Customer Reviews

Namath: A Biography

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I am a New York Jets fan, which means that my life on Sundays usually sucks. There have been a few exceptions, such as the Jets' charge to the AFC Championship game and the Monday Night Miracle against the Dolphins, both of which were led by the much-maligned Vinny Testaverde, but mostly my memory of Gang Green has been of Rich (f%!@$&*) Kotite and of Chad Pennington's rotator cuff. However, I have been constantly reminded of the days when the Jets whipped up on everyone and their quarterback was the mythical Broadway Joe Namath, when the overrated Balitmore Colts were embarassed by a guy who guaranteed he'd beat them. So when I saw "Namath" on the shelf, I had to buy it.

I don't read many sports biographies, but in every regard "Namath" stands out as a compelling book that is shocking and emotionally jarring all at once. Mark Kriegel does much to wreck the mythical stature of Broadway Joe, but in doing so he presents a depiction of Ol' Joe Namath that most football fans have never considered. Above all, he impresses upon the reader that although Joe did not have jaw-dropping statistics as a quarterback, his impact on the NFL has been unparalleled - *nobody* influenced the entertainment machine that is the NFL more than Namath.

I grew up in the era of Marino and Montana and all the god-like 80s quarterbacks (heck, I think to this day that even Bernie Kosar was a killer QB), so I heard little about Namath until I became a Jets fan. First I heard about the Guarantee (which, as Kriegel writes, didn't make many headlines at the time - Namath had said many things equally as shocking), then I heard about the Booze and Broads. Kriegel reminds us that Broadway Joe's nickname was no exaggeration - he was an integral part of the New York scene for a decade or so and was the biggest American-born celebrity in, well, the world. He famously stole Mick Jagger's girls and hung out with Mickey Mantle. Even John Wayne said Joe was his hero. I didn't realize the impact Joe (and his huge contract) had had on football.

The early portions of the book concentrate on Joe's rough family life as a kid in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. He was a child of divorce and had older brothers that loved to beat him up, but Kriegel implies that this upbringing allowed him to survive atrocious hits in the NFL. His time at Alabama is also crucial to the story, especially Namath's father-son relationship with the tyrannical genius Bear Bryant. Of course the story of the Jets, the Super Bowl, and the New York parties are told, but many readers may be surprised by the path that the last fourth of the book follows as Joe goes from sports diety to has-been to father to divorcee to drunk. It's a rather depressing ending, but Joe Namath's story isn't over yet.

"Namath" is exhaustively researched and reveals a Joe Namath that is much more than just the Guarantee, the girls, and the booze. Joe is shown to be a man to whom the most important things are always family, loyalty, liquor, - and nothing else. Joe's aloofness toward his former teammates and his unfortunate reliance on his money-mongering agent Jimmy Walsh are offset by the unparalleled beatings he took as the most hated quarterback in the NFL (which he always came back from) and the sad flight of his self-absorbed wife. Joe is, fortunately, shown to be a devoted father - yet he cannot shake his dependence on alcohol.

Perhaps most significantly, this book describes the phenomenal athletic ability of Joe Namath that was ruined when his knees first began to betray him. One can only wonder what a healthy rookie Joe Namath would do today in the NFL. All that aside, "Namath" is a wonderful biography and deserves a look by any football fan (and especially Jets fans). You'll be awed by the heights to which Joe rose and to the depths to which he fell. But most of all, you'll be enthralled by the truth behind the legend of Broadway Joe.

What I enjoyed the most about Namath by Mark Kriegel was the way the author wove not just the sports play by play aspects of the Namath story, just enough to give a real memory lane feel to the games, but also that sense of the 60s and 70s mood, the sports bars, the Fu Manchu, the swinging Upper Eastside, the competition with Frank Sinatra, the attempts to make it in show biz, and the strange marriage to a woman who seemed to change her first name with the seasons, and the whole alcoholic decline. There are so many stories to Namath and Kriegel moves them along in a fantastically readable way. I just could not put the book down. I ended up actually wishing each section had been much longer but at 441 pages with a significant footnote section obviously Kriegel could not have done more. This is a terrific book.

This is a very interesting book and it takes you through Joe's entire life past his Suzy Kolber interview. Few sports biographies do that. Like Paul Hornung Joe serves as an alter ego for guys who wish they could have had Joe's life in their younger days. I wish that there would have been more pictures of Joe's serious girl friends (there were several), as only Susie Storm & his wife Deborah are pictured in the book. It would have been nice if they were some pictures of where Joe had lived.

