Revolutionaries

I asked him why he was so upset.

"Are you kidding?" he said. "All that Joe has meant to us, to our league, whipping the Colts' ass the way he did. He's the reason a lot of us are making decent money."

In 1965 Namath, then a rookie out of Alabama, spurned the St. Louis Cardinals and signed a three-year, $427,000 deal with the Jets. At that time the contract was the biggest for a pro football rookie. The signing was a public relations bonanza for the struggling AFL. "Ridiculous," Packers coach and general manager Vince Lombardi said at the time, but the signing war was on. The following year Lombardi topped Namath's big deal with a $1 million package for a pair of rookie running backs: Donny Anderson ($600,000) and Jim Grabowski ($400,000). Also, the Atlanta Falcons came up with more than $300,000 for linebacker Tommy Nobis, the first player picked in the '66 draft.

The brash Namath was a shot in the arm for the AFL. In his first season, Jets home attendance increased by more than 12,000 per game. The Houston Oilers set a single-game franchise home-attendance record that would stand for 14 years when 52,680 turned out to see Namath ride the bench in his pro debut. In June 1966 the AFL and the NFL merged.

Then came the Super Bowl, with Namath guaranteeing a victory and then meticulously picking apart a Colts team that was favored by 19½ points. After having been whipped by Lombardi's Packers in the first two Super Bowls, the AFL now could look the NFL in the eye. "A bunch of guys from the Chiefs—Buck Buchanan, Emmitt Thomas, Willie Lanier—were waiting at the hotel to meet us after the game," Namath says. "They just wanted to shake our hands. John Hadl, the Chargers' quarterback, told me he was sitting in the stands at the game, taking abuse from Baltimore fans, and when we won, he just started crying. Couldn't help it, he said, and John's a pretty tough guy."

Looking back on that Super Bowl almost 30 years later, what did it all mean? "I got letters from a lot of high school coaches who told me they used the game as a motivator," says Namath, who, in 1967, became the first player to pass for more than 4,000 yards in a season. "Maybe it motivated some other people, too. There are a lot of underdogs in the world. Maybe it meant something to the underdogs in life."

It was a system built out of desperation, the Bill Walsh system, also known as the Cincinnati system and popularly mislabeled the West Coast offense, whose true architect was Sid Gillman. It was a system that Walsh, the Cincinnati Bengals' quarterbacks and receivers coach, had installed to accommodate Virgil Carter, a quick-thinking, short-to medium-range passer who became the starter during the 1970 season after Greg Cook went down with an injury.

"I didn't think of it as a system; it had no name," Walsh says. "It's just what we did. Keep the sticks moving with high-percentage passes, get through your progression of reads quickly, make the guy underneath, the guy closest to the passer, your final read."

The system worked for Carter and his successor, Ken Anderson, and also for Steve DeBerg, the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, when Walsh took over as coach. But when Joe Montana arrived that year, Walsh knew he had something special. "He took the system to a new level," Walsh says. "His gracefulness on the move, his skill, his resourcefulness, all of that blended into the system.

"We'd have what we called bad-situation practices where I'd take Joe aside and tell him, 'O.K., I want you to go to the third read on every play.' Then in a game he'd do it, but what made him extraordinary was his innate ability to concentrate downfield with all hell breaking loose around him and then to put the ball in exactly the right spot on perfect timing. It would be like a guy standing on the Speedway in Indianapolis, looking past the cars and throwing his pass."