We need the Super Bowl for more than multimillion-dollar TV ads and sexy extravaganza halftime shows. We also need it to happily prod us into mindless discussions about semi-meaningless things.
So, let’s take a look at this NFL three-peat thing.
As the Kansas City Chiefs closed their recent semifinal victory, the discussion in the network broadcast booth turned to the Chiefs' opportunity to win their third straight Super Bowl. That three-peat was labeled “unprecedented,” and thousands of Green Bay Packers fans, when they heard that, sat straight up in their easy chairs.
The word “unprecedented” is actually accurate, but dependent on semantics. It is unprecedented for the official Super Bowl but there are asterisks.
The Packers, who won NFL titles under Curly Lambeau in 1929, ’30 and ’31, won the title again under Vince Lombardi to end the 1965 season, beating the Cleveland Browns in the championship game 23-12. The game was played Jan. 2, 1966, marking the first NFL title game played in January. It also became the first leg of the next Packers triple, 1965 to 1967.
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On Jan. 1, 1967, the Packers beat the Cowboys in Dallas 34-27 for their second straight NFL title, but there was a new wrinkle. The rival American Football League needed to be shown that it was inferior, so that ongoing negotiations for a merger of the leagues would give the most leverage to the assumed-superior NFL. Nothing like a good beating on the field to bring dividends at the bargaining table.
So, a game was created, and it didn’t have a super name — the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. It matched the poor little Chiefs, champions of the AFL, against the big NFL bullies, the Packers.
The game was scheduled at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. It didn’t come close to selling out and the media mingled with the players and coaches around hotel swimming pools, just like they might have before an exhibition game in August — pretty much what this was.
The NFL quest for a bargaining chip worked. On Jan. 15, 1967, the Packers, several of them reportedly seeing the sights of L.A. well into the night before the game, still beat up on the Chiefs, 35-10.
This game was not instantly labeled “Super Bowl.” commissioner Pete Rozelle of the NFL hated the label, once it was brought up by AFL commissioner Lamar Hunt, who had gotten the idea from one of his children’s toys, a Super Ball. Rozelle thought the word “super” was mostly slang and too undignified for his league. By word of mouth, however, and probably the need of some newspaper columnists to jazz up the game, Super Bowl stuck. It was made the official moniker in 1969, but used freely before that.
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In the middle of all this negotiating and game-naming confusion, the Packers won again, taking the NFL title on Dec. 31, 1967 in the famous Ice Bowl game in Green Bay.
At last word-of-mouth count, 11,056,200 people had reported they were there. It is a Wisconsin badge of honor to have been at the Ice Bowl, an indication of both Midwestern hardiness and insanity. The temperature was minus-13 with a wind-chill of minus-36. The players couldn’t start their cars to go home afterward, and the referees had to keep their whistles out of their mouths for fear of having them freeze to their lips.
The Packers won on a last-second quarterback sneak by Bart Starr, following the block of center Ken Bowman and right guard Jerry Kramer, who eventually turned the moment into a bestselling book called “Instant Replay.” The final scores were 21-17 for the Packers and hundreds of thousands of dollars in book sales for Kramer.
In the book, and on several speaking tours, Kramer explained the genesis of the moment.
“I noticed in films that [Cowboys tackle] Jethro Pugh would stand up before he charged,” Kramer wrote. “I told coach Lombardi about that in the week before the game, he watched the film and agreed that we could wedge Jethro.”
Lombardi called the play, Pugh stood up, Kramer was able to get under him for leverage, and Starr snuck into the end zone right behind Kramer. Immediately, 11,056,200 headed for the exits, with joy in their hearts and frostbite over the rest of their bodies.
That was a Packers two-peat. Or, in the minds of many Packers followers, a Packers four-peat — an NFL title in '65, another in ’66, plus the first non-Super Bowl Super Bowl in ‘67, and another NFL title in the Ice Bowl at the end of the ’67 season.
Or, maybe even a five-peat, with a 33-14 beating of the Oakland Raiders in Miami on Jan. 14, 1968, in the second non-Super Bowl Super Bowl.
Actually, the concept of the Packers’ streak being anything more than the three-peat they have always been credited for is semantics, fan talk ... a little bit of apples and oranges. The Packers finished three seasons on top. Two of those league titles simply led to another game. A Chiefs victory in the upcoming Super Bowl would be an unprecedented three-peat in the NFL, as currently constructed.
Sorry, Packers fans. Tony Romo was right. Deal with it.
The game really became the Super Bowl, officially and in U.S. sports lore, in Super Bowl III, when Joe Namath sat with a bunch of reporters around a pool in Miami, site of the game for the second straight year, and guaranteed victory. That, of course, was heresy, since Namath played for the AFL's New York Jets and the big boys from the NFL champion Baltimore Colts, led by Johnny Unitas, were 19-point favorites.
On Jan. 12, 1969, Namath and the Jets won, 16-7, and the merger became official in 1970. On the back of Namath, the fledgling AFL had earned its spurs.
There was no turning back. Even Rozelle, were he still alive, would agree now that it is all pretty “super.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
