Donna Broadhurst was there.
Her ticket cost $6.
And the show wasn’t quite ready for prime time.
The 75-year-old Fayetteville resident — a self-described tomboy who was then living with her family in Los Angeles — was in the stands for the very first Super Bowl, which was played on Jan. 15, 1967, at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
“To my sister and I, it was something to do,” Broadhurst recalls. “And we both enjoyed football. And being brought up with football, we were just going to a game down there. A pro game.”
Broadhurst was accompanied by her sister Linda Krause at that game 56 years ago.
Her parents had five daughters, and it was always a sports family. Her father, Lester Hoff, coached a girls football team, and he had played semi-pro baseball for the Chicago White Sox farm team. The sisters enjoyed bowling, and an uncle who had a boxing ring taught them to box.
“He always wanted a boy,” Broadhurst says of her father. “You name it, we did it. My dad would challenge the neighborhood that his girls could beat the guys. We were all very involved in sports very much.”
So she jumped at the chance to attend a professional football game, which turned out to be the first Super Bowl.
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It wasn’t even called “Super Bowl” at the time, but rather the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game.
The National Football League champion Green Bay Packers — coached by the legendary Vince Lombardi and led by the game’s Most Valuable Player, quarterback Bart Starr — defeated the American Football League champion Kansas City Chiefs 35-10.
Kickoff was at 1 o’clock, Broadhurst says, a contrast to Sunday’s Super Bowl that will begin at 6:30 p.m. to rake in the profits of high-dollar prime-time advertising.
Super Bowl LVII will pit the same Kansas City Chiefs (16-3) against the Philadelphia Eagles (16-3) and will be broadcast by Fox.
It was Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt who came up with the name Super Bowl, a sort of tribute to a popular kid’s toy back in the day, Wham-O’s Super Ball.
The name became official in its third year, 1969.
As expected, the NFL’s Packers proved superior in that first championship game, but the Chiefs were well within striking range through the first half, trailing the Packers 14-10.
Many sportswriters and fans thought of the older NFL as vastly superior to the upstart American Football League. They anticipated a blow-out.
“Back then, the AFC was considered a ‘Mickey Mouse’ team,” Broadhurst says. “They didn’t even compare to the NFL.”
Signature game
The Super Bowl telecast has evolved into a near holiday, with family and friends coming together to enjoy game-day pizza, chili and lots of salty snacks.
Each halftime show tries to top the previous one with glitter and celebrities, and some tune in just for a barrage of attention-grabbing television ads.
But when Broadhurst was there, it was different. She was 20 at the time.
She and her sister got their $6 tickets from their father. He had planned to go, but his father passed away and Hoff was off to Chicago for the funeral.
“My dad actually had six tickets,” recalls Broadhurst, who shares a home with her 72-year-old husband, Carter, on a cul-de-sac in the College Lakes subdivision.
“You couldn’t get anyone to go with you back then, because (Los Angeles) Dodgers tickets were like $5, and they were charging $6 or $7 up to $12 for a Super Bowl ticket,” she says. “And people weren’t going to pay that.”
According to online accounts, local newspapers in the area printed editorials about what they viewed as an exorbitant ticket price of $12.
According to Ticket IQ, an online ticket search engine, the average price for tickets to Sunday’s Super Bowl LVII is $6,783.
“And my sister and I, our ticket was for the 10-yard line,” Broadhurst says. “And there was hardly anyone there. She said, ‘Donna, this is ridiculous.’ Someone came up to my sister — I was getting a soda or something — and said, ‘I’ll give you $12 if you move down to the 50-yard line.’ Because they wanted to look like it was crowded there because there were so many empty seats. So, we walked down to the 50-yard line and sat there and watched the game. Everyone was doing it.
“We went higher up to see better.”
Broadhurst says she only found out about the $12 offer to change seats about a month ago.
“They paid my sister. She never told me about this,” she says with a laugh. “She had the money. I guess she thought it would pay for the gas to get there.”
Broadhurst has since obtained a copy of a photo taken from an original videotape that briefly shows the sisters from behind heading for their 50-yard-line seats. When Carter Broadhurst watched an HBO documentary on Super Bowl 1, he recognized an image of his future wife as the sisters shifted to midfield.
“You just get a glimpse of her,” he says. “You never really see them full in the face. So, the picture of them walking away, it’s a wonder I recognized her. I saw that and said, ‘That’s Donna. That’s Donna.’”
The first Super Bowl is the only time that two networks — CBS and NBC — broadcast the game. The original tapes were later erased by the networks because videotape was very expensive in those years and it was common to reuse it.
Rooting for Green Bay
Broadhurst says the game remains vivid in her mind.
“I was rooting for Green Bay because I’m from Chicago, and my dad was a big (Chicago) Bears fan. And just to spite him, I picked Green Bay as my team. So that made it interesting when playoff times came and we watched football on Sunday. I did that just to spite him to make it interesting.”
Donna Broadhurst laughs when she remembers that the 1967 halftime show featured a high school marching band. New Orleans trumpeter Al Hirt also played during the half.
“The weather was very nice,” she says. “There were a lot of movie stars there. … I don’t remember their names. They weren’t sitting next to us. I think they were the ones getting mad because people were moving down to the 50-yard line that they bought tickets for.”
But Donna and her sister Linda were among them to witness history.
“Who knew it was going to take off?” she says.
Michael Futch covers Fayetteville and education for CityView. He can be reached at mfutch@cityviewnc.com.