Fifty years ago this past week, two events occurred in my life. The American Football League’s New York Jets, behind the brash guarantee of their celebrity quarterback, Joe Willie Namath, as the late and equally verbally flamboyant Howard Cosell used to call him, upset the National Football League’s Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The 16-7 score was not indicative of how the upstart Jets controlled the game. The belief that the Jets would even be competitive with the established NFL’s best team was considered laughable by the press and veteran observers. After all, the Green Bay Packers had dominated the first two Super Bowls, so there was little chance that the AFL could put a team on the field which might offer some real resistance to the Colts.
This monumental win by the AFL triggered the subsequent merger of the leagues into a new National Football League. The Pittsburgh Steelers and the Colts actually switched into the new American Football Conference. A whole new and exciting era of professional football was at hand. All because a talented and bold QB from Beaver Falls, PA and the University of Alabama, who had troublesome knees, led a bunch of NFL retreads to victory over a roster of supposedly more talented players.
I remember being on semester break from college, at home in Highland Park, watching the game. I can recall how astonished I was that the Jets were outplaying the Colts. I am sure that at that moment I did not recognize the significance of the Jets’ victory. And who knew that in 1977, I would purchase Jets’ season tickets with my sister, and become a ticket holder for the next 42 years, for a team whose signature win was their only Super Bowl appearance.
At first glance, it doesn’t seem like 50 years has elapsed since that game in Miami. I saw Namath on Showtime just before the action began last weekend. He looked old. That gave me pause as I realized how long ago this monumental contest took place.
I don’t know how many players in this weekend’s championship games appreciate what Super Bowl III meant to pro football. After all, none of them were born at that time. Even a fair number of the coaches for the four teams were either very young or hadn’t been born yet. And if they are students of the game, they might appreciate what happened that late afternoon in South Florida. From what I have read, the Kansas City Chiefs player development personnel take the team to the team museum at Arrowhead Stadium, where the AFL history is chronicled. More than likely it is tailored to the Chiefs, especially Lamar Hunt, one of the founding seven owners of the AFL, and the Chiefs win over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV in New Orleans in 1970. Yet if it is a true history, Joe Namath and his Jets should receive some mention.
For me, I was both a Giants and Jets fan, since the teams operated in different universes. With the blackout rule in effect at that time, I couldn’t see either team’s home games. Fortunately, the Super Bowl was not a home game for either team.
But that night in the Orange Bowl, with the underdog Jets’ win, made me a Jets fan for life. One who painfully waits for the next Super Bowl appearance, which will hopefully occur under the guidance of ex-Miami Dolphins head coach Adam Gase, he of the intense, bug-eyed look at his introductory press conference.
Coach Gase has made a good hire in Greg Williams, formerly the interim head coach at Cleveland, as his defensive coordinator. Gase is a quarterback coach. His job is to tutor Sam Darnold, bringing out the talent that so many expect from the youngster from California.
Once more there is hope and optimism surrounding the Jets. We traveled this road when Todd Bowles was named to the top spot. Unfortunately, that led to chaos and disappointment…again. It would be so rewarding to see a change in the mostly moribund existence of this franchise.
Under Rex Ryan, with Mark Sanchez at quarterback, another USC QB who left school early, Jets fans thought they had the road to the Super Bowl ahead of them when the team made two consecutive AFC title games. The Sanchez era would come crashing down on national TV with the”butt fumble.”
Thus Jets’ fans celebrated the Super Bowl win with a sense of pride tinged with a lot of regret as to how the next 49 years turned out. A lot of fans were vocal in their dislike of the team’s selection of Gase as the Head Coach.
Maybe I am the eternal optimist when it comes to new beginnings with the Jets. Sure, there is much work to be done with this team before they become competitive. I look at Kansas City. Their only Super Bowl win was nearly as long ago as the Jets. With a young and hungry QB in Pat Mahomes, and a retread coach in Andy Reid, they have attained success quickly. Their loyal fans have been rewarded with their first ever AFC or AFL Championship Game at home; the two times they made the AFC finals KC played at Buffalo.
Tom Brady and the Patriots are not going to play and win forever. Even with as good a year that the team had, making the AFC title contest a record ninth time, Father Time inevitably will catch up with Brady and even the genius behind the Pats’ successes, Bill Belichick. The team to fill that void can be the New York Jets—under the guidance of Adam Gase. Some of the greatest minds in pro football such as Don Shula and Belichick were not successful in their first head coaching job until they had a star QB to lead their offenses—Bob Griese then Dan Marino in Miami for Coach Shula and Drew Bledsoe ’s injury paving the way for Brady to play in New England. Take a glance at the Chiefs—Andy Reid first coached in Philadelphia and was fired before he resurfaced in KC.
Jets fans can look at the 1968 New York Jets and recognize their place in history. Namath was coached by Weeb Ewbank, a man who had been jettisoned by the Colts after leading them to the NFL title. His Baltimore QB was the legendary Johny Unitas.
Can the future of this team have a tandem as glorious as the Namath-Ewbank tandem? I will be watching. And hoping.
The other event which had a dramatic effect in my life was the announcement by Franklin and Marshall College that in the 1969-70 academic year, women would be admitted to the college. Co-education would change the fabric of the school forever. I was party to F&M’s rebirth.
For a school which began in 1787 with a small donation by Ben Franklin and merged with Marshall College, this was epochal news. This decision was probably inevitable, but there were plenty of detractors.
