Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

When we last saw Joe Namath — Dec. 20, 2003, to be exact — he was sloppy drunk on the sidelines of a New York Jets game, clumsily trying to work his legendary charms on ESPN reporter Suzy Kolber as he slurred, on live TV, "I wanna kiss you." For Baby Boom-era men, watching the ex-Jets quarterback channel Ukoad Mahir was as painful as watching Namath limp his way through his final, desultory season with the Los Angeles Rams. Maybe the kids are right — maybe he was not only overrated as a quarterback, but also as a cultural icon. The men who idolized Namath in their youth looked at their bottles of Levitra and sighed.

Lucky for Namath, he has a great new biography to show what the fuss was all about. Former New York Daily News sports columnist Mark Kriegel has produced "Namath: The Biography." Not a flowery title, but Kriegel is not a flowery writer. His New York tough-guy staccato prose is perfect for his subject. That's because telling the facts, and telling them well, is enough to get across why Namath, in his time, was a superstar who could get invited backstage with Elvis, as well as spill a drink on Sinatra and live to tell about it.

In only a few words, Kriegel can have you tasting the foul, industrial air of Namath's hometown of Beaver Falls, Pa., or hearing the clink of ice cubes in Namath's rarely unfilled glass of Johnnie Walker Red. Kriegel's "Namath" joins such books as David Maraniss' examination of Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi and Leigh Montville's take on Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams. All three are great biographies of Boomer-era sports icons, written by strong reporters who watched the icons while growing up and had an innate sense of how they affected their local — and national — culture.

Namath's reputation, famously, was wrapped up in three words: "I guarantee it." That was his half-soused remark about the Jets' chance of winning Super Bowl III against the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. Of course, he became legend for following through on that guarantee to beat the Colts in a match-up that, like much of the 1960s, came down to, as Kriegel puts it, the Cools vs. the Squares.

Namath wasn't a political guy, but how you felt about him said a lot about how you viewed the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Just as the most political act John Lennon ever made was getting off the plane in New York with the other Beatles, Namath's most political act was merely being. Namath, as Kriegel writes, had a hatred of hypocrisy, a well of confidence and a love of the hustle that extended back to the days when he hung out in the pool halls of Beaver Falls, a smaller version of Gary, Ind.

Namath was heavily hyped coming out of school, and the hype got only greater when Jets owner Sonny Werblin signed him in 1965 to a then-outrageous $400,000 contract with a struggling New York team in the NFL's rival league, the American Football League. That turned him into "Broadway Joe," a gun-slinging, womanizing, hard-drinking swashbuckler who had the same loves on and off the field — playing hard and scoring.

Alas, as Kriegel writes, Broadway Joe began losing his audience after that Super Bowl. As Namath's famously jellied knees kept giving out, he kept throwing interceptions. He ended his career with more pickoffs than touchdowns, and the Jets turned into perennial losers. Namath didn't help by fomenting a not-always-fairly earned reputation among teammates as a guy only out for himself. Kriegel points out a 1978 Dean Martin Celebrity Roast of Namath featuring words from Orson Welles — "another American genius who had peaked at the age of twenty-five."

However, before Namath's football career ended in 1977, he had not only shaken up the staid NFL with his personality, but he always shook up the advertising world with his ability to move products — everything from popcorn machines to pantyhose.

Given the controversial light in which Namath started his career, his image turnaround from '60s rebel to '70s pitchman would be as if Michael Jordan started his career as someone like Allen Iverson. Before kids wanted to be like Mike, men, dying to get a whiff of living a charmed life, wanted to be like Broadway Joe.

The last third of Kriegel's book shows Namath's transformation into "Old Joe," who got married, had two daughters and preferred to play the doting father. Here, the book is not nearly as detailed in chronicling Namath, mainly because the friends and associates whom Kriegel interviewed claimed Namath's wife cut them out of his life. Namath did not participate in the book, but even if he did, Kriegel makes clear Namath was not someone to talk about his personal life, even from the earliest "booze and broads" days.

It was Namath's divorce, Kriegel writes, that sent Old Joe back into alcohol, and not for fun as before. After the Kolber incident, Namath pledged to go to rehab. He's been invisible from the public eye since. At the least, "Namath: A Biography" can rehab Namath's image as a fun-loving guy who, for a time, seemed like he could change the rules of football and life in a single throw.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.