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A little girl named it, but
Namath made it real
of TheColumnists.com
It was Lamar Hunt’s
six year old daughter who made it all happen. Who knows what
we would all be doing next Sunday without her?
Hunt was the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs of the old American
Football League and daughter Carrie was his feisty first child
in 1967 when the National Football League got together with the
upstart AFL for something described in the press as the Professional
Football Championship.
That had as much ring for fans as the NCAA title for college
basketball fans until someone came up with the descriptive Final
Four.
Carrie Hunt bounced a large ball around the house as her dad
tried to figure out how to promote this title game, get sponsors
more interested and make it all into a national event. After
all the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Orange
Bowl always sold out for radio and television and 100,000 people
usually filled the stadiums for those games.
When the big, bouncing ball found its way mysteriously to papa
Hunt’s desk, he asked his daughter, “What is this?”
Sweetly the beautiful child innocently answered, “My super
ball.”
Super ball? Super Bowl? Wouldn’t that work?
It’s worked well enough to make the Super Bowl Sunday from
Glendale, Arizona, home of the University of Phoenix, the single
largest one day sports watching event of the year. It happens
every year.
No matter that the New York Giants, one of the legendary franchises
of football and the New England Patriots, the first 18-game undefeated
team in pro football history, will go against each other for
the second time in little more than a month.
This is for the whole enchilada, the championship of professional
football, the Super Bowl title in Super Bowl XXXXII, the biggest
instrument for national partying since New Year’s Eve.
Who could imagine such excitement if the game didn’t have
that historic, lasting, over hyped, colorful name of Super Bowl?
Green Bay won the first two Super Bowl titles easily, beating
Hunt’s Kansas City team in one and Al Davis’s Oakland
team in another. Then came the Super Bowl III, the contest that
bonded the leagues and put the event on every home’s television
schedule.
I have been to 30 World Series starting in 1959 through 1988
and one Super Bowl starting and ending in 1969, the New York
Jets defeating the Baltimore Colts that day 16-7.
On that January 12, 1969, football took its biggest forward step
ever because a cocky kid from Beaver Falls, PA, and the University
of Alabama went against the Colts, led by future Hall of Fame
quarterback Johnny Unitas. Only Unitas had a sore elbow that
week and had to watch his backup Earl Morrall struggle through
the game.
Sore-armed Unitas could manage a late game touchdown only good
enough to avoid a shutout.
The Jets quarterback, Joe Namath, the embodiment of the free
living lifestyle of the 1960s, put on a classic exhibition of
leadership, play calling and performance in defeating the 19
point favorite Colts.
Baby brother Eli Manning, this guesser believes, will do the
same for the underdog Giants on Sunday as they beat Bill Belichick’s
heretofore undefeated Pats and outshine Tom Brady, the Joe Namath
of the 21st century.
Namath was linked to just about every beautiful starlet around
New York in those days. Brady is linked to just about every super
model these days, one of whom he had a child with, another of
whom he will have dinner with in the days before the game.
Not that this has anything to do with the playing ability of
either of them.
Manning, brother of last year’s Super Bowl champion QB,
Peyton, is a shy, soft-spoken, introverted young man with a strong
arm. He has only one known named girl friend, Abby McGrew, who
he charmingly identifies in 1920s fashion as his fiancée.
Not that this has anything to do with his playing ability.
The championship game took off with the public when it was identified
with this wonderful, catchy term of Super Bowl. It was made a
classic for fans after Namath “guaranteed” victory
for his team during an inebriated discussion of the event.
Now it will be watched across the country on February 3 as the
greatest group entertainment since Santa Claus was first discovered
coming down a chimney.
I’ll be rooting for the Giants, of course, as a New Yorker
and maybe because I can’t stand Belichick’s arrogance.
None of that matters. The beer will be cold, the canapés
will be warm, the hero sandwiches will be large and the pals
will all be attending.
That’s really what the Super Bowl is really all about after
Joe Namath and Lamar Hunt made it into an American institutional
experience some 40 years ago.
Let the parties begin.
©2008 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The photo of Tom Brady is from Wikipedia. This
column first posted Jan. 28, 2008.
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