There would be an opportunity for an exclusive interview. And oh, by the way, I could bring a Plus One to the event.
Only a year into my Daily News tenure, I had a chance to talk one-on-one with a forever member of the New York professional athletes’ Mount Rushmore – the Jets’ Super Bowl III champion quarterback Broadway Joe Namath.
The invite came courtesy of a good friend, CSTV (College Sports Television Network) executive Jon Gerstel, and I would get a chance to talk with Namath after he made an appearance at CSTV’s Chelsea Piers studios to tape a segment on his alma mater, the University of Alabama. My girlfriend (now wife) Beth was welcome to tag along, too.
The CSTV shindig fell on a Monday – December 8, 2003 – and Namath’s old team was already on its way to a losing season under coach Herm Edwards. Plenty of other sports stories dominated the headlines already, including Alex Rodriguez’s recent trade to the Red Sox imploding after the players’ union nixed the deal. But maybe Namath would say something over the top, a verbal salvo that could garner a back page headline – what every reporter salivated over in the newspaper tabloid wars heyday.
Conveniently enough, CSTV’s studios were located right down the street from The News offices on Tenth Avenue and 33rd, and that night, I planned to work a little late, then walk down and meet Beth outside the Chelsea Piers entrance.
No sooner had I exited onto Tenth – long before Hudson Yards and the High Line existed, when that neighborhood still resembled a dead zone of auto body shops and Lincoln Tunnel traffic – than I was sorry I’d chosen a suit and dress shoes for the occasion. A brutal sleet storm was underway and by the time I got to Chelsea Piers, I was soaked, as was Beth, whose umbrella had already been turned into an inverted V. We trudged indoors looking like we’d just emerged from the Hudson River.
One of the surreal aspects for sportswriters – at least for me – is when you come face to face with the athletes you idolized as a kid. I was a Cowboys, and later an Eagles fan, and rooted for those teams when Namath’s pro football career was coming to a close, and I was too young to have remembered his famous Super Bowl guarantee or the Jets’ upset of the mighty Colts.
But Namath’s Broadway Joe persona was very much a vivid memory – the photo of him at the Oscars with Raquel Welch as his date, his Hollywood movies with the likes of Ann-Margret, the guest role (as himself) on a Brady Bunch episode, the pantyhose and shampoo commercials (the latter with Farrah Fawcett), and his later broadcast career.
When he appeared in the room where Beth and I were waiting, something was off, though. Namath seemed out of it, and before I pushed the record button on my cassette tape recorder, Namath looked at Beth and mistook her for wait staff.
“You’re pretty,” Namath said. He asked her to fetch him a vodka tonic.
“More vodka than tonic,” Namath said with a smile. I looked at Beth like, “Uhhh…” She nervously laughed, but backed away so things wouldn’t be awkward. Fearing I was on a very short clock, I started firing questions at Namath. No other PR staff was around, but I could see New York Post reporter Andrew Marchand – who I barely knew – off to the side, waiting for his turn with Namath.
The interview went south… quickly. Namath’s answers were pretty vanilla, anyway, but being overserved, he was all over the place.
“It’s clumsy for me to talk about what the team needs because I don’t know enough of what happens in the trenches,” Namath said when I asked him about the current 2003 Jets.
Then, before it had begun, it was over, and Namath was ushered away. I don’t even think Marchand got a crack at an interview and I later heard that CSTV couldn’t use its Namath interview material.
“What did Namath say? Anything good?” one of the News copy desk editors asked when I called in later that night. (There were about 10 copy editors on any given night in the slot. Now you’re lucky if an outlet has a copy desk at all – but that’s for another story).
For whatever reason – maybe my New York journalism jadedness hadn’t kicked in yet – I didn’t divulge anything about Namath being drunk. It seemed like piling on in some way. Instead, I regurgitated a few quotes and was told to send in a small story. I was mostly still a sidebar person at that juncture, and unless Namath had said Herm Edwards deserves to be fired, or something equally inflammatory, my contribution was going to be a low priority. Sure enough, the “story” – more a paragraph – didn’t end up running until a day later, in Wednesday’s edition, and even then, it was buried in a sports roundup toward the back of the newspaper.
Twelve days after the CSTV event, I joined News Jets beat writer Rich Cimini at Giants Stadium for a game against the Patriots. The Jets were 6-8 going in – soon to be 6-9 – so my sidebar possibilities were a tossup between Chad Pennington’s or Curtis Martin’s stats, or maybe something off the Patriots, who were rolling toward another Super Bowl appearance.
