The Day I First Saw Football On a Color TV

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This is a significant date for Kansas City Chiefs fans. It was 45 years ago today that the Chiefs won their only Super Bowl.

So far.

I have a friend who is a Chiefs fan, and he would remind me that the entire history of pro football has not been written — and, like Chicago Cubs fans who insist that one day their beloved Cubbies will return to and win the World Series, he has faith that the Chiefs will return to the Super Bowl and win it.

I am not a Chiefs fan — I'm a Packers fan — but I remember vividly the day the Chiefs beat the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV. Why? Because it was the first time I ever saw a football game on color TV.

We had a black–and–white TV in our home. It was the TV on which I had watched every football game that I had seen to that point in my young life. No one in my neighborhood (and I use the word neighborhood very loosely here because I grew up in the country, and my neighborhood was hardly a conventional one) had a color TV — until a few days before Super Bowl IV.

Our neighbors (and, again, the word neighbors is used very loosely here; they lived close enough to us that we could walk from our house to theirs instead of driving) bought a Zenith color TV and invited us to watch the game with them. My father is an avid football fan so he accepted the invitation, and we walked over there. It may have snowed. Sometimes we got snow in central Arkansas in January; if it did snow, we trudged through it. No obstacle would keep us from watching a football game in color.

I'm pretty sure the game was played in the afternoon, too. The NFL didn't move Super Bowl kickoffs to the very late afternoon/early evening until several years later. Besides, my mother would never have allowed my brother and me to stay up as late as we would have if the game had been played at night — as it is today.

I remember being astonished by the color of a football game. OK, Super Bowl IV may have been more colorful than most. The Chiefs were dressed in their bright red home jerseys.

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The Vikings wore their road whites, but the uniform still incorporated splashes of the trademark Viking purple — and gold trim.

And the game was played in New Orleans, one of the most colorful cities I have ever visited.

I sat transfixed by the color. I remember looking at my father at one point. The look in his eyes told me we would have a color TV in our house soon, too.

And we did.

That was a time when ownership of a color TV was a real status symbol. It was also a time when networks would announce whether a program was being presented in color. Many in the audience — like my family — still watched black–and–white TVs, and sometimes in those days when a program was being broadcast in color, it had kind of an odd effect on the appearance of the program on black–and–white sets. Believe it or not, people really did call channels to inquire about oddities in picture reception.

Mind you, this was at a time when picture reception was about as imperfect as it could be. It was years before cable took hold, and most customers probably received transmissions via antenna, either of the outdoor variety or the rabbit ears that were on the back of each set.

Consequently, if a customer called because image reception was bad, there must be something to it.

Of course, my parents told my brother and me that the color TV would enhance our enjoyment of educational and cultural programming. I accepted that — not because I particularly believed it but because I knew what had put the hook in my father — the afternoon we spent watching the Super Bowl at the neighbors' house.

It's funny when I think back on the Chiefs' 23–7 victory over the Vikings, who came into the game as 12–point favorites. The Chiefs had been in two of the four Super Bowls and were expected to be in Super Bowl conversations for years to come — but they haven't been back to one since.

The Vikings were making their first Super Bowl appearance and were expected to be contenders in the future, which they were. They went to three more Super Bowls in the next seven years but lost them all and haven't been back to the Super Bowl in 38 years.

In the meantime, ownership of a color TV is no longer a status symbol. Ownership of more exotic variants — high definition, perhaps — are the status symbols now. But virtually all modern TVs are equipped to provide color pictures.

I'm not sure they even make black–and–white TVs anymore.

The First Super Bowl

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Super Bowl Sunday is firmly established as perhaps the biggest social event of any year.

It's so well established, in fact, that it is almost certainly difficult for most people to imagine a time when there was no Super Bowl. But there was.

The first Super Bowl was played 45 years ago today. It wasn't called the Super Bowl at the time. It was generally known as the AFL–NFL World Championship Game; some media reports called it the Supergame. Later on, Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt came up with the name it is known by today — Super Bowl.

But that's another story.

What it was, actually, was the Establishment vs. the Upstarts. The Establishment was the NFL, appropriately represented by the Green Bay Packers — who, incidentally, will be hosting the New York Giants in the playoffs later today. The Upstarts, the AFL teams, had only existed for a few years, but, like a presidential challenger who is given an opportunity to stand on a level playing field as the president's equal in a debate, they were eager to make the most of it.