You always wonder how playboys will adapt to the married life, as they always get married. Paul & Joe lasted longer than most playboys. Joe said that he only wanted to get married once, and wanted to get his running around out of his system before he settled down. Although his drinking was a problem, he proved to be an otherwise excellent husband and outstanding father. His drinking wasn't what caused his divorce. Unfortunately in Deborah Joe married someone who wanted her own life and wanted to have some success in life. When you marry at 21, you haven't had that opportunity and that was a problem. Joe was so smitten with her that he couldn't see that in her personality before they were married. In retrospect it may have been better if Deborah never married or married much later in life after she had achieved some success in her chosen field. She also was in astrology. Deborah was probably too dominating and also wanted to remake or shape Joe's life and that's never good. That didn't seem to bother Joe and wasn't the cause of the divorce either, although it does give you some insight to Deborah's personality. Another interesting side note about Deborah's family is that her brother died or came up missing while he was suspected to be on a drug run.

As the author pointed out Joe lived off his past but didn't want to live in his past. Joe was like Joe Dimaggio in that respect. Joe did very well financially in his post playing career.

Mark Kriegel has given the sports world a wonderful biography of a very interesting subject. He has also replayed an interesting time in our pop-culture history that made me a little nostolgic and at the same time, reminded me that the late sixties and early seventies were a little more complex than some of us care to remember.
I mean to say that he shows Namath paying the price for every moment of hedonism and that Joe's easy swagger had a lot to do with intense over medication of all sorts. I always sensed that there was more to Joe than natural talent and charm and we see that in these pages. He was incredibly competitive and seen as a winner throughout his career. Yet the Jets he quarterbacked had only three winning seasons in twelve years.
Some of the most telling passages come toward the end of the book, when Kriegel lists the number of times Joe was simply not there for his friends and when he, in effect, abandonned his Jet teamates. I truly felt compassion for a guy who wanted so badly to be a good family man and when Joe confesses to having embarrassed his daughters and the rest of his family, it seems heartfelt and you have to hurt for him a little.
This is no fluff piece and Joe comes across at times as being the grown up example of every kid who has ever been told that being talented in sports is good enough and nothing else is required. Joe's high school coach takes a lot of credit for everything good that ever happened to him, but I wonder if he would be willing to accept a little responsibility for the pain that the guy has experienced in his life.

If you are a Jets fan, you can probably skip this book . . . especially if you live in the New York area. Mr. Kriegel mostly recounts stories covered in detail in newspapers and Sports Illustrated . . . and what you've seen yourself on television. That's because the book is an unauthorized biography. An authorized biography would have cost a lot of money and would have been censored, so the author took the unauthorized route. That was probably the right choice.

If you are a football fan who enjoyed following Joe Namath's career but didn't have access to the New York media, this book will be fun for you. It will fill in many gaps about his family and youth, his various mobster associations, and how all of those amazing contracts and spokesperson deals were developed. It's a fairly typical celebrity portrait.

The best parts of the book come in where the author captures the psychology that Joe Namath often used on his football opponents and his adversaries in other parts of his life. You get a hefty dose of the hustling part of his ethic from this material. It's written in a gritty way that makes it appealing. You'll feel the emotions that he was trying to inspire as you read these stories -- particularly in regard to Super Bowl III.

The book has two important flaws. First, Mr. Kriegel likes to simplify his story a little too much. The story line is that Joe was crushed by a dysfunctional family, and couldn't live in peace until he had a family of his own where he could dote on his daughters. Now he is saved. People are a little more complicated than that. Mr. Namath was a compulsive womanizer and alcoholic for decades, and still seems to have moments where he falls off the wagon (as occurred on national television recently as he asked his interviewer for a kiss). Second, the book doesn't have enough football in it . . . but has way too much about drinking, carousing and womanizing. The over emphasis on the bad habits gets to be more than a little repetitive. This book could have cut out 150 pages and been a much better read.

The football analysis is almost nonexistent. For example, Broadway Joe threw a lot of interceptions. There's almost no discussion of the causes of that result. You just get a repetition of how much pain he was in, how bad his injuries were, and how he took responsibility with the media for the interceptions.

As I read the book, I imagined how one could write a comparable biography about Madonna and how she has reinvented herself to continue to be a celebrity. That's the overall tone of the book.

