Pro Football and Joe Namath: Not Entirely Out of Place in a Musical Memoir
My interest in pro football began in the fall of 1969, when I was in the third grade at Skyline Vista Elementary in Westminster, Colorado, and all the talk at school was about Joe Namath. Earlier in the year, in January, Namath had led the New York Jets to a victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, so of course his name was on the lips of everyone — even those of snot-nosed third graders. I didn’t know Namath from Adam, but in order to get in on all the fuss, I decided to become a Namath fan too. And when the Scholastic Reader newsletter came around I, like most of my friends, ordered the book about Broadway Joe. Unlike my buddies, however, I actually read the book and then kept on reading. The first additions to my library were more glossy paperbacks from the Reader, the source of nearly all my early football books. Biographies of players like Johnny Unitas and Bart Starr gave me a fascinating look at the lives of the game’s all-time greats, while books like Greatest Pro Quarterbacks and Championship! introduced me to pro football’s intriguing past. Gifts around this time included posters, pennants, miniature football helmets, and an electric football game. But the best and most enduring present of all was a subscription to Sports Illustrated (my maternal grandmother’s Christmas gift to me for the next twelve years), which kept me intimately involved with the game’s present. Soon thereafter I joined SI’s book club, which exposed me to more cerebral, adult books such as Rocky Bleier’s Fighting Back and Vince Lombardi’s Run to Daylight.
For the next ten years or so, pro football was almost as important to me as music; but in the early 70s the two were so tightly wound they were inseparable. In the basement at the Phillips Drive house, on a small black & white TV, I watched any and every program that involved pro football. And more often than not, the sights and sounds of football mixed with the sounds and thrills of music to form an exhilarating concoction. I cannot, to this day, hear “Everybody Plays the Fool,” “Use Me,” or “I Can See Clearly Now” without again feeling the excitement of listening to Howard Cosell improvise the halftime highlights on ABC’s Monday Night Football. [1] Neither can I listen to “Summer Breeze,” “Me and Mrs. Jones,” or “It Never Rains in Southern California” without again hearing the stirring voice of Bob DeLaney bring the syndicated NFL Game of the Week to life. [2] I vividly recall watching the program in the fall of ’72 when GOTW spotlighted the September meeting between the Jets and the Colts — one of the greatest games ever played. The Jets were 0–4 against the Colts in the years following their Super Bowl face-off, but on this day Namath “outdueled Johnny Unitas in the greatest aerial show ever presented in the NFL as the two combined for 872 yards in one game . . . . September 24, 1972, was hailed as the best day of quarterbacking the game had ever seen. Unitas threw for 376 yards on a career-high 26 completions. Namath completed 15 of 28 passes for 496 yards, more than 33 yards per catch. He also threw six touchdowns” in the Jets’ 44–34 victory (Telander 5; Kriegel 344–46). Nowhere are pro football and pop music more connected than in the fall of 1972.
Talk of football and Joe Namath is not entirely out of place in a musical memoir. Like rock ‘n roll, pro football was (and is) loud, fast, and colorful, while Namath, with his long hair, good looks, and Morrison-esque swagger, radiated a certain rock ‘n roll charisma — on and off the field. For a time, Namath was a superstar on par with the Beatles and Rolling Stones and maybe even Elvis. In my mind, pop music and pro football in the early seventies go together like cheese and crackers, peanut butter and jelly, beer and pretzels. They are inextricably linked. They are two sides of the same platter. They are nearly one and the same.
Above piece excerpted from the forthcoming It’s Only Music: A Musical and Historical Memoir.
[1] “Everybody Plays the Fool” by The Main Ingredient; #3, 1972. “Use Me” by Bill Withers; #2, 1972. “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash; #1, 1972.
[2] “Summer Breeze,” by Seals and Crofts; #6, 1972. “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul; #1, 1972. “It Never Rains in Southern California” by Albert Hammond, #5, 1972.
