The Making of a Football Icon
The New York Sun
September 8, 2004
Just a few blocks south and west of last week's Republican National Convention is the proposed site of the new stadium for the New York Jets. In the franchise's 30-plus year history, this would be the first stadium they could call their own (from 1964 until 1984 they played at Shea; since then, they've moved to Giants stadium in New Jersey). To help quell the controversy over a potential deal between the team and city, the Jets have turned again to the one proven winner in an often losing history: Joe Namath.
Mr. Namath, along with other Jets greats, has been testifying recently to the value of the stadium to the city and the team. And ever since he "guaranteed" a victory against the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III - and delivered - people have listened to what Joe Namath has to say.
That game - a battle between Mr. Namath and Johnny Unitas, old guard and new; crew cuts and beards; the memory of the 1950s and the future of the 1970s - made Mr. Namath one of this country's best-known athletes. Fun-loving and stylish, Mr. Namath set the square, uptight world of professional football on fire.
"He walked off with Jagger's girls," Mark Kriegel writes in his exhaustive and thoroughly engaging new biography of the man (Viking, 514 pages, $27.95). "He spilled drinks on Sinatra. He grinned his way through it all. The Raiders broke his face, and he caught a flight to Vegas, came back the next week, and set a single-season passing record." Only "Broadway Joe" could call his memoir "I Can't Wait for Tomorrow, 'Cuz I Get Better Looking Every Day."
For better or worse, Mr. Namath changed the accepted idea of the American athlete, according to Mr. Kriegel: "In the not too distant future, athletes would be judged not by their play but by the merchandise they moved." He became the spokesman for Braniff Airlines, Faberge, Schick, and women's stockings. "Now I don't wear panty hose," he said in a television commercial in which he did. "But if Beautymist can make my legs look good, imagine what they'll do for yours."
Mr. Kriegel, a former columnist for the New York Daily News, places the player in the context of the tumultuous 1960s - of race riots and women's liberation and the Vietnam war - as well as the rapidly changing world of professional football. But he also attempts to examine the private person within the public persona. Here was a thrill-seeking football player who years after college yearned for the discipline of Bear Bryant; a ladies man who refused to marry for fear of getting a divorce; a hustler who disliked lying.
Mr. Namath grew up in Beaver Falls, Pa., a wild though well-liked boy who shined shoes and played at the local pool hall. His parents divorced when he was still very young, and he excelled at football, basketball, and baseball (the St. Louis Cardinals sought him out as he was considering college). After a success at quarterback in high school, he found his way into the hands of Bryant at the University of Alabama. The Jets signed him in 1969 for the astounding sum of $427,000.
Mr. Kriegel doesn't shy from the darker side. Hustling for more money from the Jets, Mr. Namath incurred the ire of his teammates, many of whom had suffered bone fractures, torn ligaments, and concussions - and received a fraction of Mr. Namath's salary. Because of his partying lifestyle and share in ownership of the Upper East Side bar Bachelors III, which was frequented by bookies and mobsters, he was placed in the FBI's "Hoover's Files."
In 1984 the man-about-town finally settled down, with actress Deborah Mays, 20 years his junior, and had the family he had longed for. But in 1999 his wife (who now called herself Tatiana) left him for a plastic surgeon. Mr. Namath, at one time the country's best-known playboy, fell into depression and turned to drink; alcohol, which he once used to quell his physical pain, now numbed his mental pain.
Mr. Kriegel handles such moments with finesse. But, in many ways, his book is less a biography of the man than a history of the rise of the American Football League, and ultimately of the making of the Super Bowl (which wasn't even officially named that until the year the Jets won). The AFL was often laughable, but that Sunday in January 1969 the league, and the New York Jets, began to be taken seriously. Football began to assume the dominant position it has in the sport hierarchy today.
Hustler Namath's guarantee, "the most famous prediction since Babe Ruth's 'Called Shot' home run in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series," made that game all the more momentous (though Mr. Kriegel points out that, contrary to consensus recollection, Mr. Namath's pronouncement went largely unreported in New York until just the day before the game.) The Jets were 17-point underdogs, but they won 16-7. And Mr. Namath was named the game's MVP - appropriately, the only time a quarterback has won that award without throwing a touchdown pass.