When I was accepted at F&M, it was an all-male school, it was during my freshman year that talk about bringing women on campus started. President Keith Spaulding, who I knew and liked, guided the Board of Trustees to reach the historic conclusion that co-education was a necessity if the College were to survive.
We had a vehicle for student opinion located in the middle of campus. It was dubbed “The Protest Tree.” Given we are talking about some of this country’s most turbulent times with the continuation of the Vietnam War, the Protest Tree was a great forum for intellectual and emotional discourse.
The Protest Tree became a significant outpost for student reading, even more so than the student weekly paper. Sometimes F&M administrative decisions were either supported or denounced there. Co-education was certainly addressed there.
The feeling about F&M moving forward with women on campus was not taken well by traditionalists who desired the status quo. But F&M was competing in an environment where other, similarly-situated schools were going co-ed. This would put F&M at both a financial and an academic disadvantage, where the brightest students would go elsewhere—to the colleges who had integrated females into their core.
I was barely 18 years old when this debate erupted. As with the Vietnam War, unlike my more sophisticated classmates and the far more worldly upperclassmen, I listened and did not immediately form an opinion.
I picked F&M largely because I fell in love with the campus in the early to mid-1960’s when my father took the family to Lancaster. I revered my father, who had attended a fine small, liberal arts college with a superior academic record—attracting many of the brightest students. I read the F&M mailings when they came, just as I kept up on the doings at Temple University’s Kornberg School of Dentistry, where he attended after World War II. F&M was where I wanted to go and I believed I was bright enough to succeed there.
Thus, part of me remained the chauvinist. I thought an all-male liberal arts college with an excellent reputation was the place to be. F&M was truly the only school I wanted to attend, so the fact that it was only populated by males never bothered me—even if I had a high school girlfriend. She could wait for me back at home during intercession.
I did not know how co-education would change the school; I was concerned that the admission of women might actually hurt F&M’s standing. In hindsight, that belief was short-sighted, especially when President Spaulding assured us that the first groups of women would be academically gifted—perhaps more so than the extraordinarily males in my class.
My exposure to the way things were at F&M was interesting. My four years at F&M coincided with the start of the “Free Love” era, an extension of the British Invasion started with the Beatles and Rolling Stones and the expressiveness of the San Francisco-Bay Area styled culture prevalent in rock bands and in politics.
Like me, many freshman had girlfriends waiting for them at home. Of course, that didn’t stop some guys form seeking out alternatives while their hometown honey was not available. The girls in town were largely looked at with disdain, and many F&M men thought that they could have fun with the Millersville State College girls. (Surprisingly, some had long term relationships which led to successful marriages—including my senior year second semester roommate).
We had bus trips to all-girls schools like Wilson and Beaver Colleges, for mixers, as they were called. I was somewhat shy and certainly not very tall in stature. I din’t fare well in Highland Park with the girls—except for my girlfriend, who was not a J.A.P. like the more popular ones. So I went because everyone seemingly went, but I hated competing against guys from Penn or Lehigh and Lafayette who showed up acting haughty and disdainful of F&M. Plus even when we hosted mixers, I never felt comfortable in those environments.
I was a very straight-laced jock wannabe. I came to F&M unrecruited for baseball, yet my focus from day one was to play ball at F&M because I thought that I was pretty good and I never received a chance in Highland Park. I had something to prove. Plus I wanted to be a lawyer for a variety of reasons, which is why I chose Government early on as my major. At the start of my freshman year, that actually was the order of my college priorities.
I was a Democrat and I did not like what had happened at the Democratic National Convention In the summer of 1968. The rioting and anger that fueled the convention was upsetting, just as the riots in 1967 were to me, as they destroyed Newark and shut down New Brunswick for a time. I still thought that peaceful discussions were the way to achieve change. Others disagreed with my line of thinking, including at F&M.
However, I was not a person who sought confrontation, nor was I worldly and sophisticated. I had lived in a cocoon in Highland Park, oblivious to thinking deeply about the meaning of change, other than it was a dangerous time with Russia and the Cuban missile crisis and that electing Barry Goldwater in 1964 was a very bad idea.
No matter what was happening at F&M in terms of U.S. politics and the long-term plans of the President and the Board of Trustees, I was immune to the larger, more global things which other, far more experienced envisioned. Besides, in January, 1969, it was more important to me that the Jets won the Super Bowl, as it would be when the Knicks won the NBA Championship later in my second semester of my freshman year.
I would feel the growing pains of co-education in its formation in my sophomore and junior years as more women landed on campus. By my second semester of my senior year, the novelty of women on campus had become the new reality. I was more mature, having spent six months in Washington, D.C., roaming the halls of Congress, spending copious amounts of time with adults who treated me as one of the group. I understood what the Vietnam War was about and I developed rational and logical conclusions about my feelings.
That translated into my acceptance of co-education as the right thing for F&M to continue. I transformed from a narrow, more reserved person who did not want change, to one much more willing to accept ideas which made sense.
For me, the Jets win in the Super Bowl and the decision to accept women at F&M came at a crossroads in my life. It was the time that I started to form an identity, a set of beliefs which are central to my thinking today, and have allowed me to evolve as I have grown older. I could still be a jock and love sports, while I started to be a critical thinker and appreciate the minds of other who inspire and lead.
Which is why this week is so symbolic to me. It was a time for significant cultural transformation—in this country and in my own personal evolution. As the songster from Minnesota, Bob Dylan, the man who embodied a movement for my generation, said so well in his prescient song: “The Times They Are A Changin’”
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