The first thing I do is find my floor's emergency exits.
And it certainly helped me establish my hotel room routine. An alarming set of eyes stared out at me from the cover and instantly grabbed my attention.Īfter finishing that book, and still to this day, I've always stayed alert in case a loose horse comes into play. I was at LaGuardia airport getting ready to leave for an away game and picked up a copy of a book about the Boston Strangler. I, too, have grown to love reading, but that took until the age of twenty-two to plant the first seed. But, now, all these years later, my daughters, Jessica and Olivia, have the things stacked up around the house, and my granddaughter Jemma reads through those Harry Potter books like they're magazines. The paper only got a peek from me because it had the sports section. We just weren't the kind of family to sit down and read. Growing up, our family didn't emphasize education much and definitely didn't have books lying around the house. I finished voluntarily reading my first book when I was in my early twenties.
Now 74, Namath is ready to open up, brilliantly using the four quarters of Super Bowl III as the narrative backbone to a life that was anything but charmed.Īs much about football and fame as about addiction, fatherhood, and coming to terms with our own mortality, All the Way finally reveals the man behind the icon. When failing knees permanently derailed his career, he turned to Hollywood and endorsements, not to mention a tumultuous marriage and fleeting bouts of sobriety, to try and find purpose.
By 26, with a championship title under his belt, he was quite simply the most famous athlete alive.Īlthough his legacy has long been cemented in the history books, beneath the eccentric yet charismatic personality was a player plagued by injury and addiction, both sex and substance. Namath was instantly heralded as a gridiron god, while his rugged good looks, progressive views on race, and boyish charm quickly transformed him – in an era of raucous rebellion, shifting social norms, and political upheaval – into both a bona fide celebrity and a symbol of the commercialization of pro sports. When the final whistle blew, that promise had been kept. Three days before the 1969 Super Bowl, Joe Namath promised the nation that he would lead the New York Jets to an 18-point underdog victory against the seemingly invincible Baltimore Colts.
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