October 4, 2022 • 27 mins
Matt Andrews tracks the evolution of professional football in America, from the origins of the Super Bowl to the celebrity of the New York Jets' Joe Namath. He rejected norms and challenged how a professional athlete can act off the field
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university.
Welcome and we're back on the untold history of sports
in America. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we have
(00:33):
a fun one. We'll be discussing the evolution of athlete
marketability as TV revolutionizes sports and every home in America
gets a TV in their living room. And who is
the first professional athlete television star Broadway? Joe Namath, quarterback
from My New York Jets. Matt also tells the story
of Super Bowl three, one of the most famous and
(00:55):
important professional football games of all time. It's also the
last great memory in New York Jets history and lucky
for me, it happened thirty years for I was born.
Here's Matt with more. Okay, as a reminder, we have
already talked about the role of radio in popularizing sports
(01:17):
in America. Americans sitting at home and hearing the crack
of Babe Ruth's bat at Yankee Stadium, or or the
whole country coming to a halt and listening to that
Joe Louis Max Schmelling fight, which also took place at
Yankee Stadium. Well, if the radio helped popularize sports in America,
the television transformed sports in America. The effects that TV
(01:41):
had on sports in the United States were massive, and
early on not all the effects were positive. The American
TV boom began in the nineteen fifties, and I have
some statistics for those of you who like your American
history and numerical form. In one in five American families
(02:02):
owned a television set by nineteen sixty. It was in
nineteen sixty, the same year that American voters watched the
first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
More American families had television sets than had indoor bathrooms
priorities baby Well, in the nineteen fifties, baseball was America's
(02:27):
pre eminent professional sport, and it was Major League Baseball
that was really the first sports league to test out
the promise of television. In ninety three, CBS Television and
Major League Baseball they launched the Game of the Week
on Saturday afternoons. Those were the first regular season games
available on TV, one game a week. But here's what
(02:50):
baseball owners found out televised baseball cut into game attendance.
Major league baseball attendance dropped during the nineteen fifties, and
one of the reasons that more and more of the
games were beginning to be on TV, and the real
disaster was in the minor leagues. Minor league baseball attendance plummeted.
(03:11):
You know, faced with the choice of watching the Hopkinsville
Hoppers live or the New York Yankees on TV, most
people chose the Yankees, and minor league baseball dropped seventy
percent in the nineteen fifties. The number of minor league
teams it dwindled from four hundred and eight to one
hundred and fifty five. Minor league baseball attendants would really
(03:35):
not rebound until the nineteen nineties, and that actually has
a lot to do with a movie about minor league
baseball called Bull Durham. The effect of TV on boxing
was even more profound, and we might say even more
damaging to the sport. You know. At first, boxing enthusiasts
saw massive potential in television physical violence in a small, contained,
(03:59):
easy to film squared ring. It seemed like a match
made in heaven, and initially, TV boxing ratings were high,
but like I just told you about minor league baseball,
televised boxing led to the collapse of local boxing venues,
those small local boxing clubs and gyms where fighters learned
(04:21):
their craft and boxing fans connected with young fighters on
a regional basis. People stopped going to those places on
Friday nights. Men were staying at home and watching boxing
from the comfort of their couch. Boxing fans abandoned the
local boxing clubs, and the foundation of the sport eroded.
(04:43):
Boxing today is pretty much at an all time low
point in terms of modern popularity. I really believe that
this is where boxing would have been sixty years ago
had it not been for one guy, Muhammad Ali. Interest
in boxing was drying up. But Ali reignited fascination with
the sport, So bright was his star all least single
(05:05):
handedly gave boxing another half century of relevance. So early
on television. It was a problem for baseball and for boxing,
but not so for football. Television turned professional football from
a marginal game into America's game. Professional football had very,
(05:30):
very very modest beginnings up until World War Two. Americans
by and large were pretty suspicious of professional football. You know,
football was supposed to be an amateur sport. It was
the great amateur college team sport. And professional football, by contrast,
it was hidden at the start of the twentieth century.
(05:53):
You might find evidence of it in the tough mining
in mill towns in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. You know
what today, I suppose is considered Pittsburgh Steelers in Cleveland
Ounds Territory. Back then, local clubs were formed and they
were sponsored by a particular company, like a coal mine
or a railroad company. And these companies would pay men
(06:17):
a few dollars to play football on Sunday afternoons. The
players would wear the name of that company on their uniform.
But no formal leagues existed. Each team scheduled its own matches.
There was chaos, there was disorder. Then group of men
gathered in a car dealership in Canton, Ohio, and they
(06:37):
created a league, the American Professional Football Association, which two
years later they renamed the National Football League the NFL.
The teams of the early NFL, they were from the
Midwest and the Northeast, I suppose what today we would
call the Rust Belt. You know, there were teams you've
never heard of. There were the Columbus Panhandles, and the
(07:01):
Muncie Flyers, the Rochester Jefferson and said, I could go
on and on, and it would take a while. And
that's because during the NFL's first thirty years, over forty teams.
