This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 3, 2011 - As the Roman poet Juvenal understood, the people require bread and circuses. There will be plenty of both on display this Sunday.
According to people who profess to know such things, Americans will consume 1 billion chicken wings and drink 325.5 million gallons of beer while watching the Steelers and the Packers vie for pro football's most treasured prize. That's enough beer to fill 493 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Antacid sales will increase by 20 percent on Monday, and 7 million employees will fail to make it to work.
In Missouri, tavern owners have to purchase a special license to do business on Sundays. There are four exemptions to that requirement: the Sunday before Memorial Day, the Sunday before the Fourth of July (if the holiday is celebrated on a Monday), the Sunday before Labor Day and the Sunday "commonly referred to as Super Bowl Sunday."
The BIG GAME, in short, is a very BIG DEAL. It was not always so.
It is generally conceded that the modern era of televised football began on Dec. 28, 1958, when the then-Baltimore Colts played the New York Giants for the NFL Championship in a nationally televised contest at Yankee Stadium. The game was a cliff-hanger and is still the only NFL title to be decided in sudden-death overtime. Grizzled veterans refer to it as the "Greatest Game Ever Played."
Johnny Unitas led his Colts on a thrilling final drive that culminated in Alan Ameche's one-yard plunge into the end zone for the winning score. A nation was hooked, and television money emerged as a vital new source of revenue for the league.
Interestingly, as the Colts moved into scoring position, a fan ran onto the field, delaying play for several minutes. It was later revealed that this miscreant was in fact an employee of NBC who'd been instructed to do something distracting to stop the game because the network had momentarily lost its video feed at this critical junction. Today, they'd have simply called an officials' time-out, but back then -- when TV existed to serve the sport, rather than the other way around -- no one had ever heard of such a thing.
The ascendant popularity of pro football gave rise to the formation of the American Football League, which began play in 1960. The fledgling league was widely viewed as an ersatz copy of the real thing, and it was generally ignored by the established NFL, which had been playing since 1920. That attitude would soon change.
Gridiron scholars are divided as to which original AFL franchise was the most pathetic. Some argue that the dubious distinction falls to the Denver Broncos. The fact that the team debuted in uniform socks with vertical stripes argues powerfully for their position. Most, however, believe the New York Titans won the futility bowl.
Clad in uniforms of putrid purple and mustard, the team played in the old Polo Grounds where the pigeons and fans were often represented in roughly equal numbers. Hapless both on the field and off, the franchise was facing bankruptcy by 1963. That prospect bade poorly for the rest of the league. If its entry in nation's largest television market folded, the AFL could be relegated to permanent minor-league status.
The enterprise was spared that unhappy fate when an investment group headed by entertainment executive Sonny Werblin rode to the rescue. They purchased the team, renamed it the Jets (after the street gang in West Side Story) and changed its colors to the now familiar green, black and white. Under Werblin, the Jets would also move to Shea Stadium. His extreme makeover of the AFL's ugliest duckling laid the foundation for America's biggest sporting event.
Werblin knew how to put on a show and had no intention of playing second fiddle to the NFL. Both leagues held their 1965 college player draft on Nov. 28, 1964. The then-St. Louis Cardinals of the NFL drafted quarterback Joe Namath in the first round as did the Jets. Werblin wooed Namath to New York with a jaw-dropping $400,000 signing bonus -- a sum unheard of in an era when quality players might make $20,000 a year. Thus did the University of Alabama all-star from Beaver Falls, Pa., become "Broadway Joe."
Werblin's next move is less well-remembered. The NFL's Philadelphia Eagles had selected the Heisman Trophy winner from Notre Dame, quarterback John Huarte, with its first pick. Werblin signed Huarte by virtue of $300,000 in bonus money. The bidding war was on. By 1966, the leagues would spend $7 million just to sign their respective draft picks.
While competition for college talent was wide-open, there was a tacit agreement that once a player was signed, the other league would respect his contract. That arrangement also fell apart in 1966 when the Giants signed football's first soccer-style placekicker, Pete "Go-Go" Gogolak, from the Buffalo Bills' roster.
AFL Commissioner Al Davis subsequently declared open season on NFL talent. Alarmed by spiraling labor costs, owners in the older league sued for peace, and an agreement was reached for a merger in 1970. For the intervening four years, the leagues would play independently but meet for a post-season "championship game."
The initial games were curiosities -- sort of like an empirical settlement of a barroom argument over who would win a fight between Superman and the Incredible Hulk. They were creatively entitled, the "First AFL-NFL World Championship Game" and the "Second AFL-NFL World Championship Game." Both were won in workmanlike fashion by the NFL's Green Bay Packers.
Fans of the older league were beginning to experience buyer's regret, suspecting that they'd adopted an inferior product. Three developments would transform a lackluster novelty into a national spectacle.
First, Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt was watching his daughter play with a Super Ball when he decided to call the match-up the Super Bowl until somebody came up with a better idea. No one ever did, and the game finally acquired a name you could utter without spraining your tongue.
Next, NBC pre-empted the dramatic conclusion of a 1968 regular season game between the Jets & Raiders to air a new production of Heidi. Public outrage was so great over the "Heidi Bowl" incident that the offending network elected to profit from its blunder by raising ad rates for AFL broadcasts by $10,000 a minute. The supposed pretenders from the younger league obviously had a very real fan base.
Finally, what was by then called Super Bowl III pitted the Jets against the Colts. The former was generally considered to be the AFL's weakest entry to date; the latter one of the strongest teams in NFL history. The flamboyant Jet quarterback, Namath, entered the contest as a 19-point underdog, and then proceeded to deliver on his brash pre-game guarantee of victory by pulling off the upset of the century.
The following year, the AFL's Chiefs beat the favored Minnesota Vikings, forever evening the record of pre-merger Super Bowls at 2 - 2.
When you tune in Sunday, be sure to follow Terrell Owens' advice and "get your popcorn." According to the statisticians, we consume some 4,000 tons of the stuff on the day now commonly referred to as Super Bowl Sunday.
M.W. Guzy is a retired St. Louis cop who currently works for the city Sheriff's Department. His column appears weekly in the Beacon.