Troy Haupt is a 47-year-old nurse anesthetist here in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. He has a secret to reveal about Super Bowl I: He owns the only known recording of its broadcast.
CBS and NBC, which televised the game, did not preserve any tapes. But the copy that Haupt owns — of a broadcast that launched the Super Bowl as an enormous shared spectacle that attracts more than 100 million viewers — might never be seen on any network. The NFL does not want to buy the tapes and has warned Haupt not to sell them to outside parties or else the league will pursue legal action.
Unless the league and Haupt make a deal to resolve the financial differences that have privately divided them since 2005, the tapes will stay in storage in a former mine in upstate New York.
“This year had to be the year, with all the hype of Super Bowl 50,” Haupt said.
The tapes are a bizarre heirloom that, for decades, sat largely ignored in the attic of his family’s three-bedroom house in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, deteriorating from shifting temperatures.
Haupt’s father, Martin, taped the game. Haupt never knew him. Haupt and his mother, Beth Rebuck, say they have no idea what he did for a living back then. They also don’t know why he went to work on Jan. 15, 1967, with a pair of 2-inch Scotch tapes, slipped one, and then the other, into a Quadruplex taping machine and recorded the Green Bay Packers’ 35-10 win over the Kansas City Chiefs. He told his family nothing about his day’s activity.
It would take another eight years for Martin Haupt to tell his wife what he had done. By then, they had divorced and both had remarried.
He was sick with cancer and handed her the tapes.
“He said maybe they could help pay for the kids’ education,” she said.
And she put them in the attic, where they accumulated dust and intrigue.
Martin Haupt died soon after, leaving behind the odd inheritance of a Super Bowl I recording, made on a professional 2-inch machine in the era before the videocassette recorder industry exploded and networks and leagues began to cherish their archives of old games.
The story might have ended with those two tapes deteriorating in Shamokin if not for a phone call from Troy Haupt’s childhood friend, Clint Hepner. In 2005, he read that Sports Illustrated had described a tape of Super Bowl I as a “lost treasure” because CBS and NBC had not saved copies of their broadcasts. The magazine estimated that a tape, if found, would be worth $1 million.
“He said, ‘Remember when we were 10 and in your mom’s attic playing board games and saw this box with metal cases in it that said Super Bowl I?’” Haupt said. “I had no idea what he was talking about and he said, ‘Talk to your mom,’ and Mom said, ‘Yeah, they’re up in the attic.’”
Rebuck added: “I remarried. The kids grew up and we talked about the tapes once in a while. But my husband was skeptical about what was on them.”
Time to come forward
Haupt and his mother unspooled the saga in the sunroom of his house here on the Outer Banks that was built by its original owner to resemble a Coast Guard station. He was born the year after Super Bowl I and grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan in Philadelphia Eagles territory. He refers to his late stepfather, Charles, as his father, and Martin Haupt as his biological father.
With Super Bowl 50 between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos approaching Sunday, he felt it was time to come forward as the owner of the tapes. For the past five years, he let his lawyer speak about an unidentified client who had the recording, who had made a deal with the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan to restore it and who was trying to sell the tapes to the NFL.
But the league does not seem to agree with him that the tapes are a significant enough part of its legacy that it should pay him what he wants. It countered his initial request for $1 million with a $30,000 offer. It never raised its price and is not interested anymore in paying anything at all.
“It’s awesome to have the tapes, but it’s frustrating that we can’t do anything with them,” Haupt said. “It’s like you’ve won the golden ticket but you can’t get into the chocolate factory.”
Last month, the league countered in another way, showing that it did not need the tapes. NFL Network showed a reconstruction of Super Bowl I drawn from the archives of NFL Films.
And last week, Haupt was angry about another turn in the dispute. CBS backed out of a plan to interview him for a Super Bowl pregame segment that would have used a few minutes from the game.
