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He loved the game, and the game loved him, but warming the bench wasn't Broadway Joe Namath's style. After sitting out most of the last ten games of the Los Angeles Rams' season, the onetime hero of the New York Jets made up his mind: he had thrown his last N.F.L. pass. "It was no fun being second-string quarterback," said Namath, 34. But, he quickly added, "I have no regrets." He spoke briefly of the leg ailments that plagued him throughout his career. "I remember after my first knee operation, right after I signed with the Jets, my doctor told me I'd be lucky to play four seasons." He played 13. In Vince Lombardi's estimation Namath was "an almost perfect passer." In Joe's own words last week, he was "a helluva entertainer." He will take his time to decide on future commitments, but TV commercials, movies and sports reporting are all possibilities. Coaching? Probably not. Says Joe: "It takes up too many hours to do it right."
Hamlet is a "crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless work," complained the novelist. Man and Superman, he wrote to George Bernard Shaw, is not "sufficiently serious." The music of Beethoven, Schumann and Berlioz, he told Tchaikovsky, has "an artificial style—striving for the unexpected." The critic was Count Leo Tolstoy, and these and other remarks appear in two volumes of Tolstoy's Letters (Scribners; $35), the first comprehensive translation into English of the Russian writer's prolific correspondence. In notes to friends and fellow authors like I.S. Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, H.G. Wells and Rainer Maria Rilke, Tolstoy also takes a hard look at his own work. War and Peace, he concedes, is in some parts "long-winded and inaccurate."
On the Record
Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director: "I'm not a writer. I'm just someone who writes plays and scripts for a single purpose —to serve as skeletons awaiting flesh and sinew."
Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General, urging young people to retain their idealism: "If you have to choose between being Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, for heaven's sake, be the Don."
Idi Amin Dada, Uganda's self-appointed President for Life, addressing a crowd of supporters and newsmen: "I wanted to assure you that whatever has been said about violations of so-called human rights doesn't exist here. Since you came, how many people have you found dead?"
Jean Rhys, octogenarian British novelist (Good Morning, Midnight), on living in France: "Paris sort of lifted you up. It did, it did, it did! You know, the light is quite pink, instead of being yellow or blue. I've never seen anything like it anywhere else."
Robert Morley, who advertises British Airways: "Commercials are the last things in life you can count on for a happy ending. The girl with the right hair spray gets the boy—or vice versa."