In today’s era, the Super Bowl is an enormous event; there’s well over 100 million viewers for the big game and also even the NBA Finals or World Series can rivet an entire city,. So I got to wondering:
I was born in the late 1980s. I wonder how much of a big deal a championship - especially, a Super Bowl - was in the 1960s-1970s?
What about the World Cup’s importance to other countries from the 1930s-1970s?
Was it only, perhaps, half or even one-third of the attention and hype and joy/agony that it is today?
I know the first Super Bowl, in 1967, wasn’t even called that. It was known as the “AFL-NFL Championship Game.” The original broadcast tape of that game doesn’t even exist in its complete form. It wasn’t until Super Bowl III in 1969, when it started to be hyped. That was when Joe Namath, quarterback of the New York Jets, famously guaranteed that the Jets would beat Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts.
200,000 people attended the Uruguay vs Brazil match in the 1950 World Cup. Brazil vowed to never wear those colors again changed their uniforms afterwards. Apparently some fans killed themselves and it’s considered a national tragedy.
Yes but the NFL Championship was a huge deal.
The earliest I can go back is the Flyers winning back to back Stanley Cups in 1974 to 1975; my mother still tells me stories to this day she had to leave the room for the 1974 Final because it was so intense and yes, the celebrations and parades were a BIG deal, to the point the Flyers still show footage of Kate Smith singing God Bless America from 1974 before big games.
The weird thing is in 1974 Philadelphia considered itself a “city of losers” despite the fact that in 1967 the 76ers won the NBA title, in 1960 the Eagles won the NFL championship, and in 1956 the Philadelphia Warriors won an NBA title, I know Philadelphia fondly remembers the 1960 NFL team, but wonder how much juice the 1967 NBA title had.
As a matter of fact, in 1980, when the Phils won the World Series, we all would go out and honk our horns, and bang on pots and pans. When the Sixers won the NBA title 3 years later, I went out to do the same thing, and was the only one in the neighborhood, and felt like a douche!
I think at the time, baseball was king, the Eagles second, and the Flyers a close third because of what they did 10 years earlier. Not sure why the Sixers were red headed step children because that was one helluva team.
The first World Cup I remember is Spain 1982 and it was definitely a very big thing at the time: all matches on tv, tons of merchandising, endless discussions at school and (I suppose) at work.
However, the difference is that I don’t remember all this circus starting so early. I swear that the current Euro has been everywhere 24/7 since the beginning of the year. When I was a kid, the only big pre-competition event was the draw for the finals, about six months before the start. You’d talk about it for a couple of days afterwards and start talking about it again a month before the competition but that was it. Now, it’s everywhere for months. And as soon as the final is finished, you start thinking about the next one.
Exactly so. Part of the reason that the first couple of Super Bowls weren’t as “big” was that a lot of NFL fans viewed the AFL as an inferior league, and there wasn’t necessarily the expectation that the game would be competitive or meaningful.
The first Super Bowl I watched was SB VII, after the '72 season. Through the 1970s, the Super Bowl was definitely a big deal – not just for NFL fans, but for American culture in general. The undefeated Dolphins in '72, the band-of-rebels Raiders, the Steelers dynasty, and the original “America’s Team” Cowboys were all teams and stories that transcended the game itself.
The level of hype certainly wasn’t the same as today (and, in those days, the game was played in the afternoon, not the evening) – but you could argue that that’s at least as much a function of what US culture and media were like in those days, compared to today.
Only 13 teams entered the 1930 World Cup. Just four from Europe. In those days, it wasn’t just a matter of hopping on a plane, the team would go out on a ship, and there wasn’t anywhere near the money that’s washing around in soccer these days.
In soccers oldest tournament the FA Cup, there were 15 entrants. Queen’s Park, from Glasgow were drawn twice against Donington School from Spalding in Lincolnshire. The first time, the two teams couldn’t agree where to play and both received a bye and, when drawn together a second time Donington couldn’t afford the £2 per man to make the trip to Glasgow on the train and withdrew. The final was watched by a global audience of 2,000 - all of them within the confines of The Oval Cricket Ground in South London.
The second Dempsey-Tunney fight (aka The Long Count) in 1926 drew nearly 105,000 fans to Soldier Field in Chicago, was carried by a national radio hookup (which was a lot harder to do back then) and was the largest grossing entertainment event to that time.
The NFL started picking up steam, moving ahead of MLB as the leading national sport, with their 1958 overtime championship game (“The Greatest Game Ever Played”, OT between the Colts and the Giants at Yankee Stadium). Super Bowl III pretty much cemented the Super Bowl as the biggest, most important sporting event of the year in the United States.
Fun fact: Attendance for Game 5 of the 1908 World Series, when the Cubs clinched their second and last World Series title, was 6,210 at Detroit. Apparently there was a ticket-scalping scheme that led to a fan boycott of sorts.
Sports championships are always a big deal, that’s why they exist. Before the railroads, telegraphs, and high speed printing presses sports were all local, and the bragging rights to having the best team in West Podunk weren’t worth much. Once teams and individual athletes could travel and compete against the best in other regions the newspapers, and later radio and TV had something to sell.
A couple of other ruminations, as I think back to the 70s…
By far, the “big” championships were the Super Bowl and the World Series, and they were definitely games that even casual sports fans would pay attention to. OTOH, it’s also interesting to note that, at that time, you had World Series games that were played in the daytime, and the Super Bowl was played in the afternoon. I remember kids sneaking transistor radios (with earpieces) into school to listen to World Series games.
