Namath: A Biography by Mark Kriegel

From Barnes & Noble

New York Jets star Joe Namath was not just a supremely gift quarterback; he was a genuine hero whose celebrity (and right arm) forever changed the game. Mark Kriegel's biography reveals both Namath's flamboyance ("I like my women blonde and my Johnny Walker Red") and his working-class insecurity. Tracking the Hungarian immigrant's son from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, to Super Bowl stardom, he describes Namath's sometimes unpredictable responses to his astonishing media fame.

From the Publisher

The first major biography of the sports hero who embodied the fantasies of a generation.

In between Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan there was Joe Namath, one of the very few sports heroes who transcended their game. The son of a Hungarian immigrant, Namath left the steel country of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, for the Deep South, where he played quarterback for Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama. Almost four years later, he signed a $427,000 contract with the New York Jets that changed football forever, transforming a crude, violent game into show business. Namath became the most glamorous athlete in America -- his fame nurtured by the age of television, the point spread, and the sexual revolution. His hair, his draft deferment, and his white shoes became symbols for a generation. But it was his “guarantee” of victory in Super Bowl III that ensured his legend.

In the tradition of Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio, David Maraniss’s A Life of Vince Lombardi, and Nick Tosches’s Dino, Mark Kriegel details Namath’s journey from steeltown pool halls to the upper reaches of American celebrity -- and beyond. He renders Namath as an athlete and a man, a brave champion and a wounded soul. Here are Namath’s complex relationships with pain and fame plus his appearances in pantyhose ads, on The Simpsons, and Nixon’s Enemies List. Namath is not just for football fans, but for any reader interested in the central role of sports in American culture.

Publishers Weekly

Avoiding the pitfalls of mythology while telling a larger-than-life story is never easy, but Kriegel does it grandly in this landmark portrait of the 1960s icon. From the segregated South to the era of showbiz sports, Namath has a Forrest Gump-like way of being there. All the important athletic moments are here, elegantly told: his hardscrabble western Pennsylvania upbringing; his unlikely pairing with Bear Bryant; his arrival in New York as a hard-partying, money-making star and, of course, the win in Super Bowl III. Namath comes off as both throwback (he played through unbearable pain) and hypermodern (40 years ago, he was already getting paid to wear certain brands of clothing). But to write of the first media-age sports star is to tell not just of an athlete but the changing nature of celebrity and society in the '60s-that is, the story of modern America-and the author manages the elusive trick of illuminating setting as much as subject. He documents how sports became both big business and pop culture through savvy TV deals and the merchandising of stars. If Namath feels like a distant figure, more statue around whom society scrambled to adjust itself than active change seeker, that's because Kriegel convinces us he was-a figure both epic and accidental in a world revolving too fast for one person to control. Kriegel has written a remarkable book: a feel-good sports story still abundant with insight and social commentary. Agent, David Vigliano. (Aug.) Forecast: Football books can be as vulnerable as a quarterback's extremities, but this will cross fluidly into pop culture-as has Namath himself. Expect adulation and sales. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Meaty biography of Broadway Joe from sports-columnist-turned-novelist Kriegel (Bless Me, Father, 1995). The sooty mill towns in western Pennsylvania have churned out a host of professional football players, but none left a mark on the sport like Joe Namath, the handsome bad boy, boozer, and womanizer from Beaver Falls. Just a few months ago, Namath turned to alcoholic rehabilitation and disappeared from the public eye. Good thing, too, Kriegel writes in this detailed work, for in his last public appearance on national TV, he drunkenly told a sports reporter that he could care less about the game and would rather be kissing her. But then, that was the Joe we knew and loved, "disheveled, but happy," doing what he liked and thumbing his nose at authority (unless that authority wore the name Bear Bryant, who coached Namath at the University of Alabama). Kriegel does a nice job portraying the two Namaths. One was a football player of intuitive genius who could read the developing angles in sports where that type of calculus mattered (football, pool, golf). The second Namath had a far more difficult time reading the emotional complexity of his life, particularly all that booze and all those women. Some of his antics were stupefying, but others defined the new braggadocio beat that a few athletes brought to the culture. While not of the same ilk as Mohammad Ali, judges Kriegel, Namath was a touchstone in an age of defiance; he managed to get on the enemy lists of both J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Plus, he was simply brilliant at what he did on the field, delivering on his promises in a way a politician never could or would. Kriegel has also uncovered a lot of terrific backstory fromfriends and coaches and sportswriters. Namath was no angel, thank goodness, but this evocative portrait shows him at play in the fields of magic.

