Namath: A Biography (Hardcover)

by Mark Kriegel (Author) "On February 11, 1911, after nineteen days at sea, the RMS Pannonia dropped anchor in New York Harbor..." (more)
Key Phrases: distant fabled land, five interceptions, jump pass, New York, Joe Namath, Beaver Falls (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From 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 withinsight and social commentary.
Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

From The Washington Post
Until recently biographies of sports figures were written primarily for adolescents, or adults suffering from arrested adolescence. With two notable exceptions -- Robert Creamer's biographies of Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel -- they were brief, worshipful and unfailingly discreet. The "heroes" about whom they were written never swore, never whored and always played fair; they were Ragged Dick in sweatpants, All-American boys, Dink Stover at Yale and Tom Brown at Oxford.

Then, four years ago, Richard Ben Cramer's Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life was published. Its prose was execrable -- showy, self-indulgent, marginally grammatical -- but it sure delivered the goods: The "hero" was revealed as a lout, the details of his crummy, money-grubbing life laid out for all the world to see. Following in Cramer's footsteps, Leigh Montville published Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero earlier this year; once again, the "hero" turned out to be decidedly unheroic, especially in his treatment of his wives and his children.

Now we have Mark Kriegel's Namath. It is not quite as elephantine as Cramer's and Montville's books and not quite as badly written, but it's cut from the same cloth. Though Kriegel finds things about Joe Namath to like and even to admire, and though he somehow manages to keep "hero" out of his subtitle, at its core this is another exercise in balloon-puncturing. To be sure, plenty of puncturing took place in the press during Namath's career as quarterback of the New York Jets, and Namath himself never made any secret of his boozing, his womanizing or his gambling, but Kriegel brings it all together in one big, sordid lump. At times it makes for modestly amusing reading, but it is rarely pleasant.

Full disclosure is in order. For about a decade beginning in the fall of 1962, I was an ardent fan of the New York Jets. I was at the Polo Grounds for the very first game they played as the Jets (they had previously been the Titans), and I rejoiced when, three years later, they signed Namath at the end of his remarkable career at the University of Alabama. When, four years after that, Namath made good on his "guarantee" that the Jets of the lowly American Football League would beat the Baltimore Colts of the mighty National Football League in the Super Bowl, I was ecstatic. I celebrated for days in a style of which the bibulous Namath surely would have approved.

To this day I retain a fondness for Namath and thus am pleased to find the reasons for it validated in certain ways in Kriegel's account. It may be a bit over the top to say, as he does, that Namath matured into "a magnificent demonstration of virtues associated with masculinity: gallantry, strength, stoicism, confidence," but on the playing field Namath indeed displayed all of those qualities at one time or another, and one of them -- stoicism -- almost constantly. In football terms if not all others, he possessed "unusual intelligence," with a "genius for football [that] was as much mental as physical." Within his own family and among his circle of friends, he was (and still is) notable for generosity and loyalty, and when, well into his forties, he at last became a father, he turned out to be attentive and loving.

All in all not a bad guy, so why does one come to the end of Kriegel's biography more in sorrow than in celebration? Because the portrait he draws is of a man who won one Famous Victory but lost in a lot of more important ways. Despite that great win over the Colts, and despite rolling up enough statistics to find his way into the Football Hall of Fame, Namath really didn't have a great professional career. He mostly played for losing teams -- the Jets went to the playoffs only once after the 1968 season, and were defeated -- he was regarded with suspicion and resentment by many of his teammates, and he lost a lot of playing time because of his fragile right knee. He may well have been the most naturally gifted quarterback ever to play the game, but he went only part of the way to fulfilling his gifts, and one rather suspects he knows that.

As to the personal stuff, the womanizing was no big deal; it happened before he was married, it doesn't seem to have hurt anybody, and the women -- many of whom pursued him aggressively -- seem to have enjoyed their brushes with sports-page immortality. But the boozing was another matter; Kriegel leaves no doubt that it was far more serious than amusing, that it probably affected his playing -- he occasionally boasted about starting games half or fully loaded -- and led to embarrassing public incidents, such as the one late last year in which he told Suzy Kolber of ESPN that "I want to kiss you" while on air. His marriage ended unhappily, at his wife's initiative, and he became a part-time father to the two daughters he loves so much. Now, in his early sixties, he travels the Joe Louis circuit, a has-been jock picking up gigs as a TV pitchman or an actor on the straw-hat trail.

Scott Fitzgerald overstated the case when he said that there are no second acts in American lives, but that's often true of American sporting lives, especially the lives of stars and superstars. What do you do when you're still in your thirties and your best days are behind you? For every Whizzer White or Roger Staubach -- great athletes who went on to successful and presumably fulfilling post-football careers -- there are all too many who never get over the tumult and the shouting, who desperately spin their wheels but never get a grip on the road to real-world adulthood. Namath, a good guy in so many respects, gives every evidence of being one of these.

That is a pity, but at least the videotapes are still around to remind us how extraordinary a player he was, and Kriegel adds to the record with a thorough -- too thorough, unless you go for game-by-game replays -- recapitulation of his career. He gives us Namath the boy, in the tough western Pennsylvania steel-mill town called Beaver Falls, "the most competitive kid I ever met," according to a childhood friend. He gives us Namath in Alabama in the early '60s, appalled by the segregation of everything from restaurants to water fountains but learning how to play football from the irascible, domineering coach, Paul "Bear" Bryant.

Kriegel recreates that exciting time from the founding of the AFL in 1959 to its merger with the NFL in 1970, a victory for the AFL and one for which Namath was in great measure responsible. The $427,000 contract he signed with the Jets in 1965 had shown the NFL that the AFL was a serious competitor and, once other players began commanding similar contracts, forced the smug, conservative NFL to capitulate. The Super Bowl victory to which he led the Jets in 1969 -- followed by another AFL win, by the Kansas City Chiefs, the next year -- left no doubt that the upstarts could play ball with the old guard, and opened the way for the phenomenal success that the merged and further expanded NFL has enjoyed ever since.

Namath did all that and more. He was Broadway Joe: pub crawler, bon vivant, swinger. He was a hustler and a con man and a gambler, though in the last capacity he seems to have skirted the pitfalls into which Pete Rose tumbled. He brought show biz to football and ultimately to all professional sports. Where sports and American popular culture intersect he didn't play as large a role as, say, Jim Thorpe or Babe Ruth or Arnold Palmer or Michael Jordan, but his influence was significant and lasting. Whether this was for good or ill certainly can be debated, but one thing is certain: When he was on his game, he was something else.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (August 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670033294
• ISBN-13: 978-0670033294
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #109,521 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars exceptional reading, January 29, 2007

By	Baird Jones (New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Namath: A Biography (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Story Needing a 100 Page Edit, January 17, 2005

By	R. Spell "raspell" (Memphis, TN USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Joe Namath is clearly a Baby Boomer icon. As this book rightly shows he revolutionized the game of football not only by his fabulous arm but his persona. Now some may say he was the beginning of the "me" generation in team sports and all the bad that has come from that. But I think that's a tad unfair. Basically this is a story that needs to be told.

But this book is not without flaws. I was glad to read in one place the complete Joe Namath story which contained many stories of which I was not familiar. But the mistake made by the author after spending so many hours of exhaustive research was to try and include it all. This book is clearly 50-100 pages too long. So while I enjoyed this, be prepared for a time commitment to read about a 60-70s icon. I enjoy learning but did I really want to learn everything about Joe that any source interviewed by the author found?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best sport bios ever, August 25, 2006

By	Bookworm - See all my reviews

This review is from: Namath: A Biography (Paperback)

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.