Forty different teams joined, the league, struggled, and then folded.
The Great Depression of the nineteen thirties wiped out all
(07:22):
of the franchises in the smaller cities, but all except one,
a team from a tiny Wisconsin town that was sponsored
by the local Indian meat packing company. They went by
the name that Acme Packers, and since they are in
Green Bay, Wisconsin, they are now known as the Green
Bay Packers. But other than tiny Green Bay, the only
(07:44):
teams that made it through the depression were the ones
in the big city. You had the Bears and the Cardinals.
In Chicago, there were the Boston Redskins. This is a
team that moved to Washington, d C. In n seven.
There were the New York Giants, and there were the
Pittsburgh Steelers in the Philadelphia Eagles. These big city teams
(08:05):
and the Packers, they were the early essence of the NFL,
but the league could never get on firm footing, and
then World War Two came and almost killed the NFL entirely.
In fact, in order to survive in ninety three, the
Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles they combined forces. Literally,
(08:25):
they merged their teams and during the war they played
as the Stiegels. This is how tenuous things were in
the early years, that the league was always just one
season away from folding forever. And to say that Major
League Baseball was the more popular sport than the NFL
is to suggest a hierarchy where there really wasn't one.
(08:47):
I mean, professional baseball was everything, professional football was nothing.
But in the nineteen fifties the NFL began to find
it stride. And when people point to the moment that
the NFL finally made it, they point to nineteen fifty
eight and the nf FEL Championship Game, when the Baltimore
(09:07):
Colts defeated the New York Giants three to seventeen and
it was an overtime in Yankee Stadium. It's still referred
to by many as the greatest game ever played. But
the key factor is that the game was on TV.
It wasn't just seventy thousand people who saw the game
in Yankee Stadium. Eleven million Americans watched this game on
(09:30):
their television sets. And this was the moment that NFL
players were transformed in the American imagination. You know, playing
this hard game on TV under the bright lights. This
is when NFL players went from working men to American legends.
You know, this is when they became folk heroes. TV
(09:54):
opened the game up. TV helped make football understandable to
the masses. Put yourself in the place of a nineteen
fifties television view or what used to appear from the
stands to be this distant, incomprehensible tangle of colliding bodies.
Now you could see it up close. Now it started
(10:16):
to make sense. And then, with the invention of instant
replay and slow motion in the early nineteen sixties, the
televised game became even more understandable. It made the game
more intimate. Now on TV, we can literally see the
whites of the player's eyes as he jumps for the
ball or tries to elude a tackler. There's an undeniable
(10:39):
allure about live games, the spectacle, the sensory overload, the camaraderie,
and the stands. But There's also something to be said
about watching a game on TV where each play has
shown five times from five different angles, and where it
is a very comfy seventy four degrees in your house
and not well below freezing like it is in Green
(11:02):
Bay where the meat Packers play. So that Baltimore Colts
New York Giants game the greatest game ever played. Again,
that was in the next year. Something else, very important happened.
In ninety nine, another professional football league was created, the
American Football League the a f L. This was the
(11:25):
creation of a twenty seven year old Texas businessman named
Lamar Hunt, and Hunt secured a TV contract for his
new league right away. That was key. ABC Sports was
locked out of the pro football game and they wanted in,
so they gave a nice contract to this new league.
And what happens in the nineteen sixties is this The
(11:48):
two professional football leagues, the NFL in the a f L.
They did battle with each other, not on the field,
off the fields that they fought for the top players
coming out of colleges at salaries for written players went up,
and something interesting occurred. Though the NFL and the a
f L owners they did not relish a bidding war
(12:09):
with each other, the fight for the players and these
escalating salaries, it attracted even more interest in professional football.
Americans are fascinated with the question of how much money
people meant, and suddenly there was a very public, open
market competition between these two football leagues. But rather than
(12:31):
escalating salaries killing one of these leagues, the competition for
the players it seems to have increased interest in both
leagues and so realizing that neither league was gonna outlast
the other, it's gonna be able to kill the other
league off. In nineteen sixty six, the two leagues agreed
to coexist and they agreed to play an end of
(12:53):
the year game between the best team from each league.
When reporters asked Lamar Hunt about the championship game, a
game called the a f L NFL Championship Game him,
Lamar Hunt said that he jokingly called it the super Bowl,
a name that he came up with after watching his
kids play with a brand new toy, the super Bowl.
