The result and the setting
Green Bay beat Kansas City 35-10 on 15 January 1967 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Packers, coached by Vince Lombardi, were the champions of the National Football League. The Chiefs, coached by Hank Stram, were the champions of the rival American Football League. The Chiefs were respected, but most observers expected Green Bay to win, and the result bore that out in the end.
The game was close for the first half. Green Bay led 14-10 at the interval, and the contest only became lopsided after the break.
Bart Starr, the MVP
The quarterback Bart Starr was named the game’s most valuable player. By the usual figures he completed 16 of 23 passes for 250 yards and two touchdowns, and he threw one interception. Starr was known as a careful, accurate passer who called a disciplined game rather than a flashy one. His best moment came on a third-down throw early in the second half, when the Chiefs were applying pressure with a blitz and Starr found McGee for a gain that kept a drive alive. Accounts often describe the passage as the point at which the game turned.
Kansas City’s quarterback, Len Dawson, also played well in the first half, and the Chiefs kept pace with a touchdown pass and a field goal. The game showed that the AFL champions could compete with the best NFL team for a half, even if they could not for a whole game.
Max McGee’s day
The unlikely star was Max McGee, a Packers receiver in his mid-thirties who had caught few passes that season and was not expected to play a large part. When the starting receiver Boyd Dowler was injured early, McGee came in and caught seven passes for 138 yards and two touchdowns, including the first score of the game. He is reported to have had little sleep the night before, which made the story more popular with later writers, though accounts of his evening vary and are best treated as anecdote.
The second-half turning point
The pivotal sequence came early in the third quarter. Green Bay’s defence put pressure on Dawson, and safety Willie Wood intercepted a pass and returned it deep into Chiefs territory. Elijah Pitts then ran for a touchdown, and Green Bay pulled away from there. Pitts finished with two rushing touchdowns, and the Packers’ lead became clear as the Chiefs’ game plan fell away.
Money and prestige
The winners’ players reportedly received about $15,000 each and the losers about $7,500, figures that were large for the time. For the Packers there was also the question of reputation, as Lombardi’s team was expected to defend the honour of the older league. For the Chiefs the loss was less a verdict than an unfinished argument, and the AFL’s case was made later, notably in Super Bowl III in January 1969.
Halftime and the broadcast
The halftime show was a modest affair by later standards. It featured marching bands, the trumpeter Al Hirt and, reportedly, a demonstration involving jet-pack flyers, with none of the large-scale staging that later became a trademark of the event.
The game was shown by two networks at once. CBS, which had the NFL contract, and NBC, which broadcast AFL games, each carried the game with their own commentators. The Coliseum, which could seat many more people, was not full, with sizeable sections of empty seats, which was a sign that the event had not yet become a cultural fixture. For many years no complete recording of the broadcast was widely believed to survive, since tapes were commonly reused.
What it meant
The game did not settle the argument between the two leagues, and no one at the time treated it as the start of a tradition. Green Bay returned a year later: after beating Dallas in the Ice Bowl on 31 December 1967, the Packers won Super Bowl II as well. The image of the event as a national occasion grew over the following seasons.
Looking at the Packers’ win now, it is easy to treat it as part of a history already in view. At the time it was one game, played on a Sunday afternoon in California, with many empty seats.