April 29, 2025 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, today, the Super Bowl is the most-watched event on television—between 90 and 110 million people tune in to the "big game" each year. Americans consume 1.45 billion chicken wings (enough to circle the Earth three times), eat 28 million slices of pizza, and drink 325 million gallons of beer on this unofficial holiday. But it wasn’t always this way. Dennis Deninger, author of The Football Game That Changed America, tells the story of how the Super Bowl as we know it came to be—from nothing.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Can we continue with our American stories? Each year? On
Super Bowl Sunday, American see one point four billion chicken wings,
order twelve point five million pizzas, and drink three hundred
and twenty five million gallons of beer? How did these
stern of events come to be? Here to tell the
(00:32):
story of the origin to the Super Bowl is Dennis Deninger,
an Emmy Award winning live sports producer and the author
of The Football Game That Changed America. How the NFL
created a national holiday? Take it Away, Dennis.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Back in nineteen fifty eight, the booming postwar years, a
young man named Lamar Hunt, who was only twenty six
years old, decided to put an expansion to team in Dallas.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
There is no professional.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Sports team of any kind in the state of Texas,
and he had a lot of money. H. L. Hunt
was his father, and he was a multi billion dollar
oil tycoon. So Lamar Hunt goes to the NFL and
the answer he got was no. The NFL owners liked
the fact that there were twelve of them, and they
were splitting all of the dollars that the NFL made,
(01:28):
and they didn't want to cut the pie into smaller pieces.
The commissioner at the time, Bert Bell said to young
Lamar Hunt, Listen, if you can get Walter Wolfner, the
owner of the Chicago Cardinals, to sell his team, we'll
let you move it to Dallas. The Chicago Cardinals they
were the four step sister to the Bears.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
They didn't win very many games, they didn't.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Get a lot of money, but Walter Wolfner really liked
being an NFL owner. He says, listen, Sonny, I'm not
going to sell team to you or to any of
the other of these rich guys that keep trying to
buy my team. And he makes the mistake of naming
names rich people who have visited him. Now he gets
(02:12):
on the airplane heading back to Dallas, and the way
he put it was.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
A light bulb went off.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
If there are all these rich guys who all want
to start teams in cities that do not have NFL franchises,
why don't we just start a second league. The AFL
arose just two years later. They got a television contract
with ABC. They started with a fourteen game season and
(02:39):
the NFL only had twelve, so the AFL controlled two
weekends in the fall that the NFL did not have
games so they had a winning combination and by nineteen
sixty six, just six years later, the NFL owners they
could not take the competition anymore, the competition for players
(03:00):
great players now could they could take bids from AFL,
NFL and the.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Price is won up.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And I think the tipping point was Joe Namath. Joe
Namath got this four hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars
contract for four years from the New York Jets. The
owners they couldn't do this, so they said, look it,
we want to go back to the days when we
could pay these guys a lot.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Less than one hundred thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
So anyway, the talks about a merger begin and the
general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, the team that the
NFL started, hopefully to run Lamar Hunt out of town,
and they did. He had a team in Dallas for
three years and then they moved to Kansas City and
they became the Chiefs, and they've been pretty successful as
(03:48):
the Chiefs, you might say. But Tex Shram reaches out
to Lamar Hunt with the blessing of Pete Roselle, who
was then the commissioner. He said, don't tell anybody else.