(13:16):
Hunt said, I know that's a ridiculous name, but the
media like the name super Bowl, and so it became
the super Bowl, a super duper championship football game. But
it was not officially called the Super Bowl until Super
Bowl three. This is when the owners also decided to
mark the game with Roman numerals, thus giving the game
(13:39):
gravitas and linking professional football with the gladiatorial spectacles of
the Roman Colosseum. And the star of that game, Super
Bowl three was Joe Namath. After the break, Joe Nameeth
makes a guarantee. Joe Namath belongs in the pantheon of
(14:15):
American sports stars, but but not so much because of
his athletic accomplishments. I mean, don't get me wrong, he
was good, but no one with any real knowledge of
the game of football would call him one of the
best quarterbacks of all time. Now, it's what Nameth brought
to sports in a non athletic way. He was a
different type of American athlete, not entirely different. I'll compare
(14:39):
him to Muhammad Ali a couple of times. No Nameth,
for example, he brought an Ali like style and and
boastfulness to football. But I think more than any other
athlete in this era, it was Joe Namath who expanded
the idea of what the modern athlete could be. Joe
Namath was a brilliant but often injured quarterback at the
(15:02):
University of Alabama and then was onto pro football and
the question was which league would he choose, or the
NFL or the a f L, And most assumed it
would be the established NFL. That's where most of the
stars were. That was the the big boys league. Both
(15:22):
the NFL St. Louis Cardinals and the a f L
s New York Jets they both drafted Nameth, and Nameth
shocked a lot of people by going with the Jets
in the a f L. He wanted the bright lights
of New York City and the Jets offered him an
unheard of four hundred and twenty five thousand dollars for
(15:43):
three years. This was the largest rookie contract ever in
any sport. The owner of the Jets was a man
named Sonny Werblin, and Sonny Werblin had made his fortune
in the music and television industries, and Sonny Werblin new
star power when he saw it. When he met Nameth,
(16:04):
he knew he had to have him. He knew this
was the guy who could bring instant fame and credibility
both to the New York Jets and the entire a
f L. Werblin said that Nameth had the same qualities
as Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, two larger than life
figures that we've talked about. The New York Press they
(16:25):
got their first taste of Joe Namath when the Jets
introduced him at a press conference, and sports reporters were
clearly a gas that all the money Nameth was making,
he hadn't even thrown a professional pass yet, and one
reporter asked, suppose you don't make it now. Joe Namath
is supposed to say, I don't know, but I'm going
(16:45):
to try my hardest and God willing, I'll fit in
and do okay, But he didn't say that. He just
smiled and said I'll make it. You know, it may
not seem like much today, but this ali like assured
nous and boastfulness. This was new to the conservative team
sport of professional football. All one other thing that happened
(17:08):
today of the press conference, the Jets team doctor took
Nameth into a bathroom stall and asked to see his knees,
and he was shocked. Nameth, he said, had the knees
of a seventy year old man, that he had torn
so much cartilage in college that the team doctor thought
Nameth would last two years tops. Joe Namath's ability to
(17:32):
play through tremendous pain is going to be one of
the things that will eventually win him fans and admirers.
But not right away. No, no, no. The more traditional
sports fans did not like Nameth. They disliked his cocky attitude.
They hated his hair when he grew it long. No,
football players were supposed to be square heads with military
(17:55):
style crew cuts. Now, Joe Namath was no hippie, but
he liked his hair in the longer, more modern style.
The traditionalists dislike Nameth even more when he showed up
on the field wearing horror of horrors, white cleats. Nope,
I'm sorry, football players wore black cleats. White cleats were
(18:18):
a flagrant violation of football's militaristic ethos. You know, everyone
wore the same color cleats, and that color was black.
But name of thought, he looked better in white shoes,
so he went with white. And he might as well
have showed up in a mesh bikini. Fans yelled anti
gay slurs at him from the stands. I mean, they
(18:40):
really did. But Joe Namath just smiled, winked, and kept
slinging the football. Call him what you wanted. What did
he care? After all, you were paying your hard earned
money to watch him play, and people watched him play
at home on the road on TV. New York Jets
(19:02):
games were not New York Jets games. They were Joe
Aimeth games. They just happened to be other guys dressed
in those kelly green uniforms that were playing with them.
The TV cameras especially, they followed Joe Namath everywhere, but
when he was captaining the offense, of course. But they
showed him getting more eye black applied to his face,
talking on the phone to his offensive coordinator, getting his
(19:25):
knees looked at by the trainers. They showed him when
he was injured, sitting on the bench in his fur
coat and his and his sunglasses. Joe Namath was the
first football player to be shown for any significant amount
of time without his helmet on. He was the first
football player to be given a face and identity separate
(19:45):
from his team. It was Joe Nameth first, the football
game second, and then there was the sex. Previously, athletes
wanted their sex lives to be very, very off the
record and sports writers that subject was taboo. Babe Ruth
(20:08):
was legendary among the sportswriters for his sexual exploits. But remember,
in the age of gee whiz journalism, the point of
sports writers was the turn players into gods, so sexual
indiscretions went unreported. But Joe Namath didn't care. In fact,
he wanted the ladies of the world to know that
(20:29):
he was single and interested in mingling. And the sports
writers followed him along his name Hath drank and caroused
and shot pool. They lived vicariously. Day after day. There
were photos of Joe Namath socializing with models and actresses
and for the record, and we know this because he
told us Joe preferred blonds. He did advertising that played
(20:54):
on his sex appeal. He did a shampoo commercial showering
with the TV star in nineteen seventies eight girl Fara Fawcett.
