The Upshot

HISTORYSOURCE

Before the Bowl Was Super

JAN. 24, 2015

Coach Vince Lombardi after his Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10, on Jan. 15, 1967, in the inaugural edition of the game that became known as the Super Bowl. About a third of the seats were unfilled.CreditBettmann/Corbis

Michael Beschloss

The past week wasn’t the first time N.F.L. officials and fans argued about the size and shape of a football.

Before the first Super Bowl, on Jan. 15, 1967, the two teams — the N.F.L.’s Green Bay Packers and the American Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs— struggled over what kind of ball to use.

The A.F.L.’s football (manufactured by Spalding) was a quarter-inch longer, slightly narrower and more tacky on its surface than the N.F.L.’s ball (made by Wilson). The A.F.L.’s ball was said to be easier to pass, the N.F.L.’s more kickable. As a compromise, each team was authorized to use its own football while on offense.

This didn’t become much of a controversy because, by modern standards, Super Bowl I (as it is now called) was modest and quaint. Compared with the quasi-religious national spectacle that more than a hundred million Americans will watch next Sunday, the 1967 confrontation looked almost like a high school scrimmage. This should not be surprising: The Super Bowl tradition in the United States was begun, relatively speaking, as a last-minute afterthought.

In 1960, the 40-year-old N.F.L. was challenged by a new league, the A.F.L., which it tried to ignore in the way a golden retriever might deal with a yipping terrier. But the two leagues, in time, discarded their unwritten understanding not to raid each other’s teams, which resulted in expensive bidding wars.

To stop the chaos, the A.F.L. and the N.F.L. signed a deal in June 1966 that called for them to join forces by the end of the decade. They made plans to have their champion teams face each other after the 1966 season, but only that December did they choose a date and a location: the next month at the 93,000-seat Los Angeles Coliseum.

“We’re the kids from across the tracks,” Jerry Mays, the Chiefs’ defensive captain, said. “We’re coming over to play the rich kids.”

The showdown was officially called the First A.F.L.-N.F.L. World Championship Game. But after watching his children enjoying Wham-O’s bouncy new Super Ball, the A.F.L.’s founder, Lamar Hunt, son of the maverick Dallas oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, told N.F.L. Commissioner Pete Rozelle that the game should be called something like the Super Bowl, although he was sure that name could be improved. The name was quickly adopted by other owners and much of the news media.

Both leagues had binding television contracts, so the first Super Bowl was televised on both CBS (with the announcers Jack Whitaker, Ray Scott, Frank Gifford and Pat Summerall) and NBC (with Curt Gowdy, Paul Christman and Charlie Jones). No other Super Bowl has been carried by more than one TV network.

NBC and CBS each paid $1 million for the privilege, selling commercials for $70,000 to $85,000 per minute; they hawked 10-cent Muriel cigars and McDonald’s hamburgers (“Over Two Billion Sold”). CBS tried to draw viewers by preceding its Super Bowl coverage with an exhibition by the Harlem Globetrotters.

An estimated 50 million to 60 million Americans watched that first game, foreshadowing the Super Bowl’s commanding place in modern American life, which drove Norman Vincent Peale, the minister and author, to say in 1974, “If Jesus Christ were alive today, he’d be at the Super Bowl.”

The live broadcast of the 1967 game was blacked out on TV stations within 75 miles of Los Angeles, but this did not significantly help ticket sales (the formal price for the most expensive seat was $12). Some local football fans were so furious about the blackout that they deliberately stayed away. Despite Rozelle’s prediction that the Super Bowl would sell out, about a third of the Coliseum’s seats were empty.

The first Super Bowl did not exactly show the incandescence of later halftimes that featured Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones. Fans were entertained instead by the trumpeter Al Hirt, the University of Arizona and Grambling College marching bands, 300 pigeons, 10,000 balloons and a flying demonstration by the hydrogen-peroxide-propelled Bell Rocket Air Men.

The focus of the game was the Packers’ renowned Brooklyn-born coach, Vince Lombardi, who conceded to the news media that the Super Bowl would be “a big football game” but contended — not very convincingly — that losing “won’t mean the end of the world.”

Behind the scenes, the usually nerveless Lombardi, who had led the Packers to three championships in five previous seasons, was chafing under the pressure he felt to demonstrate the N.F.L.’s superiority over the A.F.L. upstarts.

Lombardi’s standout quarterback, Bart Starr, said the “main problem” was that his team had never faced the Chiefs; thus there was “no basis for true comparison.” Starr felt that Lombardi “wanted to win this game very, very badly, and treated it like a personal mission.”

According to the Lombardi biographer David Maraniss, the anxious coach knotted his necktie so tautly that morning that he later had to snip it off. Interviewing Lombardi before the game, Gifford was startled to note that he was “shaking like a leaf.”

By the end of the first half, the Packers led, 14-10, but the underdog Chiefs, coached by Hank Stram, had prevailed in total yards, 181-164.

During halftime, in the Packers’ constricted Coliseum locker room, Lombardi told his men they were “too tight.” By Maraniss’s account, linebacker Ray Nitschke asked some of his teammates, under his breath, “Who the hell does he think got us so nervous in the first place?” Lombardi’s order was to “stop grabbing and start tackling.”

After the Packers won, 35-10, William N. Wallace reported in The New York Times that Lombardi was “hiding from well-wishers, as is his habit, because he cannot abide flattery.”

In his relief over the victory, Lombardi told reporters, “In my opinion, the Chiefs don’t rate with the top teams in the N.F.L.” Lombardi added, “They’re a good football team, with fine speed, but I’d have to say N.F.L. football is tougher.”

Asked to design the Packers’ 1967 Super Bowl ring, Lombardi had it emblazoned with the words “Love” and “Character.” Three years later, he died at 57 of cancer, but his name remains entwined with the history of the annual confrontation that his team was the first to win. Next weekend, when the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots meet in Super Bowl XLIX — with a standardized ball, presumably properly inflated — the victors will receive the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

Correction: January 24, 2015

An earlier version of this article misidentified the broadcast network that featured the Harlem Globetrotters as part of pregame programming for the first Super Bowl, in 1967. It was CBS, not NBC.