On 15 January 1967, in the bright Los Angeles sunshine, two football teams jogged onto the grass of the Memorial Coliseum for a game nobody quite knew what to call. The two leagues of American football - the older NFL and the newer AFL - had agreed to play a championship between their best teams. Some called it the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. The Kansas City Chiefs' owner, Lamar Hunt, had been calling it the 'Super Bowl' in private memos because his daughter had a bouncy Super Ball toy. The nickname stuck.
The Green Bay Packers, coached by the legendary Vince Lombardi, faced the Kansas City Chiefs. The Packers were the seasoned champions of the old league. The Chiefs were the upstarts. Tickets cost just 12 dollars, and amazingly, around 30,000 seats sat empty. The Packers' quarterback Bart Starr threw for 250 yards, receiver Max McGee - playing with a hangover after sneaking out the night before - caught two touchdowns, and Green Bay rolled to a 35-10 win. Both major TV networks broadcast the game on the same day, the only time that has ever happened.
Fast-forward sixty years and the Super Bowl is the biggest single-day sporting event on the planet. More than 100 million Americans tune in. Ads cost around 7 million dollars for thirty seconds. Pop stars from Michael Jackson to Rihanna have headlined the halftime show. Each winning team gets the Vince Lombardi Trophy, named after that 1967 coach. And it all started with a 12-dollar ticket, a bouncy ball, and a stadium that did not even sell out.