Very famously, he did an advertising for pantyhose. He put
those old Nora old knees of his and legs panty
hose and showed women how pretty their legs could be.
(21:15):
So like Muhammad Ali, who liked to call himself pretty,
Nameth blurred gender lines. He was both hyper heterosexual, but
he was also willing to reject that conventional masculine model.
So look, Joe Namath was not Mohammed Ali critiquing the
(21:36):
war in Vietnam. He was not Tommy Smith or John
Carlos critiquing racism in the United States. He was not
Billy gene King attacking sexism in America, her story still
to come in this course. Joe Nameth's radical nous was
the way in which he challenged the stereotype of what
the successful athlete was supposed to look like and how
(21:59):
he was supposed to act off the field. NFL quarterbacks
were supposed to be humble, crew cut, god fearing field generals,
and Joe Namath looked and acted like he belonged on
a Hollywood movie set or or at Woodstock. Nameth's moment
in the Sun came at the aforementioned Super Bowl three,
(22:21):
which was between the very established Baltimore Colts of the
NFL and the upstart Jets of the a f L.
The NFL's champion team had demolished the a f L
champion in the previous two Super Bowls, and oddsmakers thought
this would be exactly the same. The Jets were huge
seventeen point underdogs. The week before the game, Nameth was
(22:45):
speaking at a press conference and he guaranteed a Jets victory. Now,
he did not say the Jets had a chance. He
did not predict a Jets victory. He said in front
of the nation sports writers, We're gonna win the game.
I guarantee it. You athletes are semi reluctant to do
this today. But back then this was unheard of, and
(23:09):
worse than unheard of, this was stupid. Everyone knew it.
There was no way the Jets could beat the Colts.
But of course that's exactly what people said about Cassius
Clay against Sunny Liston Super Bowl one and Super Bowl two,
they had not sold out, not even close, but seventy
(23:31):
people packed themselves into the Orange Bowl in Miami to
see if Joe Namath could live up to his boast
or to watch him get flattened by the Colts. More
people would watch Joe Namath playing Super Bowl three on
TV than watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon later
that summer. And there's a lesson here, and it's the
(23:52):
same lesson we saw with Muhammad Ali. Flapping your lips
sells tickets. The iconic quarterback of the other team, the
Baltimore Colts, it was Johnny Unitis, and with his military heuristic,
buzz cut and quiet attitude, he was like Gary Cooper
in high noon in a football uniform. And he was
(24:13):
everything Joe Namath was not. And so this football game
was sold as a battle between sensibilities, between generations. You know.
It was crew cut versus long hair, tradition versus rebellion,
square versus cool and cool. One Nameth and the Jets
(24:37):
beat the Colts sixteen to seven. Joe Namath had backed
up his guarantee and as he ran off the field,
he held up his index finger were number one? Or
was he saying I'm number one? Holding up your finger
in this boastful manner. This was also something athletes didn't
do back then. There was a Philadelphia sportswriter named Larry
(25:01):
Merchant who was at the game, and I just love
how he described the impact of Joe Namath and the
Jets and Super Bowl three. I'm going to quote him.
For three hours, seventy million viewers on television saw the
end of the world as they knew it, and it
blew their minds. They had been convinced by the pro
(25:22):
football mystique that a quarterback had to be Bart Star
or Johnny Unitis to win championships, leading by example, modesty, discipline, character,
and attendance at communion breakfasts. For the fans who bought
that theology whole, it was a three hour horror show.
(25:43):
Nameth changed the face of professional football with one or
gasmic victory. Man, that is a great paragraph of writing,
but I actually think he's under selling it a little bit.
Joe Namath did more than just changed professional football. He
changed American sports. You know, I like compared Daring Nameth
(26:05):
with Ali. Clearly, I've done that a couple of times today.
But let me end by contrasting them. Even Muhammad Ali,
for all his boastfulness and radical nous, he was spartan.
Ali did not drink. You know. Sure he caroused, but
it was all done in private. And when it was
time to train for a fight, Ali went up into
(26:27):
the mountains and isolated himself. But not Broadway, Joe. All
their lives, American athletes and sports fans, they've been told
that modesty and hard work and sober living, these are
all requirements for athletic excellence. Well, hard work still was.
But it turns out you could be a hard drinking
(26:50):
out all night on the make Playboy and still win
the biggest game of the year. It was, as they say,
a whole new ball game. That's all for now. Next
time on the Untold History of Sports in America, presented
by One Day University, The Battle of the Sexes h
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university.
