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January, it will be 40 years since the Jets participated in Super Bowl III, now remembered as one of the greatest games ever played.Skip to next paragraph
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Associated Press
Joe Namath passing under the rush of the Colts’ Bubba Smith in Super Bowl III on Jan. 12, 1969.
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They were underdogs, champions of the American Football League, led by their brash quarterback, Joe Namath, and a defense that never fully got its due.
“The significance of that game, nobody knew it at the time,” said Winston Hill, the starting left tackle. “I certainly didn’t know we’d be talking about it 40 years later.”
The Jets return to Florida, where they will begin the 40th anniversary season of their first and only Super Bowl victory on Sunday against the Miami Dolphins. Led by their brash quarterback, Brett Favre, and a defense they hope is equally underrated, the Jets will play in one of their most significant games since.
Players on that 1968 team, which defeated the Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl, recognize the significance of that season — and of this one.
“I don’t remember any other season like this,” said Larry Grantham, a starting linebacker whose Jets ties date to when they were the Titans. “Even in Joe’s early years, it wasn’t anything like this, like the buzz. I’m really looking forward to this year, following Brett and the Jets.”
Frank Ramos, the Jets’ public relations director from 1963 to 2002, remembered that the 1968 Jets arrived 10 days early and their longtime coach Weeb Ewbank did not enforce a curfew until after the first weekend. Those who knew of the Jets hard-partying reputation considered both moves curious.
The Jets stayed at the Galt Ocean Mile Hotel, which is now a condominium complex, L’Hermitage, on the beach.
Players were instructed to shave the beards they had grown toward the end of the season. (Namath reportedly made $10,000 when he chopped off his Fu Manchu mustache.) They were permitted to stay in the same hotel as their wives.
They practiced at the Yankees’ spring training complex in Fort Lauderdale, and threw parties at night at the hotel. At one shindig, the wife of the team’s equipment manager jumped off the high dive into the swimming pool with her clothes on.
On Jan. 9, 1969, a limousine took Namath from the hotel, where his teammates held a barbecue, to Miami Villas and a room called the Playhouse, where the Miami Touchdown Club was set to honor him as football’s most outstanding player.
Everyone knows what happened next.
“We’re going to win Sunday,” Namath said. “I guarantee it.”
The next morning Ramos picked up The Miami Herald to find a banner headline with Namath’s proclamation. He showed it to Ewbank en route to a news conference.
“Dag-gon-it, Joe,” Ramos remembers Ewbank saying. “Why did you have to go and say that for? We had them right where we wanted them.”
But most of the Jets felt the same way as Namath. After watching film, Grantham said they thought only tight end John Mackey could beat them, and they planned to double him on every play.
“Didn’t matter if we came from a league everyone considered Mickey Mouse,” Grantham said.
Ramos added: “The Jets players, to a man, really felt they were going to win the ballgame. It wasn’t just Joe.”
When Namath said it — and repeated it the next day at another news conference — his teammates did take notice.
“Joe was the leader of our team,” said Ralph Baker, a starting linebacker who later became a captain. “If he was so confident, I felt there was no reason I shouldn’t be, too.”
For all of Namath’s playboy image, Ramos said he studied the game more than he was credited for. In the Super Bowl, Ramos said Namath called 50 percent of the plays at the line of scrimmage.
Behind Hill, the left tackle, Matt Snell rushed for 121 yards and a touchdown as the Jets took a 16-7 lead against the Colts, the champions of the National Football League. Hill had been released by Baltimore before the season, becoming another castoff on a Jets roster filled with them.
Grantham worried until the very end, as Baltimore moved the football, only to have the Jets force five turnovers.
After it ended, after the guarantee came true, the Jets had to wait for their Champagne. They doused one another with the bubbly and eventually retired to the hotel, where the party continued well into the night.
“So many of the players, it was redeeming for them,” Ramos said. “These were players who had been let go by or left out of the N.F.L. Guys who felt they had been blackballed. Guys the Jets picked up along the way.”
Member of the 1968 Jets still get together on occasion. Several participate in a golf tournament for Freedom House, a drug and alcohol treatment center in New Jersey.
Baker, now a junior high school principal in Pennsylvania, said the euphoria from that Super Bowl continued for a long time.
“We didn’t always win every football game, but we never lost the party,” he said. “Now, we’re in bed by 9:30, but we still enjoy telling the stories over and over. The lies get a little bigger. Everyone was a little better than they were.”
Baker said his former teammates consider it an honor to have played in one of the greatest games in N.F.L. history.
And they never stopped following the Jets, a team that has not returned to the Super Bowl in the 40 intervening years. Those Jets thought they would be back the next season, but they fell short to the Kansas City Chiefs in the A.F.L. playoffs.
In Favre, Grantham sees some of Namath, the swagger and celebrity. In the revamped defense, he sees the possibility for comparison.
“It seems like everything is coming together for this team,” Ramos said. “The free agents, the new facility, the new stadium on the way. The fans finally have the quarterback they’ve been wishing for all this time.
“It’s a break away from the old to something new. The fact is when they have the 40th reunion this year, depending on how the season goes, it could really tie everything together.”
The new season starts Sunday, full of hope, in the same area of South Florida where hope became reality.
