J. Mark Powell

Lamar Hunt had a problem. The big game, the biggest of its kind ever held, was being planned. And it needed a name worthy of the occasion.

Hunt, an oil tycoon’s son, had been crazy about football since he was a kid, just like many boys. With one huge difference … his family’s wealth meant he could indulge his passion in ways others never could.

As a young businessman just out of college in the 1950s, he wanted to get in on the game. Professional football was a distant second to big league baseball back then. Hunt believed he could change that. He applied for a National Football League expansion franchise and was rejected. In 1959, he tried to buy the Chicago Cardinals and take them to Texas. (The next year, the team moved to St. Louis instead.)

Many men would have called it quits. Not the brash, young millionaire. If he wasn’t good enough for the NFL, he’d start his own league. Hunt rounded up others whose franchise requests had been denied, and in August 1959, the American Football League was formed. Skeptics sneered that AFL stood for the “American Foolish Club.” These new kids on the gridiron block proudly wore the nickname as a badge of honor.

Hunt’s Dallas Texans began having a tough time attracting crowds when the NFL placed the Dallas Cowboys in the Lone Star State. Sensing an opportunity, the mayor of Kansas City, Mo., invited Hunt to relocate his team there. In 1963, the Texans became the Kansas City Chiefs.

Meanwhile, the professional football landscape was changing, just as Hunt predicted. Suddenly, interest in the game wasn’t limited to high school and college action. The big leagues had reached the big time.

The middle-age NFL (the league was 40 years old then) reacted with typical irritation at the young upstart nipping at its heels. When the AFL’s inaugural season wrapped up, Commissioner Joe Foss wrote to his NFL counterpart proposing a “World Playoff” championship game between the two groups. A high-stakes, one-game, winner-take-all title to be played at the end of the 1961 season.

The NFL blew it off with a polite “Thanks, but no thanks.”

However, public interest in a championship game mounted as the 1960s went on. Behind the scenes, talks about a reconciliation among owners in both camps led to something much bigger. On June 8, 1966, it was announced the two would merge. The new entity would be called the NFL, and it would have two conferences.

And there would be a single championship game played between them at the end of each season. Though the merger wouldn’t take effect until 1970, the first such game would be played in January 1967 at the conclusion of the season.

The team owners — who clearly weren’t marketing geniuses — christened this Mother of all Football Games with the lackluster title “AFL-NFL Championship Game.” Hunt was having none of it.

As serious planning for the big showdown began, Hunt couldn’t get an image out of his mind.

His young kids were crazy about a brand-new toy called the Super Ball. Wham-O put the little gizmo on the market in 1964. A seemingly innocent rubber ball was made with a substance called Zectron, making it incredibly bouncy. You could drop it at shoulder level, and it would fly back into your hand. In one instance, a strong adult documented a bounce three stories high. Young Baby Boomers were snatching them up like hotcakes, making the Super Ball one of the mid-’60s’ best-selling toys.

As Hunt mulled it over, Super Ball morphed into Super Bowl.

Bowl games had been around for decades. They were institutions, the grand finale of each college football season. This new pro game would be a finale, too. But it would be bigger and more spectacular the any other.

In an interview with The Kansas City Star, Hunt mentioned “the Super Bowl — that’s my term for the championship game between the two leagues.” The media, recognizing a good thing when they saw one, took the ball and ran with it. Hunt wrote to the NFL commissioner, “I have kiddingly called it the ‘Super Bowl,’ which obviously can be improved upon.”

Except, it couldn’t. Because the name immediately caught on.

The NFL wanted to ditch it the following year, saying in a statement, “Not many people like it.” The owners suggested snazzy alternatives such as the “Merger Bowl,” “Summit Bowl” and even “The Game.”

It was too late. By 1967, the Associated Press was reporting the name Super Bowl “grew and grew and grew — until it reached the point that there was Super Week, Super Sunday, Super Teams, Super Players, ad infinitum.”

And so, it officially became the Super Bowl, starting with the third game in 1969.

Which is why when the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles take the field in New Orleans on Sunday, they’ll be playing Super Bowl LIX, not the 59th-anniversary edition of the AFL-NFL Championship Game.

Thankfully.

J. Mark Powell is a novelist, former TV journalist and diehard history buff. Have a historical mystery that needs solving? A forgotten moment worth remembering? Please send it to HolyCow@insidesources.com.