Joe and the Jets

LET US SAY that we, looking up at the Sony from our paperbacks and pills, are warmed by the victory of our cat-quick, long-sideburned, free-thinking team from the city over the cold, blank rednecks from the South in a game which we have been made to feel is more theirs than ours.

And if this was the effort of the Northeast--with its cooled sensibility, its foxy indifference--then it couldn't do without the representatives of our little group. There was John Dockery, Harvard '66, who plays position R2 on the kickoff team, a compassionate former Red Sox who studies city planning at Columbia when most footballers would be celebrating their victories--how different from the passionless fullback from Yale who Super Bowled for those tired titans of old football, the Packers. And Babe Parilli, the ageless place-kick holder and former Boston Patriot quarterback whose sensitive hands can now spot a ball (and spin the laces to the front!) three-eights of a second faster than anyone else in the world.

Our team had Johnny Sample, the often racked, tumbled, and tripped cornerback whose free use of speech unknowlingly taunted a whole team of frustrated men who had been made to believe that as hulking football players they must lack verbal ability.

And finally we're gleaming because of Joe Namath, the embodiment of Free Will, who triumphed over legions of such slicked-back Colts fans as Bob Hope and Ted Agnew. Namath--who grew a big moustache he liked, who could shave it off for $10,000 from Schick razor, who went to Alabama because that's where he'd get the best deal, who says what he likes about teams he's about to play, who punches out sports writers he doesn't like, who is proud of the league he plays in and the team he's captain of, and who doesn't really care about anything other than himself and the rationality of his own existence.