But before the half, Rich tapped me on the shoulder and said his wife, Michelle, was watching the nationally-televised game from their Long Island home and had just heard an interview between Namath and ESPN sideline reporter Suzy Kolber. Namath was at the game for a celebration of the Jets’ Four Decades Team.
“She said Namath looked and sounded drunk,” said Rich. He quickly gave me his home number and told me to call Michelle for a play-by-play of the interview, as she had been recording it. The press box was loud as it is, and this was during the flip-phone era, so I could barely hear Michelle on the other end when I called.
“Ok, are you ready? Namath said, ‘I want to kiss you,’ to Suzy Kolber,” said Michelle. “Then he said, ‘I couldn’t care less about the team struggling.’”
I frantically wrote down the quotes while Rich was trying to see if he could pick up anything different on the radio simulcast that he was listening to. Needless to say, my sidebar was set. During a break after I filed my story, I told Rich about the CSTV event earlier in the month.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
Eight years would pass before I would interview Namath again. That my first two stories on him came during what Namath later described as his lowest point wasn’t lost on me.
Namath apologized to Kolber after the Dec. 20 incident, and by the next summer (2004), former Daily News columnist Mark Kriegel’s terrific biography on Namath was to be published. I didn’t know Kriegel too well, since our paths at The News didn’t overlap, but he had called me out of the blue one day after he had learned about my CSTV anecdote, which he ended up using — page 438. Before publication, I had to write an advance story, so I interviewed Namath’s old Jets center John Schmitt and the late Miami Herald columnist Edwin Pope, who’d covered Super Bowl III. Schmitt dropped a mini bombshell – that Namath had quit drinking on Jan. 12, 2004, the 35th anniversary of the Super Bowl III title.
“He’s so proud of being where he is. He looks great,” Schmitt said of Namath then.
Years passed, the Giants became the football talk of New York, especially after they toppled Tom Brady and Co. in Super Bowl XLII, and then again in Super Bowl XLVI. The Jets, meanwhile, continued to be the same old Jets, or in other words, more often a punchline. The closest I got to anything Namath-related during that eight-year stretch came from the mouth of the great News columnist Vic Ziegel. Vic and I were both covering the Yankees’ spring training in 2006, and I gave Vic a ride one day to a Grapefruit League game in Orlando. Vic always had great stories – Mantle, DiMaggio, you name it – and on this trip, he regaled how he had been in Mexico in January 1969, and had listened to Super Bowl III on a radio.
“I didn’t understand a thing,” Ziegel said, “except when they said Joe’s name. It was a lot of Spanish, and then the announcer would say, ‘Broad-away Joe Na-meeth!’ And then more Spanish, and again, ‘Broad-away Joe Na-meeth!’ That was the only name I heard, so I figured the Jets were doing well.”
After the 2011 death of legendary News cartoonist Bill Gallo, I helped with the paper’s special Gallo tribute, planting myself at my office desk and calling a list of celebrities and VIPs a mile long – most of the numbers taken from Gallo’s prized little black address book. Everyone from the artist LeRoy Neiman to director Spike Lee to former heavyweight champion Larry Holmes. And of course, Namath. But to get to Broadway Joe, I had to go through a rep. Namath would call me back, I was told. I wasn’t holding my breath.
Then my work phone rang. Florida area code. I picked up and heard that unmistakable voice. I immediately thanked Namath for calling me back.
“Ahhh, you know what, man? You don’t have to thank me for calling, I promise you,” Namath said. “This is a sad day. There was a time, honest to God, I didn’t like to read about myself. But I promise you I always looked to Bill’s work. Even when times were tough, man, and there were some things that we went through, I went through in a sense, but the way he had of putting it on paper, and with his sense of humor, I got such a kick out of seeing. Even if I didn’t have the humor at the time, in the situation. You know what I mean?”
Namath cracked up several times during the conversation. It was so genuine, no handler also on the line, telling me to hurry up. And it was the Namath I had always heard about from football writer colleagues and peers, that once you connected, he was an awesome interview. I just happened to have had my first one during a decidedly un-Namath moment.
I asked him if he recalled any Gallo cartoon in particular, and he laughed describing how Gallo drew Namath in the locker room one time, with what Namath said were either gnats or flies circling his head.
“I haven’t gone to the scrapbooks yet, but I do have some of those in my scrapbooks,” he said. “There was one, I don’t remember the year. I was upset about something. He had me in the locker room, sitting there, and a bunch of bugs flying around my head. Gnats or flies. I don’t even remember the caption. But that was a classic. I was so down in the dumps about something. When I saw that, man, I just had to take that humor to heart and understand things in a different light. He picked me up without him even knowing about it or trying to, in a sense. He was so special. So special. The way he drew… I couldn't think of those things! You know what I mean? He had a way of saying it with his art. It was so special.”
