Superbowl, The Morning After

No, it's now about being blitzed yesterday or nursing a hangover this morning, it's about a little Superbowl history from a Geezer.

I suspect that there aren't many out there that have taken in all the Superbowl's. Maybe Mel, Howard, or Alan. I, on the other hand, have watched every one (all or part) since Superbowl 1. That would be 51 years worth.

Some were good, some bad, some were a waste of time. The half time shows were, eh!! Most of the time with the exception of the wardrobe malfunction that Justin Timberlake gave us via Janet Jackson in Superbowl XXXVIII (38) weren't worth watching.

Immediately after.

But what I really wanted to touch on was Superbowl 1 because of the gyrations I had to go through to watch the game.

The date: January 15, 1967.
The place: Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.  
The teams: Kansas City Chiefs and the Green Bay Packers.
The score: Later.

In 1967 I was newly married, lived in the same apartment building I lived in when I landed in Los Angeles in 1963 (from Florida) and there was something that now days doesn't exist. Blackout. 


Yup, if you lived within about 50 square miles of a game, you couldn't watch the game. So our options were to drive to San Diego, rent a room with TV, and watch the game OR being young, poor, and destitute as young marrieds were in those days, we made an antenna that could get the game from a San Diego TV station.

Use your imagination here. Two broomsticks shaped like a cross. Coat hangers straightened out and taped to the broomsticks parallel to the cross arm. Wired together with ( I can't even find a picture out on the net) two strand TV wire and then screwed to the back of the TV. It was two copper wires separated with plastic to make a connection from your antenna (that's the thing that used to be on your roof for you youngsters) or rabbit ears (those alien antenna's that sat on the top of your TV) back when your TV was wide enough for something to sit on top of it and screwed to the connections on the back of the TV. You used to have one connection for UHF channels and one for VHF channels.

Something like this:

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The wire coming out of the back of the TV was the wire I was talking about above. Then we had to put that antenna on top of the two story apartment building to get it high enough to get reception.

Back to Superbowl 1. Green Bay won 35 to 10 and we watched it on a small (probably 12") set with a grainy picture (they used to call it snow), but we watched the game non the less.

And as they say, "The rest is history".

As the years went on, some of the games were good, some were awful (14-7 very boring Redskins and the Dolphins in Superbowl VII [7]), and some where blowouts (Superbowl XXIV [24] was 55 - 10, 49'ers over the Broncos, sorry Howard).

So Superbowl LI is in the books and if you watched it, it was a really good game. First Superbowl to ever go into overtime. Tom Brady is the first quarterback to win 5 Superbowl's.

Just want to share that with you.