Nothing Like Namath's Guarantee

Otherwise, some of the most famous words in sports -- words that would in some ways launch a new era of bravado -- went almost unreported until the game itself, when announcer Curt Gowdy said something about it on NBC. It wasn't until afterward when Namath proved right and ran off the Orange Bowl field signaling No. 1 with his finger that everyone realized how great a story it really was.

Now it has become the foundation for a sports cliche.

Inside the Comfort Inn and Suites, Jose Roncal, the bell captain, stood next to Delgado. "You can't predict something," he said. "It's like when a hurricane comes. They say it may go here, it may go there. No one knows."

Delgado shook his head.

"That's what makes the game fun," he said. "The guy talking is probably going to go out into the game and get whacked."

Which in the end is what guarantees have become, silly pregame banter that find their way onto television and spin out of control on talk radio. Whatever mystery Namath's words had, trickling slowly over the following days from a banquet hall, would have been lost the moment they became an intro on "SportsCenter." There was a magic in that moment that can't be replicated. He said it first, then it happened. And no victory, no matter how thrilling, can ever be as perfect as that one.

"It wasn't a contrived moment," Kriegel said.

From Boston, where he runs the Northeastern University Center for Sport in Society, Peter Roby chuckled into the phone. He has watched many players make silly guarantees over the years, always amused when their pictures come up on the television and their names dominate a week's worth of news cycles.

"I think they're starving for attention," he said. "They're trying to get their careers started in the media."

But in the smoky room of the Playhouse, before a rapt audience watching sports change before its eyes, Joe Namath was doing something else entirely.

He was just trying to think of a new way to win a football game.