Pablo Torre Finds Out - The Super Bowl Tape That the NFL Doesn't Want You to See

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Jet packs! Double kickoffs! Protest! The helmet-less, hungover superstar with a dynasty at stake! A killer game clock! Unconsciousness! The first Super Bowl was a sh*tshow. So why hasn't anyone seen it? Because the footage vanished for a half-century, only to resurface — with a million-dollar bounty — from an attic in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and get thrown in a vault under lock and key. Until correspondent Devin Gordon entered the time machine to witness the progenitor of Travis Kelce, feel the primordial ooze from which Taylor Swift may have been formed… and, yes, to open a Playgirl centerfold featuring a man called The Hammer.Special thanks to Richard Sandomir for his reporting. For more, visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/sports/football/super-bowl-i-recording-broadcast-nfl-troy-haupt.html Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. I took a can of, ironically, pork and beans on a can I headed in my pocket. And as he came toward me, I threw it. You're listening to Draft King's Network. So, Devin Garden, I brought you back in studio. Hello. Thank you.

Thank you for having been back. I wanted to kick off Super Bowl Week with a very specific story that only you Only you, Devin can tell. Yes, that I do agree with you. That for this once, only me. I do really think that might be true. Yeah. In a nation, it is obsessed with firsts, right?

The first person to do this ever. As we sit on the precipice of Super Bowl 58, it has occurred to me that I don't know jack shit about Super Bowl one. And that makes me quite unlike you. Yeah, yeah. This is the one reason why this is, I'm the only one on the list for this story. know way too much about Super Bowl 1 and have since I was about eight years old. Why? There are two ways to answer that question. If you're my therapist, I would say something about

being like a latchkey kid and, you know, a dearth of male role models in my life, that sort of thing. But the sports reason is because the helmets were really cool. And I'm watching, like, on the weekends, the NFL films videos of their Super Bowl, they're 30-minute Super Bowl 1 documentary, which has this voice of God on all of the, like, the icy tundra. of Lambeau Field. This premier spectacle of sport took place in a carnival atmosphere appropriate to the Hollywood setting. For the first time, the Green Bay Packers, champions of the National Football League,

played the Kansas City Chiefs, the best team in the American Football League. I'm learning about all these things as an eight-year-old, and getting obsessed with football, the first book I ever wrote was a crayon illustrated guide to all of the Super Bowls thus far. We were on Super Bowl 19, I think, when I wrote it. Just to state perhaps the obvious and apologies to your therapist. I might have to deal with this later.

You're a pretty fucking weird kid. Yes, yes. I mean, I wrote a crayon book of the illustrated history. But most kids don't do that. No. I just got obsessed with it. So I knew a little bit about the first Super Bowl, and it always seemed like this amazing thing.

Because by the time I was a kid, it was massive. It was the biggest thing in the world. But when I think about what the Super Bowl is now, which is as much about pop culture and halftime and music as anything. Well, I imagine in my brain that 1967 Super Bowl on halftime was, I don't know, like old-timey. Like, you know, there was marching bands and things like that, but there was also jet packs. So these two guys with giant tanks of hydrogen peroxide strapped to their backs at halftime zoomed up about 100,000. feet to the air and flew around.

Just got to say, for people who aren't watching on YouTube with the Draftings Network, that was pretty awesome. I have wanted a jetpack my whole life. I still don't have one. And apparently they had them at a halftime of the first Super Bowl. That part, already mind-blowing. That part worked, which is a study in contrast. They survived, by the way, at the end of that clip.

Which is a study in contrast of most of the things that happened around the first Super Bowl. I mean, this thing was a shit show. A shit show, a cluster fuck. There are so many curse words you can describe to what this game was on the ground. That is somewhat fitting, definitely amazing that the biggest sporting event than one national holiday we all share began with really a disaster. I mean, this thing could have gone off the rails so many times in so many ways, not least with a detonating jetpack above L.A. Coliseum and two dead spacemen, right?

That could have happened, and it honestly wasn't the only mass slaughter event that the Super Bowl one narrowly avoided. That's how crazy this was. How were others in danger at Super Bowl what? So there was a giant wrought iron clock in the far end zone at the L.A. Coliseum, and during the entire week leading up to the Super Bowl, the planned for the network broadcasts was their big innovation was going to be an on-screen game clock. This did not exist. When you were watching football, you had no idea how much time was left in the quarter. game anything. They decided to be a good idea to change that.

