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About 5,000 miles away from Miami, Joe’s brother Sonny Namath sat at his kitchen table in the married quarters of Sullivan Barracks in Mannheim, Germany. Sipping a cup of coffee, he looked over the headlines in the Army Times. When he saw his own last name he read more closely. Something about the Alabama quarterback signing a big professional contract. That would be his little brother Joey, he thought. As he read, he made a face. “Oh, Christ, they made a mistake there.”
“What’s the matter, Sonny?” his wife, also a lifer in the Army, asked when she saw the look on his face.
He answered that “the stupid paper” never got anything right. She knew all about the Army Times’s problems. It seldom got even the most mundane facts completely correct. Even items such as the ranks of Army officers inevitably got screwed up by the paper. “What’d they do this time? Make [General] Mark Clark a private?” she asked.
“No, they got a story about Joey signing a contract with the Jets. Got one too many zeros, though. Says here he got four hundred thousand!”
“Think they’d have caught something like that.”
“Four hundred thousand. Ain’t nobody in this world worth four hundred thousand dollars! Christ almighty, this stupid paper. You ever heard anything so silly?”
Reflecting on the amount, Sonny added, “They must have meant forty thousand. Jesus, he’s really doing great. Joey got forty thousand dollars to play football! Did you ever hear anything so crazy? Forty thousand dollars to play football?!”
“Your little brother made the right decision, I guess.”
“Good for Joe.” Sonny drank his coffee and let the number sink in—the forty, not four hundred, thousand. “That’s an awful lot of money just to play a game. Unbelievable. He’s really doing great. Good for Joe. Good for Joey.”
