There may have been better football games than the 1958 NFL Championship Game and Super Bowl III. But without the Giants-Baltimore Colts overtime game in 1958, and the Jets’ upset of the Colts on January 12, 1969 at Miami’s Orange Bowl, there might not be the annual Super Bowl holiday weekend. The Giants-Colts game on December 28, 1958, at Yankee Stadium helped launch professional football to Americans, as people sat in front of their black-and-white television sets and began watching the NFL with great intensity. One of those people was a young Texas oilman named Lamar Hunt who was attempting to land an expansion franchise or buy an NFL team such as the Chicago Cardinals and move it to Dallas.

On the field, the Giants were becoming the glamour boys of Madison Avenue, led by the handsome Frank Gifford. The Giants were the NFL champions in 1956, and finished the 1958 season in a tie with Cleveland on top of the NFL’s Eastern Conference. They beat the Browns 10-0 in a playoff game, and faced the Baltimore Colts in the championship contest.

The Giants had Gifford, Charley Conerly, Kyle Rote, and Sam Huff — highly recognizable names. Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore, Gino Marchetti, and Artie Donovan were fine players, but the New York press had convinced the sporting public that the Giants were simply better.

The Colts and Giants finished regulation tied at 17–17. Baltimore had tied it on a Steve Myhra field goal with just seven seconds remaining. The Colts won it in overtime after Unitas lead the team downfield, capped by Alan Ameche’s one-yard touchdown run with 8:15 gone in the overtime.

The on-field drama had viewers tied to their TV sets, and convinced both TV executives — and Hunt — that football had arrived. “I think there was an opportunity, the sport needed to grow,” recalled Hunt at an NFL owners meeting in the mid 1990s. “It had gone through a consolidation period and we had seen the 1958 great championship game between the Giants and Colts. There was great national interest in the game and there were a lot of cities frankly that were growing, and not all of them had great stadium facilities. But it was beginning to happen. The public was beginning to perceive that this game had a national appeal.”

Hunt eventually didn’t get an NFL team in Dallas. K.S. (Bud) Adams was hoping to land a team in Houston, and like Hunt, Adams failed in his attempt to obtain an expansion team or buy the Chicago Cardinals and move it to Houston. The two met and formed the American Football League in 1959. Hunt’s league outlasted three other American Football Leagues and the All-America Football Conference, and became a major rival to the established NFL.

In 1966, Hunt’s AFL merged with the NFL, and in January 1967, the “World Championship Game, AFL vs. NFL” was played. The game was held in the 94,000 seat Los Angeles Coliseum. The ticket prices were $12, $10, and $6. There were 33,000 empty seats. It was the last time a Super Bowl or the World Championship Game was not a sellout. The game took place just 26 days after the final approval of the merger between the National Football League and the American Football League. Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers won the first two “World Championship Games.” In January 1969, the Jets won the AFL Championship and played the NFL Champion Colts. The Jets, according to many of the sports experts of the day, didn’t even belong on the same field as the Colts.

The Jets-Colts game was the turning point in the popularity of the Super Bowl. The NFL and the football press thought the old league would just be better all the time.

The Jets were portrayed as the free-spending rebels from the rebel league. New York quarterback Joe Namath had a large contract, long hair, a llama rug in his living room, a mink coat, sometimes had a moustache and a goatee, and played in white shoes. The Colts’ quarterbacks, Earl Morrall and Johnny Unitas, both had crew cuts. Namath was known as Broadway Joe, a nickname given to him by former Colts and Jets offensive lineman Sherman Plunkett. Unitas was known as Johnny U and wore black high-tops. Namath, because of his image, was a lightning rod in the turbulent late 1960s, which added interest to the Jets-Colts match.

Namath stated there were four quarterbacks in the AFL who were better than Morrall, the Colts starter, and then added, “We are going to win this game. I guarantee it.”

Namath and the Jets were confident and really believed they were better than the Colts.

“That’s true and I understood Coach [Weeb] Ewbank,” Namath said years later. “The next day, I saw Coach Ewbank and he said, ‘My goodness, these guys (the Colts) are overconfident and I have been working on that and here you are giving them fuel to get fired up for the game.'”

“I simply said, ‘Coach, if they need clippings to fire them up, then they are in trouble.’ That was that. He made me aware that he was very upset that I had said what I did and I felt badly about it after that. Fortunately we won.”

The Jets won 16–7. Namath’s outspokenness and performance permanently etched the term Super Bowl into the American mindset.

For veteran AFL players, Namath represented something more than the quarterback of a Super Bowl winning team. He was the AFL, and put the league on the sports map forever — and he singlehandedly changed pro football. Namath is in Pro Football’s Hall of Fame as a player, but his real contribution to football was giving life to what, after just two years, was becoming just a run of the mill championship sporting event, the World Championship Game. The notion that the Super Bowl is merely a game is wrong. It’s a hugely successful business vehicle for football owners, radio and TV networks, the Internet, advertisers, and in every American community that has a food and liquor store, thanks to Super Bowl parties. The Super Bowl transcends sports.

The Super Bowl has become an American holiday, thanks in very large part to Unitas leading the Colts downfield twice — once to tie the game with seconds remaining and in overtime to beat the Giants in Yankee Stadium in that December of 1958. Those drives arguably help create the AFL, and Namath leading his Jets over Unitas’s Colts in 1969. Those two events changed American culture forever.

evanjweiner@yahoo.com