Product Details

• ISBN: 064179634X
  
• ISBN-13: 9780641796340
• Format: Paperback, 512pp
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
• Pub. Date: July 2005
• Edition Description: Bargain
• Sales Rank: 21,216

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Barnes & Noble.com: Why did you write this book?

Mark Kriegel: Joe was the first player I remember idolizing. I must have been about seven or eight, and I had a Joe Namath poster and a Joe Namath uniform, and later I went to a Joe Namath football camp. Later on, I spent ten years as a sports columnist for the New York Post and the New York Daily News -- and every story seemed to come back to him. To me he summed up everything I learned about fame and masculinity. Then I heard about Namath trying to cope with life. It certainly is not the destination most people would have envisioned for Joe Namath. [After his playing career, Namath sought treatment for alcohol problems.]

B&N.com: What is the main idea of the book?

MK: The main thrust of the book deals with the notions of fame and masculinity in the Baby Boom. I think that the central event in Namath's life is not the Super Bowl victory [Super Bowl III] but his own parents' divorce. And that informs his own emotional life from his adolescence to today.

B&N.com: Namath didn't directly cooperate, didn't do interviews for the book. Did that surprise you?

MK: Initially, yes. I would have thought if someone is doing a biography and you have a naturally sympathetic bent toward the character, he would cooperate. Looking back, I am not sure that Namath would want to submit himself to a process that is that emotionally invasive. Beyond that there was a financial problem, in that his representative saw the book as a licensing agreement and I saw it as a biography. I didn't see it as a business agreement, and I don't think of it as that. I don't blame the representative for asking for money, but I didn't think it was appropriate.

B&N.com: What did you do to compensate for Namath not cooperating, that is, not being interviewed? Did that make it especially challenging?

MK: I compensated by being as voracious a reporter as I could. The key to overcoming his lack of participation was investigative reporting. I became less and less concerned with Namath as I went on. One good thing about writing about sports figure is there is a good record. Joe started appearing in the papers from junior high school. Joe has been so famous for so long that there is an abundance of material out there on video, paper, books, and magazines. And some of the older material is more revealing than his reminisces would be.

B&N.com: How many people did you interview?

MK: I did about 180 on-the-record interviews. I also looked at court cases, video, and advertising.

B&N.com: How long did it take you to do the book?

MK: I started in earnest in October 2001, and I finished the first draft in December 2003. I did not take a day off. I did not understand what a biography entailed when I started.

B&N.com: How did Namath end up at the University of Alabama?

MK: By accident. He wanted to go to the University of Maryland, but his SAT scores were under the cut. He went through the summer thinking about playing professional baseball. At the last minute a recruiter on behalf of Coach Bear Bryant and the University of Alabama arrived in Namath's hometown of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and invited him to visit. He wound up staying. He loved Bryant and playing there. Bryant could be a very tough guy to play for, but he was exactly what Namath needed in the wake of his parents' divorce. Bryant became a kind of father to Joe.

B&N.com: Just as he was to revolutionize pro football, do you think he also revolutionized college football?

MK: No. Because even with his enormous talent -- and Bryant did adjust his offense for Namath -- the change wasn't a radical one. What you see in Joe's college career, if you want to look at a harbinger of change, look at the first prime-time bowl game [the 1965 Orange Bowl, between Alabama and Texas]. The idea of putting a prime-time game on was done in large deference to Namath's talent. He turns in not just a great performance but a supremely dramatic performance. Someone tells Sonny Werblin -- the owner of the New York Jets and boss of MCA's television division -- after the game that you have just seen a great pilot for your series. Alabama was always Coach Bryant's team the way the Jets were Joe Namath's team. The harbinger of change is how big this sport is going to become by putting it on in prime time. What distinguishes Namath as a ballplayer and celebrity is TV. He is the first ballplayer to become famous through television.

