An unidentified man who has possession of the only known tape of Super Bowl I in existence is in negotiations with the NFL to sell the rights.
When Super Bowl I was played at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Jan. 15, 1967, the concept of the game was so new that it wasn’t even called the “Super Bowl.”
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The “First AFL-NFL World Championship Game,” as it was billed, was a watershed point in the quelling of hostilities between the established NFL and the upstart American Football League that had been founded in 1960 and, by 1966, had forced a merger with the older league.
Even the broadcast rights were different, since there had never been a game like that. Super Bowl I was carried on both CBS and NBC. CBS had the rights to televise the NFL, while NBC was the AFL’s broadcast partner and it is, to date, the only simulcast game in NFL history.
The problem stems from a common cost-saving procedure at networks in the 1960s—broadcast tapes of sporting events were routinely recorded over with other programming.
No one knew in 1967 that the Super Bowl would become an event of such magnitude.
Brian Stelter of CNN did a segment on the missing tape, speaking to the attorney of the anonymous owner—who explained how the tape came into existence—as well as to Jack Whitaker, who was one of the play-by-play announcers for CBS that day.
The recording came into being because the father of the anonymous owner had access to two-inch color videotape and recorded the CBS broadcast, sticking the reel-to-reel tapes in an attic in a Pennsylvania home, where they were discovered in 2011.
One of the tapes was restored by the Paley Center for Media in New York, according to the Wall Street Journal.
That version of the tape has most of the game, with the exception of the halftime show—featuring trumpeter Al Hirt and the marching bands from the University of Arizona and Grambling State University.
Not exactly the high-profile acts of the contemporary Super Bowl, to be sure.
According to the attorney, Steve Harwood, Sports Illustrated estimated the value of a recording of Super Bowl I at $1 million in 2005. Harwood pointed out that the $1 million figure wouldn’t buy a fraction of a commercial spot in Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIX.
Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers beat Hank Stram’s Kansas City Chiefs in that first AFL-NFL matchup, the first of four Super Bowls that would be played by the champions of the two separate leagues who merged in 1970.
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