It had agreed to pay him $25,000 and give him two tickets to the Super Bowl. A producer was preparing to watch a restored, digital copy of the game at the Paley Center. A crew was ready to go to Manteo. He was going to tell his story, and perhaps the league would listen.
“It was my right to tell my story, and they were paying me for it,” Haupt said.
But according to his lawyer, Steve Harwood, the deal collapsed when he was told that the NFL had ordered CBS not to pay him.
“They said they’d still put Troy on but couldn’t pay,” Harwood said. “After dealing with the NFL all these years, and with CBS, which screwed up, Troy said he wouldn’t do it for free.”
Brian McCarthy, a league spokesman, denied that the NFL was involved.
“We didn’t tell them not to do it,” he said. “We didn’t talk to CBS about the payment.”
A CBS Sports spokeswoman said only that it chose not to do the feature “because we couldn’t get the appropriate clearances.”
Signs of exposure
With one click on the computer screen in the Paley Center viewing room, Super Bowl I came back to life.
The recording is a relic that shows the signs of exposure to the heat and cold in the attic in Shamokin. Colors fade in and out. The picture is grainy and skips. And it suffers somewhat from Martin Haupt’s decision to stop or pause before most commercial breaks and hitting play when the break ended, which caused him to miss parts of the action when play resumed. The stops and starts give the tapes an occasional herky-jerky feel.
And more important, he did not tape halftime and about half of the third quarter.
“It’s like he thought he would run out of tape,” Troy Haupt said.
But it is still a viewable document, a vintage broadcast by CBS, with Ray Scott calling the first half with Frank Gifford, and Jack Whitaker taking over in the third quarter with a friendlier, wittier play call. Gifford referred regularly to Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi as “Vinny” and kept promoting the Chiefs’ great play well after they were out of the game.
A 1968 sensibility is preserved, helping to separate the tape from the NFL Films reconstruction.
Each replay is labeled “Video Tape” and each slow-motion shot is noted as “Slow Motion.” The effect continues with network promos; an ad read by Whitaker (United States savings bonds that were recommended by President Lyndon B. Johnson) and the commercials Haupt did not cut out (like the anchormanlike announcer promoting the taste and other benefits of True cigarettes).
As the game entered its final seconds, Whitaker started to count down. “Nine, eight,” he said, and the game ended. A marching band ran onto the field. It played “Seventy-Six Trombones.”
“The first Super Bowl was always our holy grail of lost sports programs, appearing on our Most Wanted List for years,” said Ron Simon, the Paley Center’s television and radio curator.
A warning from the league
Haupt owns the recording but not its content, which belongs to the NFL. If the league refuses to buy it, he cannot sell the tapes to a third party, like CBS or a collector who would like to own a piece of sports history that was believed to be lost. He would like to persuade the league to sell the tapes jointly and donate some of the proceeds to their favorite charities. His mother said that she would give some of her share of the sale to the Wounded Warrior Project.
“They’re not doing anybody any good sitting in a vault,” he said. “Let’s help some great charities.”
But that is unlikely to happen. A letter from the league to Harwood last year provided a sharp warning to Haupt.
“Since you have already indicated that your client is exploring opportunities for exploitation of the NFL’s Super Bowl I copyrighted footage with yet-unidentified third parties,” Dolores DiBella, a league counsel, wrote, “please be aware that any resulting copyright infringement will be considered intentional, subjecting your client and those parties to injunctive relief and special damages, among other remedies.”
The law favors the league, said Jodi Balsam, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.
“What the league technically has is a property right in the game information and they are the only ones who can profit from that,” said Balsam, a former NFL lawyer.
But, she added, the league has not handled the matter as well as it should have.
“It seems they’ve misplayed their hand here,” she said. “They’ve known about this tape for years, and it seems to me they should have resolved this years ago, because it’s important footage.”
But until the league and Haupt resolve their differences, the public will never see the game as it happened, on the winter day when Green Bay became the champion of the NFL and AFL, and Martin Haupt took a mysterious route to recording history.
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