Where Did You Go, Joe Namath?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It once was a game that could cost a coach his job, or make a name for a player on the basis of one jaw-dropping play. Seasons have been lost in this game, careers destroyed. And always, there was as much passion in both locker rooms before the game as there was in the stands. Now, it’s a who-cares event in a nowhere stadium between two teams who use this town only as a mailing address.
Whatever happened to the Jets-Giants game? Where there was once a rivalry, there are now only shrugs and indifference. Once, it was for “bragging rights,” as Weeb Ewbank, put it. Now, as Tiki Barber said, “It doesn’t count. It’s just an opportunity to get better. A practice is just a practice.”
The Jets and Giants meet tonight in their annual preseason game, but it may as well be the Jets vs. the Saints or the Giants vs. the Seahawks. In Texas and New Jersey, in Hollywood and Florida, ex-Jets and Giants are shaking their heads.
When first they met, NFL players did not fraternize and Jets and Giants did not even acknowledge each other’s existence. Now, the Giants and Jets practice together. Coaches phone one another for tips on upcoming opponents.
“What rivalry?” snorts Matt Snell, now a construction foreman in Jersey. “These days, the NFL is one big team.”
Don Maynard, a financial planner in El Paso, said, “The Super Bowl was one thing, but playing in Yale Bowl before 70,000 people for an exhibition game, that was another kind of Super Bowl. That game meant something.”
Maynard, a Hall of Fame receiver who paired with Namath to create the most explosive game of catch in football history to that point, knew what was at stake the first time these two teams met, in the 1969 preseason.
The Jets were coming off their shocking – to everyone but the Jets – 16-7 upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The Giants may only have been 7-7 the previous season, but still carried themselves with the arrogance of the old-guard NFL, refusing to believe the upstart Jets, or any AFL team for that matter, could really match up with them.
“We knew if we didn’t beat the Giants, everyone would have said the Super Bowl was just a fluke,” Maynard said. “We couldn’t let that happen.”
There was even more at stake for Maynard. In 1958, after a rookie season with the Giants in which he touched the football all of 16 times, he was cut by then-Giants coach Allie Sherman.
“I could run backward faster than the guy they kept could run forward,” Maynard said. “I didn’t really have a problem with the Giants, just one particular guy.”
So, in the closing moments of the Jets’ humiliating 37-14 victory, there was Don Maynard with his back to the field, leading the stadium in a rousing rendition of “Goodbye, Allie!” Halfway through the season, Sherman was fired, and it was the pre-season loss to the Jets that greased the skids.
At the time, the Jets represented everything Giants owner Wellington Mara despised: Rebellion. And no one embodied it better than Joe Namath, the shaggy-haired, booze-and-broads loving quarterback that the Jets stole from under the Giants’ noses in the 1964 draft.
“In many ways, the Giants were defined by him,” said Giants defensive end Fred Dryer in the brilliant new biography, “Namath,” by Mark Kriegel. Everything the Giants were, Dryer meant, was in direct opposition to what Namath was.
So deep was their antipathy that according to Dryer, “I never once heard Wellington Mara say the words: Joe Namath.” In fact, the Giants’ whole game plan, like that of the Colts the previous January, was to knock Namath out of the game, and injure him if possible.
Of course, they never could, and in one of the greatest “screw you” moments in New York sports history, it was Namath, gimpy-kneed and hopeless in the midst of a 1-7 season, who stuck it to the Giants by running the ball into the end zone on a naked bootleg in a regular-season game in 1974 for a 26-20 Jets win, the first regular-season overtime win in NFL history.
Them was the days. In recent years, the Jets-Giants matchup has become just another game. Last season, Giants head coach Jim Fassel referred to the Jets as “a faceless opponent.” Soon Fassel, like Allie Sherman, was a jobless coach, but not because of losing to the Jets in the preseason. In fact, the Jets have won the last eight pre-season meetings and no one on the Giants seems to care about reversing the trend.
“If you want to call it a rivalry, call it a rivalry,” said Jets head coach Herm Edwards. “That’s for you guys to write. I’m new here.”
Unfortunately, like most of the players, Edwards has no idea what he has missed.