Mr. Kriegel is probably overly supportive of Joe Namath in the book. That's what makes this a fan's book. I think the book would have been better, however, if the focus had been less sympathetic and more like reporting and analysis.

Stand for what's right!

"Namath" is an outstanding biography by Mark Kriegel, a former New York Daily News sportswriter. I read Mark Kriegel daily for many years beginning in the early 1990's; he later moved to a non-sports column. His background in sports and non-sports, along with the length afforded a book as opposed to a column, have enabled his true talents to shine in the most definitive biography to date of Joe Willie Namath and one of the best sports books in recent years.

Kriegel starts off with Namath's Hungarian immigrant grandfather coming ashore at Ellis Island and his grandfather's and father's tough times working in the coal and steel industrial areas of Western Pennsylvania. Joe's close relationship to both his mother and father (they divorced when Joe was still young) is explored throughout the book. His many loves -- the girls he had crushes on to the many sports he excelled at -- also are examined. He was also a famous hustler whose "living on the edge" mentality --whether at a pool hall or going joyriding -- would explain his braggadocio attitude and The Guarantee during Super Bowl III.

Namath's respect and admiration for Paul "Bear" Bryant at Alabama had a profound effect on Joe. It was at Alabama that he first hurt the knee that would so negatively impact his playing career with the Jets. One has to see the pictures of Namath throwing airborne -- there are several in the book -- to remember that before he hurt his knee, he had exceptional mobility. He was not a scrambler in the mode of Joe Montana or Steve Young, but his ability to throw and jump gave him additional vision on the field. He missed that ability in the NFL.

Joe Namath was taken by the Jets of the old American Football League (AFL). The New York Giants of the NFL secretly wanted him, but Wellington Mara (still running the Giants today) would not be seen bidding against the upstart league and his proxy, the St. Louis Cardinals, were unable to secure Namath. He went to the Jets, then controlled by Sonny Werblin, and signed an outrageous contract calling for $400,000. It saved the Jets. It saved the AFL. And it helped make the NFL the economic powerhouse it is today. The merger with the AFL and the jolt the Super Bowl was given in 1969 when the Jets upset the heavily favored Baltimore Colts are both directly attributable to Joe Namath.

Joe Namath called his own plays at QB, as most players at that position did (Tom Landry of the Cowboys was one of the few coaches who did not allow his QB to call his own plays). Today, virtually all coaches or offensive coordinators call the plays for their team. One wonders how much better Namath might have been if he had a coach or coordinator to call the plays, toning down his talent, but allowing for a better overall game for the team. Namath had many 4 and 5 touchdown games -- but he also had games with 6 interceptions. Clearly, he tried to force passes and would have been better off taking what the defense allowed at certain times

There are three recurrent themes throughout "Namath." One, the drinking that Joe did, both before games as well as the off-season. Even for a professional athelete in severe pain (imagine having 5 inch needles inserted into your knees!), Namath's drinking was excessive. Second, knee problems plagued Namath almost from the time he joined the Jets and severely impacted his playing ability. His best season was 1967 when he passed for 4,007 years. It would be another decade before the NFL would change the pass-defense rules which ushered in the passing era of Dan Fouts and Air Coryell, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, etc.

The third theme is the ever-present number of women that Joe Namath was seen with -- or NOT seen with, as he often preferred. Some of these women include rocker Suzie Storm, Randi Oakes (of TV's "CHiPs" fame), Raquel Welch, and Farrah Fawcett (a pair of famous TV commercials). But it would not be until Joe was past 40 that he would get married in the mid-1980's.

The book is a retrospective for older football fans, particularly those familiar with New York sports in the 1960's and 1970's. Many references are made to Dave Anderson of The New York Times (Joe's favorite sportswriter), Paul "Dr. Z" Zimmerman (Joe's least favorite sportswriter) then of The New York Post but now with Sports Illustrated/CNNSI.com, the late Dick Young of The Daily News (an early supporter but one who got tired of Joe's constant demands for renegotiating his contract), and Sal Marchiano, a longtime local NY television sportscaster who once almost got busted with Joe for smoking a joint in an entranceway on a Manhattan street. Joe much preferred the TV guys who did less delving into his personal and lockeroom life. He disliked sportswriters in general, the beat reporters more so, and especially, those from the tabloids.

