Interference (28 page)

A member of the Colts told me that immediately after the loss, “there was a closed-door meeting with Rosenbloom, Shula, and the organization. Nothing was discussed with the players. They were very shocked that we had lost the Super Bowl. Rosenbloom was very depressed. He didn't speak to anybody before their meeting.”

Despite the fact that there is no evidence that Rosenbloom had bet against his own team, some football insiders, aside from Smith, have continued to allege that there was something fishy about Super Bowl III.

Bernie Parrish, a former defensive back for the Cleveland Browns, has speculated that Jets quarterback Joe Namath had been given the Colts' defensive signals prior to the game. “Namath's most difficult job as quarterback is to recognize and read the opposition's defenses,” Parrish wrote. “With this problem solved before he came to the line of scrimmage on every play, the Colts wouldn't have had a chance.”
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In the NFL's official video highlights of the game, the narrator marvels at the manner in which Namath picked apart the Colts' defense, which is described as the finest defensive team in the history of the NFL.
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Namath boasted after the game, “Some people were saying that the Jets'd be scared of the Colts defense. Scared, hell—the only thing that scared me was that they might change their defense.”
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The story from Jets representatives is that the team's defensive coach, Walt Michaels, also a former star linebacker with the Cleveland Browns, had figured out the Colts' defense and tutored
Namath on passing options when the Colts were aligned in a zone defense with a possible linebacker blitz. However, according to sports reporter Lou Sahadi, neither Michaels nor even Weeb Ewbank had been responsible for spotting the weakness in the Colts' defense. Instead, according to Sahadi, it was Namath and his roommate, Jim Hudson, the Jets' safety.

“Namath and Hudson began to study films of the Baltimore-Los Angeles game,” Sahadi wrote. “They were viewing a part of the game in which the Rams were on offense. One particular Ram pass pattern caught Joe's eye. He kept running the sequence through over and over … Namath, who can read films as well as anyone in the business, detected a flaw in the Colts' pass coverage on a particular type of pass pattern. It would provide at least one approach for him to pick the Colts' pass defense apart.”
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Namath refused to be interviewed for this book, but Hudson told me that he disagrees with Sahadi. “Lou [Sahadi] hung around the Jets. A lot of the stuff he wrote about, well, we may have been pulling his leg. And he probably didn't even know it. Joe would say, ‘Yeah, we had their signals. We got them from the films.' But nobody had their signals. I don't remember anything that complicated. The Colts were a blitzing team, and a lot of times they showed the blitz. That leaves certain pass patterns open.”

Namath has written that he called over one third of the Jets' offensive plays in audibles from the line of scrimmage, depending on the Colts' defensive alignment. “[W]hen I saw Lou Michaels come on the field, I knew positively that the Colts were going into a tight five-one defense … [T]he first play with Michaels on the field, I said, ‘We'll go on the first sound.' I called a 19-straight, a handoff to [Matt] Snell, and Matt bounced around the left side and scored.”
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Namath said that he picked up on Michaels's tip-off of the five-one defense from watching films of the Colts.

The Colts' premier placekicker, Lou Michaels, who was Walt's brother and a backup defensive lineman, told me, “Namath is full of baloney. Whenever I came in, we were in a goal-line defense—to stop the short yardage. A goal-line defense is never a five-man line. I came in as a defensive tackle on the inside, and they ran outside around the end when they scored their one touchdown. Everything else, we stopped. They had to kick three field goals.”

Those who still insist that something about the game was suspicious call attention to a meeting between Namath and Lou Michaels at a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale on January 5, 1969, a week before the big game.

Michaels told me that the meeting at a Miami bar/restaurant was quite accidental and even confrontational. “I was with Danny Sullivan [a Colts offensive lineman and Michaels's roommate] at a table in the back, and he saw Namath and Jim Hudson come in. Namath was wearing his big, full-length fur coat. So I said to Danny, ‘Let me go up and get another drink for us.' I walked up to the bar. I wanted to shake hands with Joe. But he pointed his finger at me and said, ‘We're going to kick the shit out of you, and I'm going to do it.' And he pointed to himself. And that got me very upset. He caught me off guard, and it put me in a different mood. He tried to aggravate me. We would have gotten along fine had he just come up to me and said, ‘Hi, I'm Joe Namath. I recognize you. You're Walt's brother.' I had heard that he was a nice guy.
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“I told Namath, ‘We got Unitas. We got Morrall.' He told me that they were ‘over the hill. We don't have to worry about them.' I said to him, ‘What happens if we beat you?' And he said, ‘I'll sit right in the middle of the field and cry.' We went back and forth, exchanging words. At one point, I told him, ‘I'd like to have you outside, just for one minute.' After that, we calmed down and relaxed.

