On the road to Orient Beach, on the Dutch side of the Caribbean island of St. Martin, is a bar. As you drive past the place, you notice a big sign that was provided by the National Football League’s official beer sponsor and which reads, “Watch the Super Bowl Here.” On this tiny speck of land, which lies on a dormant volcano, baseball (on the Dutch side) and soccer (on the French side) — are the most popular sports. Still, both locals and tourists will gather in front of a bank of television sets at a crowded bar to watch international broadcasts of NFL games.

Both the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl are must-see TV in St. Martin, thanks to George Halas and Lamar Hunt.

The influence of Halas and Hunt on the NFL is so great that the league annually awards the George Halas Trophy to the winner of the National Football Conference championship game and the Lamar Hunt Trophy to the victor of the American Football Conference championship game. Without Halas and Hunt, pro football would look a lot different.

Indeed, absent Hunt there would be no Super Bowl — he coined the term “Super Bowl” (it had been referred to simply as the AFL–NFL Championship Game).

These days, the Super Bowl is a cultural phenomenon in America, enjoys a large following in Canada and Mexico, and continues to capture new fans as it expands its presence globally. It’s hard to believe that Halas and Hunt had the foresight to envision that professional football — which produced far more failures than successes between 1920 and 1960 — would become the multibillion dollar industry it is today. Both Halas — who laid the groundwork in 1920 for what would become the NFL during a meeting of entrepreneurs in a Canton, Ohio, auto dealership — and Hunt, a founder of the American Football League — were businessmen of a different era. Under Halas, who amassed an enormous amount of clout within the league, the NFL was a ragtag operation that regularly added and subtracted teams in the first 15 years of its existence. In the 1920s, football salaries ranged between $75 and $100 per game, the average ticket price was less than $1, and a typical team roster consisted of about 15 players. Late in the 1925 season, the NFL gained national recognition when All-America halfback Harold “Red” Grange signed a contract to play with Halas’s Chicago Bears before his college eligibility was up at the University of Illinois. The Grange signing clearly violated NFL rules that prohibited players from signing before they had completed college, but the acquisition of Grange and the Bears’ subsequent national barnstorming tour may have saved the NFL in the 1920s.

On Thanksgiving Day, a crowd of 36,000 at Wrigley Field — the largest in pro football history — watched as Grange and the Bears played a scoreless game against the Chicago Cardinals. By December, the Bears went on an eightgame, 12-day barnstorming tour that ended in Chicago. Later that season, a crowd of about 73,000 watched the Bears play the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds, helping to ensure the future of the troubled NFL franchise. That record attendance was bested 10 games later when the Bears defeated the Los Angeles Tigers at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in front of 75,000 fans.

The move from the mom-andpop operations, the old football families — the Maras in New York, the Rooneys in Pittsburgh, and the Halases in Chicago — to today’s corporate model did not happen overnight. The NFL had to fend off a rival league between the 1946 and 1949 seasons, and absorb three All-American Football Conference franchises in 1950. It continued to be plagued by franchise failures until 1952. The NFL finally had a taste of franchise success between 1953 and 1956 when it started to think about a future with more teams.

During the mid- to late 1950s, Halas and Hunt were conducting business with each other — to nearly disastrous results. The NFL and television had also found each another; football was the perfect game for the small screen, and the NFL provided fall programming for local TV stations. By December 1958, with the New York Giants facing off against the Baltimore Colts in the championship contest, the NFL had succeeded in capturing the imagination of the American public. Regulation play between the teams finished tied at 17–17, when Steve Myhra of the Colts scored a field goal with just seven seconds remaining. The Colts won in overtime — the first overtime game ever played — after Johnny Unitas led the team downfield capped by Alan Ameche’s one-yard touchdown run. The onfield drama had viewers tied to their TV sets and convinced television executives and businessmen like Hunt and Bud Adams, a charter owner in the former American Football League, that the NFL had arrived.

Hunt and Adams, both Texans, applied for expansion franchises in Dallas and Houston respectively. NFL owners dragged their feet in making a decision to expand. Both men had also attempted to buy the Chicago Cardinals with the intention of moving them to Texas. Both bids were rejected.

The impetus for NFL expansion came from Halas. NFL Commissioner Bert Bell appointed Halas and Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney to a committee to explore the possibility of expansion. Dallas and Houston were identified as cities that could support an NFL team, and Bell, Halas, and Rooney, encouraged by the interest, suggested that the NFL should expand to both Dallas and Houston by 1961.

But Halas did not move fast enough for Hunt’s liking, and Hunt countered by finding five other businessmen who wanted to try their hands at pro football. In August 1959, the fourth American Football League got off the ground.

“The first organizational meeting of the AFL was in mid-August of 1959 in Chicago,” Hunt recalled decades later. “I think there was an opportunity, the sport needed to grow. 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, 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.”

In 1960, Hunt’s AFL began play. Hunt’s Kansas City Chiefs played for the World Championship of Professional Football in January 1967 in the first-ever meeting between an AFL and NFL team. Hunt’s Chiefs lost to the Green Bay Packers that day before a crop of empty seats at the Los Angeles Coliseum. That first American Football League–National Football League Championship Game would evolve into the Super Bowl and an unofficial national midwinter celebration — not only in America, but apparently in places like St. Martin and the Bahamas as well. But Halas’s and Hunt’s successors are not satisfied with celebrations in America, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean Islands.

The NFL would like to see the midwinter holiday take on an even more international feel, with more fans in more countries. Later this year, the league will preside over a preseason game in Beijing that is being billed as the China Bowl 2007, and a regular season game in London. It makes you wonder how many strange looks one would have gotten from Halas’s Canton cronies had they been told that people would be toasting their game from some faraway, exotic island or that football would one day be a global entity worth billions of dollars.