Joe Namath

The man let me down.

I just read his autobiography, written in 2019, titled (unfortunately) All The Way - My Life in Four Quarters.

This is his second autobiography. He wrote one in 1969 at the height of his fame, titled I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow ...........'Cause I Get Better Looking Every Day. I read it. I recently tried to re-read it, but quit halfway through. It was terrible. Unbelievably bad. The whole point of it was to make him look as cool as the image he projected. 100% braggadocio, minimum substance.

Now dig - Joe Namath is on my list of people I look up to. You had to be alive at the time to understand the impact he had on football, the whole NFL vs the AFL thing, his cultural significance, his uniqueness - especially when set against the backdrop of professional football.

He had style. At a time when football players wore crew cuts, white shirts and dark ties, Joe had long hair, a mink coat, a Fu Manchu, and white shoes.

The man had balls. He did what he wanted to do. He said what he wanted to say. He didn't give a fuck what other people thought. He was the right man for the right times.

I wanted to be him. Not a football player, but a man who lived true to his convictions. Flamboyantly.

When I slid the 2019 book out of the envelope, there was a picture of Joe's smiling face looking up at me and.................. I smiled. Inadvertantly, naturally, immediately.

I hoped that fifty years later there would be a lot more substance to the book. It was fleshier, but nowhere near enough. It was written simplistically. Almost like a child. 

In fact there is something like a disclaimer on the very last page of the book: "Joe Namath has been a reluctant author since he was able to write. Choosing sports over schoolwork unless absolutely necessary..........................Despite all the years of practice, however, Namath still struggles with writing even the simplest thank-you note because of his insatiable urge to get outside and play."

I would be embarrassed if that was written on the last page of my autobiography. Of course the last page of my autobiography will say: "And Joe is still whining in his blog, 31 years after the whining began." 

I wanted horror stories about Joe's decades of alcoholism. I wanted to read that Suzy Kolber grabbed his balls off camera. I wanted dirty, inside stories about the Jets and the AFL and the NFL. Stories about the criminals and celebrities he consorted with.

What I got was pretty vanilla. 

And Joe comes across with that "aw shucks" attitude - please and thank you and sir and ma'am and heck. He told a story about his childhood when he heard - as he writes it - "the MF word" for the first time. Wow.

I wanted to put the book down. I didn't. It was Joe Namath. 

He had a major impact on me as a teenager, and that shit never goes away.

No matter how bad his autobiographies are, I will always love Joe Namath.