the team might get tomorrow’s back page.
The story of Fireman Ed began when he was a child prodigy who accused Bill James – the father of sports sabermetrics — of ripping off his mathematical formulas to predict the performances of Major League Baseball players. Instead of legal action, according to his brother, Ed chose to spend countless nights in the basement to become the Mid-Atlantic Dungeons and Dragons champion and earn a berth in the national tournament.
Twenty six years ago, after an Ivy League career, he found that attending Jets games took his mind off of algorithms and modern economic theory. Because he never saw a leader on the field, he vowed to be a leader in the stands. He originally toyed with the idea of wearing an accountant’s visor and calling himself “Economist Ed.”
“Eddie really wanted Economist Ed thing to work, but one day I told him geeks are only cool in the eyes of other geeks; remember this was before Napoleon Dynamite and Harry Potter,” said Frank Anzalone, Ed’s brother, the 2nd shift manager at The Thruway Deli, and the schmuck who carried Ed on his shoulders during 26 years of chanting. “He changed his mind when I told him that the firefighters who come into the deli get crazy amounts of tail. Well right after I told him getting tail was not a reference to being a good deer hunter, then he was in.”
White House sources said they’ve been recruiting Anzalone for years but he politely declined, saying being a genius “didn’t fit his brand” of being a Jets fan. Tebow’s presence and three Patriots touchdowns in 52 seconds last week convinced Anzalone to instead serve his country. Among Economist Ed’s tasks while in Washington will be to spearhead the tax reform proposals, specifically closing corporate tax loopholes and providing models based on various capital gains rate increases, and to keep tissues ready in case House Speaker John Boehner gets scared and weeps.