B&N.com: He was a pro star before he even played pro football. Why was that, and what was it about him that gave him star quality?

MK: His charisma was authentic, it was natural. The "Broadway Joe" character wasn't phony -- it was an amplification of who he was. This was a kid who learned about playing ball and hustling through life in pool halls back in Beaver Falls. He had a great natural wink to him. The charm is real. And he was a great hustler.

New York and Joe were a great match, as the nightlife in New York was changing. There were available women all over the place. Joe was not bound by conventions of appearance like Joe DiMaggio, the former Yankee baseball player. He did not have to pretend he was a teetotaler. Namath was encouraged to play the role of Broadway Joe by Jets owner Sonny Werblin. The swashbuckling role helped the Jets, the American Football League, and eventually the National Football League after the two leagues merged.

B&N.com: You seem to say in this book that Namath revolutionized pro football with the Jets. How did he do so?

MK: He elongated the game's dimensions. He made fans and players alike more conscious of the long pass -- the "bomb." Although I think Namath's career resists the notion of quantification, he was the first player to pass the career mark for 4,000 yards thrown in 14-game seasons. This was a monumental achievement. There is a beautiful sense of geometry in his game. In the Super Bowl, he beats the Colts by the small game -- short passes and the running game. Namath obviously had physical talents in throwing the long ball, but there were other things that were spectacular in his deceptive talents and sleight of hand. What people forget about Namath is that in addition to throwing such a long ball, he was a masterful faker.

B&N.com: Everyone still talks about Super Bowl III as the greatest Super Bowl. The Jets were big underdogs, yet Namath had the gumption to guarantee the win.

MK: Absolutely, he believed it. The guarantee was given at a banquet in response to a heckler but was given in public before. He believed it, and by the third quarter of the game, the Colts believed it.

B&N.com: What is his greatest legacy as a pro player, as a New York Jet? Was he overrated?

MK: He was not overrated, because he probably did more to change pro football than anyone. There are two parts of his legacy, one is the Super Bowl; he did make that particular game and the Super Bowl in general what it is. Second part, he is the guy through whom football and showbiz became one. He helped to change the way people looked at sports, especially through television. He created a kind of excitement that can't be quantified in a mere quarterback rating.

B&N.com: After his career, why did he spend so much time acting rather than, say, being a football coach?

MK: I don't think that he wanted to put the time in that is required of being a big-time football coach or a front-office type. He loved the game enough to play for many years in an enormous amount of pain. He spent a few years trying to basically find himself in show business. Personally, I think he found himself and his calling when he became a father.

B&N.com: What is the explanation for his alcohol problem, and how is he coping with it?

MK: I think that one of the things that happened to Joe as a result of playing with enormous physical pain is that he started, like many athletes in the '60s, to use alcohol as an analgesic. He used alcohol to medicate himself. He had pain that was constant, and I think that over the years he lost the ability to distinguish between physical and emotional pain. So, he started treating sadness in the same way that he would treat an injured limb. When he was married, he was sober. One of the things I find most endearing about Namath as a character is that the guy who was cast as the ladies' man of his generation turned out to be an incredibly dedicated father. A kind of Mr. Mom. He is sober through his marriage, but when the marriage breaks up, he goes back to drinking, because, as I understand it, he is in pain. By his own admission, it was a very dramatic hurt. He has been in outpatient treatment for alcohol abuse.

B&N.com: What will your next book be?

MK: I am kicking around a number of ideas, but the one I keep returning to is the late Pete Maravich, the basketball player. Another possibility is the boxer Barney Ross. Richard Price, the author, once told me that you don't always choose a subject but that the subject chooses you.