Welcome and we're back on the untold history of sports
in America. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we have
(00:33):
a fun one. We'll be discussing the evolution of athlete
marketability as TV revolutionizes sports and every home in America
gets a TV in their living room. And who is
the first professional athlete television star Broadway? Joe Namath, quarterback
from My New York Jets. Matt also tells the story
of Super Bowl three, one of the most famous and
(00:55):
important professional football games of all time. It's also the
last great memory in New York Jets history and lucky
for me, it happened thirty years for I was born.
Here's Matt with more. Okay, as a reminder, we have
already talked about the role of radio in popularizing sports
(01:17):
in America. Americans sitting at home and hearing the crack
of Babe Ruth's bat at Yankee Stadium, or or the
whole country coming to a halt and listening to that
Joe Louis Max Schmelling fight, which also took place at
Yankee Stadium. Well, if the radio helped popularize sports in America,
the television transformed sports in America. The effects that TV
(01:41):
had on sports in the United States were massive, and
early on not all the effects were positive. The American
TV boom began in the nineteen fifties, and I have
some statistics for those of you who like your American
history and numerical form. In one in five American families
(02:02):
owned a television set by nineteen sixty. It was in
nineteen sixty, the same year that American voters watched the
first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
More American families had television sets than had indoor bathrooms
priorities baby Well, in the nineteen fifties, baseball was America's
(02:27):
pre eminent professional sport, and it was Major League Baseball
that was really the first sports league to test out
the promise of television. In ninety three, CBS Television and
Major League Baseball they launched the Game of the Week
on Saturday afternoons. Those were the first regular season games
available on TV, one game a week. But here's what
(02:50):
baseball owners found out televised baseball cut into game attendance.
Major league baseball attendance dropped during the nineteen fifties, and
one of the reasons that more and more of the
games were beginning to be on TV, and the real
disaster was in the minor leagues. Minor league baseball attendance plummeted.
(03:11):
You know, faced with the choice of watching the Hopkinsville
Hoppers live or the New York Yankees on TV, most
people chose the Yankees, and minor league baseball dropped seventy
percent in the nineteen fifties. The number of minor league
teams it dwindled from four hundred and eight to one
hundred and fifty five. Minor league baseball attendants would really
(03:35):
not rebound until the nineteen nineties, and that actually has
a lot to do with a movie about minor league
baseball called Bull Durham. The effect of TV on boxing
was even more profound, and we might say even more
damaging to the sport. You know. At first, boxing enthusiasts
saw massive potential in television physical violence in a small, contained,
(03:59):
easy to film squared ring. It seemed like a match
made in heaven, and initially, TV boxing ratings were high,
but like I just told you about minor league baseball,
televised boxing led to the collapse of local boxing venues,
those small local boxing clubs and gyms where fighters learned
(04:21):
their craft and boxing fans connected with young fighters on
a regional basis. People stopped going to those places on
Friday nights. Men were staying at home and watching boxing
from the comfort of their couch. Boxing fans abandoned the
local boxing clubs, and the foundation of the sport eroded.
(04:43):
Boxing today is pretty much at an all time low
point in terms of modern popularity. I really believe that
this is where boxing would have been sixty years ago
had it not been for one guy, Muhammad Ali. Interest
in boxing was drying up. But Ali reignited fascination with
the sport, So bright was his star all least single
(05:05):
handedly gave boxing another half century of relevance. So early
on television. It was a problem for baseball and for boxing,
but not so for football. Television turned professional football from
a marginal game into America's game. Professional football had very,
(05:30):
very very modest beginnings up until World War Two. Americans
by and large were pretty suspicious of professional football. You know,
football was supposed to be an amateur sport. It was
the great amateur college team sport. And professional football, by contrast,
it was hidden at the start of the twentieth century.
(05:53):
You might find evidence of it in the tough mining
in mill towns in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. You know
what today, I suppose is considered Pittsburgh Steelers in Cleveland
Ounds Territory. Back then, local clubs were formed and they
were sponsored by a particular company, like a coal mine
or a railroad company. And these companies would pay men
(06:17):
a few dollars to play football on Sunday afternoons. The
players would wear the name of that company on their uniform.
But no formal leagues existed. Each team scheduled its own matches.
There was chaos, there was disorder. Then group of men
gathered in a car dealership in Canton, Ohio, and they
(06:37):
created a league, the American Professional Football Association, which two
years later they renamed the National Football League the NFL.
The teams of the early NFL, they were from the
Midwest and the Northeast, I suppose what today we would
call the Rust Belt. You know, there were teams you've
never heard of. There were the Columbus Panhandles, and the
(07:01):
Muncie Flyers, the Rochester Jefferson and said, I could go
on and on, and it would take a while. And
that's because during the NFL's first thirty years, over forty teams.