But that required attaching sort of an electronic device to the back of one of the clock's hands, which they tested all week, got it perfect. And then for the opening kickoff, when they went to flip it on, it malfunctioned. The clock hand broke off, plummeted downward into the stands. And the only reason Super Bowl one isn't remembered for some kind of final destination-style bloodbath is because there was no one in those seats below. because the game was not even close to being sold out. It was a television innovation that they were trying to debut for the first time,

like, you know, the first downline when that was a thing. Right. So, okay, so this brings me to the way in which all of us are going to consume this thing, which is from our living rooms, right? Like, we're not going to be at the game itself. We'll be watching what now has become the, truly, like the paragon of broadcast, cultural institutions, right? The telecast of a Super Bowl.

The made-for-television event to end all made for television events, yes. And so in 1967 for Super Bowl 1, what did this look like from America's living rooms? Yeah, see, that's the thing after Super Bowl 1 ended. And Super Bowl 1 was carried on two networks, NBC and CBS, which is one of the reasons

they had 50 million people watching it. There were only three channels, so you didn't have that many choices. So it simulcast. Simulcast on two networks. NFL. Also unthinkable. Also unthinkable.

So the game ends. And almost immediately, both networks tape over the first Super Bowl. Because that's what you did with everything in those days. Film was expensive. No one was archiving sports because it didn't occur to anyone that this would be something you might want to preserve. So, you know, within days of Super Bowl 1, ending, Super Bowl 1 vanished. If you can believe this, They recorded soap operas over the game tapes,

and VCRs hadn't been invented yet. Because of the high cost of videotape in the 1960s, it was network policy to reuse old stock. Neither CBS nor NBC owns a full Super Bowl 1 broadcast. Yeah, I just like how the NFL and the networks in this case just were like that dad who accidentally tapes over his daughter's ballet recital. The fact that you can't watch Super Bowl one because the networks themselves taped up two networks,

not just one, two, two, two. That's like two terrible parents. That's like two different people smashing one tablet of the Ten Commandments, right? Like, it's crazy that this happened. So in 2005, Sports Illustrated publishes a story called the 25 Greatest Lost Treasures of Sports. And it's things like Honest Wagner's baseball card, the chunk of Andrew Holyfield's ear that Mike Tyson bit off that one time.

and a broadcast copy of either NBC or CBS of Super Bowl 1. The broadcast copy, though, explain what that means because we just watched the jet packs. Like, what's missing here, really? Yeah, so there's like little bits online. You know, you can see bits of the halftime show. You can see bits of the game. You know, the NFL films was there. They were gathering stuff for their own.

It's much more primitive than what you would have seen on the broadcasts. And what you can't see is what the world saw. what 50 million people watched that day. And now there's a $1 million bounty on it. And, you know, there's tapeheads and, you know, the world. This is the internet rabbit. Yes, people are going to go for it now. We want to know what we as Americans would have seen

in the way that we all gather around the Super Bowl. In like, again, the lone collective ritual that we engage in today, what was that like when it first was born? Yeah. And so, okay, so I'm imagining now this like a national treasure sort of a hunt, right? There's a bounty of sorts, a million dollars. And so where is that hunt today? How is that, how is that search going? Ten years later, by this point, we're deep into the internet era, right? If it hasn't shown up yet, either it doesn't exist or there's a really good reason why. And I think it doesn't exist, camp is winning. Right. It's been close to half a century.

Because people didn't have VCRs. No VCRs. It's not like you could point a home video camera at the television and record that. Right. You know, there's only a handful of ways this could possibly exist. Except that 10 years later, around 2015, at a thin air, a copy of Super Bowl 1, the CBS broadcast miraculously resurfaces. And your reaction, I can only imagine. I got to go see this thing.

I've been waiting way too long. 30-ish, let's call it, years. It exists. It can be done. I can see this. Of course I can see it. Why wouldn't I be able to see it? Why can't the world see it?

I couldn't see it. I spent years trying to get permission from the one person, the wizard behind the curtain, who holds the key to Super Bowl one. And I tried, and I tried and he didn't answer. I just assumed my life would end in failure, not having seen Super Bowl 1. But the reason, Devin Gordon, you are sitting across from me here today, is because what? I finally got the call. So there's an active mystery that you can now finally solve after decades.