Read an Excerpt

Magyar society—emanating from two classes, nobles and serfs—hadn’t changed much through its first millennium, which had been celebrated in 1896. Hungary’s national anthem proclaimed: “Here you must live and here you must die.” Emigrants were denounced in Parliament and the press. American fectris were said to be so dangerous that real Americans wouldn’t even work there—“not even Negroes,” according to the Budapest Notifier. America’s mills and mines represented nothing more than a new kind of servitude. A Magyar folk song warned of perils “in a distant fabled land.” “We have lived and died here for a thousand years, Oh! Why, at your own danger, do you want to leave here now?”

America was not to be confused with El Dorado. Mines collapsed. Mill furnaces exploded. Men drowned in a lava of molten steel. Still, one didn’t need theories of probability to understand the lure of the distant fabled land.

Why America?

More meat, more money. Better odds.

Andras Nemet took the bet. Years later, Janos, the third of his four sons, would remember: “My dad came to this country when I was a year or a year and a half old, and I stayed behind. The reason I stayed behind was because my older brother was learning the blacksmith trade and had two years to go, so my father wanted to leave him behind for those years. He asked my grandparents to remain with him and be his guardians. They said that they would do it only if one of the younger children also remained with them. So I was the one that was elected to stay there. That way they figured that my mother would come back and they would get to see their daughter again. My grandparents were wonderful.”

Wonderful as they might have been, this couldn’t have been an easy period for Janos, who grew up without a father. Two years went by, then two more, and so on, until almost a decade had passed. Finally, on December 4, 1920, Janos arrived at Ellis Island. He was eleven. The ship’s master entered his name as “Nemeth.”

Janos was accompanied by his kid brother Lazlo, nine, and their mother, Julia, who had traveled back to Hungary to reclaim him. Janos answered the same questions his father had. He was not a polygamist, an anarchist, or a cripple. But there was still one more question: How long would he be staying in the United States? Most immigrants left Hungary with ambitions to return, already dreaming of a glorious homecoming. Not Janos, though. The officer inquiring as to the length of his stay checked the box marked “Always.” World War I had redrawn national boundaries; Janos’s hometown was now part of Czechoslovakia. But his fate had nothing to do with politics. Or money. Or even the American fever.

For Janos Nemeth, repatriation wasn’t a matter of country, but of kin. It was about making the family whole again. Janos wasn’t ever going home. He was home.

By now his father had signed a “Declaration of Intention,” a petition for citizenship, renouncing forever his allegiance to Charles, emperor of Austria and apostolic king of Hungary. Andras had settled in a place called Beaver Falls, about thirty miles northwest of Pittsburgh, where he worked as a laborer for the Armstrong Cork Works. It was in Beaver Falls that Andras Nemet became Andy Namath.

The oldest of his four sons, Andy Junior, had given up blacksmithing to work in the mill, pouring molten metal for a living. The three other boys still lived at home. There was Steve, a machinist at the Keystone Driller Company; Lazlo, better known as Lester, and Janos, who quickly became John.

“When I first came here my father told my brother to take me amongst the boys,” John Namath would recall. “He didn’t want to hear me talking Hungarian. Learn to talk American, he says, and learn it right.”

John Namath mastered more than the language; he learned, quite quickly, to live American as well. Something about him was exquisitely adapted to life in the hardscrabble precincts of Beaver Falls. “He was tough,” said Jeff Alford, whose family, descended from slaves, had come from Alabama. “Guys like that just didn’t take no shit. You had to be tough to survive around there. Shee-it, lot of white guys could fight they ass off back then.”

What young Namath evidenced was a kind of rugged egalitarianism. Race and religion were like athletic talent: granted by God. But you didn’t judge a man by how God treated him; you judged him on how he treated you. This was a practical philosophy in a town like Beaver Falls, whose many tribes were known by pejorative proper nouns: Hunkies, Coloreds, Wops, Polacks, Micks, Krauts, Yids, even Chinamen. For each tribe, there were several churches and as many bars.

