It has become an American national holiday.
On the Sunday when the Super Bowl is played, the country stops. Families
and friends collect around televisions armed with beer, brats, bravado
and Buffalo wings to experience the ultimate water-cooler event.
As evidenced by the 2011 game on February 6, 2011, when the Green
Bay Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25 to win Super Bowl XLV,
the game is bigger than the sport itself.
On television, nothing eclipses the power of the Super Bowl. An
estimated television audience of 111 million tuned into that game, making
it the most watched program in history.
Pete Roselle presenting the first NFL - AFL World Championship
Trophy to Vince Lombardi - January 15, 1967
"If Jesus Christ were alive today," minister Norman Vincent Peale
allegedly once said, "he'd be (watching) the Super Bowl."
So how did this game come to be called the Super Bowl? The legend
began auspiciously in 1959 when Lamar Hunt was instrumental in forming a
competitive football league to the long-existing NFL.
On the strength of his great inherited oil wealth, Hunt applied for
an NFL expansion franchise in 1959, but was turned down. The thinking
among NFL executives was that the league must be careful not to
oversaturate the market by expanding too quickly. Hunt also attempted to
purchase the NFL's Chicago Cardinals franchise in 1959 with the intent to
move them to Dallas, but was again turned down.
In response, Hunt approached several other businessmen who had also
unsuccessfully sought NFL franchises, including fellow Texan and oil man
K.S. Bud Adams of Houston, about forming a new football league. The
American Football League (AFL) was established in August 1959. The league
began play on September 9, 1960, with eight teams - the Boston Patriots,
Buffalo Bills, Dallas Texans, Denver Broncos, Houston Oilers, Los Angeles
Chargers, New York Titans and Oakland Raiders.
Hunt became owner of the Dallas Texans and hired future Hall-of-
Famer, Hank Stram, as the team's first head coach. By 1963, the Texans
struggled to compete for attendance and interest against the popular
Dallas Cowboys, so Hunt re-located the club to Kansas City and the Chiefs
were born.
Reggie White achieved his Super Bowl dream, and we all rejoiced
with him.
In the meantime, the AFL's credibility was on the rise. Since the
NFL's inception in 1920, the league fended off several rival leagues
before the AFL began play in 1960. The intense competition for players
and fans led to serious merger talks between the two leagues beginning in
1966.
From those talks, the idea of an NFL-AFL Championship Game was born
but not given an official nickname.
The origin of the Super Bowl name may have had a subconscious
lineage back to college.
In 1902, the Tournament of Roses committee decided to enhance the
day's parade festivities by adding a football game - the first post
season college-football game ever held. Stanford accepted the invitation
to take on the powerhouse University of Michigan, but the West Coast team
was flattened 49-0. The lopsided score prompted the Tournament to give up
football in favor of Roman-style chariot races, according to the
Tournament of Roses website. In 1916, football returned to stay and the
crowds soon outgrew the stands in tiny Tournament Park. William L.
Leishman, the Tournament's President in 1920, envisioned a stadium
similar to the Yale Bowl, the first great modern football stadium, to be
built in Pasadena's Arroyo Seco area. The new stadium hosted its first
New Year's football game in 1923 and soon earned the nickname "The Rose
Bowl" in honor of the Rose Parade and the fact the new venue was
literally shaped like a bowl that sat over 100,000 revelers.
Exploiting the popularity of the Rose Bowl stadium and the college
championship game of the same name, the Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl
football games were created in 1935, followed by the Cotton Bowl in 1937.
"Bowl" thus became a standard term and other "bowl games" were created in
later years.
So, when the established NFL began to merge with the upstart AFL in
1966, football fans finally got their wish - a showdown between the two
league champions, billed as the "NFL-AFL World Championship Game."
In the book, The Super Bowl: An Official Retrospective, Lamar Hunt
recounts the origin of the name he concocted. "There were three super
balls given by my wife to our three children at that time, Lamar Jr.,
Sharon and Clark. It was a highly concentrated rubber ball manufactured
by the Wham-O company. You could bounce it off concrete and it would
literally bounce over a house. The kids were always talking about these
super balls. I think that's how the name came about.
"In the fall of 1966, in one of our joint committee meetings
between the AFL and NFL, we were talking about where we were going to
have this championship game. One of the people said, 'Which game are you
talking about?' I said, 'Well, you know, the last game after the last
game. The final game. The championship game. The Super Bowl.' The members
of the committee - three of us from the AFL and three from the NFL and
(commissioner) Pete Rozelle - looked at me, and we all kind of smiled.
Thereafter, the committee began to refer to the game as the Super Bowl.
It was three or four years before the league officially adopted that
name, but the media and public seized on it. Especially when CBS and NBC
promoted that first game as Super Sunday."
Later that summer, Hunt sent a memo to Commissioner Rozelle
suggesting that the merged leagues should finally coin a proper phrase
for their new championship game. "I have kiddingly called it the Super
Bowl," Hunt wrote, "which obviously can be improved upon."
Rozelle agreed. The commissioner despised the word "super" because
it lacked sophistication. Rozelle, with his background in journalism and
public relations, was a stickler on words and grammar. The game, for now,
would continue to be called the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game."
That bulky title didn't last. People caught wind of Hunt's name and
soon everyone, from media members to players, were calling the title game
the Super Bowl. By the end of 1966, network executives were referring to
the day of the first game as "Super Sunday." After Hunt's Kansas City
Chiefs defeated the Buffalo Bills in the AFL Championship Game, the next
day's Kansas City Star headline declared that the Chiefs were "Super Bowl
Bound." In Los Angeles, on the morning of Jan. 15, 1967, an NFL Films
crew member could be heard giving a sound cue - "Super Bowl, reel one" -
before shooting the first pre-game footage at the Los Angeles Memorial
Coliseum.
The first two NFL-AFL Championship games were anything but "super"
as the NFL's 1960s powerhouse Green Bay Packers demolished their AFL
counterparts both times (35-10 over the Chiefs in January, 1967, and 33-
14 over Oakland in 1968). At the time, some doubted the competitiveness
of AFL teams compared with NFL counterparts.
Even Coach Vince Lombardi famously told his players before the
meeting against Oakland that, "You damn well better not let that Mickey
Mouse (American Football) league beat you. It'd be a disgrace, a
complete, utter disgrace."
But that perception changed when the AFL's New York Jets defeated
the Baltimore Colts 16-7 in the third such championship game in January,
1969.
The merger between the leagues became official after the 1969
season and beginning with the 1970 season, the American Football
Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC) were formed with
each conference's winner meeting in what was now officially called the
Super Bowl.
Yet few fans noticed as they'd been calling the big game the Super
Bowl since the first one was played.
Share your historic moments in Green Bay
Packers' history and submit a memory that we can post on the Packer's
Hall of Fame Digital Archive. http://packershalloffame.com.
Keeping Packers History Alive.
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