These two guys from Long Island saw the Jets in Super Bowl III. Now they're ready to meet the Jets in Las Vegas and Super Bowl LVIII.
Ron Kuznetz, 77, at his home in Plainview, chatting over the computer with his best friend, Barry Aaronson, 76, from his home in Lantana, Fla. The two were at Super Bowl III and have vowed to attend Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas if the Jets get there again. Credit: Ron Kuznetz
As the Jets embark on the 2023 season with what feels like limitless possibilities, Newsday will be following along with occasion check-ins with two Long Islanders who were at Super Bowl III and have vowed to be there in Las Vegas if the Jets are in Super Bowl LVIII in February. We’ll measure their confidence, chronicle their emotions, and, who knows, maybe even see them in Vegas.
One of the few bad memories Ron Kuznetz has about his trip to Miami to see the Jets beat the Colts in Super Bowl III in 1969 was the bus ride from New York. It took about a day and a half for him to get there from his home in Plainview.
“Listen, if I wanted to go down to Florida today I’d just hop on a plane,” the now 77-year-old said. “I was a kid, I couldn’t just hop on a plane then.”
What he had been able to do, though, was get his hands on tickets to the big game. Those came from a season ticket holder – the boyfriend of the sister of the girl he was dating – who couldn’t use them. So he called up his childhood friend Barry Aaronoff, a student at the University of Miami, and asked is he wanted to go with him in exchange for crashing on the couch in his off-campus apartment.
The deal was made.
“We were just two kids from New York who got free tickets,” Kuznetz said. “We didn’t expect anything. But as we were watching the game it was like our mouths were dropping. The game was never close. The Jets dominated.”
“Ronnie and I were convinced they would win,” Aaronoff added. “Not because [Namath] made that pledge, but because we thought they were the better team. And they were the better team.”
The Jets won. Kuznetz hopped back on the bus to return to New York. Another awful trip, but at least he had the smile of the victory to keep him company on the way home.
Little did he know that getting to another Super Bowl would wind up being even more arduous than the bus to Florida. For 54 years, Kuznetz has been waiting for the Jets to go back so he and Aaronoff could return with them and witness another possible championship for their favorite football team. Along the way there have been a lot of detours, flat tires, busted radiators, construction, congestion and just about everything else that could prevent them from making that second Super Bowl journey.
This year, though, they think the Jets have a chance. And they think they have a chance, too.
The two men have promised that if the Jets are playing in Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas in February, they will be there, too.
Even though Aaronoff, 76, and his wife Patty, both of whom were international teachers, will be in Cambodia in the middle of a four-month visit with their son, who lives there, he’s already explained what might happen.
“If the Jets are in the Super Bowl, I’m going,” he said a few days before the Jets opened the 2023 season against the Bills. “I’m going with Ronnie.”
“How many people are still around who were at that game?” Kuznetz wondered aloud. “It was so long ago, most of them are dead I would think. But we’re hanging on pretty good right now thank God. We’d have to go. We wouldn’t take a bus but we would have to go. Somehow we’d have to go.”
They’ve already started scoping out flights and ticket prices.
But they are Jets fans, so they are not making any promises or payments on them just yet. The Jets still have to hold up their end of the bargain.
“I find that less probable than me holding up my end,” Aaronoff chuckled.
Fifty-four years of rooting for them has created some thick scar tissue.
“It’s very frustrating,” Kuznetz said. “They’ve disappointed over and over and over again.”
Both men, though, feel good about this Jets team.
“I can only be confident in the Jets if they stay healthy,” Kuznetz said. “I’m hoping the in-game management will be better than it was last year, the clock management and the adjustments that they make. I think the best coaches in the league are the guys who can adjust to what is going on in the game and I’m not sure that’s what was happening last year… The Jets coaches have to prove that. They’re on the right track but they have to prove it.”
Aaronoff agreed that the Jets have a very strong roster.
“They have some good players,” he said. “Big names. I am very optimistic. They don’t have Emerson Boozer, but they can probably get around it.”
The memories they have from Super Bowl III have never left them.
Their seats were 10 rows up from the field at about the 20-yard-line at the Orange Bowl. There are some old photographs from the game that Kuznetz has found where he can circle himself sitting in the stands in the background (“Three rows up and two seats to the right of Emerson Boozer’s helmet,” he says as he points to the blur that was him in one of them).
Kuznetz recalls a few guys coming up to them in their seats before the game and offering them money to swap with theirs upper deck. They didn’t.
“I was given both tickets for free with one condition: That we would actually use them and go to the game, not sell or make any money from them,” he said.
They recall some heavy betting action going on in the seats behind them. Two groups of fans, one from New York and one from Baltimore, were wagering up to $1,000 on which team would score first, whether the Jets would beat the huge point spread against them, and other in-game action.
“The New York guys cleaned up,” Kuznetz said.
And of course they remember Joe Namath and his guarantee for a victory that had become the talk of the town in the days leading up to the game.
“We were all starstruck with Namath,” Aaronoff said. “He couldn’t have picked a better place to show off his bathing suit playboy image than in Miami Beach, so he was on TV and in the papers all the time, holding court as only Joe could have.”
What they don’t remember is understanding the historical significance of the moment, grasping that the fabric of professional football had changed.
“It was more like ‘Holy crap, what did we just see?’” Kuznetz said. “If you were from New York it was great. If you were from Baltimore it was a shock, and I think it was a shock to the whole NFL. But a sense of the history of it? Not as much as I should have because I would have saved all of the [ticket stubs and programs]. I was a 22-year-old kid, what the hell did I know? All I cared about was having fun.”
That part of the mission was accomplished.
Now, the long-awaited encore could be coming. And the two boys from Plainview, now in their late 70s but still best friends, are excited about the possibilities. It might just bring them back to the Super Bowl along with their favorite team.
“It would be great to see the Jets do something,” Kuznetz said.
Even better, added Aaronoff, “It would be a great event to share with my friend Ronnie.”
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
