If you are a football fan who enjoyed following Joe Namath's career but didn't have access to the New York media, this book will be fun for you. It will fill in many gaps about his family and youth, his various mobster associations, and how all of those amazing contracts and spokesperson deals were developed. It's a fairly typical celebrity portrait.

The best parts of the book come in where the author captures the psychology that Joe Namath often used on his football opponents and his adversaries in other parts of his life. You get a hefty dose of the hustling part of his ethic from this material. It's written in a gritty way that makes it appealing. You'll feel the emotions that he was trying to inspire as you read these stories -- particularly in regard to Super Bowl III.

The book has two important flaws. First, Mr. Kriegel likes to simplify his story a little too much. The story line is that Joe was crushed by a dysfunctional family, and couldn't live in peace until he had a family of his own where he could dote on his daughters. Now he is saved. People are a little more complicated than that. Mr. Namath was a compulsive womanizer and alcoholic for decades, and still seems to have moments where he falls off the wagon (as occurred on national television recently as he asked his interviewer for a kiss). Second, the book doesn't have enough football in it . . . but has way too much about drinking, carousing and womanizing. The over emphasis on the bad habits gets to be more than a little repetitive. This book could have cut out 150 pages and been a much better read.

The football analysis is almost nonexistent. For example, Broadway Joe threw a lot of interceptions. There's almost no discussion of the causes of that result. You just get a repetition of how much pain he was in, how bad his injuries were, and how he took responsibility with the media for the interceptions.

As I read the book, I imagined how one could write a comparable biography about Madonna and how she has reinvented herself to continue to be a celebrity. That's the overall tone of the book.

Mr. Kriegel is probably overly supportive of Joe Namath in the book. That's what makes this a fan's book. I think the book would have been better, however, if the focus had been less sympathetic and more like reporting and analysis.

Stand for what's right!