HOUSTON – He did the right thing, of course, the correct thing, the adult thing, the responsible thing, the commendable thing. Joe Namath went on ESPN last weekend and he spilled his heart onto the floor, and he confessed, “Every time that something in my life has gone askew, alcohol has been involved.”
He said he’s sought treatment. He said, “I’m very disappointed with my behavior, because of how I’ve embarrassed my family, and the people that I work with and my friends and all.” There was genuine remorse in his voice, genuine humility. You could almost see him wince as he recalled his performance on ESPN in late December, when he twice told Suzy Kolber, “I want to kiss you.”
And yet, even as we applaud Namath for acknowledging a problem and doing something about it, there is a small part of us that feels a certain loss, a certain yearning. The Super Bowl has been lacking color and juice for years. Nobody laughs anymore. Nobody has a good time. We’ve accepted that. That’s what football has become. Besides, whenever we were feeling down about that, all we had to do was chat up some of the old-timers, who’ve been coming here since the ’60s.
“You shoulda been in Miami, kid,” they all say. “You shoulda been around Namath.”
Nobody laughs at the Super Bowl anymore. Nobody has a good time. A few Panthers have the audacity to say they think they can actually beat the Patriots, and they’re treated like Ali trash-talking Liston. That’s how low our standards are now. That’s how accustomed we are to the boring and the banal.
“We’re here on a business trip,” Pats’ coach Bill Belichick said the other day. “We aren’t here to see the sights. We aren’t here to have a good time. It’s all business.”
So that’s what we get at the Super Bowl now, year after year, Tampa to New Orleans, San Diego to Houston, an endless flood of Stepford Linebackers, glassy-eyed and opinion-free. A few years ago, Glenn Parker of the Giants bought a book, “1831,” a book about slavery and politics and religion, lugged it to all his media sessions, and was hailed as some kind of poet laureate of the NFL, Maya Angelou in a facemask. It was ludicrous. But that’s how starved we are for personalities. For non-conformists.
That’s how badly we wanted to find the next Namath.
We want to be in the audience at that Miami Touchdown Club dinner, listen to him guarantee victory over the Colts. We want to sit poolside by the Galt Ocean Mile, watch him watch all the pretty girls walk by. We want someone to do something that livens up Super Bowl week, and, really, the only one who’s ever come closest to that in the 35 years since Namath owned South Florida was Jim McMahon in New Orleans 18 years ago.
Which is why this has been an especially sobering season for those of us who long for the return of style over substance, characters over character. McMahon was busted for drunk driving a few months ago. And Namath offered himself up as a permanent punch line, making his slurry pass at Kolber.
Look, we knew what we were getting with Namath all those years ago. When he said he liked his women blonde and his Johnnie Walker red, we knew he wasn’t substituting milk in those bottles, and we knew he wasn’t shaking hands with those girls at the end of a long night. We never thought of what the possible consequences to that kind of living would be, because it was like they were happening in a vacuum, to fictional characters.
So maybe what we’re looking for is something that can’t possibly exist. What watching Namath on television proved last week is that there is no such thing as being larger than life. Not if you want to keep living. It’s a good lesson for Namath, at 60, to have learned. And a tough lesson for those of us looking for life and color at the Super Bowl.