Joe namath book autobiography

In short, punchy sentences Kreigel tells the bittersweet story of Namath’s sad childhood, his astonishing football career, his endless attempts to turn fame into money, and his melancholy retirement.

The story begins in the mean streets of a western Pennsylvania steel town, moves to the tough grounds of Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide and then on to New York where we watch money began to leak into sports via television and the many tentacled monster that was MCA.

At the heart of this story sits David Abraham “Sonny” Werblin, the dark-hearted talent promoter who clawed his way to the top of MCA, grabbed television by the balls and squeezed until there was nothing left for the television stations to do but to go down-market with more glitz, more controversy, more exhibitionism and more scandal.

(For those of us too young to remember, this trend accelerated into the 70s and 80s. It was as unstoppable as the earth’s rotation no matter how many dumb-dumb