The Kansas City Chiefs, who will play this Sunday against the Eagles in New Orleans and could become the first team in history to achieve three consecutive titles, are intimately linked to the creation of the Super Bowl.
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The founder of the Chiefs franchise, Lamar Hunt, and father of the current owner Clark, was the one who came up with the name during a "war" between two American football leagues.
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What were the two leagues that were in dispute?
With the massification of television in the 1950s, the popularity of the NFL grew a lot, although it was still second to Major League Baseball at that time.
This popularity led several entrepreneurs to try to join the competition, but they were rejected. Among them was Lamar Hunt, who lived in Dallas, and was the promoter of a new league, the American Football League, which debuted in 1960 with eight teams: Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Denver Broncos, Houston Oilers, Los Angeles Chargers, Titans of New York, Oakland Raiders, and Hunt's Dallas Texans.
To the surprise of the NFL, the emerging AFL began to do very well thanks to its innovative rules, and soon they were competing for top figures with million-dollar contracts and the best talents from college football.
In 1963, Hunt moved the Texans to Kansas City and renamed them the Chiefs, and in 1966 he became a key mediator in the negotiations that led to the merger of the NFL with the AFL.
How was the Super Bowl born?
As part of the negotiations, the idea of holding a match between the champions of both competitions arose.
This game was simply called the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game", it took place on January 15, 1967 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and the NFL's Green Bay Packers defeated the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs 35-10.
The event was far from the magnitude of these days: 61,946 spectators attended and the venue was not full even though the cheapest ticket cost $6 ($55 adjusted to current value according to inflation).
Initially, the name "The Big One" was also considered, however, it was Lamar Hunt, the owner of the Chiefs, who started referring to the game as "Super Bowl." The name arose because his children played with a popular bouncing ball at the time called "Super Ball."
In addition, the term "Bowl" was already used to name the very popular postseason games in college American football, such as the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, or the Sugar Bowl that had been played for decades. The name "Super Bowl" gained popularity and was officially adopted in 1969, during the third edition of the game.
There are no original copies of the first Super Bowl broadcast.
Super Bowl I is the only one that was broadcast simultaneously by two television networks, NBC and CBS. However, as was the common practice in those years due to cost reasons, both channels erased the footage to reuse the tapes, in another example of how the game did not have the importance it does now back then.
In a Pennsylvania attic, in 2011, a partial recording of the historic CBS broadcast was found, missing a large part of the third quarter.
Five years later, in 2016, NFL Films achieved a significant feat by reconstructing the entire game with all 145 plays. To do this, they combined various video sources and synchronized the images with the original NBC Radio broadcast. This restored version was presented on NFL Network on January 15, 2016 and can be viewed on NFL+.