Three days before the third Super Bowl, in January 1969, a quarterback with bad knees stood up at a Miami touchdown club dinner and told the room that his team would win on Sunday. He guaranteed it. The New York Jets were eighteen-point underdogs to the Baltimore Colts, who had lost one game all year, and the league Namath played in was widely regarded as the lesser of the two — the first Super Bowl had been a rout, the second another. Then the Jets won, 16–7, and Namath walked off the field in the Orange Bowl with one finger in the air. Nobody who saw it has ever quite got over it.
He had come out of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, by way of Alabama, where Bear Bryant later called recruiting him the best coaching decision he ever made, and in 1965 the Jets paid him a reported four hundred thousand dollars and change to sign — a figure that shocked the sport and told the older league, plainly, that the younger one intended to compete for its players. He wore white shoes when nobody did, a fur coat on the sideline, and the nickname Broadway Joe, which the tackle Sherman Plunkett hung on him after a Sports Illustrated cover that first summer, fit him exactly. In 1967 he became the first professional quarterback to throw for four thousand yards in a season, at a time when nobody threw that much.
He guaranteed it. Then the Jets won, and nobody who saw it has ever quite got over it.
The knees were the story underneath the story. He had the first of his operations before he had played a professional down, and by the end he was playing on very little cartilage and a great deal of tape. His career numbers are not the numbers of the quarterbacks who came after him, and it is fair to say that the Hall of Fame elected a moment as much as a record. The moment deserved it. The merger that produced the modern National Football League was already agreed when he made his guarantee; Super Bowl III was the game that made it look like a partnership of equals rather than an act of charity.
His 1965 Topps card is one of the hobby’s great oddities. Topps issued its football set that year in a tall, narrow format — collectors call them tall boys — that it never used for football again, and the Namath, card 122, is among the short prints that make up most of the set. So the rookie card of the most famous quarterback of the decade is a short print in a set the size of a bookmark, which is why finding one with four sharp corners is hard and why the card is graded the way it is. It is a card that looks like nothing else in a collection, which seems right for the man.
He retired in 1977 after one unhappy season in Los Angeles, and the rest has been what it was always going to be: television, a few films, and a permanent seat at the table whenever anyone talks about the day the two leagues became one. Most names in this index earned their place with a body of work. His is here for a single Sunday afternoon that changed the shape of the sport, and for the nerve it took to say out loud, in advance, that it would.