Unfortunately for the AFL's representatives, the Chiefs, things never really went their way. That didn't surprise most people. The Packers came into the game as 14–point favorites and exceeded expectations with a 25–point margin of victory.

I guess it goes without saying that a lot of things have changed in 45 years. That's probably a classic understatement applicable to any time, any year in recorded history, and it's certainly true of the Super Bowl.

The game that was played 45 years ago today really bore little resemblance to the spectacle that the Super Bowl has become. The difference in the name is probably the least of the changes.

In fact, if a football fan could be magically transported back to January 1967, that fan would be in for quite a case of culture shock.

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Oh, to be sure, it would look like the same game in many ways — same field dimensions, same rules (mostly), same uniforms (although their designs as well as their construction certainly have changed).

The first thing a modern fan probably would notice would be an absence of hype surrounding that first Super Bowl. It was really more of a curiosity. I mean, everyone just knew that the NFL's team would beat the AFL's team. The superiority of the NFL was obvious. Nearly all of the best college football players went on to play for NFL teams.

At that time, I think the only truly high–profile college player who had signed with an AFL team was Joe Namath — and Namath did go on to win an early Super Bowl, legitimizing the league in the eyes of many. But that was still in the future on this day in 1967.

Super Bowl I was unique in other ways.

• It is the only Super Bowl to be broadcast on two TV networks, NBC and CBS. NBC had the rights to AFL games; CBS had the rights to NFL games.
  
  Subsequent Super Bowl broadcast rights have been granted to only one network each year, although the network has varied depending upon the arrangement. Forty–five years ago, it was decided that the best solution was to permit both networks to carry the game.


• Very little video footage from that first Super Bowl survives to this day, even though two networks carried it.
  
  There was a broadcasting procedure at the time called wiping, in which videotape of a previous program was taped over. Usually — but not always — this was done with tapes of programs that weren't expected to have much value in the future.
  
  It is, perhaps, indicative of just how low expectations for the game were that both networks chose to recycle their videotapes instead of preserving them.


• Considering how difficult it is to acquire tickets to a Super Bowl today, it certainly would surprise some modern fans to know that the very first Super Bowl was not a sellout.
  
  It was still possible on game day to walk up to the Los Angeles Coliseum, where the game was played, and pay $12 for admission to the game. Those were the days, huh?

The Longest Day

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Christmas is one of those holidays — like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July — that inspires memories, both great and awful, that seem to follow you as long as you live.

When you get right down to it, Christmas is just another day on the calendar. It's great for some, not so great for others.

But whatever happens on that day seems to take on more significance, simply because it is Christmas Day. Whatever happens on this day definitely does not stay on this day. It lives on in memory, and its details become, if anything, sharper with age.

Depending upon who you are, I guess, Christmas 1971 was just such a day.

It was, as I recall, the first of three consecutive Christmases my family spent at South Padre Island, Texas.

Ordinarily, we spent Christmas with my grandparents in Dallas, but, by Christmas 1971, my parents were in the mood to hit the road. They had purchased a popup camper (much like the one you can see at the right) a few years earlier, and we had taken it on family trips in the spring and summer.

(Actually, that picture is a pretty fair representation of the camper we had, except that the bottom part wasn't white, it was green. Frankly, I never thought it was a very attractive shade of green, either, but my mother really liked it. She dubbed the camper the "Big, Bright Green Pleasure Machine" after a Simon & Garfunkel tune.)

In December 1971, we took it about as far south as you can go in Texas and set up our campsite at a campground not far from the beach. It was, as I remember, a couple of days before Christmas when we arrived.

The weather was gorgeous for late December, which wasn't unusual in Port Isabel, Texas. That certainly hasn't changed. Even after it cooled off here in north Texas late this week, it stayed in the 70s in Port Isabel. Temperatures there might dip into the mid–60s today, but I'm sure that still sounds pretty good to many Americans right now.

It was probably like that 39 years ago. I don't remember if I even knew what the temperature was that Christmas. All I remember is that it was warm and sunny.

Just another Bethlehem–like day slightly north of the border.

