A game that did not yet have its name
On Sunday, January 15, 1967, the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League played the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Officially it was the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. The name “Super Bowl” was already in informal use, and is usually credited to Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, who reportedly borrowed it from a toy. It was only later that the league adopted it and attached Roman numerals, so the contest now known as Super Bowl I was not billed that way on the day.
Green Bay won 35-10. The result was widely expected, but the game’s real importance lies in what led to it and what it began.
Two leagues, one market
The NFL was the established league. The AFL began play in 1960 as a rival, backed by wealthy owners who were willing to spend heavily and who won a television contract with a network. For six years the two leagues competed for players, and bidding for college stars pushed salaries up and worried owners on both sides.
In June 1966 the two leagues announced a merger agreement. The main terms, as generally described, were a common draft of college players, a championship game between the two league winners starting after the 1966 season, and a full merger of the competitions by 1970. Teams from both leagues would play each other in the preseason in the meantime. The agreement still needed Congress to grant protection from antitrust problems, which it did later that year.
So the January 1967 game was a product of negotiation as much as sport. It was meant to settle an argument that had run for years: was AFL football as good as the NFL’s?
The road to Los Angeles
Green Bay, coached by Vince Lombardi and led by quarterback Bart Starr, had won the NFL title by beating the Dallas Cowboys 34-27 on New Year’s Day 1967. Kansas City, coached by Hank Stram and led by quarterback Len Dawson, had won the AFL championship by beating the Buffalo Bills 31-7.
The Packers were heavy favourites. Many in the NFL regarded the game as an obligation they could only lose, and Lombardi was reportedly under intense pressure. The stakes were as much about reputation as about a trophy.
The game itself
The first half was closer than the final score suggests. Kansas City was competitive early, and Green Bay led 14-10 at halftime. One of the surprises was receiver Max McGee, a veteran who had played little during the season. He came into the game when Boyd Dowler was injured and caught two touchdown passes in the first half.
The turning point is usually placed early in the third quarter. Willie Wood of Green Bay intercepted a Dawson pass and returned it deep into Kansas City territory, and the Packers scored soon after. From there they pulled away, with Elijah Pitts scoring on the ground and Green Bay adding another touchdown to reach 35.
Starr was named the game’s most valuable player. He is generally credited with completing 16 of 23 passes for about 250 yards and two touchdowns. The Packers’ defence, including Willie Davis on the line, did much to contain Kansas City in the second half.
The setting and the broadcast
The Coliseum was not full. The stadium held far more than the crowd that attended, and the gap in the stands was noted at the time, with attendance commonly given as somewhere around 61,000. Ticket prices were modest by modern standards, and nothing about the day suggested the national event the game would become.
The television arrangement was unusual. Both CBS and NBC broadcast the game, each with its own commentators, because each held rights to one of the leagues. That was the era of spreading “color television”, and the event drew a large audience, but it was a sports broadcast rather than the cultural occasion later Super Bowls became.
What it settled and what it did not
The Packers won again the following January, in Super Bowl II against the Oakland Raiders, so for two years the NFL’s superiority appeared to be confirmed. The doubt over the AFL’s quality was reversed only when the New York Jets, led by Joe Namath, beat the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III after the 1968 season, and Kansas City won Super Bowl IV the following year.
Green Bay’s next title run ended with the “Ice Bowl” against Dallas on December 31, 1967, another famous game, played in bitter cold at the end of the calendar year. The wider picture of the year, including other “sporting moments”, shows a calendar in which American sport was changing quickly, with television money steadily reshaping the leagues.
Why the date matters
It is easy to read modern Super Bowl spectacle back into January 1967. At the time the game was a negotiated meeting between two leagues, played in a stadium with empty seats. Its significance only became clear as the leagues completed their merger and the championship game grew into a fixture of the American calendar. It is also worth remembering that the 1966 season, not 1967, is the one the game concluded; the date on the calendar is 1967, but the football season belongs to the year before.