Prohibition never stopped anyone from getting a drink in Beaver Falls. Drink was a man’s reward for breathing the exhaust fumes of progress. Just about everyone’s father worked in a factory. Beaver Falls made glass, china, enamel, cork, steam drillers, and doors. But mostly, like all those towns along the Beaver River, it made steel. Moltrup made cold finished steel. Union Drawn made bars and rods. Standard Gauge produced crankshafts and taper pins. Babcock & Wilcox, the town’s biggest employer, was known for seamless tubing.

After a shift in the mills, most men were too tired to do anything but drink. Their sons, however, could avail themselves of other amusements. Basketball was in its infancy, but still popular enough that the standings of club teams were dutifully printed in the local paper. Football, another very young game, had been popularized by college kids. But as it skirted the line between athleticism and violence, the sport seemed less suited for a bunch of swells than the rough-hewn sons of mill towns like Beaver Falls.

Still, basketball and football were mere curiosities compared to baseball. The Beaver Falls Athletics, the town’s first entry in organized ball, had been around since 1896. In 1921 and ’22, the Beaver Falls Elks were the reigning champions of semipro ball. There was a city league and a county league and any number of industrial leagues. The town had at least six ball fields, showcases for local legends with names like Heinie and Bennie and Lefty and Babyface.

Kids were crazy for baseball. In 1920, the year Janos became John, Babe Ruth hit fifty- four home runs, more than any single team had hit the season before. Baseball embodied an almost absurd sense of possibility, decidedly un-European, but no matter how Andy Namath tried to assimilate, the game and its value would remain beyond his comprehension.

That didn’t stop John from playing. He just learned to sneak around, keeping his glove and his uniform at a friend’s house. “My parents never allowed none of us to compete in any sport at all,” John would remember. “They said, ‘We didn’t raise you boys up to go out there and cripple yourselves up.’”

America didn’t want cripples. They were turned back at Ellis Island. Cripples couldn’t work.

Zoltan Kovac, a Hungarian immigrant who came to know the Namath family, explains: “To an old-fashioned Magyar family, sport was wasting time. You have to work, to earn a living. They don’t want you playing ball or painting pictures. You worked. That’s how they were brought up. That’s what they brought with them from Hungary.”

All the Namath brothers left school early to get jobs. “I had a doctor change my birth certificate so that I could quit school when I was 15,” John said.

He got a mill job, a standard fifty-five-hour week at 23 cents an hour. He worked in a glass factory for a quarter an hour. Then he worked as a “heater boy,” heating rivets at the Penn Bridge Company. He worked at the Union Clothing Company. He worked at Armstrong Cork. He was still a kid.

What, then, made you a man?

Was it loss? Or the ability to endure it?

On November 10, 1926, Andy Junior died of septicemia—blood poisoning—not uncommon among America’s industrial class. He was twenty-six, survived by his wife and young daughter. The cost of the funeral, including limousine, floral arrangements, and a deluxe “Belmont” casket, came to $643.50, a considerable sum at a time when steelworkers made about 50 cents an hour. Still, all the expense afforded the Namaths little peace. The poison would linger in the family’s blood.

From the lead story in the Beaver Falls Tribune, May 17, 1927:

Answering an alarm of fire which came over the telephone this morning shortly after 9:30 o’clock, the Beaver Falls fire department discovered upon arriving at 1315 Twenty-Third street, Mt. Washington, Beaver Falls, that instead of there being a fire, the man living in the house, Andy Namath, aged 56 years, had taken his life by hanging himself to supporting beams in the cellar of his own home. . . .

It is said that the man had been in ill health for several weeks past and had brooded considerably over the death of his son about one year ago as well as his wife’s present illness. Procuring a clothesline, he threw one end of it over the supporting rafter in the cellar while standing on the lower cellar steps, after which he stepped off. He then evidently bent his knees, causing slow strangulation.

There would be no $385 Belmont casket this time; the entire burial cost less than that. As a gambling man would say, why chase after bad money? Andy Namath lost the bet he made as Andras Nemet. So much for those great odds in this distant fabled land.

