Jaxson Dart was the one. He was the heir. In this 50th year since Broadway Joe Namath took his talents to Los Angeles for the final forgettable chapter of his career, New York has long sought the successor to the character Namath created and no one else had seen fit to copy: the big-city QB1 who liked the bright lights as much as the lights love him.
We’ve had our share of stars walk the quarterback runway. Eli Manning won a pair of titles, but he was football royalty, of a bloodline too regal to regale. Phil Simms won one, probably would’ve won another, but he was a North Jersey family man, at home with the Suburbanites who protected him, raising a couple of his own accomplished quarterbacks.
Ken O’Brien, Vinny Testaverde, Chad Pennington, Jeff Hostetler, Kerry Collins — fine quarterbacks, all of them, plenty of wins among them. But you weren’t going to see any of them on Page Six, let alone Page One. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that Broadway Joe’s template had gone unused for almost half a century. It was rusty and near disrepair.
And then here came Dart: good looks, high charisma, intriguing talent, abundantly fearless. He’d find himself in the news, good or bad, shake it off, move along. It’s difficult to drive more than five minutes in any direction in North Jersey, not see Dart’s smiling face looking back at you from a billboard. He had all of the Broadway building blocks …
