PW: Reading your book Namath, one understands what a seminal and progressive figure Joe Namath was, how much of the groundwork he laid for the modern culture of sports celebrity. But he's also a throwback—playing through pain and calling his own plays. Can these be reconciled?
Well, I don't know if progressive is the right word. I think his virtues are the classical virtues associated with masculinity. He's much more of a strong, silent type than people remember. He is remembered as part of the '60s, but in many ways he stood apart from the decade. He anticipates the '70s and the Me Decade perhaps more than he figures in the '60s. He was not a flower child. He's assiduously apolitical.
What was it, then, about Namath that singularly changed the relationship between media and sports? If he didn't do it, could someone else have used TV and it all would have turned out the same?
Yes, it probably would have. But he was the perfect guy at the perfect time. Joe is, in so many respects, a creature of television.
Is he fundamentally different from those creatures that we have today? Or do we just celebrate him because he was the first?
Well, unlike a lot of guys, I don't think his image was a lie. Broadway Joe was just an amplification of who he was as a young man. It wasn't a marketing campaign that three guys at Nike thought up. It's the antithesis of someone like Dennis Rodman and Brian Bosworth, where they sit down and think through what pathologies they can use as an advertising vehicle.
So in a sense, it was an act, but he was playing himself.
Yes. And he wasn't nuanced about it. Even from the beginning, he felt ambivalent about fame. Later on, when he becomes a performer, you see the difference. He's not very good at performing. He's good at playing Joe Namath the young man.
You unravel a lot of Namath myths. What's the biggest one?
That he was trying to start a revolution. He really just wanted to play ball and get paid. This quasi-religion was made of his hedonism. But if you looked at his first contract, it's all about taking care of his family. The guy who is cast as sexual liberator for a generation of guys was in fact, in a strange way, an apostle of family values. Even the reason why he doesn't want to get married is because he doesn't want to cheat.
Your book is tremendously researched. Even childhood crushes are here. Was it ever daunting?
It's funny. This book started because I had heard this story of Namath as a struggling divorced dad, and it blew me away. I thought about a biography. Then I went out and looked at a few books (including biographies of DiMaggio and Lombardi) and saw the footnotes and thought, "Holy s**t. I'm just a sportswriter."
Do you think that, Ali and Michael Jordan aside, Namath is the most influential sports figure of the media age?
I do. The funny thing about being Joe is that people who have no explicit connection to him still feel emotionally involved and tethered to his myth. I don't make the case that Namath set out to change the game. But the game changed a lot through him.
