A Day in the Fan's Life - 6/6/69

It's a little premature to be doing this, but one can't resist dredging even the remotest of strange things in Jets history, and for a Jets fan, the Strange is the norm. On this day, Joe Namath declared he would quit football because of a dispute with Pete Rozelle over Bachelors III, the nightclub he co-owned that apparently featured enough riffraff clientele to get the Commissioner nervous. He worried about Namath's performance being compromised by the small-time gamblers who were probably more interested in getting Namath's autograph and girlfriends than a piece of his game. The Commissioner said Namath had to quit the nightclub; Namath told the Commissioner to take a leap. The squabble is charming by comparison to Tank Johnson of the Chicago Bears, whose recent cache of firearms drew a police intervention, or Cincinnati's Ordell Thurman, whose rap sheet is impressive even by that franchise's current standards.

Obviously I was too young to recall Namath's temporary retirement. If I could return back in time (as for some reason I think in the afterlife I will be able to) I would head to Bachelors III and have whatever the owner's having. This is the era when booze was advertised in popular magazines the way investments and computers are today; drinking was was still less demure than personal business in 1969. As Mark Kriegal writes in his great biography of Namath, the draw of the club was the chance to brush shoulders with the Man himself, for Namath was often there.

The only interior shot I have ever seen of Bachelor's III is less inviting, though. It shows a working-class stiff in a windbreaker standing at the bar, probably awaiting sight of Namath, nursing a drink that probably cost more than he would rationally have spent anywhere else. Above the liquor shelf is a LeRoy Neiman triptych of Namath, while a bored-looking girl tends bar in a makeshift "12" away jersey, staring off into space like A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. It doesn't seem like that great a time.

When I was in grade school I read about it all in a biography of Namath written for kids. Writers obviously didn't know how to describe his actions. He quit, they said, because he was impetuous, but he came around to the big boss' point of view in the end, and all was well again. Still, for a boy growing up on Long Island, oblivious to the radical transformations of the 1970's, Namath's actions made ironic sense: "Don't fuck with the merchandise. You don't own me. I do what I want with whom I want." Seemed okay.

I didn't understand any of the details of the affair, but by the time I was starting to love the Jets, six or seven years after Bachelors III, Namath was already over-the-hill, and the charm of it was rooted in pure wish fulfillment. Dad didn't clarify it any more than saying, "Well, Joe didn't want anyone telling him whose boss, right? Nobody likes that. You don't like it when I tell you what to do, right? But you gotta do it."

Right. Exactly. So naturally I pretended to be Joe Namath when I ran out onto the recess ground. It didn't matter if his play had deteriorated by the time I was in first grade, for it was the way he carried himself on the field that mattered. I jogged around in his half-caring, limping slouch so often that the school nurse wondered if I had some neurological problem.

We take for granted that the athlete - usually male, usually irresponsible and single-minded - will do the wrong thing because he doesn't know better. Joe returned to work a few days after his weeping resignation to the press, but he shrugged off the reprimand with the careless elan of an incorrigible boy. The child pretended to be the man who pretended to be the child. The stiff standing at the bar of Bachelor's III was already too old for that drink, yet a boy could still dream of never growing up. That singular quality of Namath's superseded all of his missteps in all of the terrible games I saw him play in his twilight years at Shea.