The Rum Diaries

Broadway Joe

“We were supposed to drink. We were following the heritage of the pro athlete going back to Babe Ruth. You punished your body. It was so ingrained: you played ball until you couldn’t play anymore. After that, you hit the bar.”
—Larry Grantham, linebacker, NY Jets

The late 1960s saw the rise of the superstar athlete, those colorful characters who popped up in gossip columns as much as they did on sports pages.

And few caused a bigger stir or excited more heated debate than New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath.

Joe reinvented himself over and over again. Ad agencies sought his services as a pitchman, and he appeared in dozens of commercials, including the infamous spot for Beautymist, which featured Joe in panty hose. He dated movie stars and rock singers. He starred in movies and Broadway shows. He had his own daytime talk show. And he did it all with a drink in his hand.

It wasn’t just a nickname. He was Broadway Joe.

In a sport that has produced a plethora of epic boozehounds, Joe Namath belongs right at the top of the list. Morning, noon or night, you’d find him with a glass of vodka, Crown on the rocks, or a bottle of beer in his hand. The hand not encumbered with booze was usually filled with an attractive young lady. In Joe’s life, the party ran 24/7.

The favorite son of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, grew up a multi-sport athlete, setting high school records in football, baseball and basketball. Before he even graduated, the Chicago Cubs and Baltimore Orioles offered big money for his services as a pitcher, but Joe wanted to play football.

The Meteoric Rise
In 1965 the New York Jets were a struggling young team in the upstart AFL. They were looking for just the right player, someone who could really make a splash, and they set their sights on a cocky, strangely dressed, good-looking quarterback from the University of Alabama. Namath packed his bags and headed for the Big Apple, where his idiosyncratic wardrobe (he once walked the sidelines in a $5,000 tailored mink coat), long hair, goatee and party animal habits lit fires all over the city.

Namath played well for the Jets. He had a bazooka for an arm (before becoming “Broadway Joe” he was “The Hungarian Howitzer”), which enabled him to invent new plays, such as sending his receivers on deep crossing routes and hitting them in stride, something most pro quarterbacks lacked the arm strength to do. He was the first QB in any league to throw for more than 4,000 yards in a single season. He was voted AFL Rookie of the Year and was the AFL All Star game MVP in 1966. In 1969 he was voted the overall AFL MVP. Contrary to his image, Joe Namath was a tough son of a bitch. Friends and foes alike respected Joe’s ability to take brutal hits and come back for more.

The apex of Namath’s career was his eye-popping performance in the Jets’ January 1969 win over the Baltimore Colts in the World Championship Game (now known as Super Bowl III). Namath faced an uphill battle. Sportscasters called the Colts “the greatest football team in history,” and the Jets were 18-point underdogs. This was the final Championship Game before the NFL and AFL merger, and the AFL had not fared well in their previous showdowns with the older NFL, going down in blowouts two years in a row. This game would, according to the naysayers, prove once and for all that the proposed merger should be consigned forever to the history of bad ideas. Celebrated former player Norm Van Brocklin singled Joe out for special abuse, saying, “This will be Namath’s first professional football game.” Yeah, the yucks just kept right on coming.

A few days before the game, a guest at an awards dinner began shouting insults at Namath, suggesting that he and his team were a bunch of losers. Unruffled, Namath took a long pull from his glass of Crown and said, “The Jets will win. I guarantee it.” His “guarantee” would become the stuff of sports legend, but Namath was only getting started. For days leading up to the game, stationed on his customary pool-side lounge chair with a glass of iced vodka in his hand, he talked a never-ending stream of smack aimed at the Colts. They were old. They were slow. They were old-fashioned. His back-up QB, Babe Parilli was better than their starter, Earl Morrall (this in itself was a veiled shot at the Colts’ injured starter Johnny Unitas). Joe delivered these predictions and insults in his lazy drawl while flashing his million-dollar grin, and he drove the Colts batshit. They didn’t know whether to laugh with Namath or mob-up, find him, and beat him so badly his name fell out of the phone book.

Popular legend has it that Namath’s guarantee aroused headlines across the country, on a par with Babe Ruth’s “called shot” in the 1932 World Series, but that isn’t really the case. There was so much about Joe that was bigger than life that his guarantee was seen as just another outburst from his oversized ego. Headlines the morning after the game, however, solidified the legend. The lowly Jets, from the hayseed American Football League, had decisively beaten the unbeatable Read the rest of this entry »

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A man is, ultimately, the sum of his accomplishments.

Each culture, of course, has a different idea as to what rates as an accomplishment. Muslims, for example, put a tremendous amount of stock into making a pilgrimage to Mecca, while generations of Frenchmen have taken great pride in not tripping over their discarded rifles while fleeing the Germans.

The subculture of avid drinkers, living as we do by our own set of rules and priorities, has an entirely different idea altogether, to the degree that our notion of a goal worth achieving may well appear bad behavior or even a criminal offense to the parent culture. Read the rest of this entry »

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