Quote of the Day (Joe Namath, with Perhaps the Most Famous Prediction in Football History)

“I try to explain that it wasn't an arrogant line; it was an angry one. I was at the Miami Touchdown Club dinner at the Miami Springs Villa, and I was up at the mike, and someone yelled something nasty from the back, and I said, 'Wait a minute, let's hold on. You Baltimore guys have been talking all week, but I've got news for you, buddy. We're gonna win the game. I guarantee it.'"—New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath, explaining his most famous quote, made three nights before Super Bowl III, quoted in Bill Speros, "Namath's Call Will Stand Test of Time--Guaranteed," Orlando Sentinel, Aug. 22,2008

It’s hard to believe that on this date 40 years ago, a brash young quarterback defied all the oddsmakers and led his team, the best in the upstart American Football League, to victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. That success shook up the NFL and enhanced the credibility of the coming merger between the NFL and AFL.

Since then, of course, the New York Jets have become perhaps the biggest teases in pro football, looking like contenders before falling just short. At times, it must have made their longtime, long-suffering fans wonder if a Faustian bargain had been made for immortality.

A certain mythology has crept into “Broadway Joe” Namath’s “guarantee” over the years. As the quarterback himself noted, it resulted less from him shooting off his mouth than from his annoyance at a rowdy Colts fan at the Miami Touchdown Club banquet at the Miami Springs Villa, who was yelling “something nasty” at the Jet leader.

My oldest brother, John, had a brush with the Pro Football Hall of Famer several years ago, at a function in western Pennsylvania, where Joe Willie grew up and where my brother has lived for a number of years. The quarterback was warm and outgoing with my brother and virtually everyone else he met that night.

At one point in the proceedings, someone held out a copy of a Life Magazine article from June 20, 1969, six months after the Jets’ improbable Super Bowl triumph. The piece chronicled the association with gambling that led the football powers-that-be to complain and Namath to contemplate briefly retirement. 

Holding the magazine, the football immortal chuckled at the sight of himself on the cover of the defunct periodical so many years ago, then said, “You’ll never guess who else is in this issue.” Leafing through the pages, he came to an article on “The Class of ‘69” college students featuring a photograph of a recent graduate named Hillary Rodham.

Someone in the vicinity commented on the homeliness of that young woman—who, you may have heard, went on to bigger things afterward. I don’t know what Namath’s response was, but I doubt that he agreed with it, no matter what his political orientation. 

You see, above all else, no matter the condition of his gimpy knees, Namath would be the first to tell you that in those days, he loved the ladies. I just don’t think he would ever say anything ungallant about any female of the species. He always knew how to score, on and off the field.