Sunday, February 6, 2011
pop culcha The Very First Super Bowl, 1967
Posted by Gabe Meline on Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 9:37 AM
This piece here in The Awl, by David Roth, is a throwback to an even more innocent big game: It's about watching a recording of the first ever Superbowl, played in 1967 at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, footage of which until recently was thought not to exist. (Turns out it was sitting in an attic for 40 years.) Roth goes to the Paley Center for Media in New York, ventures down to the basement and watched the CBS broadcast of Superbowl I, which was played between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs in front of 61,000 people and 30,000 empty seats. Imagine: 30,000 empty seats at the Superbowl. But mostly it's Roth's descriptions of what the game looks like that get me:The laconic sportscasting style of the day—roughly half of the play-by-play is comprised of ellipses, the color commentary is colorless—added to the strangeness of this version of Super Bowl I. The score and game clock, among other constants of the contemporary televised football experience, surface only briefly and seemingly at random. A vast shadow passes over the field when a blimp floats overhead. the first one, padded by 30 minutes of artless technophiliac retardo-pop at halftime—"In other Peas-related news: apl.de.ap has shaved 'XLV' into his scalp, and Taboo has a book coming out"—and nearly 50 minutes of commercials. Super Bowl I's homemade-looking yardage markers have been brought up to state of the neon-foam art; a helpful yellow line will demarcate first downs; there will be that fucking football robot, doing the things it does.
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