We don't know where the talks are going to go,
so we're not going to do this as a group
of twelve. You just go talk to Lamar Hunt. Well,
Mama Hunt was flying back from somewhere to Dallas to
(04:10):
love Field, and tex Sharam said, why don't we meet
at the airport when you arrive, if you'll meet me
at old Texas Rangers statue and then we can start talking. Well,
they start talking and looking around, and this is kind
of a public place, so tex Shram says, why don't
we go out to my car. So the talks about
the merger of the AFL and the NFL started in
(04:32):
an oldsmobile in the parking lot of love Field in Dallas,
and they sat there and they talked for forty five
minutes and pretty much sketched out what they would do
if there was a merger. And Pete Roselle announces in
June of nineteen sixty six that the two leagues are
going to merge and at the end of the upcoming season,
(04:54):
the nineteen sixty six season, they will have a world
championship game, the NFL champion versus the AFL champion.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
The first Super Bowl wasn't called the super Bowl.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Pete Roselle did not like the words super This is
the era of the nineteen sixties. He hated all of
these empty superlatives like.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Super and neat and keen and cool.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
It was called the AFL versus NFL World Championship.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
That was the official name the media was calling at
the super Bowl. The public was calling at the super Bowl.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Because it was just a nice abbreviation, right, And that
is how the super Bowl came to be. Pete Roselle
was a man of vision. He saw this Super Bowl
as the greatest sporting event that would happen every year
in the United States. This is an arrival the Kentucky
(05:52):
Derby the World Series, and it was going to be
in January, so he wanted it always to be in
a warm weather site where people would want to go,
that you could plan well ahead. When you think about
Baseball's World Series, you don't know where it's going to
be until the final two teams are decided.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
The NBA Championships the same way.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Roselle also wanted to take advantage of any opportunity he
had for public relations. All of the NFL championships up
to that one, had been one week after the end
of the season. He wanted there to be two weeks
so people would know about it, you could promote it,
and so super Bowl Week was born from his vision.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
They had very little time to get this together.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
In fact, tickets were six, ten and twelve dollars and
it wasn't a sellout. There were thirty thousand empty seats
in the coliseum for the first Super Bowl. But although
they couldn't sell out in the stadium, NBC had been
carrying the AFL games and CBS had been carrying the
NFL games. They each paid the NFL a million dollars
(06:59):
for this new con So two of the three networks
are promoting the hell out of tune into this game.
So the Green Bay Packers won the game, and the
first Super Bowl was the most watched sporting event in
the history.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Of America up to that point. It was televised on
both networks.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Over fifty one million viewers tuned in, and that was
the humble beginning which really blossomed very quickly. The most
recent Super Bowl halftime was viewed by one hundred and
thirty three million people per minute, and that's far more
(07:42):
than any entertainment show all year long, and it wasn't
always that way. The halftime shows started as let's fill
the field. We have a field to this one hundred
yards long, and let's turn it into a big variety
show and let's have college bands marching all over and
(08:03):
have floats come in.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
So it was very much g rated and middle of
the road.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
But that took a really sharp turn right after nineteen
ninety two. Fox Network had debuted and they were trying
to do anything they could to get folks to watch,
and they had a great show called in Living Color
that had Jamie Fox, and they said to themselves, well,
(08:32):
what if we tried to do a show at halftime
on the Super Bowl and were promoted to get people
away from this wishy washy entertainment and have some fun,
cutting edge entertainment that we can offer them. So what
Fox did is for weeks leading up to the super
Bowl they said, at halftime of the Super Bowl, tune
over to watch in Living Color. We'll be live, we'll
(08:55):
have fun, and we'll be joking about the super Bowl. Well,
twenty five million viewers left the Super Bowl telecast to
sample this box show, and they had a countdown quant
the game is going to start at this point so
you can tune back, and the NFL they blew their
stat We cannot have this happen. We cannot have viewers
(09:16):
tuning away from our premiere show to watch something else.
So they said about getting the number one act for
nineteen ninety three, and they got Michael Jackson. It ended
the era of people tuning away, and since twenty twelve
it has been the highest rated segment of the show.
(09:38):
It's the biggest most watched entertainment event of the year.
The halftime gets more viewers than any other event, any
other entertainment show all year long. The super Bowl has
become a sports event that stands apart from all others.
It's the most important advertising day of the year. The
economic impact in the United States is plus or minus
(10:01):
forty billion dollars every year.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
It's the second largest food consumption day of the year.
It's become winters fourth of July.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
There are significant displays of patriotism, certainly and sitting together.
More people watch the super Bowl than vote in presidential elections.