“I went back to Danny and told him what happened. Then, after a while, Hudson came over to our table and started talking and then Joe came over, too. We sat there for about an hour or so. We had about two or three drinks. I don't remember.

“Joe paid for the whole tab. He threw a hundred-dollar bill down and gave us a ride back to our hotel in his rented car. Nothing particular was discussed on the way back. What we talked about had no relationship to the game.”

Hudson agrees with Michaels that “nothing technical” about the game was discussed. “Everybody had been drinking—and maybe Lou more than others. Joe didn't start it. I remember Lou talking about how they were going to kick our asses.”

Soon after the incident between Namath and Michaels took place, Namath came out publicly and guaranteed the game. “We're going to win Sunday,” Namath boasted. “I'll guarantee you.”

Recalling Namath's guarantee, Weeb Ewbank told me, “When we went down there, I told the whole squad that we were seventeen-point underdogs. And I told them that if I could, I'd make it twenty-one. I told the players to be careful what they said and not light any fires under the Colts. When Joe said that he could guarantee the game, I could've shot him. I told Joe to watch what he was saying.” Ewbank added that Namath, even in private, was absolutely positive that the Jets were going to win.

Did Michaels, while boasting of his team's strengths, tip Namath and Hudson off to the Colts' defense? “I don't think it's likely,” Michaels told me. “We did have a few drinks, but I would never do anything to hurt my team.”

Namath completed seventeen of twenty-eight passes for 206 yards and no interceptions during the 16-7 Jets victory. Shaken up at one point during the contest, he missed only one series of downs and was replaced by the Jets' backup quarterback, Vito “Babe” Parilli. Namath was selected as the game's most valuable player.

Ewbank told me that his victory over the Colts was particularly sweet after his 1963 firing by Carroll Rosenbloom. “Before the game, Carroll walked around the field with me. While we were talking, he invited me and my wife, Lucy, to a party at his place at Golden Beach after the game. But I told him, ‘We are planning to have a party of our own.'”

Pressing too hard, Michaels had missed two field goals of twenty-seven and forty-six yards during Super Bowl III. Michaels says, “On the first one I really thought, deep down, that it was good. I kicked it. It was going straight between the bars. But, no alibis, I missed. I kicked for the middle of the bars, and I should have kicked for the left. It was close. It blew right over the top of the bar. It just drifted away. Naturally, I was a little depressed.

“The second one was about a forty-six yarder. And I just kicked a lot of dirt. I guess my mind was on the last field goal that I missed, because I thought that I should've had it. I just topped the ball. I might have pressed for that one.

“The only trouble is: For the rest of my life, this is the only game they'll remember about me. They block every other game out. They don't remember the two field goals I kicked against Cleveland two weeks earlier for the NFL championship that helped get us into that Super Bowl.”
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Danahy concludes, “We checked it all out backward and
forward. First of all, if Rosenbloom or anyone else had made a large bet, there would have been a lot of noise about it. We checked all over Las Vegas, and there was no heavy movement. But I guess that Rosenbloom could have spread the money through beards all over the United States.”

Bobby Martin agrees that there was no fix and cites as evidence the fact that no unnatural money was bet on the game.

However, in documents that were obtained for this book, a top convicted-bookmaker-turned-federal-witness said that Rosenbloom had indeed bet on the game—but that he had bet on his own team, the Colts. The government informant claimed that he had handled a portion of Rosenbloom's money while he served as a member of the Mafia's gambling network that was operated by Gil Beckley and Marty Sklaroff.

“Carroll Rosenbloom bet a million dollars with us on the Colts against the Jets,” the informant said. “Because of the size of the bet, Marty Sklaroff and Gil Beckley had to lay it off around the country. I laid off two hundred thousand dollars of it, and they laid off the rest of it.”