Forty different teams joined, the league, struggled, and then folded.
The Great Depression of the nineteen thirties wiped out all
(07:22):
of the franchises in the smaller cities, but all except one,
a team from a tiny Wisconsin town that was sponsored
by the local Indian meat packing company. They went by
the name that Acme Packers, and since they are in
Green Bay, Wisconsin, they are now known as the Green
Bay Packers. But other than tiny Green Bay, the only
(07:44):
teams that made it through the depression were the ones
in the big city. You had the Bears and the Cardinals.
In Chicago, there were the Boston Redskins. This is a
team that moved to Washington, d C. In n seven.
There were the New York Giants, and there were the
Pittsburgh Steelers in the Philadelphia Eagles. These big city teams
(08:05):
and the Packers, they were the early essence of the NFL,
but the league could never get on firm footing, and
then World War Two came and almost killed the NFL entirely.
In fact, in order to survive in ninety three, the
Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles they combined forces. Literally,
(08:25):
they merged their teams and during the war they played
as the Stiegels. This is how tenuous things were in
the early years, that the league was always just one
season away from folding forever. And to say that Major
League Baseball was the more popular sport than the NFL
is to suggest a hierarchy where there really wasn't one.
(08:47):
I mean, professional baseball was everything, professional football was nothing.
But in the nineteen fifties the NFL began to find
it stride. And when people point to the moment that
the NFL finally made it, they point to nineteen fifty
eight and the nf FEL Championship Game, when the Baltimore
(09:07):
Colts defeated the New York Giants three to seventeen and
it was an overtime in Yankee Stadium. It's still referred
to by many as the greatest game ever played. But
the key factor is that the game was on TV.
It wasn't just seventy thousand people who saw the game
in Yankee Stadium. Eleven million Americans watched this game on
(09:30):
their television sets. And this was the moment that NFL
players were transformed in the American imagination. You know, playing
this hard game on TV under the bright lights. This
is when NFL players went from working men to American legends.
You know, this is when they became folk heroes. TV
(09:54):
opened the game up. TV helped make football understandable to
the masses. Put yourself in the place of a nineteen
fifties television view or what used to appear from the
stands to be this distant, incomprehensible tangle of colliding bodies.
Now you could see it up close. Now it started
(10:16):
to make sense. And then, with the invention of instant
replay and slow motion in the early nineteen sixties, the
televised game became even more understandable. It made the game
more intimate. Now on TV, we can literally see the
whites of the player's eyes as he jumps for the
ball or tries to elude a tackler. There's an undeniable
(10:39):
allure about live games, the spectacle, the sensory overload, the camaraderie,
and the stands. But There's also something to be said
about watching a game on TV where each play has
shown five times from five different angles, and where it
is a very comfy seventy four degrees in your house
and not well below freezing like it is in Green
(11:02):
Bay where the meat Packers play. So that Baltimore Colts
New York Giants game the greatest game ever played. Again,
that was in the next year. Something else, very important happened.
In ninety nine, another professional football league was created, the
American Football League the a f L. This was the
(11:25):
creation of a twenty seven year old Texas businessman named
Lamar Hunt, and Hunt secured a TV contract for his
new league right away. That was key. ABC Sports was
locked out of the pro football game and they wanted in,
so they gave a nice contract to this new league.
And what happens in the nineteen sixties is this The
(11:48):
two professional football leagues, the NFL in the a f L.
They did battle with each other, not on the field,
off the fields that they fought for the top players
coming out of colleges at salaries for written players went up,
and something interesting occurred. Though the NFL and the a
f L owners they did not relish a bidding war
(12:09):
with each other, the fight for the players and these
escalating salaries, it attracted even more interest in professional football.
Americans are fascinated with the question of how much money
people meant, and suddenly there was a very public, open
market competition between these two football leagues. But rather than
(12:31):
escalating salaries killing one of these leagues, the competition for
the players it seems to have increased interest in both
leagues and so realizing that neither league was gonna outlast
the other, it's gonna be able to kill the other
league off. In nineteen sixty six, the two leagues agreed
to coexist and they agreed to play an end of
(12:53):
the year game between the best team from each league.
When reporters asked Lamar Hunt about the championship game, a
game called the a f L NFL Championship Game him,
Lamar Hunt said that he jokingly called it the super Bowl,
a name that he came up with after watching his
kids play with a brand new toy, the super Bowl.
