A year that crowded the calendar
Sport in 1967 produced an unusual number of events that people still use as reference points. Some were triumphs that changed how a club saw itself. One was a death that forced a sport to confront how its athletes were being treated. Several of them sit in a small window between late April and early July, which makes the middle of the year feel especially crowded.
A note on dates before going further. Sporting seasons do not follow the calendar year, so a few of the stories below belong partly to 1966 or 1968. Where that is the case it is said plainly.
Football on two continents
On 15 January 1967 the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs in what is now known as the first Super Bowl, a game that at the time was billed as a meeting between the NFL and AFL champions. It has its own place in the story of the year, and the account of Super Bowl I is covered separately on this site. Green Bay’s coach, Vince Lombardi, was by then the most famous figure in the American game.
The more vivid American football memory comes from the very end of the year. On 31 December, with the temperature in Green Bay far below freezing, the Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys 21-17 in the NFL championship game, remembered as the Ice Bowl. The winning points came from a quarterback sneak with seconds left.
In European football, the standout moment came on 25 May in Lisbon. Celtic, from Glasgow, beat Inter Milan 2-1 to become the first British club to win the European Cup. The side that did it, all born close to Glasgow, became known as the Lisbon Lions, and the match is still treated as the high point of the club’s history.
Hockey and basketball
The 1967 NHL playoffs were the last of the six-team league. The Toronto Maple Leafs, an ageing side that finished third in the regular season, beat the Montreal Canadiens in the final in May. The league doubled in size for the following season, so the Cup that year is often described as the end of an era.
In basketball, the 1966-67 season ended with the Philadelphia 76ers winning the NBA title. They knocked out the Boston Celtics, who had won the previous eight championships, and Wilt Chamberlain was the centre of a team that is regularly listed among the best the league has produced. The season straddles two calendar years, so the title is a 1967 event in the sense that the playoffs were played in the spring.
Baseball
The American League pennant race was one of the tightest of the decade. Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski won the Triple Crown, leading the league in batting average, home runs and runs batted in, as the Red Sox won the pennant on the final weekend. The run is remembered as the Impossible Dream Red Sox season, even though St. Louis beat them in a seven-game World Series.
Motor racing
Two events dominate the year in racing. The Indianapolis 500 was postponed by rain and run over two days at the end of May, and A. J. Foyt won it. The race is equally remembered for the experimental STP turbine car, which led for most of the distance before a mechanical failure close to the finish.
In June, Ford won the Le Mans 24 Hours for the second year running, this time with the Mark IV car driven by Dan Gurney and Foyt. The Foyt connection, two major wins within about two weeks, is one of the more striking footnotes of the season. The year’s Formula One season, won by Denny Hulme, is a separate story with its own article.
Golf
At Baltusrol in New Jersey, Jack Nicklaus won the US Open in June with a 72-hole total of 275, a record for the championship at that time, finishing four strokes clear of Arnold Palmer. It was a significant moment in a career that eventually included 18 professional major titles.
Cycling
The most sombre memory of the year belongs to cycling. On 13 July, during the 1967 race around France, the British cyclist Tom Simpson collapsed and died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in extreme heat. Amphetamines were later reported to have been found, and his death is generally treated as a turning point in how the sport approached drug testing. The race itself, won by Roger Pingeon, is given separate treatment under the Tour de France.
Other events outside this cluster
Sport in 1967 did not stop at these headlines. Tennis had its own year at the Wimbledon championships and on the Roland Garros clay. Muhammad Ali’s refusal of military induction in April, which cost him his boxing licence, is a sporting story and a political one, and it is told in the Ali draft refusal article.
Why these particular events last
A few things link the moments that endure. Many were decided late, whether by a goal five minutes from the end, a final-day batting run or a sneak a few seconds before the clock expired. Several marked the end of something, such as the six-team NHL or the Celtics’ run of titles. And a number involved people whose names remained famous for decades. That mix of drama, endings and personalities is why a list like this one is still easy to assemble more than half a century later.
Counts of this kind are always a matter of selection. A different writer might have included a boxing bout, a cricket Test or a rugby international, and fans of other sports would reasonably say so. The events here are the ones that most often come up when people look back on the year, and each has a fuller article on this site.
The calendar also shows how tightly the year was packed. Within roughly eight weeks, from early May to early July, the Maple Leafs lifted the Cup, Celtic won in Lisbon, the Indianapolis 500 was finally run, Ford won at Le Mans, Nicklaus won at Baltusrol and Simpson died on Ventoux. Few later years offer a comparable run of stories that people still bring up without prompting. Readers who want to place all this against the wider events of the time can start with the year of change overview, since the sporting calendar ran alongside the Summer of Love and a sharply divided American public.