We're going to get to that. But the setup to the game, what was this game like Super Bowl 1? back in 1967. On January 15th, the day of the first Super Bowl, the Green Bay Packers represented the old-time NFL. They were a dynasty. Oh, Vince Lombardi, yeah. Vince Lombardi was the head coach.

Bart Starr was the quarterback. This was the original NFL dynasty. And then they played representing the NFL, the Kansas City Chiefs. The Chiefs were the upstart team that no one thought even belonged on the field with the NFL champions. So that's how far we've come.

It's a historical story that tells us a lot about, I mean, truly, how insanely far this sport has come. Because beyond the jet packs and the clocks almost murdering people, take us back to 1967, what was the business of football like in America? When I first learned about the Super Bowl, I'm an eight-year-old kid. And I'm assuming that the AFL and the NFL merging to form the Super Bowl is like kind of Voltron, right? It's this awesome thing that everybody's, you know, excited about, let's have a party and have a big game. Neither side wanted to do this. It was a last resort. They hated each other.

And they planned it so late in the game that they didn't have a location for Super Bowl 1 until about six weeks before kickoff, which is one of the reasons why they had 30,000 empty seats. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There were so many things that could have derailed this, almost did derail this. And yet we think of it as this transformative American success. Right. Well, I think about it as the proof of the merger. But in reality, it turns out, like the merger happens formerly AFL and NFL. Upstart being resorbed into the conservative incumbent in 1970.

So this is a game that takes place before even that diplomacy is formally struck. Like so many great American shotgun marriages, this one began in the back seat of a car in a parking garage in Dallas, Texas. That's literally where the merger between the AFL and the NFL was conceived. It was between the TechSram, who is the Dallas Cowboys owner in the NFL, and Lamar Hunt, whose son still owns the Kansas City Chiefs. And these two were bitter rivals who realized that as long as both teams, both leagues had television contracts, they could spend each other into oblivion. The only way to save pro football was to merge.

And neither side wanted to do it. And that's why they had to do it in secret. Okay. So the Super Bowl then is almost like a, it's a foreshadowing of the union to come, which is to say that in the meantime, these people just hate each other. Yeah. And so the NFL versus the AFL remind us of what their reputations were, respectively, how they differed and why they clashed.

Sure. So the NFL was the football establishment, right? Militaristic, top down, lots of running, lots of gritty defense. Well, I think many coaches are identifying success with very strong defenses. Classic traditional. The commissioner of the NFL was Pete Roselle, who was a Madison Avenue guy, always wearing a suit. And the AFL was the wacky upstart. But in 1960, the new American football league began.

A fast and wide open approach to the game that fans loved, the AFL quickly caught on and ignited a heated competition for players. It was all about speed and passing. They were tolerant of, if not exactly welcoming, of black athletes, which was one way in which they were able to narrow the talent gap so quickly is that they would take black players to a degree that the NFL was, you know, there were several teams that just would not take black players. An incredible market inefficiency. Yes, yes.

And one that the AFL for, you know, exploited and not necessarily for, you know, racially progressive reasons. So you have these two very different leagues in the AFL. The commissioner of the AFL is Al Davis. So if Al Davis is, you know, a legendary figure, in sports, but he's also... Right, owner of the Raiders. Yeah, he's a lunatic.

He's a rebel. And for about five or six years leading up to the Super Bowl, the AFL and the NFL wanted to kill each other. They wanted to leave the other one dead. It wasn't, they didn't want this to end in merger.

And so simultaneous to that larger context is the fact that there was a season. In the NFL, the Green Bay Packers, coached by Vince Lombardi, defeat the Dallas Cowboys. And typically, That's it. That's what you celebrate.

That's the NFL title game. Instead, they get dragged into this thing that they are talking about how. They just won what has always been considered in the NFL the most important game. And they've been hearing all season about this thing called the Super Bowl, that Green Bay Packers can't understand why they're even playing this game, don't want to play this game, and have no respect for the team that they're playing, which is the Kansas City.

Chiefs representing the NFL. They've never played these teams. People are expecting the Packers win 72 to nothing. I spoke with Jerry Kramer, who is one of the great surviving Packers of that era, a literary giant in sports because he wrote instant replay. An amazing account of what it's like to be an NFL player, even though he wrote it 50 years ago with Dick Scha. I was able to ask Jerry Kramer if what had been reputed about the Green Bay Packers attitude going into this game, that they were sort of not taking it very seriously and kind of annoyed they had to play. I got a chance to ask him, is that true? Is that how you felt?

