Namath, Jets forever changed the NFL 50 years ago
Last Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of the most important professional football game ever played, and millennials, hang onto your selfie sticks: The Jets won it.
That’s right, the New York Jets. Those Jets. The Jets of the Fake Spike, the Butt Fumble and the greatest Dear John letter ever written: “I resign as HC of the NYJ,” sincerely, Bill Belichick.
And also, the Jets of Joe Namath, who put the franchise on the map and, on Jan. 12, 1969, orchestrated the victory that forever changed the NFL and set the Super Bowl on the path to the wretched excess it represents now.
I have learned that on Feb. 3, Super Bowl Sunday, Namath is expected to take part in some sort of acknowledgment of that game, although everyone connected with it is cloaking his role in mystery.
“I have been approached to do something, but I don’t know whether I should be the one to give that information out,” Namath told me by phone on Friday. “I consider it an honor to have been asked, but things could change.”
“We haven’t announced plans yet but we do anticipate a recognition moment,” Brian McCarthy, the league’s vice-president of corporate communications, said via text. But he, too, refused to furnish any other details.
At the very least, it’s good to know that some type of a nod backward will be made by a league that seems relentlessly determined to bury its past.
The NFL has no problem promoting foolishness like a halftime show featuring the likes of Bruno Mars or Maroon 5, but when it comes to recognizing its debt to something that happened 50 years ago? Forget it. Might scare off the kiddies.
The Jets, too, have been notably low-key about celebrating the greatest moment in franchise history, no doubt not wanting to remind their long-suffering fan base that a half-century has passed since their one and only Super Bowl appearance.
In truth, this year’s Super Bowl should be a celebration of Namath — Broadway Joe for those of you just tuning in — and the 1968 Jets, the AFL champions who were fully expected to follow in the footsteps of the Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders as the latest sacrificial lambs to be served up to the monsters of the NFL.
Although a merger of the two leagues had been kicked around, a third straight defeat by the supposedly junior half of the Super Bowl — which, incidentally, was still called the AFL-NFL Championship Game at the time — would have provided plenty of ammunition for those who wanted to keep the leagues separate.
The Jets’ surprisingly lopsided victory over the 18-point favorite Colts told the doubters not so fast. The Chiefs’ victory the next year over the favored Minnesota Vikings not only evened the score but cemented the equality of the leagues. Fifty-two Super Bowls later, the NFC has won 27 times, the AFC 25.
“It’s hard to overstate the importance of that game,” said Namath, who was named the Super Bowl MVP although by rights, the honor probably should have gone to his teammate, Matt Snell. “If we hadn’t have won, I think the leagues still would have merged, but the marriage wouldn’t have been as good. It would have been kind of like a shotgun marriage, something nobody wants but something we had to do.”
In the half-century since that game, the Super Bowl has grown bloated out of proportion. It is now less a sporting event than a spectacle, a national holiday featuring mounds of fried food, gallons of beer, a lot of overproduced TV commercials and occasional glances at the game itself.
All of that probably would have eventually happened anyway, but the Jets victory over the Colts surely hastened the process.
“I think about it now,” said Namath, who turned 75 last May. “But at the time, I didn’t understand what was taking place. That was beyond what I was thinking about. All I was thinking about was playing in the biggest game of our lives.”
And winning it. In the ensuing 50 years, Namath became the prototype for what we now have come to know as the sports superstar. He made movies, owned a nightclub, sold shaving cream and pantyhose on television. And in his later years, he has moved on to other pursuits. These days, he heads a charitable foundation and has written a book, “All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters,” scheduled to be released around Father’s Day.
But none of it would have been possible without a single momentous football game that happened nearly 20 years before Lady Gaga, the “star” of Super Bowl L — that’s 50 — was even born.
More than a few members of that Jets team are dead — George Sauer, Winston Hill, Johnny Sample, Larry Grantham — and the number of fans who remember watching the game is dwindling. Because of its neglect of its own history, NFL games of the past are hardly remembered as fondly as old baseball games or prizefights, and the young fans the league so desperately courts seem to want to only look ahead.
But for a few moments on Super Bowl Sunday, it appears the NFL will break character and pay tribute to the day that changed the course of its history.
Joe Namath deserves that moment, whatever it turns out to be. And it’s about time he’s getting it.