The following columns give a good sense of the atmosphere leading up to Super Bowl III. January 8: Super Booze: Much Ado About Nothing Miami -- Is the Super Bowl filled with booze? No, of course not, but the impression is about that the boys have been having one grand wassail of a time in the early preparations for Sunday's game. The hard-working, clean-minded folk who run football are not at all happy about this and will do their best to counter this dastardly kind of thinking, but the gossips of this town--it's a gossipin' town--are titillated at the idea of the boys living it up in preparation for the game. It's Broadway Joe Namath's fault, of course. Namath couldn't get up out of bed Monday in time to show for picture-taking, and now everybody's telling stories about how late Namath was up on the town. When Jimmy Orr, the rollicking Baltimore end, heard that Namath didn't make the picture-taking session at 10AM, he said, "Well, it's no surprise considering the hour I left him. I am glad they scheduled our pictures for the afternoon." And there's the word that Namath ran into the Colts' Lou Michaels the other night at one of the places where the Miami elite meet to eat and greet. One thing led to another and there were needling words back and forth. Namath did a pretty good job of razzing, because Michaels reported back to his mates that Namath had said all sorts of naughty things about the Colts. He said the Colts line was of dubious quality, that the defensive lines in the entire National Football League were inferior. Mean things like that. It reportedly got so heated that Michaels at one point threatened to take Namath outside. But the old Namath charm prevailed, and before long, they were buddy-buddy again. And when the evening was over Namath put down a hundred-dollar bill to pay for the whole tab. That impressed Michaels the most. He came back telling about all the things Namath had said, but that Broadway Joe was the greatest anyway. Michaels, known for good cheer, was feeling so well that night, he made the kind of statements nobody should be nasty enough to hold against him. He hinted, for instance, that Colts coach Don Shula is not as good as Michaels' brother Walt, the Jets' defensive coach. Lou Michaels, among other things, keeps a picture of Shula hung up in his locker. When he is asked why he does that, he gives one of those sardonic laughs that make people ask, "I wonder what he meant by that?" Unlike Namath, Lou showed up for his team's picture-taking session. Some people noticed, though, that Michaels was having trouble place-kicking the ball. He not only didn't kick it between the uprights, he couldn't seem to get the ball between the two sideline markers. And if he seemed quite moved by hidden spirits in his post-workout conversations with the press, it was chalked up to an excesssive feeling about the upcoming game. Namath, of course, undid all the good that he had accomplished in the cause of clean living this year when he got the Jets to break out the champagne after they beat Oakland and won the American Football League championship. There is a league rule against that, or something, but the Jets wanted to celebrate, and Namath, the leader, knew the mood of his men. A few times Namath paused while guzzling the champagne to ask a photographer not to take his picture. He couldn't spot all the photographers hovering around him, though, and sure enough his picture, waving the stuff around, made many of the public prints. When Namath poured the champagne over locker-room visitor Johnny Carson, a television personality, Carson said, "Gee, Joe, I've never known you to waste good booze like that." Of course, that made a few of the public prints, too, and people are coming to expect Namath to walk out on the field with a bottle of gin in one hand while throwing a pigskin around with his other one. The partying went on last weekend before the curfews were put in and before the athletes got down to the hard work of getting ready physically and mentally for this game. The partying is done; only the gossip lingers. It's suprising how some people are getting worked up at Namath, the quarterback of a team that is an 18-point underdog, for putting down the skills of a champion team like the Colts from the superior National Footbal Leauge. There are at least three possibilities that may come out of this concentration on Namath. His irreverence may serve to infuriate the Colts so much they will run the Jets out of the Orange Bowl. On the other hand, it's possible Namath has set out to do a masterful psych job on the Colts in which he is getting the Colts to think he is more formidable than he really is. And, on the third hand, it's not inconceivable that all the talk about Namath putting down the Colts--like all the talk about the booze--will not mean a damn thing when the athletes go out there and tend to the business of playing football.
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1969 The Bigger They Come the Harder They Fall 
