Football fans are gearing up for the biggest show in sports with Super Bowl LVI on the horizon. The Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams will battle on February 13 for the Vince Lombardi Trophy and the honor of being named the Champion of the National Football League.
It will be the 56th Super Bowl played in NFL history, a history that strangely traces back more than 60 years to a dusty airport in North Texas called Dallas Love Field.
On February 7, Love Field Stories, a steaming show sharing unique and interesting stories about the airfield in Dallas, aired the first episode of its second season. In the episode, host Mark Elfenbein was joined by Clark Hunt, CEO of the Kansas City Chiefs. Clark’s father, Lamar Hunt, was the founder of the Kansas City Chiefs and played an integral role in the creation of the NFL as it is known today.
“He approached the National Football League about an expansion franchise for Dallas,” Hunt recalled about his father’s desire to own a professional football team in the 1950s. The NFL told him two things: “first of all, we’re not interested in expanding, and secondly, Dallas is a horrible market for pro football. It’ll never succeed there.”
Undeterred by the NFL’s rejection, Lamar Hunt sought to buy an existing franchise that he could then relocate to Dallas. Again, Hunt was told no, but he did learn that he was not the only person hoping to purchase and relocate a team to Texas. One of those people was Bud Adams, who wanted to position a football franchise in Houston.
While on a four-hour flight back to Dallas, Hunt sketched out a business plan to create his own league on stationary given to him by a stewardess. From that sketch, the American Football League was born.
The AFL began play in 1960 with the Dallas Texans playing at the Cotton Bowl alongside a brand-new NFL expansion team, the Dallas Cowboys. Clark Hunt recalls that the NFL was under antitrust investigations by Congress during the first years of the AFL, and the Cowboys team was created specifically in hopes of damaging the upstart league and preventing competition.
In 1963, Hunt decided to relocate the Texans to Kansas City to get away from the difficulty of a two-team marketplace in Dallas, and the team was rebranded as the Chiefs. Hunt had also considered New Orleans as a possible location for his franchise but ultimately settled on Kansas City due to the involvement of local leaders there.
Business between the NFL and the AFL was “a battle,” Hunt said, and in the spring of 1966, Tex Schramm, the first owner and President of the Dallas Cowboys, reached out to Lamar Hunt to discuss the possibility of a merger between the two leagues.
Schramm and Hunt met at Love Field, and, while sitting in Schramm’s Oldsmobile, the two worked out the beginning framework of how today’s NFL would be formed.
As the merger came together, the need for a new, final championship game arose. According to Hunt, during a meeting, one of the six team-owners got confused about which championship game was being discussed.
“The last game, the final game, you know, the Super Bowl,” Hunt said. It was the first time that the term was used in connection with the NFL championship. The name wasn’t officially used until Super Bowl III.
Lamar Hunt said that he came up with the name after attending college Bowl games. He combined the idea of a bowl game with the word Super because of the Super Bounce Ball that was a popular toy at the time.
When the Cincinnati Bengals defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game this season, the trophy they hoisted was the Lamar Hunt Trophy, a fitting way to honor the legacy of one of the league’s pioneers. It is interesting to think that it may never have happened if it wasn’t for a dusty airstrip in North Texas.