"You learn you can do your best even when it's hard, even when you're tired and maybe hurting a little bit," he said. "It feels good to show some courage."
He played with pain in the Orange Bowl that year and despite the fact that Alabama lost, 23-17, to Texas he impressed everyone watching the game, including the owner of the American Football League's New York Jets.
The Jets signed him to a three-year, $427,000 contract -- the largest in football history -- and from there, he made NFL history.
"AT THE TIME, I WAS only interested in going to work. I really wasn't interested in location. ... Bear Bryant gave me some information and some help on the importance of getting to know and feeling good with the people I was going to work for. Well, after I got to know Weeb Ewbank, it was a pretty easy decision. Weeb had Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts in the NFL, and he had already won a championship and that was my goal to begin with, to make the team go to the championship."
Ewebank brought him along slow, ever mindful of that nagging pain in the kid's knee.
He did OK in his rookie year -- the Jets finished second in their division -- but in his sophomore pro year, he showed what he had on the field and became without a doubt one of the best quarterbacks in the game.
His career culminated in his "called" victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in 1968 when he guaranteed -- in a bar room prediction a few days before -- that the AFL would triumph. He was not lying. He completed 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards and became the game's MVP.
And that is just another reason that Broadway Joe Namath is now in the Hall of Fame.
By the way, he retired at the end of the 1977 after he had been picked up as a free agent by the Rams, played a few roles in some films and even posed in pantyhose. In 1985, he was immortalized with the Hall induction.
And today? When he talks about football, people still listen. Even if he's still bragging a little, too.
"I could throw better than both (Drew) Bledsoe and Brett Favre," he said a few days before Super Bowl XXXI. And you know, he just may be right.