Pens Stop When Broadway Joe Takes a Buffalo Stance

“Well,” Joe Namath said as he sized up another Super Bowl in which the underdog has absolutely no chance whatsoever, “I got the Bills winning, 38-30.”

Twenty-five years have passed, and Broadway Joe hasn’t lost a step. As the E.F. Hutton of Super Bowl prognostication, he can still work a room, work it into a lather, and Namath grinned mischievously as he studied his handiwork.

Sportswriters stopped writing. Heads bobbed upward in unison. A wave of tittering started to swell.

“You playing?” someone asked Namath.

“No, but if I could play, I’d still be out there trying. It’s a fun game to play.”

The Bills should be so lucky.

Like Namath’s New York Jets in 1969, Buffalo enters this Super Bowl as a double-digit underdog. Unlike those Jets, these Bills have no one cocksure enough to stare down the odds and declare, “We’re going to win the game, I guarantee it”--the most famous sentence uttered in 28 years of Super Bowls.

This is possibly because the Bills know their place, which, for the past three Januarys, has been on the bottom of a dog pile. In 1969, the Jets didn’t know any better. They were 0-0 against the favored Baltimore Colts and 0-0 in Super Bowls. They hadn’t lost to anyone by a score of 52-17--not recently, anyway.

All the Jets knew about the Colts was what they saw on film, and, as Namath remembers it, none of his teammates were especially impressed by the special effects.

“We were driving to practice one day,” Namath said. “Billy Mathis was driving, Babe Parilli was riding shotgun, and ‘Big Boy’ Pete Lammons, our tight end, was in the back seat with me. We’d just finished a meeting, and Pete leans back and says, ‘Y’all know something? We keep looking at these films, we’re gonna get overconfident.’

“We laughed, we giggled, but that was the underlying feeling. We really believed we were going to win. To a man.”

Namath was the only one to put it on the record, though. Friday, Namath was asked if he had premeditated his attack, choosing his words intentionally to light a fuse, much the way Jimmy Johnson did before last week’s NFC final.

“It just came out, it wasn’t prepared,” Namath said. “I was at the Miami Touchdown Club accepting an award. I got up to the podium to speak, and this fella in the back yelled out, ‘Hey, Namath, we’re going to kick your you-know-what.’

“And I said, ‘Wait a minute. It’s my turn. I’m at the podium now. I’ve been listening to you guys for 10 days now, and I got news for you. We’re going to win the game, I guarantee it.’

“That was just out of that old business of ballplayers wanting respect. How many times have you heard guys in baseball, football or whatever say, ‘Well, we want to get the respect’?

“We didn’t feel our team had won any respect, even though we knew we beat a team that was excellent--the Oakland Raiders--to get the Super Bowl. It was still the AFL syndrome--’a second-rate league to the NFL.’

“I’m glad we had a hand in settling that.”

Namath backed it up, 16-7, but before he could, he had to withstand three days of national ridicule, and one death threat.

“Weeb Ewbank, our coach, wanted to kill me,” Namath said. “He was very upset the following morning, and justifiably. Weeb had done a brilliant job of downplaying our expertise and hyping the Colts’ talent. He really believed he had the Colts thinking, ‘Hey, the Jets are OK, but we’ll wipe ‘em up, we’ll kill ‘em.’

“Weeb thought they were overconfident and thought me opening my mouth would give them fuel.”

The mind games would continue on the floor of the Orange Bowl that Sunday. The Jets didn’t outhit or outplay the Colts so much as outthink them. With the Colts thinking pass, the Jets ran. With Baltimore quarterback Earl Morrall throwing into the slot, the Jets swarmed the middle and left Jimmy Orr unattended yards downfield, intercepting the ball while Orr waved his arms in vain.

Orr still laments that play, insisting history would have changed if Morrall had only looked to his left, but Namath tweaks him, teasing, “He thought he was open. Our free safety, Billy Baird, swears to this day that he could’ve closed on the throw and made the play. Now Billy swears on that.”

Twenty-five years later, Namath returns to the Super Bowl to flip the coin that decides if Dallas receives and scores first, or Buffalo receives and fumbles. Twenty-five years. That makes Namath 50, a number he says “still confuses me.”

After knee replacement surgery in 1992--on both legs--Namath claims he feels better today than ever. “That’s why the number throws me a bit,” he says. “I have a buddy who’s 35, and he’s worried, talking about down the road. He says, ‘You know, 25 years from now is not so far away.’

“Far away? It’s a flash. Twenty-five years--where did it go? It’s scary. I have a hard time believing I’m 50, because 50 is such a big number.”

Joe deals with it the same way he dealt with the Colts.

Predicts he: “I plan on living till 100, so I’m only at halftime. I still got the third and fourth quarters ahead of me.”

As for that other forecast, Joe finally had to fess up.

Bills, 38-30?

“If I had a hand in it,” he quipped.

“Really, I think Dallas is the team that’s going to win, but, again, I’m hoping for the other guys. Having been an underdog myself, I’d like to see the Bills win. Dallas has won it already. Let’s see somebody else do it and get to enjoy it.

“But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Another hand shot up from the audience.

How would Namath and the Jets have fared against the Bills and the Cowboys today?

“It’s a different game, naturally. I doubt that we’d fare very well right now,” Joe had to admit.

He was grinning that grin again.

“Most of us are a little older than those guys.”