(13:16):
Hunt said, I know that's a ridiculous name, but the
media like the name super Bowl, and so it became
the super Bowl, a super duper championship football game. But
it was not officially called the Super Bowl until Super
Bowl three. This is when the owners also decided to
mark the game with Roman numerals, thus giving the game
(13:39):
gravitas and linking professional football with the gladiatorial spectacles of
the Roman Colosseum. And the star of that game, Super
Bowl three was Joe Namath. After the break, Joe Nameeth
makes a guarantee. Joe Namath belongs in the pantheon of
(14:15):
American sports stars, but but not so much because of
his athletic accomplishments. I mean, don't get me wrong, he
was good, but no one with any real knowledge of
the game of football would call him one of the
best quarterbacks of all time. Now, it's what Nameth brought
to sports in a non athletic way. He was a
different type of American athlete, not entirely different. I'll compare
(14:39):
him to Muhammad Ali a couple of times. No Nameth,
for example, he brought an Ali like style and and
boastfulness to football. But I think more than any other
athlete in this era, it was Joe Namath who expanded
the idea of what the modern athlete could be. Joe
Namath was a brilliant but often injured quarterback at the
(15:02):
University of Alabama and then was onto pro football and
the question was which league would he choose, or the
NFL or the a f L, And most assumed it
would be the established NFL. That's where most of the
stars were. That was the the big boys league. Both
(15:22):
the NFL St. Louis Cardinals and the a f L
s New York Jets they both drafted Nameth, and Nameth
shocked a lot of people by going with the Jets
in the a f L. He wanted the bright lights
of New York City and the Jets offered him an
unheard of four hundred and twenty five thousand dollars for
(15:43):
three years. This was the largest rookie contract ever in
any sport. The owner of the Jets was a man
named Sonny Werblin, and Sonny Werblin had made his fortune
in the music and television industries, and Sonny Werblin new
star power when he saw it. When he met Nameth,
(16:04):
he knew he had to have him. He knew this
was the guy who could bring instant fame and credibility
both to the New York Jets and the entire a
f L. Werblin said that Nameth had the same qualities
as Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, two larger than life
figures that we've talked about. The New York Press they
(16:25):
got their first taste of Joe Namath when the Jets
introduced him at a press conference, and sports reporters were
clearly a gas that all the money Nameth was making,
he hadn't even thrown a professional pass yet, and one
reporter asked, suppose you don't make it now. Joe Namath
is supposed to say, I don't know, but I'm going
(16:45):
to try my hardest and God willing, I'll fit in
and do okay, But he didn't say that. He just
smiled and said I'll make it. You know, it may
not seem like much today, but this ali like assured
nous and boastfulness. This was new to the conservative team
sport of professional football. All one other thing that happened
(17:08):
today of the press conference, the Jets team doctor took
Nameth into a bathroom stall and asked to see his knees,
and he was shocked. Nameth, he said, had the knees
of a seventy year old man, that he had torn
so much cartilage in college that the team doctor thought
Nameth would last two years tops. Joe Namath's ability to
(17:32):
play through tremendous pain is going to be one of
the things that will eventually win him fans and admirers.
But not right away. No, no, no. The more traditional
sports fans did not like Nameth. They disliked his cocky attitude.
They hated his hair when he grew it long. No,
football players were supposed to be square heads with military
(17:55):
style crew cuts. Now, Joe Namath was no hippie, but
he liked his hair in the longer, more modern style.
The traditionalists dislike Nameth even more when he showed up
on the field wearing horror of horrors, white cleats. Nope,
I'm sorry, football players wore black cleats. White cleats were
(18:18):
a flagrant violation of football's militaristic ethos. You know, everyone
wore the same color cleats, and that color was black.
But name of thought, he looked better in white shoes,
so he went with white. And he might as well
have showed up in a mesh bikini. Fans yelled anti
gay slurs at him from the stands. I mean, they
(18:40):
really did. But Joe Namath just smiled, winked, and kept
slinging the football. Call him what you wanted. What did
he care? After all, you were paying your hard earned
money to watch him play, and people watched him play
at home on the road on TV. New York Jets
(19:02):
games were not New York Jets games. They were Joe
Aimeth games. They just happened to be other guys dressed
in those kelly green uniforms that were playing with them.
The TV cameras especially, they followed Joe Namath everywhere, but
when he was captaining the offense, of course. But they
showed him getting more eye black applied to his face,
talking on the phone to his offensive coordinator, getting his
(19:25):
knees looked at by the trainers. They showed him when
he was injured, sitting on the bench in his fur
coat and his and his sunglasses. Joe Namath was the
first football player to be shown for any significant amount
of time without his helmet on. He was the first
football player to be given a face and identity separate
(19:45):
from his team. It was Joe Nameth first, the football
game second, and then there was the sex. Previously, athletes
wanted their sex lives to be very, very off the
record and sports writers that subject was taboo. Babe Ruth
(20:08):
was legendary among the sportswriters for his sexual exploits. But remember,
in the age of gee whiz journalism, the point of
sports writers was the turn players into gods, so sexual
indiscretions went unreported. But Joe Namath didn't care. In fact,
he wanted the ladies of the world to know that
(20:29):
he was single and interested in mingling. And the sports
writers followed him along his name Hath drank and caroused
and shot pool. They lived vicariously. Day after day. There
were photos of Joe Namath socializing with models and actresses
and for the record, and we know this because he
told us Joe preferred blonds. He did advertising that played
(20:54):
on his sex appeal. He did a shampoo commercial showering
with the TV star in nineteen seventies eight girl Fara Fawcett.
