How the Super Bowl Came to Be

00:00:10
Lee: Can we continue with Our American Stories? Each year, on Super Bowl Sunday, Americans eat 1.4 billion chicken wings, order 12.5 million pizzas, and drink 325 million gallons of beer. How did this series of events come to be? Here to tell the story of the origin of the Super Bowl is Dennis Deninger, an Emmy Award–winning live sports producer and the author of The Football Game That Changed America: How the NFL Created a National Holiday. Take it away, Dennis.

00:00:49
Guest: Back in 1958, during the booming postwar years, a young man named Lamar Hunt, who was only 26 years old, decided to put an expansion team in Dallas. There was no professional sports team of any kind in the state of Texas, and he had a lot of money. H. L. Hunt was his father, and he was a multibillion-dollar oil tycoon.

So Lamar Hunt went to the NFL, and the answer he got was no. The NFL owners liked the fact that there were twelve of them, and they were splitting all of the dollars the NFL made. They didn’t want to cut the pie into smaller pieces.

The commissioner at the time, Bert Bell, said to young Lamar Hunt, “Listen, if you can get Walter Wolfner, the owner of the Chicago Cardinals, to sell his team, we’ll let you move it to Dallas.” The Chicago Cardinals were the poor stepsister to the Bears. They didn’t win very many games, and they didn’t make a lot of money.

But Walter Wolfner really liked being an NFL owner. He said, “Listen, sonny, I’m not going to sell my team to you or to any of these other rich guys who keep trying to buy my team.” And he made the mistake of naming names—rich people who had visited him.

Lamar Hunt got on the airplane heading back to Dallas, and the way he put it was that a light bulb went off. If there were all these rich guys who wanted to start teams in cities that didn’t have NFL franchises, why not start a second league?

The AFL arose just two years later. They got a television contract with ABC. They started with a 14-game season, while the NFL only had twelve. That meant the AFL controlled two weekends in the fall when the NFL didn’t have games. They had a winning combination.

By 1966, just six years later, the NFL owners couldn’t take the competition anymore—especially the competition for players. Great players could now take bids from both the AFL and the NFL, and prices went up. The tipping point was Joe Namath. He got a $427,000 contract for four years from the New York Jets.

The owners couldn’t keep this up. They said, “We want to go back to the days when we could pay these guys a lot less than $100,000 a year.” So talks about a merger began.

The general manager of the Dallas Cowboys—the team the NFL had started, in part to run Lamar Hunt out of town—reached out to him. Hunt had a team in Dallas for three years, then moved it to Kansas City, where they became the Chiefs, and they’ve been pretty successful there.

Tex Schramm reached out to Lamar Hunt with the blessing of Pete Rozelle, who was then the commissioner. He said, “Don’t tell anybody else. We don’t know where these talks are going to go, so we’re not going to do this as a group of twelve. You just go talk to Lamar Hunt.”

Lamar Hunt was flying back to Dallas Love Field, and Tex Schramm suggested they meet at the airport by the old Texas Rangers statue. Since it was a public place, Schramm said, “Why don’t we go out to my car?”

So the talks about the merger of the AFL and the NFL began in an Oldsmobile in the parking lot of Love Field. They talked for about 45 minutes and sketched out what a merger would look like.

In June of 1966, Pete Rozelle announced that the two leagues would merge. At the end of the upcoming 1966 season, there would be a world championship game—the NFL champion versus the AFL champion.

The first Super Bowl wasn’t actually called the Super Bowl. Pete Rozelle didn’t like the word “super.” This was the era of the 1960s, and he disliked empty superlatives like “super,” “neat,” “keen,” and “cool.” The official name was the AFL–NFL World Championship.

But the media and the public kept calling it the Super Bowl because it was a convenient abbreviation. And that’s how the Super Bowl name stuck.

Rozelle was a man of vision. He saw the Super Bowl as the biggest sporting event of the year, alongside the Kentucky Derby and the World Series. Because it was held in January, he wanted it in warm-weather cities where people could plan well in advance. Unlike baseball’s World Series, you don’t know where that’s going to be until the final teams are decided.

He also wanted more time for promotion. Up to that point, NFL championship games were played just one week after the season ended. Rozelle wanted two weeks, which gave rise to Super Bowl week.

They had very little time to organize the first game. Tickets cost $6, $10, and $12, and it wasn’t a sellout. There were 30,000 empty seats in the Coliseum.

But NBC had carried AFL games and CBS had carried NFL games, and each network paid the league a million dollars to televise the game. Two of the three major networks heavily promoted it.

The Green Bay Packers won, and the first Super Bowl became the most-watched sporting event in American history up to that point. It aired on both networks, and more than 51 million viewers tuned in.

That was a humble beginning, but it grew quickly. In recent years, Super Bowl halftime shows have drawn as many as 133 million viewers per minute—more than any other entertainment program all year.

That wasn’t always the case. Early halftime shows were meant simply to fill the field with college bands, floats, and variety acts. They were very G-rated and middle-of-the-road.

That changed after 1992. Fox had debuted and was trying to attract viewers. They promoted a special episode of In Living Color during Super Bowl halftime, featuring Jamie Foxx. Twenty-five million viewers switched over.

The NFL was alarmed. They decided they needed the biggest act possible for the next year, and in 1993 they booked Michael Jackson. That ended the era of viewers tuning away. Since 2012, halftime has been the highest-rated portion of the broadcast.

Today, the Super Bowl stands apart from every other sporting event. It’s the most important advertising day of the year, with an economic impact of roughly $40 billion annually.

It’s the second-largest food-consumption day of the year and has become winter’s Fourth of July. More people watch the Super Bowl than vote in presidential elections. There’s a sense of communal bonding around it that you don’t get with other holidays.

The Super Bowl has become America’s secular holiday.

00:10:32
Lee: And the rest, as they say, is history—the story of the Super Bowl and the story of the halftime show, here on Our American Stories.