He concluded the conversation saying he was “a believer in the energy out there,” and that “we’ll all cross paths again, somehow, with our form of energy.”
I wished him well and thanked him for the call. “Aw, thank you, Christian, and my best to you and yours, buddy.”
There were other Namath interactions sprinkled along the way – an interview during the 2014 Super Bowl week in Manhattan before the title game was played at MetLife Stadium between Denver and Seattle; a group interview at BTIG’s “Charity Day,” when the financial services giant brings a full slate of star athletes to stump for charity; an interview before Namath took the dais alongside fellow quarterback Joe Theismann to discuss the Jupiter Medical Center and neurological center that bore Namath’s name.
It wasn’t until after Tom Seaver died in 2020 that I reached out to Namath again. Originally, I had an idea to do a tribute to Tom Terrific, but the feature became a broader look at New York professional sports’ golden era, 1969-70, when three of the four major professional sports crowned New York teams champions – the Jets, Mets and Knicks – all within a year’s time. The story ironically ended up in the Daily News, even though I had been a layoff casualty two years earlier.
I started calling all the big names from that era – Willis Reed and Walt “Clyde” Frazier, ‘69 Mets like Ron Swoboda and Ed Kranepool, Rangers great Rod Gilbert, and certainly Namath, although I still had to go through a rep. I also decided to try and do a separate story angle on Namath’s Hollywood career, which started around that same time. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying to contact Ann-Margret, who starred with Namath in C.C. & Company.
When her rep called me back, she said Ann-Margret would be happy to do the interview, but the rep asked who had come up with the idea to request an interview with the legendary actress.
“Oh, that was just something I came up with on my own,” I said.
“Oh perfect,” said the rep.
A pause before a sultry voice spoke from the other end.
“Mr. Red, you got a great name,” said Ann-Margret. The Sixties’ and Seventies’ siren who had starred opposite the likes of Elvis, Dean Martin, Jack Nicholson and Dick Van Dyke — not to mention being the voice of Ann-Margrock on The Flintstones — liked my name. Off to a good start.
“He was a natural. He was just a natural. I had a great time,” Ann-Margret purred, referring to filming C.C. & Company with Namath. “Well, my husband (Roger Smith) wrote the script. We always liked Joe. He was exciting. He wore fur. He had the restaurants. Quite the life. Humble, and just polite and what can I say? He was a joy to work with.”
Namath called me back after my initial request. He was apologetic for his tardiness, and joked about the brave new world of living in the midst of a pandemic. Maybe it was the topic, or the fact that he didn’t have to answer about the state of the current Jets for the millionth time, but it was as if I pressed the “on” button with my first question about Seaver, and Namath was off to the races.
“You know, I knew Tom, of course, because we practiced in the same stadium (Shea). And I was a baseball fan. The Mets and the Jets went together,” said Namath. “I knew Tom from out at the stadium, prior to practice, after some practices, lunchtime. We’d have lunch together as a team, or individuals, we would bump into each other.
“I never hung out with Tom. He was younger, came in a couple years after I did. He was a pretty quiet guy. Got along well. We didn’t socialize in Manhattan. I’d run around a little bit but I never saw Tom in Manhattan.” Namath stopped and laughed a couple seconds.
“I think (Seaver) stayed closer to family and close to work,” said Namath.
“You had fun though,” I said.
“Yeah, as a quarterback you learn about defenses too, and I had to learn about Manhattan.”
Namath said the only athlete of that era that matched him in the nightlife category was Rangers stud Rod Gilbert.
“He’s in first place. He out-suaved me, man,” said Namath. “He was suede, boy. The way he talked, he had that accent that the girls loved.
“The Knicks, I’d go to a game or two. I’d watch Phil Jackson and stuff. Man, those cats -- (Bill) Bradley and (Willis) Reed, I can see Reed right now running down that floor with his limp. Yeah, that was a good run,” he said. “I don’t know any other town to this day that won the three championships like that.”
Namath retweeted the story when it ran, the ultimate social media stamp of approval, and a few years later, Cimini, my former colleague, wrote a beautiful ESPN story on a day in the life of Namath, where Cimini hung out with the Hall of Fame quarterback in Florida on the cusp of his 80th (!) birthday.
[https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/37755549/day-life-broadway-new-york-jets-qb-joe-namath-80-year-old-birthday]
The feature detailed a legend at peace, and Cimini wrote that Namath had “settled into Ordinary Joe,” as opposed to the colorful Broadway Joe past.
I’d say Namath has more than earned it.
Love the plus one!