BEFORE THE ROMAN NUMERALS : It Was 30 Years Ago Today That Only 61,946 Saw Packers Beat Chiefs at the Coliseum in ‘World Championship Game’

Lamar Hunt, the good-natured Dallas Texan who has owned the Kansas City Chiefs all these years, says he knows how any sports fan can make a fortune today in parlor games or barroom seminars.

“Just offer to bet anyone that they can’t tell you who won Super Bowl I,” Hunt suggests. “In years of asking, I’ve never met any person anywhere who could give me the correct answer. I swear, it’s the best-kept secret in football.”

The correct answer, of course, he says, is: Nobody won Super Bowl I.

“Nobody called it the Super Bowl until the second year,” Hunt says. “And it didn’t get its name, officially, until Super Bowl III.”

Nonetheless, it was played that first year, as any reader can verify from old newspaper clippings. And the Green Bay Packers won the game, which at the time had a long, unwieldy title: “World Championship Game, American Football League vs. National Football League.”

It is so identified in the old game program, which sold for $1.

And older Southern Californians know all about that because the game was played in the Los Angeles Coliseum 30 years ago today.

So there has been some talk about it again this week. Calling from one coast to the other, sportswriters have been asking old-timer Hunt what he remembers about that day in January 1967, when, for the first time, an NFL team played an AFL team.

“I remember 35 to 10,” he says, speaking from his home in Dallas.

That was the final score.

Hunt remembers because he owned the team that got the 10.

The score is also lodged in the memory of veteran sports announcer Jack Buck, who, along with thousands of other national media representatives, passed up the game.

Instead, Buck did his radio show in St. Louis that week. And the night before the game, he got a phone call from a listener who asked, “How much will Green Bay win by?”

Replying promptly, Buck said, “35 to 10.”

Some things never change. There are football fans who expect Green Bay to beat New England in Super Bowl XXXI, 35-10.

Buck’s prediction, he says, made him famous in the Buck family. But he notes that elsewhere, public interest wasn’t overwhelming for what was widely billed as a world championship game.

“That game had already been played, most people thought,” Buck says.

What he meant was that pro football’s main event in those days, three years before quarterback Joe Namath made the AFL internationally celebrated in Super Bowl III, was the championship game of the senior league, the NFL.

The NFL’s 1966 renewal, played at Dallas on Jan. 1, 1967, had been won by Green Bay, 34-27, as the stern, conservative Packer coach, the late Vince Lombardi, opened up with passes for the only time in his life to beat a great passing team.

Many old-time sports fans still recall with fondness the Bart Starr-Don Meredith passing duel on national television that afternoon, when many called it the greatest football game ever played.

Two weeks later, predictably, they showed less interest in Kansas City-Green Bay for the first AFL-NFL title. To the sophisticated sports fans of the 1960s, that had an exhibition-game sound.

So in Los Angeles for what was only later called Super Bowl I, they mustered an exhibition-size crowd of 61,946.

It remains the Super Bowl series’ only non-sellout. And it happened, 1960s fans will tell you, for strictly one reason--because Los Angeles thought of the AFL as a minor league, and, accordingly, worth little support.

Los Angeles at that time, in the minds of its sports fans, was a major league city. Things are somewhat different today, when, with the NFL absent in pursuit of riches, Los Angeles supports everything from hockey to soccer.

A big-league city, however, only rouses itself for big-league events. And whereas you can be sure that Los Angeles in the winter of 1966-67 would have had a Coliseum-sellout 90,000 for the NFL’s Green Bay-Dallas game--equaling the 1973 Super Bowl turnout here seven years later--it was only mildly interested in the 1967 AFL Chiefs.

“We were surprised that Los Angeles diagnosed that 61,000 as a small crowd,” the Kansas City coach of that era, Hank Stram, remembers, speaking from his home in New Orleans. “We thought it was a big crowd. We had never played to 61,000 in Kansas City.”

The Chiefs, though, lived up to Los Angeles’ expectations, losing by 25 points to the team led by Lombardi, who since the 1960s has often been called the NFL’s all-time best coach.

“The game wasn’t really that bad,” a longtime AFL fan, George Mitrovich, says from San Diego. “The most neglected fact about Super Bowl I is that at halftime, the score was only 14-10.”

It was, in fact, at least that close until the last three minutes of the third quarter, when, surprising those who were increasingly expecting an upset, Hall of Fame Packer safety Willie Wood suddenly stepped into a pass by Kansas City quarterback Lenny Dawson.

Running the interception back 50 yards to the Chiefs’ five-yard line, Wood set up Elijah Pitts for a five-yard touchdown run, the first of his two scores. In the game, Bart Starr completed 16 of 23 passes for 250 yards and two touchdowns to Max McGee.

Stram has wondered since whether the Chiefs would have played more successfully if he hadn’t brought them west two weeks early, thereby exposing his players at length to the many temptations of Hollywood.

“I told the team that I’d take them to Los Angeles right after the Buffalo game if they beat the Bills in that terrible Buffalo weather,” Stram says, recalling the day the Chiefs smashed the Bills in the AFL’s 1966 title game, 31-7.

Nor did Stram go back on his word. One of the foremost football philosophers in the sport’s long history, Stram, who came up with, among other things, the rolling pocket and the tight end I formation, says that in 1967, everyone on the Kansas City roster enjoyed practicing in the warmth of California instead of a Kansas City winter.

The record shows that in time, Stram was to dominate pro football, bringing zone defense to the NFL--his greatest strategic achievement--and taking Kansas City to victory in Super Bowl IV, in which the Chiefs slammed Minnesota, 23-7, as their coach, wired for sound, made a memorable TV documentary.

Conceivably, Stram could even have won Game I if, in the luck of the draw, he had won the home-field advantage. That first one and all of the other Super Bowls might have been played on home fields instead of neutral fields, Kansas City owner Hunt says, but for a strange and all-but-forgotten fact.

“The late Pete Rozelle, greatest of the commissioners, telephoned a number of [club owners] that year and discussed where to play [Super Bowl I],” Hunt remembers. “Without question, I think most owners would have voted for home-field sites if it hadn’t been for [Lombardi].

“They worried that a coin flip could have put the game in Green Bay--not only that year but in alternate years, possibly, for a long time. And no owner wanted to take a chance on January blizzards in Green Bay. Zero weather there is always [probable].”

And that’s how the gypsy tradition of the Super Bowl--with games played in different cities-- began.

“Moving the event around has turned out to be a great idea for pro football,” says Hunt, who in 1960 founded the AFL--a Hall of Fame accomplishment. “I think that much of the Super Bowl’s national interest comes from taking the game to neutral sites every year--to cities that want us and look forward to us.”

The long shadow of Lombardi, in other words, keeps getting longer.

“We sort of lucked into what we’re doing,” Hunt says. “In January, who would ever choose to play in Green Bay?”

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Super Bowl Cities

Cities and the number of times they have hosted the Super Bowl.

San Francisco: 1

Los Angeles: 7

Pasadena: 1

San Diego: 1

Phoenix: 1

Minneapolis: 1

Houston: 1

Detroit: 1

Atlanta: 1

Miami: 7

Tampa: 2

New Orleans: 8

Source: National Football League