N.Y. Times Article: Chatham

September 15, 2006

Role Player With Patriots Wants More With Jets

By KAREN CROUSE

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y., Sept. 14 ? After a few years, Matt Chatham realized he was in one of those dead-end relationships, the kind in which one party is keen to deepen the commitment while the other seems perfectly fine with the status quo.

Chatham, a 6-foot-4 linebacker, was a special-teams stalwart and defensive role player for the New England Patriots, but what he really wanted was to be considered for a starting job. When that did not happen after six years, Chatham decided it was time to move on.

In March, he signed with the Jets as an unrestricted free agent, following Eric Mangini, the Patriots? defensive coordinator, to New York two months after Mangini was named the head coach.

?You spend a long enough time with someone and you get a sense of what they think of you,? Chatham, 29, said before practice Thursday. ?It?s almost like they grow into you in a role, and they don?t see you as anything else because that?s all they?ve ever known you as. They think highly of you, but just in one particular role.?

When people think of Chatham, they may remember the tackle he made on the streaker who ran onto the field before the second half of Super Bowl XXXVIII. He also made the last tackle of that game, on kick returner Rod Smart, to seal the Patriots? 32-29 victory over the Carolina Panthers.

?If you talk to people up in New England about my career,? Chatham said, ?the two things they basically remember are the streaker thing and then the fumble recovery a few years ago against the Giants when I scored a touchdown.?

It was against the Giants in 2003 that Chatham recorded his first and only career touchdown. That season, he started four games at outside linebacker. That is where Chatham hopes to end up with the Jets. At Tennessee last week, he played behind Victor Hobson.

On special teams, Chatham has already made enough of an impression that his teammates voted him a captain. And he has set himself apart in other ways.

Chatham, who majored in English and criminal justice at the University of South Dakota, sent writers scurrying for their dictionaries the other day when he used the word exigent while describing the showdown Sunday between Mangini and his mentor, Bill Belichick, when the Jets play host to the Patriots.

It was not some urgent need to show off that made Chatham talk like that. He is not like Matt LeBlanc?s character in ?Friends,? whose efforts to improve his vocabulary were ponderous. Chatham really speaks that way.

In 2004, Chatham completed an internship with Esquire magazine in New York. He said he approached the job with the same enthusiasm and intensity that he does football. While researching a question about a certain sexual turn-on for ?Answer Fella,? for example, Chatham tracked down a nipple clamp wholesaler and interviewed him.

?I was trying to think of who outside of a doctor would be an expert in the field,? Chatham said. ?And I thought, well, you know, someone has to sell these things.?

You cannot fault that logic. Or this: ?You can?t get 32 teams to love you,? Chatham said. ?You can?t get every coach. It just takes one team and one situation, and this one was good for me.?