Super Bowl I: Packers Launch a New Sports Era

Tickets cost twelve dollars, and a third of the seats went unsold. The first Super Bowl, played on January 15, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, was so far from the cultural juggernaut it would become that NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle refused to call it by that name. The official title was the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game," and the stadium's 61,946 attendees filled barely two-thirds of its 100,000-seat capacity. The game was the product of a bitter merger between the established National Football League and the upstart American Football League, which had been raiding each other's talent for seven years. AFL owner Lamar Hunt of the Kansas City Chiefs reportedly coined the name "Super Bowl" after watching his children play with a Super Ball bouncy toy. Rozelle considered the name undignified, but sportswriters and fans adopted it immediately, and the NFL eventually conceded. Both CBS and NBC broadcast the game simultaneously, an unprecedented arrangement required by their separate television contracts with the two leagues. The dual broadcast would never be repeated. NBC's halftime cameras were slow to return from a commercial break, causing the second half kickoff to be replayed, another incident without precedent or repetition. The Green Bay Packers, led by quarterback Bart Starr and coached by Vince Lombardi, entered as heavy favorites and validated the NFL's claim to superiority. The Chiefs kept the game competitive through the first half, trailing just 14-10, before Green Bay pulled away in the third quarter. Starr completed 16 of 23 passes for 250 yards and two touchdowns, earning the first Super Bowl MVP award. The final score was 35-10. No recording of the complete game broadcast is known to survive. Both networks erased or taped over the footage, a standard practice at the time for events not expected to have lasting value. The championship trophy was later renamed in Lombardi's honor after his death from cancer in 1970. What started as a half-empty stadium and a naming dispute has grown into the most-watched annual television event in the United States, drawing more than 100 million viewers and commanding $7 million for a thirty-second advertisement.