Super Bowl I: What's in a name? A look back at the origin — and oddities — of the first game

Kansas City will participate in its seventh Super Bowl next Sunday, an impressive achievement given that this will be only the 59th to be played.

But one of those seven holds a special place in Super Bowl lore, one that never can be erased from the record books: the first one.

Speaking of that, first things first: An enduring myth of the game’s history is that that first game was not called the Super Bowl, but rather the “AFL-NFL Championship Game.”

That technically is true, as an official name. But the term “Super Bowl” already was in wide, informal use by fans and the news media.

Newsday published 52 stories in January 1967 that included the term “Super Bowl.” The New York Times published 25.

(The NFL officially started using “Super Bowl” along with Roman numerals for the Jets’ victory in the big game in 1969. They have not been back since.)

Kansas City was 11-2-1 in the 1966 regular season and blew out the Bills, 31-7, in the AFL Championship Game. (Same opponent, closer score this season.)

But they lost to Vince Lombardi’s NFL champion Packers, 35-10, on Jan. 15, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The cavernous stadium was only two-thirds full even though the game was blacked out on television in the L.A. market and the top ticket price was $12. (That is about $115 in current dollars.)

Green Bay led 14-10 at halftime before scoring 21 points in the second half. Unlikely hero Max McGee caught two touchdown passes from the game’s MVP, Bart Starr.

McGee, then 34, had caught only four passes in the regular season and did not expect to play in the Super Bowl. So he stayed out late the night before the game, breaking curfew. He warned starter Boyd Dowler on Sunday morning that he had a hangover, then saw Dowler go down with a shoulder injury on the Packers’ second drive. McGee somehow finished with seven catches for 138 yards in Dowler’s place.

Newsday’s headline over the game story the next day read: “Packers Efficient, Methodical, Dull.”

The result was a huge relief to Lombardi, who — knowing the entire NFL was expecting him to put the upstart league in its place — had been nervous all week.

After the game, Lombardi told reporters, “That’s a good football team, but it doesn’t compare with the National Football League teams. That’s what you want me to say. I said it.”

Later, he clarified he meant Kansas City did not compare with the NFL’s “top teams.”

Lombardi again defended the NFL’s honor the next January against the Raiders before the Jets broke through with their upset of the Colts in Super Bowl III.

While Super Bowl I itself is not remembered as a classic, some of the elements that surrounded the game are difficult to fathom for fans too young to recall those early days.

For example: The game was televised by both CBS, the NFL’s home network, and NBC, home of the AFL.

That resulted in a huge promotional blitz leading up to the game from both networks to justify the $1 million they were paying the NFL for the privilege — and early complaints about Super Bowl hype.

Newsday TV writer Barbara Delatiner wrote, “If I had heard one more reminder to watch the Super Bowl, I would have thrown something at the set . . . Televiewing these past few weeks has been pure torture.”

But few people have seen the TV coverage of the game since it was shown live.

About 200 did so last February at the Paley Museum in midtown Manhattan for the first public screening of the game since 1967.

The viewing was made possible by Troy Haupt, who owns a 2-inch videotape of CBS’s coverage.

His late father, Martin, recorded the game while working at a television station in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in an era when networks usually taped over old programs rather than preserve them.

The tape was discovered in Martin’s ex-wife’s attic in 2005 — in a canister marked “Super Bowl I,” naturally, not “AFL-NFL Championship Game.”

The tape has not been shown widely after two decades of negotiations with the NFL, which does not own the tape itself but does own the rights to what is on it.

Watching the live coverage reveals just how long ago it was. Instant replay had been around only a few years, so CBS tried to help viewers by labeling replays as “slow motion” or “videotape.”

The mechanics of televising a game of that magnitude were so unpolished that when NBC missed the second-half kickoff coming out of a commercial, the officials simply instructed Green Bay to kick off a second time.

If it beats the Eagles, Kansas City will make history by becoming the first team to win three Super Bowls in a row — and the first to win three NFL championships in a row since the Packers of 1965-67.

But the franchise helped make history even before that first big game was played. Then-Kansas City owner Lamar Hunt was inspired to suggest calling the game the “Super Bowl” when he saw his children playing with a Super Ball as a toy. (Today those children share ownership of the team.)

In the summer of 1966, Hunt wrote to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle proposing a match between the AFL and NFL champs. He wrote, “I have kiddingly called it the ‘Super Bowl,’ which obviously can be improved upon.”

Turned out, it couldn’t be.

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.