SUPER COMPARISONS
SUPER BOWL I
Attendance: 61,946
Ticket Price (face value): $8-$12.
TV Viewership: 50 million.
TV Ad Price: $85,000 for a one-minute spot.
Credentialed Media: 338.
Halftime Act: Michigan & Grambling bands/Al Hirt
Players’ Share: $15,000 for winners, $7,500 for losers.
SUPER BOWL 50
Attendance: 70,000 (approx.)
TV Viewership 114 million (Super Bowl 49).
TV Ad Price: $5 million for 30-second spot.
Credentialed media: 5,500
Halftime Act: Cold Play
Players’ Share: $102,000 for winners, $51,000 for losers
The photo is a window to another era, the Jurassic Period as far as the NFL goes.
You may wish to Google it (neither noun nor verb in 1967). And make it your screen saver (also not a thing when it was taken).
Behold Kansas City quarterback Len Dawson at the halftime of the first Super Bowl. He is sitting on a cheap metal folding chair, an open bottle of Fresca at his feet. Contemplating a second half against the mighty Green Bay Packers, visions of Nitschke and Adderly and Wood parading in his head, he takes a deep drag on a cigarette.
Dawson’s taste in halftime refreshment was period perfect.
“One of the biggest shocks of my life was walking in the Packers locker room and seeing a bunch of people light up — I mean a bunch of people,” Bill Curry remembered last week. “And some at the halftime of games. It wasn’t all that unusual in those days.”
The simplicity and the surgeon general’s warnings have long since been left outside the gates of the Super Bowl. As unpredictable as this season’s game is, this much is certain: Peyton Manning won’t be enjoying a Camel and a Tab during the break.
After the all-day pregame show has beaten its last drum Feb. 7, when the final $167,000-a-second TV ad has run and the winner has declared his intentions to visit a rodent-inspired theme park, 50 Super Bowls will have been played.
On such round anniversaries it is customary to reminisce about the beginnings, to mark the distance travelled, the changes made and the corrosive properties of time.
The driver of this Way-Back Machine is none other than Atlanta’s own Curry, best known for playing at Georgia Tech, later coaching there and then at Alabama, then Kentucky and finally starting a football program at Georgia State. He also had an eventful NFL playing career that placed him in at the dawn of America’s most extravagant sporting event.
Few have viewed the evolution of the Super Bowl from Curry’s perspective. Like Darwin coming ashore at the Galapagos, Curry stepped onto the field of the L.A. Coliseum on Jan. 15, 1967 as Green Bay’s center, a starter in the first Super Bowl. Three of the first five to be precise, as he snapped the ball first for the Packers and then the Baltimore Colts in Nos. III and V.
So little was thought of the historical significance of the first game that neither of the two broadcasting networks — yes, it was shared then — thought to preserve the master tapes. The NFL Network recently aired a replay of the game that was pieced together from more than 20 different sources.
Included were the pregame introductions that featured one No. 50 for Green Bay who was scarcely recognizable today, even to ol’ No. 50 himself. “I actually had a neck then that wasn’t a pencil neck. And a flattop,” chuckled Curry. Always the lightest lineman on any pro team that would have him, Curry came into Super Bowl I as a strapping 235-pound center. He is significantly lighter today at 73 years old, 40 pounds so.
Officially, the game was called the NFL-AFL World Championship, with the rival leagues just on the verge of a merger. The title Super Bowl wasn’t adopted for corporate use until game No. 3.
Watching that replay of the Packers’ 35-10 victory earlier this month, Curry got to revisit the moment during the second quarter when he injured his ankle on the punt-coverage team. Even in one piece, Curry was struggling to block the monstrous Chiefs lineman Buck Buchanan, one of 13 future Hall of Famers who were on the field that day (10 with Green Bay, three with K.C.). Ken Bowman took Curry’s place at center.
Thus, he was afforded a sideline view of the moment often cited as being the most satisfying of the day. Even the first Super Bowl had its designated villain. Before the game Kansas City cornerback Fred “The Hammer” Williamson promised to level various Packers receivers, but it was Williamson who was knocked out in the fourth quarter.
Even when conscious, Williamson was having a bad day. Max McGee, sporting a third-degree hangover as legend has it, burned the Chiefs’ secondary for 138 yards and two touchdowns.
“(Williamson) had just shot his mouth off the whole time,” Curry remembered. “The guys were more amused by that than bothered or offended. Then when he went down there were some comments on the sideline, ‘Well, the Hammer got hammered.’ He actually made a pretty good hit and ran his head into Donny Anderson’s thigh.”
The Super Bowl today is central to American culture, an undeclared national holiday. It gathers us around the hearth of the big screen, and tells us more about ourselves than we may want to know.
No one inside a three-quarters-occupied L.A. Coliseum in 1967 could have imagined the excesses to come.
Where now every players’ pregame utterance is spread to the world like so many papal decrees, Curry could not remember being interviewed in advance of Super Bowl I. Not once. “I didn’t realize how nice that was until it changed,” he laughed.
As we have come to treat each Super Bowl as the greatest sporting story ever told, there was a time when it didn’t seem like even the most important game of that season.
While there was pressure on Packers coach Vince Lombardi to deliver a victory and put the upstart AFL in its place, players like Curry looked back on their NFL championship meeting with Dallas as more meaningful.
The Super Bowl now is a celebrity mixer interrupted by a football game. The glitz was turned way down in 1967, although Curry did get to meet actor Burt Lancaster before the game and tell him how much he enjoyed his work in “The Birdman of Alcatraz.”
And when it was over, when Green Bay had outclassed the Chiefs, outscoring them 21-0 in the second half, no one exactly celebrated as if an armistice had just been signed.
“It was very matter of fact. It really, honestly felt like business as usual. We were supposed to win, we won. OK let’s go home,” Curry remembered. Two days later he was stranded in a blizzard, trying to get his car back to Atlanta from Green Bay. Ah, the glamor.
Overall, the years have treated Curry most kindly. One souvenir, though, of his craft is a set of arthritic fingers that scarcely allows him to wear his ring from Super Bowl I. The swelling did subside just enough for him to show it off a little last month when he went to see Georgia State play its first bowl game.
The NFL is not bringing in the survivors of Super Bowl I to honor them at the site of No. 50 (Northern California this time). Having been to four of the first five Super Bowls — attending No. IV as a correspondent for Atlanta’s WAGA — Curry never had much interest in attending any of the other games in which he was not invited to play.
So, he’ll watch No. 50 quietly in Atlanta. And will inevitably sort through thoughts of the time when the Super Bowl wasn’t half so super, weighing in his mind the changes he’s seen.
“I always find myself doing that,” he said.
“I’m watching thinking, ‘Gosh, when do these kids get to think about playing football?’ Because the distractions are so amazing.”
There was a time, you know, when the halftimes weren’t galas, a TV ad wasn’t an epic, the quarterback could enjoy a halftime smoke in peace and the Super Bowl was a game played to scale.
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