Joe Namath changed the game forever

[Kentucky Jet]

Monday, January 28, 2008

Jerry Green: Super Bowl memories

Namath changed the game forever

PHOENIX -- The man who made the Super Bowl super walked stooped over with a shuffle and spoke in a cultivated Alabama drawl. He had long black hair and good looks and he could also pass a football. The ladies loved him, and his nocturnal escapades became part of a legend.

The Ballad of Joe Willie Namath!

The Sunday night Namath arrived at the Super Bowl he nearly became involved in a barroom brawl. The next morning he slept in when commissioner Pete Rozelle had ordered all athletes to appear for a grilling by the press. Rozelle fined him 50 bucks for disobedience.

Tuesday, he again stiffed the cream of American sports journalism, assembled inside the Galt Ocean Mile Hotel in Fort Lauderdale. Then he was spotted shuffling through the lobby. He plopped himself alongside the swimming pool.

There, Joe Willie brushed off one intrepid Midwestern journalist. The guy sheepishly crept away.

It was about then that the late Si Burick, a sports editor from Dayton, quietly approached me.

"Namath's agreed to talk to a few of us," Si whispered. "Want to come?"

"You betcha," I responded.

So the Selected Six gathered around Joe Namath in the sunshine and listened to him speak in his cultivated drawl.

"Somebody wrote I was fined for drinking J&B scotch," Namath said with the sunlight glaring off his bare chest.

"Hell, I don't even drink J&B . . . unless they run out of Johnnie Walker Red.

"I was fined for missing the picture session."

Women ogled him over our shoulders.

Joe Willie Namath was the symbol of the American Football League. It was league established by proud men who had been denied their ambitions to purchase franchises in the established NFL. The AFL went to war against the NFL. AFL clubs signed premier draft choices away from NFL clubs in a prolonged bidding battle.

Namath was one of many stars coveted by NFL clubs who signed with what Rozelle mockingly called "The Other League." He had been drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals and turned down a lucrative contract to play in the NFL. He signed with the New York Jets for $424,000.

In six years, the AFL had become a serious threat to the welfare of the NFL. A peace treaty, known eternally as The Merger, was agreed to by the AFL's Lamar Hunt and the NFL's Tex Schramm in the airport parking lot in Dallas.

Part of the merger would be a match between the champions of the rival leagues.

Still haughty NFL executives ridiculed the AFL as a league of inferior teams.

And the inferiority was magnified when Vince Lombardi's NFL champion Packers soundly defeated the AFL's Chiefs in the first Super Bowl and routed the Oakland Raiders in the second.

NFL owners, privately, were considering abandoning the entire concept of the Super Bowl.

Super Bowl III was going to be the test -- and in the planning of the NFL, the grand finale. Super Bowls I and II had been duds.

The following season, 1968, the Jets, with Namath, won the AFL championship. They were to be pitted against the NFL champion Baltimore Colts.

Oddsmaker Jimmy The Greek installed Don Shula's Colts as 18-point favorites to beat the Jets. Shula figured Earl Morrall, in for John Unitas as the Colts' quarterback, would outduel Namath

"There are five quarterbacks (in the AFL) who are better than Morrall," Namath said when the Jets won their AFL title.

"Namath hasn't been throwing against the defense that Earl has been throwing against," countered Shula.

Then the teams arrived in Florida on the Sunday before Super Bowl III. That evening Namath wandered into Jimmy Fazio's saloon. There he encountered the Colts' gruff Lou Michaels.

"Namath," went the reconstructed conversation, "Lou Michaels."

Namath just nodded.

"You sure do a lot of talking, boy," Michaels said.

"There's a lot to talk about," Namath responded. "We're going to kick the hell out of your team."

The conversation turned bellicose until Namath picked up Michaels' bar tab.

Two mornings later Namath, having snubbed the press at two media sessions, enchanted six journalists from NFL towns. And two nights later, at a banquet, he issued his famous statement:

"We're going to beat the Colts. I guarantee it."

Joe Namath delivered on the guarantee the following Sunday and saved the Super Bowl. And AFL teams became merged partners of the NFL.

Last time, I read about Joe Willie Namath, the nocturnal creature who once stirred America, the article announced that he had become a grandpa.

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