The campground actually had a putt–putt golf course that campers could play for free. All you had to do was go by the office and get a putter and a ball. It didn't take me long to make a friend and spend hours playing miniature golf with him in the warm south Texas sun.

Anyway, when Christmas arrived, we did our family Christmas in that camper. It was kind of cramped in there for much Christmas festivity for a family of four with a dog so when the gifts had been exchanged and all the rituals had been observed, I exited the camper and hooked up with my new friend to play some miniature golf.

I don't know how long we played. We never kept score, we just putted until we both got our balls in the hole, then we proceeded to the next hole, and we could do that for hours. (It really is amazing how much energy you have when you're a child — and how oblivious you are to extremes in temperature.)

Anyway, at some point, we returned to the campground office, perhaps to turn in our putters and balls for the day.

And I recall that most of the men from the campground — workers and campers alike — had gathered there to watch the AFC playoff game between the Miami Dolphins and the Kansas City Chiefs.

I'm sure no one realized it at the time, but a new order was emerging in professional football.

People seldom seem to recognize such transitions for what they are at the time. It is only with the benefit of hindsight — and a certain amount of distance — that most can see things clearly.

Up to that time, the dominant teams in the AFC were probably the Chiefs, Raiders and Jets, all charter members of the old American Football League. The Colts (still in Baltimore at that time) had just won the first Super Bowl to be played following the NFL–AFL merger, and they had done so as members of the AFC, but the Colts were NFL refugees. They had no history against the AFL — other than their upset loss to the New York Jets in Super Bowl III in January 1969.

By 1971, the Chiefs had been to as many Super Bowls as the Packers and the Colts — and they had won as many, too. The Dolphins, meanwhile, had never been to one before. In fact, they were making only their second–ever playoff appearance that Christmas Day — but they were doing so with the Colts' former coach, Don Shula, and he knew something about getting to the Super Bowl, as he demonstrated that year.

I don't remember what the point spread was, but I'm sure the Chiefs must have been heavy favorites.

And they got off to a fast start. Jan Stenerud nailed a field goal and Ed Podolak scored a touchdown, and Kansas City had a 10–0 lead when the first quarter ended. But Miami rallied with a Larry Csonka touchdown and a Garo Yepremian field goal in the second period, and the score was tied, 10–10, at intermission.

My friend and I, being normal boys who couldn't understand why anyone would stay indoors when it was warm and sunny outside, didn't spend much time in the office until after the sun went down that day. We popped in for a drink of water — and a score update — from time to time, and we heard that the teams traded touchdowns in the third and fourth quarters, and the game went to overtime with the score tied, 24–24.

By that time, if my memory serves me, the sun had gone down, and we remained in the office with our fathers, who were engrossed in the game — so engrossed, in fact, that many of the men remained in the office even after their children came to tell them that dinner was ready back at their campsites.

I recall that my own father was among those who resisted the calls from their wives.

It really seemed the Chiefs were going to put an end to things early in overtime, but the Dolphins blocked what would have been the game–winning field goal, and the defenses, who must have been wearing down, dominated things through the first overtime period ...

... and into the second.

All anyone had to do to win was to score — any kind of score would do, even a safety, and, finally, someone did score. After more than 82 minutes, Yepremian kicked a field goal with 7:40 showing on the clock in the second overtime period, and the Dolphins advanced to the AFC Championship game.

It remains the longest professional football game ever played.

No one knew it at the time, but that was the last time anyone would see Kansas City in the playoffs for more than a decade, and it would be two decades before the Chiefs would win in the postseason. Miami, on the other hand, was about to go to the first of three consecutive Super Bowls. In all, the Dolphins have been in five Super Bowls since that Christmas Day 39 years ago. The Chiefs haven't been to any.

No one knew that on this day 39 years ago, but everyone did know it was the last time the Chiefs would play in Municipal Stadium. The Chiefs were scheduled to begin playing in Arrowhead Stadium the next year so when their 1971 season ended, so, too, did Municipal's existence.

In addition to serving as the home to the Chiefs' two Super Bowl teams, Municipal hosted Kansas City's baseball teams — the American League's Athletics (before they moved to California) and the Royals in their early years, the Negro Leagues' Monarchs, the minor leagues' Blues — for half a century.

The times they were indeed a–changin'. But no one seemed to know it.

Not yet.