Mark Kriegel has written an outstanding book. The early history of Namath's Hungarian forebears (real name: Nemet), his athletic and hustling prowess in the 1950's, his relationship with Bear Bryant, his role in saving the Jets and the AFL and helping to make the Super Bowl the definitive annual event in television -- Kriegel covers it all. His voluminous research, oral interviews with many of the characters, and detailed and objective analysis more than allow for a comprehensive look at Joe Namath, even without Joe's cooperation in writing the book. The book ends on a positive note for Namath fans, and Kriegel properly devotes more time and space to the early years than in the time since Namath's retirement.

An outstanding book that will appeal to Jet fans, football fans, sports fans, and readers who want to know about it was like to be young, single, and rich in the 1960's and 1970's.

This book is a welcome gift, not only for those who love Nammath, but for those who have watched Kriegel's muscular talent mature. Neither a puff or a hatchet job, this nuanced portrait reveals a man and a time made for each other. The book is evocative without being sentimental, full of inside nuggets but never reeking of cheap gossip. A fun read and a rich one, too, as tightly wound as a spiral to Don Maynard.

Joe Namath-a man that conjures an image that few people in this world could ever match. Although this book tends to be a bit of a long read and gossipy at times, it provides some real insight into the life and legend of a hero to many and a bad influence to others. Mark Kriegel does a thorough job in helping us visualize the complexities of a man who always seems to live a life of extremes.

Being in my early 40's and having grown up in Alabama as a Crimson Tide fan, I have always been enamored with the legend of Joe Namath playing for Coach Bryant. I also have some memories of him as a kid quarterbacking the Jets and seeing some of his commercials years ago as well as his appearances on television. I was probably more like one of the Ovaltine kids that Kriegel mentions.

This book helped me to see the whole picture of the life of Joe Namath; a very private man living a very public life. I found myself sickened at times by his lifestyle and his mannerisms, yet the book has a way of making your dark side revel in it sometimes. All the while, I found myself uplifted by this never say quit attitude and his ability to fight through the pain. This book is well worth reading as it will stir the full range of your emotions.

I doubt I will ever understand the complex life of Joe Namath, but I still love seeing him on the sidelines at Alabama games and hope that the rest of this life will be one of peace, reconciliation, and fulfillment.

When it comes to the subject of Joe Namath, one event towers above all: Super Bowl 3 reigns supreme! That glorious afternoon of January 12, 1969 stood the sports world upside down. Those who can remember and still relish the New York Jets fabulous upset win over the arrogant Baltimore Colts will fully appreciate "Namath". Those who with no appreciation of that wonderful day probably will not. One might almost discourage those unfortunate folk from reading "N". Author Kriegel has touched all the bases in this well-researched biography. There are 50 pages of notes! "N" is no slap dash job, run off to beat a deadline. This is the complete Broadway Joe from childhood through middle age. Joe has done quite well for himself- and endured challenges on and off the field. Kriegel dutifully tracks ALL of it. Virtually every word rings true; the author obviously got to know his subject. Kriegel makes no effort to canonize Joe. The reader will get the full story, for better or worse, including generous doses of the selfish and often loutish behavior we Jet fans remember-and still tolerate. The story may be a tad too long but this is not a function of sloppy writing or the absence of a sharp-penciled editor. Kriegel set out to produce a thorough bio and has done so. Jets fans will scarcely object to the length! (On a personal note, this reviewer was in an Upper East Side bar, sometime after the 1967 season. My overcoat was draped over the next bar stool and who should sit on it but Joe! He apologized profusely (!) and moved away, marking him forever as a true gentleman.) The final word on "N" must be positive. Members of the aforementioned limited audience should subtract a star or two from the rating above. For we true believers (and long sufferers), let's hear it: J-E-T-S; JETS-JETS-JETS!!. 5 Green and White Stars!

Former Daily News sports columnist Mark Kriegel has fashioned one of the better biographies on a sports legend in the past few years with Namath: A Biography. The book takes a look at the life of Broadway Joe from his days in the Lower End of Beaver Falls, PA to his greatest heights as the quarterback of the New York Jets. Mr. Kriegel describes how a generation of boys grew up idolizing Mr. Namath and he is clearly one of them. But Mr. Kriegel does a great job of walking that precarious line between being a fan and a reporter. The book provides you with all the highs and lows from Mr. Namath's life. From his dealings with purported mobsters to his problems with alcohol to his saving the AFL and forcing the AFL-NFL merger to his greatest triumph of winning Super Bowl III, Mr. Kriegel offers up it all up with sharp writing style. Like the hustler himself, he plays all the right angles to create a must read for fans of Joe Namath, the Jets and sports itself.