This Bowl Made Them Super

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This Bowl Made Them Super
What's remembered about '69 -- and what's forgotten

By ALLEN BARRA

The Super Bowl as we know it, the centerpiece of the most successful league in American sports, began 40 years ago with the most humiliating defeat in NFL history.

The first two games between the rival leagues, the old NFL (which traces its lineage back to 1920) and the upstart AFL (which began in 1960), ended in victories for Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers over, respectively, the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders. Today it's common to refer to those two games as Super Bowls, but the name wasn't official until the 1969 match between the NFL's Baltimore Colts and the AFL's New York Jets in Miami on Jan. 12.

In the summer of 1966, the two leagues had agreed on an eventual merger and that their champions would meet to play each other at the end of that season. What they couldn't agree on was what to call the game. Allen St. John, author of "The Billion Dollar Game: Behind the Scenes of the Greatest Day in American Sport, Super Bowl Sunday," says "NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle wanted to call it 'The Big One.' For reasons obvious to everyone but Rozelle, no one was happy with that. Lamar Hunt, who owned the Kansas City Chiefs, saw his kids playing with a new toy called a SuperBall and jokingly suggested that Super Bowl -- implying that such a game would be bigger even than college football's Rose Bowl -- would be a good name. That one stuck."

Not, however, until the owners voted on the new title prior to the 1968 season. "Even then," says Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films, "some of the more conservative owners resisted the name, which they thought was too hyperbolic. If you look at a game ticket, it says 'Third World Championship Game.' No mention of 'Super Bowl.'"

The Colts, favored by anywhere from 17 to 19 points, were soundly whipped by quarterback Joe Namath and the Jets' defense, 16-7. Due to injuries, Broadway Joe would have only a few good years, but the 1968 season and 1969 Super Bowl were enough to make him a folk hero. Even today, his name is better known to many fans than those of most players on this year's Super Bowl teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals.
[Joe Namath ] Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

So many myths grew up around the 1969 Super Bowl that they have become part of pro football's folklore. For instance, everyone who saw the game -- and even the millions who didn't -- "remembers" when Mr. Namath guaranteed a Jets victory; in reality, few fans knew of that guarantee until after the Jets had won.

"After a week of seeing his team insulted in the press," says Mark Kreigel, author of "Namath: A Biography," "Joe went on the offensive and told an audience at the Miami Touchdown Club, 'We're going to win Sunday -- I'll guarantee it.' The 'guarantee' was mentioned in a story in the Miami Herald on Friday, was picked up in the New York area by Newsday on Saturday, and didn't make most Manhattan papers until game day -- all without causing much of a stir. A relative handful of fans around the country who saw the game even knew about Joe's guarantee." Those who saw Mr. Namath's remarks wrote them off as the boasting of a loud-mouthed quarterback whose team was about to be annihilated.

It was only afterward -- in the wake of the shocking upset, when the promise was revived for headlines -- that everyone "remembered" that Joe Namath had "guaranteed" the victory.

Another popular myth is that the Jets' win proved to the NFL establishment that the AFL had caught up with their league. "Most of the NFL old guard simply denied what they saw in Miami," says Mr. Sabol. "They said it was a fluke and that 'We'll get them next year.' Well, next year proved to be an even bigger shock when the Kansas City Chiefs, almost as much an underdog as the Jets had been, destroyed the Minnesota Vikings 23-7. That's when everyone knew the AFL had caught up."

Perhaps the biggest myth about the 1969 Super Bowl is that it was an upset at all. Today, teams from the American and National Football Conferences play each other regularly throughout the season, and prognosticators have reams of statistics on which to base their predictions. But in 1969, before the Jets and Colts took the field, the only two games between the two leagues were won by the Green Bay Packers by a total of 44 points.

"Everyone assumed the Colts would dominate the Jets the same way." says Mr. Kriegel, "but the Jets were big and fast, especially Namath. The Colts, even with Bubba Smith, couldn't get to Joe. His release was too quick -- and when they blitzed him, he picked them to pieces." New York's defense intercepted four passes and nearly shut Baltimore out.

"The Colts always insisted they could have won if they hadn't made so many mistakes," said Dick Schaap, who covered the game for ABC, when I interviewed him for Sport magazine on the 20th anniversary of the Jets' victory. "Actually, it was the Jets who should have scored more points. It wasn't an upset -- the Jets were the better team and we just didn't know it."

The first two NFL-AFL championship games were disappointments both in TV ratings and at the box office. The Jets' victory over the Colts, though, lit a fire under the fans and media that ultimately ensured the Super Bowl's place as an unofficial American holiday. But in the years after the leagues' merger, many fans have forgotten why the game was so important. In 1994, NFL Films released a video of the game as part of its "Great Games of the NFL" series, a bit of revisionist history not unlike including Fredericksburg on a list of the U.S. Army's greatest battles.

The simple truth is that the NFL couldn't beat the AFL, so they joined them.

 

I read this in the Journal today and it made me even more proud about how important this game was. More important than the other SBs that have been played. Its always good to remind ourselves that this is why you can indeed hold your head up high when you are a fan of this team, even though we crave our second victory.