Very famously, he did an advertising for pantyhose. He put
those old Nora old knees of his and legs panty
hose and showed women how pretty their legs could be.
(21:15):
So like Muhammad Ali, who liked to call himself pretty,
Nameth blurred gender lines. He was both hyper heterosexual, but
he was also willing to reject that conventional masculine model.
So look, Joe Namath was not Mohammed Ali critiquing the
(21:36):
war in Vietnam. He was not Tommy Smith or John
Carlos critiquing racism in the United States. He was not
Billy gene King attacking sexism in America, her story still
to come in this course. Joe Nameth's radical nous was
the way in which he challenged the stereotype of what
the successful athlete was supposed to look like and how
(21:59):
he was supposed to act off the field. NFL quarterbacks
were supposed to be humble, crew cut, god fearing field generals,
and Joe Namath looked and acted like he belonged on
a Hollywood movie set or or at Woodstock. Nameth's moment
in the Sun came at the aforementioned Super Bowl three,
(22:21):
which was between the very established Baltimore Colts of the
NFL and the upstart Jets of the a f L.
The NFL's champion team had demolished the a f L
champion in the previous two Super Bowls, and oddsmakers thought
this would be exactly the same. The Jets were huge
seventeen point underdogs. The week before the game, Nameth was
(22:45):
speaking at a press conference and he guaranteed a Jets victory. Now,
he did not say the Jets had a chance. He
did not predict a Jets victory. He said in front
of the nation sports writers, We're gonna win the game.
I guarantee it. You athletes are semi reluctant to do
this today. But back then this was unheard of, and
(23:09):
worse than unheard of, this was stupid. Everyone knew it.
There was no way the Jets could beat the Colts.
But of course that's exactly what people said about Cassius
Clay against Sunny Liston Super Bowl one and Super Bowl two,
they had not sold out, not even close, but seventy
(23:31):
people packed themselves into the Orange Bowl in Miami to
see if Joe Namath could live up to his boast
or to watch him get flattened by the Colts. More
people would watch Joe Namath playing Super Bowl three on
TV than watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon later
that summer. And there's a lesson here, and it's the
(23:52):
same lesson we saw with Muhammad Ali. Flapping your lips
sells tickets. The iconic quarterback of the other team, the
Baltimore Colts, it was Johnny Unitis, and with his military heuristic,
buzz cut and quiet attitude, he was like Gary Cooper
in high noon in a football uniform. And he was
(24:13):
everything Joe Namath was not. And so this football game
was sold as a battle between sensibilities, between generations. You know.
It was crew cut versus long hair, tradition versus rebellion,
square versus cool and cool. One Nameth and the Jets
(24:37):
beat the Colts sixteen to seven. Joe Namath had backed
up his guarantee and as he ran off the field,
he held up his index finger were number one? Or
was he saying I'm number one? Holding up your finger
in this boastful manner. This was also something athletes didn't
do back then. There was a Philadelphia sportswriter named Larry
(25:01):
Merchant who was at the game, and I just love
how he described the impact of Joe Namath and the
Jets and Super Bowl three. I'm going to quote him.
For three hours, seventy million viewers on television saw the
end of the world as they knew it, and it
blew their minds. They had been convinced by the pro
(25:22):
football mystique that a quarterback had to be Bart Star
or Johnny Unitis to win championships, leading by example, modesty, discipline, character,
and attendance at communion breakfasts. For the fans who bought
that theology whole, it was a three hour horror show.
(25:43):
Nameth changed the face of professional football with one or
gasmic victory. Man, that is a great paragraph of writing,
but I actually think he's under selling it a little bit.
Joe Namath did more than just changed professional football. He
changed American sports. You know, I like compared Daring Nameth
(26:05):
with Ali. Clearly, I've done that a couple of times today.
But let me end by contrasting them. Even Muhammad Ali,
for all his boastfulness and radical nous, he was spartan.
Ali did not drink. You know. Sure he caroused, but
it was all done in private. And when it was
time to train for a fight, Ali went up into
(26:27):
the mountains and isolated himself. But not Broadway, Joe. All
their lives, American athletes and sports fans, they've been told
that modesty and hard work and sober living, these are
all requirements for athletic excellence. Well, hard work still was.
But it turns out you could be a hard drinking
(26:50):
out all night on the make Playboy and still win
the biggest game of the year. It was, as they say,
a whole new ball game. That's all for now. Next
time on the Untold History of Sports in America, presented
by One Day University, The Battle of the Sexes h
Host
Matthew Andrews
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