22 Broadway Joe

JOE NAMATH WAS BORN and raised in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, also the hometown of quarterback Babe Parilli. As a boy, Namath was a runner for local bookmakers. After his all-American playing days at the University of Alabama and his $427,000 contract with Sonny Werblin and the Jets, Namath became the symbol of the new-wave professional athlete of the late 1960s. With his trend-setting clothes, Fu Manchu mustache, expensive shag carpeting, white football shoes, and his overall demeanor, Namath became the Frank Sinatra of his generation—another hip, swingin' kind of guy with a “fuck off” attitude. Namath appealed to America's youth—and to just about every gambler and bookmaker in New York.

Although Namath has insisted that he never bet with a bookmaker on a football game, the Jets quarterback wrote in his autobiography, “I'm a known gambler, and I don't just mean on third down. Anyone who's ever seen me in Las Vegas knows I'm a gambler. I don't go out there to look at the sand. My last three trips to Vegas, I've lost $2,500, $2,500, and $5,000 in the casinos, a total of $10,000, not really much for a gambler … I'm friendly with known gamblers, too. Like, I'm friendly with my mother.”
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Namath's associations with gamblers became a major controversy later on in 1969 after his big Super Bowl win. In late 1968, Namath—along with his partners, Ray Abruzzese
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and Bobby Van—opened Bachelors III, a New York restaurant at Sixty-second Street and Lexington Avenue.

Recalling Namath and Bachelors III, Jack Danahy told me, “Joe was a naïve young guy who enjoyed fun and games. Unfortunately, he bought into this bar. And it became a fantastic hangout for bad guys. A bookmaker had established himself in the basement of the place and was using the telephone. The New York Police Department had an undercover guy in the place.

“Just before the 1969 Super Bowl, I got a call from a friend of mine, a very high-ranking NYPD official. He said, ‘Jack, don't worry about the game, but when you get back we have to talk to you about something involving one of your Jets.' When I got back, they gave me the whole story. And we called in Joe.”

Namath was told that “undesirables”—mobsters and gamblers—had been frequenting his establishment. Specifically, notorious New York Mafia figures such as Carmine Tramunti, Carmine Persico, and Thomas Mancuso, as well as New Jersey's Joseph Zicarelli, were regular customers. It was also known that besides the basement telephone in Bachelors III, Namath's personal line in his private office had also been used to place bets. Namath simply shrugged the information off. Months passed and nothing more was said.

The NYPD's supervisor of detectives, Ralph Salerno, told me, “Bachelors Three was the big hangout. When it would close at four, most of the hot contenders and the drawing cards hanging around there would then go to an after-hours joint that was mob-run. The guy who owned the after-hours place was Carmine Trumanti, who succeeded Three-Finger Brown [New York Mafia boss Thomas Lucchese].
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“There was a bug that picked up a conversation between Trumanti and Namath during which Trumanti said, ‘Hey, kid, you're sitting on top of the goddamn world. You're a big football star. You're making a lot of money. You shouldn't hang out with these creepy bastards. They're no good for you.'

“I give Trumanti a lot of credit for that. He told Namath he didn't need mob guys.”

On June 3, while appearing at a New York banquet, Namath was contacted again by Danahy, who instructed him to sell his interest in Bachelors III. A meeting was arranged with Namath in Rozelle's office. Rozelle was cool as he explained to Namath the NFL rules on players associating with gamblers and ordered him to sell his interest in the restaurant or be suspended from football.
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The NFL had also learned that the telephones in Namath's
bar had been wiretapped and gambling information was collected.

Danahy says, “I told him, ‘Look, I don't care whether you give [your interest in the bar] to your mother or anybody. Just get your name off that license.'”

Weeb Ewbank told me that he discussed the controversy with Namath. “I told him not to get into an argument with the commissioner. Joe had kept saying that he thought the commissioner was being unfair because there were a lot of players who had restaurants. He said that they were trying to say that some bookmaking was going on there. But Joe told me that there hadn't been. He said that whatever was going on was happening on a pay telephone—and that there was nothing he could do about that.”