So we’ve come to that stage in life when celebrities formerly featured on the cover of Rolling Stone now appear on the cover of AARP, The Magazine. However, nothing stings quite as much as seeing Joe Namath pitching Medicare benefits on television. Doctor’s and nurse’s visits? Home healthcare aides? Home delivered meals? Say it ain’t so, Joe!
It happens that Joe Namath and I are almost exactly the same age, having both been born in the springtime of 1943. I’m eight weeks older than Joe, but look at least thirty years younger. I attribute my youthful appearance to clean living in the slow lane, which isn’t to say I wouldn’t have traded places with Joe in a heartbeat back in 1969 after he quarterbacked the upstart New York Jets to an epic win over the favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl Three. More than just a win, it was a cultural shift. No one had ever imagined that a bunch of long-haired hippies could defeat a band of blue-collar crew-cut stalwarts led by none other than the great Johnny Unitas. Moreover, Joe had defied tradition by brashly guaranteeing the victory beforehand. From that day on, Namath became a celebrated pitchman, endorsing everything from Ovaltine to Haines pantyhose. Needless to say, no football player before him had ever had the audacity to pose in pantyhose.
At the age of 41, Broadway Joe married Deborah Mays, who was nineteen years younger. The erstwhile playboy sired two daughters and soon became such a homebody that his child bride left him, citing irreconcilable boredom. Namath turned to booze for comfort, but later gave it up, as he had previously quit football, in the interest of preserving what was left of his health.
Namath’s mother once warned her son that if he didn’t stop playing football, he’d have the knees of a seventy-year-old by the time he was forty. Well, now Broadway Joe Namath and I FINALLY have something in common; i.e., septuagenarian knees.
I will give him this: Joe’s teeth are much brighter and whiter than mine. Mine, however, are real, whereas I suspect that his—given the absence of mouth guards in the Sixties—are implants, or maybe even bridgework. Dear God, I hope never to see Joe Namath pitching Polident on television, because that’s when I’ll know the time has come for me to call the Medicare Coverage Helpline.