Namath’S Guarantee Stands Test Of Time It’S Been 30 Years Since Broadway Joe Assured All The Jets Would Beat Colts In Super Bowl Iii

Broadway Joe was well fortified when he addressed the Miami Touchdown Club.

Broadway Joe had two stewardesses waiting in another room at the Miami Springs Villas, or that may have been another night. He had four, or five, or six Johnnie Walker Reds before he took to the dais, or maybe it wasn’t that many. He had come to be honored by the Miami Touchdown Club on Jan. 9, 1969, three nights before Super Bowl III, against the wishes of his coach, Weeb Ewbank, or perhaps Joe Namath had been the reluctant one. Can’t guarantee any of it.

It’s been 30 years since the quarterback, dressed in a soft green suit, grabbed food and a beer at the New York Jets’ poolside barbecue at the Galt Ocean Mile Hotel in Fort Lauderdale, and entered a limousine headed for Miami Springs. Details of the next 4 hours have been colored by three decades of interpretation and exaggeration, by the several hundred who came to Dade County’s primo spot to crown Namath “the Outstanding Professional Football Player of 1968.”

But this can be guaranteed:

Namath made sport’s most famous guarantee that night, predicting the Jets, at the time 19-point underdogs, would upset the Baltimore Colts.

“It was typical Joe,” said New York Times columnist Dave Anderson, who chronicled the Jets’ week in the 1969 book Countdown to Super Bowl. “You knew he might say anything. He had been saying things like that all week, he just didn’t use the word guarantee.”

When the Miami Touchdown Club voted to honor Namath, it didn’t know the Jets would be preparing for a Super Bowl that January week. The honor was significant, as Namath was an American Football League player receiving a “professional football award” when National Football League stars were far more respected.

The site was significant too: the Miami Springs Villas, on the Glenn Curtiss estate.

The Villas were part of 21 acres owned by the jet-setting Arthur Bruns, host or dining partner to Mickey Mantle, Adlai Stevenson, Arnold Palmer, Nikita Khrushchev and Dwight Eisenhower. The Villas are gone, replaced by economy hotels, and Bruns died in 1996. But then, Bruns was a showman and, according to Mary Ann Taylor, curator of the Miami Springs Historic Preservation Society, the Villas were “quite a showplace.”

“It was the place to be,” says Joe Walker, an original member of the Miami Touchdown Club.

The Club was generally all-male, and often off-color, but women were allowed to attend the banquet on Jan. 9, and many did.

The question was: Would Namath? And would Ewbank let him?

Frank Ramos, then and now the Jets’ media relations director, says he urged Namath to go. “He was talking about not going to it, because a lot of things were going on during Super Bowl week,” Ramos says. “It was the day off, and I said, `Joe, the only thing about that - if you told these people you are going to be there, and they sold all these tickets to this event, and this is a great honor because it was the first time they had an AFL player of the year, you should go.”’ “Frank Ramos is the one who twisted my arm and made me go,” says Namath, who has a home in Tequesta. “I would have rather stayed at the hotel. It was a tremendous honor, it was an important situation. I was probably wishing I was back in Fort Lauderdale instead of south Miami, although I did get along well in south Miami.”

This was the attraction of Namath’s appearance: his flamboyance, his unpredictability. With whom would he arrive? Flirt? Whom would he praise? Insult? He had already perturbed many NFLers by stating that Colts quarterback Earl Morrall wasn’t as good as Daryle Lamonica of the AFL’s Oakland Raiders. On Sunday, he nearly got into a barroom brawl with Colts kicker Lou Michaels, then ended the night by dropping off Michaels at the Statler Hilton, the Colts’ hotel. On Monday, he slept through Photo Day, and was fined $50.

Anderson accompanied Namath on the ride to the Villas, and notes in Countdown to Super Bowl that the quarterback “was sipping Johnnie Walker Red out of a paper cup in the front seat of a turquoise Cadillac sedan.”

Namath was to share the spotlight that night with O.J. Simpson, who had been named college football’s best player. But Simpson was on the West Coast and didn’t show. Bill Bruce, the emcee, says that during the next year’s banquet, he picked up the phone, pretending Simpson had called, and said, “No, O.J., you dumb so-and-so, that was last year.”

Namath would receive the award from Milt Woodward, the AFL president who had suggested he shave and cut his hair.

“I thought it would be the usual, `Thank you for this lovely trophy,”’ says Joe Hirsch - Namath’s New York roommate and a longtime columnist for the Daily Racing Form. “I guess everybody else did, too.”

Others lived vicariously through his exploits and excesses. Norris Anderson, a Touchdown Club founder, says he sat beside Namath, who “had three Johnnie Walker Reds.” Walker says “they were bringing him Johnnie Walker Reds as fast as he could down them.”

Dave Anderson wrote that “Namath leaned down every so often and sipped Scotch out of a napkin-wrapped old-fashioned glass.” Yet Anderson says: “He wasn’t drunk. He was Joe. He had had a drink or two. He wasn’t drunk before or after. There were no women around him that night. When he got back, we watched some film.”

Namath espoused film work - “The one-eyed monster doesn’t lie.” The monster convinced him he could attack the left side of the Colts’ defense, and his receivers could outrun their cornerbacks. Especially if Baltimore was complacent.

Says Colts tight end John Mackey: “We just believed we had to show up. We announced a victory party Wednesday before the game, and we cut up the playoff share at the pre-game meal.”

As the Colts frolicked with their families and spoke of adding extensions to their houses, Namath studied. “He was very confident that they were going to win that game,” Dave Anderson says.

And he said so Thursday night, helping make the Miami Touchdown Club one of the most famous clubs in the country.

Versions differ on his words.

Bruce says he told Namath that night his “remarks so far have been as welcome as a hernia at a weight-lifter’s convention, but it’s about time you came up and defended yourself.”

According to Bruce, Namath said: “I don’t like banquets usually, but tonight, I’m having a lot of fun. You people are all great, and I’m going to offer you this. I want you to sell your car, cash in your insurance policies, take your money out of the bank, and bet it on the Jets.” Then, after an interruption, Joe continued: “Hey, wait, we’re going to beat the Colts on Sunday. I guarantee it.”

Countdown to Super Bowl recalls the sequence and sentence a bit differently: “We’re going to win Sunday, I guarantee you.”

Either way, it was exciting, especially to the media. “Most of the other sportswriters had already left when Namath made his guarantee,” says Deborah Evans, widow of Luther, whose story under a banner Miami Herald headline appeared Friday morning, upsetting Ewbank’s breakfast. “He came home and told me about it. He thought he had a hold of something pretty good.”

“That was Namath,” says Bernie Rosen, then a cameraman for Miami’s WTJV-4. “The Broadway Joe fit him perfectly. He was just a cocky, cocky, cocky individual.”

And a prescient one.

“All we did was laugh,” Mackey says. “We thought it was a joke. And that was the problem.”

“By halftime, I can remember thinking back, `That crazy bastard knew what he was talking about,”’ Walker says. “I think they might beat the Colts.”

They did, 16-7. Guaranteed.

Falcons vs. Broncos Sunday, 3:18 p.m. TV: Fox