There's this communal bonding around the super Bowl that you
don't get with other holidays. The super Bowl has become
America's secular holiday.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
And the rest, as they say, is history. The story
of the Super Bowl, the story of the halftime show.
Here are now American stories.
Can we continue with our American stories? Each year? On
Super Bowl Sunday, American see one point four billion chicken wings,
order twelve point five million pizzas, and drink three hundred
and twenty five million gallons of beer? How did these
stern of events come to be? Here to tell the
(00:32):
story of the origin to the Super Bowl is Dennis Deninger,
an Emmy Award winning live sports producer and the author
of The Football Game That Changed America. How the NFL
created a national holiday? Take it Away, Dennis.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Back in nineteen fifty eight, the booming postwar years, a
young man named Lamar Hunt, who was only twenty six
years old, decided to put an expansion to team in Dallas.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
There is no professional.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Sports team of any kind in the state of Texas,
and he had a lot of money. H. L. Hunt
was his father, and he was a multi billion dollar
oil tycoon. So Lamar Hunt goes to the NFL and
the answer he got was no. The NFL owners liked
the fact that there were twelve of them, and they
were splitting all of the dollars that the NFL made,
(01:28):
and they didn't want to cut the pie into smaller pieces.
The commissioner at the time, Bert Bell said to young
Lamar Hunt, Listen, if you can get Walter Wolfner, the
owner of the Chicago Cardinals, to sell his team, we'll
let you move it to Dallas. The Chicago Cardinals they
were the four step sister to the Bears.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
They didn't win very many games, they didn't.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Get a lot of money, but Walter Wolfner really liked
being an NFL owner. He says, listen, Sonny, I'm not
going to sell team to you or to any of
the other of these rich guys that keep trying to
buy my team. And he makes the mistake of naming
names rich people who have visited him. Now he gets
(02:12):
on the airplane heading back to Dallas, and the way
he put it was.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
A light bulb went off.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
If there are all these rich guys who all want
to start teams in cities that do not have NFL franchises,
why don't we just start a second league. The AFL
arose just two years later. They got a television contract
with ABC. They started with a fourteen game season and
(02:39):
the NFL only had twelve, so the AFL controlled two
weekends in the fall that the NFL did not have
games so they had a winning combination and by nineteen
sixty six, just six years later, the NFL owners they
could not take the competition anymore, the competition for players
(03:00):
great players now could they could take bids from AFL,
NFL and the.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Price is won up.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And I think the tipping point was Joe Namath. Joe
Namath got this four hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars
contract for four years from the New York Jets. The
owners they couldn't do this, so they said, look it,
we want to go back to the days when we
could pay these guys a lot.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Less than one hundred thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
So anyway, the talks about a merger begin and the
general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, the team that the
NFL started, hopefully to run Lamar Hunt out of town,
and they did. He had a team in Dallas for
three years and then they moved to Kansas City and
they became the Chiefs, and they've been pretty successful as
(03:48):
the Chiefs, you might say. But Tex Shram reaches out
to Lamar Hunt with the blessing of Pete Roselle, who
was then the commissioner. He said, don't tell anybody else.
