Mark Gastineau held the NFL single-season sack record from 1984 to 2001. All those years, his 21 sacks for the New York Jets seemed insurmountable.
Then 2001 happened. Everyone remembers the final day of the season when Brett Favre did his friend Michael Strahan a solid and rolled right into Strahan’s now-record 22nd sack.
Now Gastineau is being very outspoken, and he wants his record back. He’s dead serious about this ladies and gentleman.
Gastineau is tired of keeping quiet. He wants to be recognized as the single-season sack champ. He feels he got robbed by Brett Favre's dive. #Jets https://t.co/X6hEdHKzdZ
— Rich Cimini (@RichCimini) February 10, 2020
Here is what Gastineau tells ESPN in a Monday phone interview regarding the matter.
“It’s my record, and I want it to be known that it’s my record. I’m not going to say, ‘I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.’ It’s my record.”
The reason Gastineau is being outspoken about the record after nearly two decades of silence is he’s 63, suffering from colon cancer and Alzheimers. Gastineau says that these factors have changed his perspective on life.
“Being nice and being a good sport, that’s good, but it’s not real. In fact, I’m kind of a liar in a way. I feel like there’s just something wrong. This is on my head all the time. It goes through my head all the time. I want to clear things up.”
You have to admire they guy’s honesty. He says that he harbors no ill-will for Favre or Strahan, but that he would never want a son getting a record that way, and the NFL should step in.
“It’s a good record and it took me a long time to get that. It took a lot of work, a lot of work to get that record. So many years I worked my butt off to get it, and I finally got it, and it shouldn’t have been cheapened like it was. It’s like a tarnished record.”
Look, I get it. But with the perspective the aging Gastineau has received in life, he should realize that we all know when it comes right down to it; everyone who followed football back then realizes that Strahan only got the record because of a gimme by Favre.
That being said, I don’t know what it’s like to work your whole career for something to have it taken away in that manner – so i should think twice before giving advice. Gastineau hopefully realizes that 99.9% or more of us will never get 21 sacks in a season and hold his head high.