But, again, the level of hype is just so much bigger today. In the 1970s, there was no Web, and cable TV wasn’t yet a factor, so you simply didn’t have the ability to be exposed to sports news 24/7, the way you are now (and, conversely, you didn’t have sports media outlets that needed to create content to fill a 24/7 pipeline).
College football was very big, too, but with the BCS still decades away, the big bowl games were what got the big attention, even if they weren’t technically “championship games” (and the big ones – Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Orange – were always on New Year’s Day). College basketball, and the NCAA tournament, didn’t get nearly the attention that it does now, as I remember it.
Pro basketball and pro hockey were the other two major professional sports, but they weren’t nearly as nationally visible then as they are now. I remember NBA playoff games being carried on CBS…but on tape-delay, after the late local news (i.e., 11:30pm Eastern). And, the NHL was still very much a regional (and Canadian) game – they had no national TV contract after NBC dropped them in the mid 70s, and it looks like even Stanley Cup games weren’t often televised nationally.
It’s not a team sport, but I distinctly recall that championship matches in heavyweight boxing had huge levels of hype (for that era)…undoubtedly in part a function of Muhammad Ali’s popularity and charisma.
I was a teenager but I don’t really remember Super Bowls I and II or kids discussing it at school. I don’t think the first one was even a sellout at the 100,000 seat LA Coliseum. I remember watching III because we were visiting relatives and my cousin and I watched some. I suppose because many “old guard” NFL fans and writers considered the AFL to be vastly inferior, that the first two weren’t considered that important. Green Bay winning the first two seemed to confirm it. In the 1970s “Sports Illustrated” had a football writer named Tex Maule who constantly picked NFC teams to win, apparently because he was an old guard type (in fairness 5 of the titles the AFC won in the 1970s were by the teams that changed conferences in the merger).
On a related note, I remember maybe in 1968 at church we had some kind of “male orientation” thing every Sunday after services…about 12 teenage boys. The adult once casually asked “who won the NBA title?”. None of us were really sure, we talked about it amongst ourselves and finally with hesitation said “Boston”…because they almost always won back then.
Some old time championships had some rather poor attendance. The 1912 World series went to a decisive game 8 (game 2 ended in a tie because of darkness). The final game at Fenway drew only 17,000…half the capacity. Interest was high but there was a dispute about what seats the booster club “Royal Rooters” should get. Led by John Fitzgerald (“Honey fritz”, grandfather of John, Robert and Ted Kennedy and all their siblings) they boycotted the game in protest. But apparently interest was high. You will see old photos of crowds in Times Square and other places with a scoreboard and visual aids telling people what was going on.
The TV commercials and halftime show weren’t as important (other than beer commercials), but the championship game itself was very important in the 60’s through 90’s. If anything, the importance has diminished over time as almost every team gets a championship, creating more parity. Also, the players used to move to their team’s city and even live there in the off-season and after retirement. Players nowadays are less tied to a team, and may live in Hawaii or Florida in the off-season, sometimes in the same neighborhood as other players from opposing teams, who may become their new teammates next season. Plus they used to drink champagne and maybe smoke a cigar after the victory.
I have an LA drinking acquaintance who likes to talk about going to Super Bowl I, which wasn’t actually called that. He and his dad walked up to the box office and got in for six bucks each. Actual prices were 6, 10 and 12 dollars. In the 100,000 or so seat stadium there were 30,000 tickets left. On the other hand, Al Davis only sold that many seats for a Raiders game when the Broncos were in town. I was there.
World Cup, Olympics… at the time, many countries had a much smaller number of TV stations than today. This often meant that programming was taken over by whatever big event was on. You want to watch something other than sports during the Olympics, in a two-channels country? Stare out the window.
It interesting that people always say that the 1958 overtime game was the big boost. But Phil Mushnick, sports media writer for the New York post, has written that he has talked to a man who was with CBS Sports at the time. They point out that ratings for the next two NFL title games were lower. This man felt the game that really started the NFL’s popularity was the 1961 game between the Giants and Packers. Not because it was exciting, it was a 37-0 romp for Green Bay. But because Middle America felt good because one of their own small towns had beaten the glamorous New York Giants. And New Yorkers could console themselves by saying that Green Bay’s coach Vince Lombardi was a New York City guy, who played on a great Fordham college football team in the 1930s.
I wonder how much expansion and relocation have affected the popularity of championship teams. The NFL was a Midwestern-Northeastern league before WW2, as was baseball until 1958. And neither league was in the South before the 60s. Did western/southern residents care about the NFL or major league champions before then?
I’d imagine especially in the south that college and high school football (and basketball) were far bigger than the NFL. With baseball you had older players who couldn’t play regularly in mlb end up on Pacific Coast League rosters. Casey Stengel’s Oakland teams
in 1947 and 1948 had former major leaguers such as Nick Etten, Cookie Lavagetto and Ernie Lombardi. So that might have brought some connection…plus ball players used to “barnstorm” in the winter playing exhibition games where it was war after October, a number of times against Negro League players (who won a large majority). So in the South and West you had a chance to see major league ball players.
Didn’t 2,000,000 people turn out for the first cup?
This kid had already been a fan for a couple seasons by the time they won it, and was walking on air…wish I was there.