We don't know where the talks are going to go,
so we're not going to do this as a group
of twelve. You just go talk to Lamar Hunt. Well,
Mama Hunt was flying back from somewhere to Dallas to
(04:10):
love Field, and tex Sharam said, why don't we meet
at the airport when you arrive, if you'll meet me
at old Texas Rangers statue and then we can start talking. Well,
they start talking and looking around, and this is kind
of a public place, so tex Shram says, why don't
we go out to my car. So the talks about
the merger of the AFL and the NFL started in
(04:32):
an oldsmobile in the parking lot of love Field in Dallas,
and they sat there and they talked for forty five
minutes and pretty much sketched out what they would do
if there was a merger. And Pete Roselle announces in
June of nineteen sixty six that the two leagues are
going to merge and at the end of the upcoming season,
(04:54):
the nineteen sixty six season, they will have a world
championship game, the NFL champion versus the AFL champion.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
The first Super Bowl wasn't called the super Bowl.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Pete Roselle did not like the words super This is
the era of the nineteen sixties. He hated all of
these empty superlatives like.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Super and neat and keen and cool.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
It was called the AFL versus NFL World Championship.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
That was the official name the media was calling at
the super Bowl. The public was calling at the super Bowl.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Because it was just a nice abbreviation, right, And that
is how the super Bowl came to be. Pete Roselle
was a man of vision. He saw this Super Bowl
as the greatest sporting event that would happen every year
in the United States. This is an arrival the Kentucky
(05:52):
Derby the World Series, and it was going to be
in January, so he wanted it always to be in
a warm weather site where people would want to go,
that you could plan well ahead. When you think about
Baseball's World Series, you don't know where it's going to
be until the final two teams are decided.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
The NBA Championships the same way.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Roselle also wanted to take advantage of any opportunity he
had for public relations. All of the NFL championships up
to that one, had been one week after the end
of the season. He wanted there to be two weeks
so people would know about it, you could promote it,
and so super Bowl Week was born from his vision.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
They had very little time to get this together.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
In fact, tickets were six, ten and twelve dollars and
it wasn't a sellout. There were thirty thousand empty seats
in the coliseum for the first Super Bowl. But although
they couldn't sell out in the stadium, NBC had been
carrying the AFL games and CBS had been carrying the
NFL games. They each paid the NFL a million dollars
(06:59):
for this new con So two of the three networks
are promoting the hell out of tune into this game.
So the Green Bay Packers won the game, and the
first Super Bowl was the most watched sporting event in
the history.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Of America up to that point. It was televised on
both networks.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Over fifty one million viewers tuned in, and that was
the humble beginning which really blossomed very quickly. The most
recent Super Bowl halftime was viewed by one hundred and
thirty three million people per minute, and that's far more
(07:42):
than any entertainment show all year long, and it wasn't
always that way. The halftime shows started as let's fill
the field. We have a field to this one hundred
yards long, and let's turn it into a big variety
show and let's have college bands marching all over and
(08:03):
have floats come in.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
So it was very much g rated and middle of
the road.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
But that took a really sharp turn right after nineteen
ninety two. Fox Network had debuted and they were trying
to do anything they could to get folks to watch,
and they had a great show called in Living Color
that had Jamie Fox, and they said to themselves, well,
(08:32):
what if we tried to do a show at halftime
on the Super Bowl and were promoted to get people
away from this wishy washy entertainment and have some fun,
cutting edge entertainment that we can offer them. So what
Fox did is for weeks leading up to the super
Bowl they said, at halftime of the Super Bowl, tune
over to watch in Living Color. We'll be live, we'll
(08:55):
have fun, and we'll be joking about the super Bowl. Well,
twenty five million viewers left the Super Bowl telecast to
sample this box show, and they had a countdown quant
the game is going to start at this point so
you can tune back, and the NFL they blew their
stat We cannot have this happen. We cannot have viewers
(09:16):
tuning away from our premiere show to watch something else.
So they said about getting the number one act for
nineteen ninety three, and they got Michael Jackson. It ended
the era of people tuning away, and since twenty twelve
it has been the highest rated segment of the show.
(09:38):
It's the biggest most watched entertainment event of the year.
The halftime gets more viewers than any other event, any
other entertainment show all year long. The super Bowl has
become a sports event that stands apart from all others.
It's the most important advertising day of the year. The
economic impact in the United States is plus or minus
(10:01):
forty billion dollars every year.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
It's the second largest food consumption day of the year.
It's become winters fourth of July.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
There are significant displays of patriotism, certainly and sitting together.
More people watch the super Bowl than vote in presidential elections.
There's this communal bonding around the super Bowl that you
don't get with other holidays. The super Bowl has become
America's secular holiday.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
And the rest, as they say, is history. The story
of the Super Bowl, the story of the halftime show.
Here are now American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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