Namath: a Biography

Author: Kriegel, Mark

Color: Black

Number Of Pages: 544

Details:

In between Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan there was Joe Namath, one of the  few sports heroes to transcend the game he played. Novelist and former sports-columnist Mark Kriegel’s bestselling biography of the iconic quarterback details his journey from steel-town pool halls to the upper reaches of American celebrity—and beyond. The first of his kind, Namath enabled a nation to see sports as show biz. For an entire generation he became a spectacle of booze and broads, a guy who made bachelorhood seem an almost sacred calling, but it was his audacious “guarantee” of victory in Super Bowl III that ensured his legend. This unforgettable portrait brings readers from the gridiron to the go-go nightclubs as Kriegel uncovers the truth behind Broadway Joe and why his legend has meant so much to so many.

Reviews:

"Brilliant ... definitive and hugely entertaining." 

— Chicago Sun-Times

"Elegantly told ... Kriegel has written a remarkable book: a feel-good sports story still abundant with insight and social commentary." —Publishers Weekly, starred

"...a story so taut and true it pulls at your heart." —Richard Ben Cramer, author of Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life

"Mark Kriegel has written an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary American." —Pete Hamill

"Irreverent and highly entertaining." —Los Angeles Times Book Review

About the Author:

 Mark Kriegel is a former sports columnist for the New York Daily News and author of the novel Bless Me, Father. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. A Distant Fabled Land On February 11, 1911, after nineteen days at sea, the RMS Pannonia dropped anchor in New York Harbor. The steamer had accommodations for 40 passengers in first class, 800 in steerage. Immigration officers directed their transfer to ferries, on which they were literally packed and delivered to Ellis Island. Among those bound for the Great Hall was Joe Namath’s paternal grandfather. The ship’s master entered his name in the manifest: Andras Nemet. He was Hungarian, of the Magyar race and the peasant class. He had been born a subject of Franz Josef, emperor of Austria and apostolic king of Hungary, and lived in a place called Raho, a village of several hundred on the Rima River in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Andras Nemet was darkly complected with gray eyes and stood five-five, which, compared with others in the Pannonia’s manifest, was a healthy height for men whose diet did not include much meat. He was thirty-nine, with the equivalent of $34 in his pocket. He swore he was neither a polygamist nor an anarchist. He was not crippled. He was in fine mental and physical condition, save for a common ailment known as Amerika-laz, American fever. Magyar society—emanating from two classes, nobles and serfs—hadn’t changed much through its first millennium, which had been celebrated in 1896. Hungary’s national anthem proclaimed: “Here you must live and here you must die.” Emigrants were denounced in Parliament and the press. American fectris were said to be so dangerous that real Americans wouldn’t even work there—“not even Negroes,” according to the Budapest Notifier. America’s mills and mines represented nothing more than a new kind of servitude. A Magyar folk song warned of perils “in a distant fabled land.” “We have lived and died here for a thousand years, Oh! Why, at your own danger, do you want to leave here now?” America was not to be confused with El Dorado. Mines collapsed. Mill furnaces exploded. Men drowned in a lava of molten steel. Still, one didn’t need theories of probability to understand the lure of the distant fabled land.Why America? More meat, more money. Better odds. Andras Nemet took the bet. Years later, Janos, the third of his four sons, would remember: “My dad came to this country when I was a year or a year and a half old, and I stayed behind. The reason I stayed behind was because my older brother was learning the blacksmith tr...

EAN: 9780143035350

Release Date: 26-07-2005

Languages: English

Item Note: Great shape- pages are unmarked and sharp.Has a remainder mark. Paperback Used - Very Good Ships fast! 2005

Item Condition: UsedVeryGood

Binding: Paperback