The first American Football League-National Football League Championship Game was played on Jan. 15, 1967. It was the only “Super Bowl” game to be telecast by two television networks, to use two different footballs, to have two kickoffs for the second half, and to fail to sell out. Tickets at $15, $12 and $10 were thought to be overpriced. Show For a while, no one knew exactly what the new game was all about—especially with two Midwestern teams, the Kansas City Chiefs and Green Bay Packers, in it. Prior to that first game, those two teams had never played against each other, and no NFL team had ever played against an AFL team. When the two leagues merged in June 1966, one of the provisions of the merger was the creation of a championship game. Now the only problem was what to call it. In 1960, at an NFL owner’s meeting, deliberations had dragged on and on to select a new National Football League Commissioner to replace Bert Bell, who had passed away. Young Pete Rozelle hung out in a Miami hotel men’s room for a couple of hours and adjusted his tie, looked away, or washed his hands whenever anyone entered. He later guessed that he had washed his hands 35 times while waiting around. Then he got the news—at 33 he was the new NFL Commissioner. Flash forward to 1966 and the upcoming championship game. One of Rozelle’s suggestions for the name of the new game was “The Big One.” That name never caught on. “Pro Bowl,” was another Rozelle idea. Had the name been adopted, there would have been confusion, for that was the name used for the NFL’s All Star game. “World Series of Football” died quickly, deemed too imitative of baseball’s Fall Classic. Finally, it was Rozelle’s idea to call the game “The AFL-NFL World Championship Game.” That name was official, but it never took off. It was too cumbersome, a mouthful, no good for newspaper headlines. It was Lamar Hunt, the main founder of the American Football League and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, who came up on the term “Super Bowl.” As his son, Lamar Hunt Jr., explained, the idea came from his “Super Ball” toy.
On Jan. 15, two very different kinds of coaches and men faced off on the playing field. Vince Lombardi out of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, once an altar boy at his local parish, had never held a head coaching position beyond the high school level when he showed up on Feb. 2, 1959 as a tough-talking and determined 45-year-old for a meeting with the Green Bay Packer Executive Committee. They were interviewing him for the head coaching job. He wound up hired as head coach and general manager. Lombardi was fond of exhorting his players to do nutcracker drills. Blood flowed freely. The Packers worked out with cracked ribs, broken bones and torn cartilage. Dehydrated players were sometimes sent off to the hospital. The Packer locker room at Lambeau Field featured a large sign that read:
Hank Stram of the Chiefs had all kinds of rituals and beliefs. He paid a great deal of attention to detail like having Dial yellow soap in the showers, thinking it reduced infections, like practicing over and over again the right way for a punter to give up a safety in his own end zone, like how his team ran out on the field to warm up, like replacing every shoe lace in every shoe prior to every game. Both Stram and Lombardi were very religious and had one or more priests traveling with them and on the sidelines during games. Both coaches quoted scriptures. The Chiefs under Stram and the Packers under Lombardi had no quotas of any kind, and they did much for diversity in pro football. It was estimated that there were more African-American athletes on the field that first Super Bowl day than at any other time in the previous history of a sport in which no franchise had selected an African-American player in the draft until 1949, 10 years after the start of the draft. The Packers defeated the Chiefs, 35-10. All Commissioner Pete Rozelle had wished for was that the first AFL-NFL Championship game would one day surpass baseball’s World Series. It would do much more than that. That mythic game has become the grandest, grossest, gaudiest annual one-day spectacle in the annals of American sports and culture. TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
Imagine if instead of playing the Super Bowl to conclude each NFL season, they played something called the "Merger Bowl," "The Game" or the uncreative "AFL-NFL Championship Game." Would the global phenomenon that is the Super Bowl have become what it is today? There's no way to answer that, of course, unless someone out there has time travel and can go back to determine those alternate realities. Almost since the very beginning after the AFL and NFL merged in the 1960s, the NFL championship game has been known as the "Super Bowl." The NFL itself held out for a couple years, but the league gave in by the third edition and hasn't wavered in its naming ever since. Something that feels so consequential and mighty now — say it to yourself in a slow voice with gravitas, the Super Bowl — doesn't have some crazy origin story. There wasn't any sort of fancy naming vote or nationwide poll. It was almost only by the power of suggestion that the Super Bowl name got started. MORE SUPER BOWL: Halftime show | Ticket prices | Commercials Why is it called the Super Bowl?When the AFL and NFL merged, that meant they'd have a championship game between the two previously separate leagues. The first was slated for January 1967. At first, it was known just as the AFL-NFL Championship Game. Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt is regarded as the first who began using the term Super Bowl. It's got two pretty simples halves to its origin. The "bowl" part was already a popularly game nomenclature at the time for college football, with events like the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl already around for many years. Hunt said later that at the time, he likely got "super" because his kids were playing with a new toy, the Super Ball. Hunt wrote a letter to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle in 1966, saying, "I have kiddingly called it the 'Super Bowl,' which obviously can be improved upon." The Kansas City Star newspaper quoted Hunt's term of "Super Bowl" shortly thereafter, and other media began following suit. The NFL didn't jump all over it, considering alternatives such as the "Merger Bowl" and simply "The Game," but apparently no one liked those, either. By the third Super Bowl, the NFL officially referred to it by that name, and it retroactively marked down the first two AFL-NFL Championship Games, both won by the Packers, as Super Bowls 1 and 2. When did the Super Bowl start?Retroactively, the first Super Bowl was played on Jan. 15, 1967. But that game, and the edition that followed in 1968, wasn't officially known as a "Super Bowl." The first two championship games between the AFL and NFL champions were simply known as the "AFL-NFL Championship Game." But Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt had begun using the term "Super Bowl," and the media caught wind of it and started to write it, too. Super Bowl gained enough popularity that by January 1969, the NFL officially called its title game the "Super Bowl." So as it was happening, Joe Namath and the New York Jets pulled an upset in the "first" Super Bowl, although the league retroactively called the Packers' titles the two prior years the first two Super Bowls. Did the Super Bowl have other names?The Super Bowl was known as the AFL-NFL Championship Game for its first two iterations, in 1967 and 1968. The NFL only began referring to it as the Super Bowl officially in 1969 for what is known retroactively as Super Bowl 3. Since switching to the Super Bowl name, the NFL has stuck with it for more than 50 years. It's obviously hugely popular now and would be near-impossible to change without totally baffling the public. Before the Super Bowl name had fully caught on, the NFL also considered names like the "Merger Bowl" (referring to the AFL and NFL's merger) and the simple name of "The Game." Maybe "The Game" would've grown in popularity just like "Super Bowl," but it's probably best that the league didn't go with "Merger Bowl." Super Bowl winners by year
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