The Story of How the Super Bowl Came to Be
Today, the Super Bowl is the most-watched event on television, with between 90 and 110 million people tuning in to the “big game” each year. Americans consume 1.45 billion chicken wings—enough to circle the Earth three times—along with 28 million slices of pizza and 325 million gallons of beer on this unofficial holiday. But it wasn’t always this way. Dennis Deninger, author of The Football Game That Changed America, tells the story of how the Super Bowl as we know it rose from nothing.
Transcript
Lee (0:10) …And 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 string of events come to be? Here to tell the story of the origins 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.
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Dennis: 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 12 of them, splitting all of the dollars the league made, and 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 stepsister to the Bears. They didn’t win very many games, and they didn’t make much money. But Wolfner really liked being an NFL owner. He told Hunt, “Listen, Sonny, I’m not going to sell my team to you or to any of the other rich guys who keep trying to buy it.” And he made the mistake of naming names—other wealthy men who had approached him.
On the airplane back to Dallas, a light bulb went off for Lamar Hunt. If all these rich men wanted teams in cities without NFL franchises, why not just start a second league? The AFL arose just two years later. They got a television contract with ABC, started with a 14-game season (the NFL only had 12), and quickly controlled two weekends the NFL did not. By 1966—just six years later—the NFL owners couldn’t take the competition anymore.
Players, especially great players, could now take bids from both leagues, and the prices went up. The tipping point was Joe Namath, who received a $427,000 contract for four years from the New York Jets. The NFL owners didn’t want to keep paying salaries that high. They wanted to go back to the days when they could pay players less than $100,000 a year.
So merger talks began. Tex Schramm, the general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, reached out to Lamar Hunt with the blessing of Commissioner Pete Rozelle. They met discreetly at Love Field airport in Dallas, even sitting in Schramm’s Oldsmobile in the parking lot to sketch out a plan. By June 1966, Rozelle announced the two leagues would merge and that at the end of the upcoming season there would be a world championship game: NFL champion versus AFL champion.
The first Super Bowl wasn’t called the Super Bowl. Rozelle hated the word “super,” dismissing it as an empty 1960s superlative, along with “neat,” “keen,” and “cool.” Officially it was the AFL–NFL World Championship Game. But the media and the public were already calling it the Super Bowl—it was short and catchy—and the name stuck. Rozelle envisioned the Super Bowl as the greatest annual sporting event in America, rivaling the Kentucky Derby and the World Series. To ensure planning and prestige, he wanted it always played in warm-weather cities and set two weeks after the regular season, creating “Super Bowl Week” for publicity.
Tickets to the first game cost $6, $10, and $12, yet it wasn’t a sellout—30,000 seats went empty in the Los Angeles Coliseum. But television made it a success. NBC, which carried AFL games, and CBS, which carried NFL games, both paid $1 million for broadcast rights. The Packers won, and more than 51 million people watched—making it the most-watched sporting event in American history up to that point.
Fast-forward: the most recent Super Bowl halftime was viewed by 133 million people per minute—far surpassing any entertainment show all year. But it wasn’t always like that. Early halftimes were G-rated spectacles with college bands and floats. That changed after 1992, when Fox lured away 25 million viewers with a special In Living Color broadcast during halftime. Alarmed, the NFL booked Michael Jackson for 1993, and from then on, the halftime show became must-see entertainment.
Since 2012, the halftime has been the highest-rated segment of the broadcast, bigger than any other show all year. The Super Bowl now stands apart: the most important advertising day, with an economic impact of around $40 billion annually. It’s the second-largest food consumption day of the year and has become winter’s Fourth of July.
Displays of patriotism abound, and more people watch the Super Bowl than vote in presidential elections. It’s a communal bonding experience like no other—a secular holiday for America.
Lee: [10:37] And the rest, as they say, is history. The story of the Super Bowl. The story of the halftime show. Here on Our American Stories.