In a little more than eight months, on January 30, 1928, Julia Namath would remarry. Her new husband, William Bartus, was a mill worker who had been widowed ten years before. They lived at 316 Ninth Avenue, on the lower end of Beaver Falls, a block populated by Americans of African, Polish, and Magyar descent. Suddenly, there was a family of ten: six children from his first marriage and two from hers. The 1930 census counts Lester and John Namath as Bartus’s stepsons. By then, John was twenty-two, ready to go out and start a family of his own.

He didn’t have to look far for a bride. Rose Juhasz lived on the very next block, at 408 Ninth Avenue, the second of four children from a good Hungarian family. The Juhaszes owned their own home, valued at $3,500. Both mother and father, a mill worker, were naturalized citizens. Their children had been born in this country. On April 11, 1930, when the census worker knocked on their door, Rose was still ten days shy of her eighteenth birthday.

She had attended St. Mary’s, run by the Sisters of Divine Providence. But to her everlasting dismay, her schooling was cut short by her household duties, which included washing, cleaning, sewing, and tending to the furnace. She was also employed as a domestic for a well-to-do family up in the Patterson Heights section. “Women in mill towns were expected to work just as soon as they could, then find a husband,” she would recall.

Rose, later described as a “handsome” woman, would not disappoint. Not only could she keep house, she was a talented cook and a devout Catholic. Rose was a very qualified spouse. And as she saw it, so was John Namath.

He had given up his great passion, baseball, but still played industrial league basketball and semipro football for the Beaver Falls Cardinals. Still, Rose wasn’t marrying John for his athletic prowess. “He had a good job at the Moltrup Steel Company as a helper on a hot furnace, and he was a big, good-looking, hardworking man,” she recalled. “But from my point of view, I was honestly less concerned about getting married than I was with the fact that at last I was finished with all the hard work around the Juhasz household.”

John and Rose were married on April 14, 1931, at St. Ladislaus, the Hungarian Catholic church. Later that year, on December 1, John Alexander Namath was born. They’d call the baby Sonny. Sonny had great timing; the Great Depression was now in full swing.

Their newlywed years were a season of hardship. A good week was one that saw John get two days’ work at the mill. He tried to make up for it by working as a salesman at Sedicoff’s shoe store. Rose worked as a maid on Saturdays, nine hours for a buck. She stretched the family budget by making everything from scratch: soup, bread, apple butter, even soap from scraps of animal fat. She cooked a lot of rabbit, which they raised for food. Sometimes John would fish the Beaver River for their dinner.

He had finally retired from the Beaver Falls Cardinals with a bad ankle. For entertainment, the young couple would play cards, pop popcorn, and listen to the radio. Rose loved Amos ’n Andy.

On October 6, 1934, Robert Namath was born. Another mouth to feed. Another baby wailing to suckle at two in the morning. Another set of diapers. After Bobby, the young couple decided not to have any more kids, at least not for a while. This moratorium came to an end on January 5, 1938, with the birth of a third son, Franklin.

Fortunately, the worst of the Depression was over. The family had survived. Soon enough the mills would thrive as never before. Beaver Falls would be a boomtown.

There was just one thing bothering Rose Namath. She wanted a girl.

On May 31, 1943, Rose went to see her doctor. She was near the end of yet another pregnancy, though this one would conclude differently. Unlike the three boys, all of whom were born at home, the Namaths had arranged for this baby to be born in Providence Hospital.

“I thought little girls deserved something special,” Rose would say. She had no doubt. In anticipation of the infant princess, Rose had already painted the baby’s room pink. There was a pink crib, pink blankets, pink sweaters.

Dr. James Smith assured her that everything was fine, right on schedule. In another two weeks or so, she would be reporting for a shift of hard labor in the delivery room. And yes, Rose Namath would indeed be having a girl. Maybe it was the way she was carrying. Perhaps it was Dr. Smith’s many years of experience. Whatever the case, the physician was absolutely certain as to one thing: The baby would be a girl.

“I guarantee you,” he said.

Later that day, after hanging the laundry out to dry, John and Rose walked the three blocks to Providence Hospital.

The baby was dimpled, but dark. Very dark. Almost Spanish-looking.

“Oh, no,” Rose told the nurse. “This couldn’t be mine.”

Congratulations. It’s a boy.