And, you know, Jerry Kramer being the honest guy he is, copped to it immediately. Well, they had a lot of new players, you know, young players, and they made a lot of mistakes. And we ridiculed them arrogantly. For the Packers, losing this game would be unthinkable. It would unravel the value of their entire dynasty. and Vince Lombardi, the coach of the Packers, would go down in history as the man who humiliated and maybe ruined the NFL.

So if there is this fundamental condescension being expressed by the players, I am curious how Vince Lombardi, again, this iconic all-time tough guy, you know, winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, that guy, how does he feel as he's getting ready to play what feels like the JV to his players?

Oh, he's terrified. He's terrified like he's never been terrified before. He doesn't think the chiefs are awesome, but he doesn't have the luxury to take them lightly because he cannot lose this game. And even before the game, he was talking to Frank Gifford, who was one of his former players when he was a coach of the New York Giants. Jerry Kramer is standing nearby. And Jerry Kramer watched Gifford interview Lombardi and told me the story. of witnessing that and just how nervous Lombardi was. They finished the interview, and Franca kind of wipes his head. And he goes, wow. He said, I don't think I've ever been that nervous in my whole life. He said, I put my hand on Coach Lombardi's shoulder, and Coach Lombardi was shaking like a leaf. I have never known that guy to be nervous about anything. So that's Green Bay.

Yeah. That's the incumbent. What's the other side of the field looking like? The NFL and Kansas City is much more freewheeling, and their players are much more swaggering, and they have one guy on their team who is sort of the modern apotheosis of everything that a lot of NFL players have become on and off the field,

and especially at his position, like the modern NFL cornerback all begins with this guy in Super Bowl 1. Fred the Hammer-Williamson, defensive back for the Chief's Super Bowl team in 1967. This is what you hear if you call his cell phone and he is indisposed. Yo, this call made me entertain

with my slumber so quickly leave my message before I can declare this interruption, a bummer. So you need to explain, America, Devin. Who is The Hammer? He got his nickname The Hammer, because what he would do is he'd use his forearm and smash you in the head with him. Well, actually, I got it from decapitating people of different color jerseys.

It's a reasonable nickname, then. Yeah, his nickname is a personal foul, basically, in modern football. And he is referred to sometimes as the original trash talker. Certainly the first in pro football of any import. He's 85 now. Yeah, that was his voicemail. Yes. We had connected and we were all set to do an interview and it turned out that he was late and he needed to postpone because he got into an altercation at a convenience store. His wife had called him because she thought there were some hooligans there and he came over and he intervened. And on my way to the checkout counter where they were,

I took a can of, ironically, pork and beans on a can I headed in my pocket. And as he came toward me, I threw it. He went down, I saw some teeth fall down on the floor. Other two guys started backing up. I just wanted to clarify that we are rescheduling our interview from yesterday because you hit a man in a face with a can of pork and beans. Pork and beans. Yeah.

And knock out of it. He realized with pork and beans, it was over, and I saw, wow, pork and beans, you know. So that's my life, man. I mean, I live that kind of life, so. So I just want to point out that The Hammer hasn't even begun the interview with you yet. Yeah, he's already the most interesting man I've ever interviewed. We haven't interviewed him yet. This guy had an interesting pro football career, and then his life got even more interesting.

He leaves football and becomes a black exploitation movie star. Of course he does. posed for Playgirl in 1973. Okay, so just stop there. We're going to, I want to circle this. Yes. But in it, we'll come back to Playgirl. We'll come back to it.

But right now, the hammer. Yes. Is back in 1967 on the sideline, getting ready to play the Green Bay Packers. Yeah, like all week, he's talking trash. He's telling reporters that he's going to knock out Packers-wide receivers. He's going to hit him once with the hammer, and that's going to be it. They're going to be out. and he was both inflaming the Packers

and unnerving his teammates because they felt like he was rousing Goliath. My teammates went against me. They're disliked. They said I was firing up the Green Bay Packers. I was really giving them an initiative. I said, look, guys, they know we're here. They know we're here.

We can't hide from them. They can't hide from us. They know we're here. So let's go out and take some heads off, knock some teeth out. Whatever it takes it, win the goddamn game. Let's go do it. Lombardi had described the AFL in the days and weeks leading up to the game as a Mickey Mouse League. And Fred did not appreciate that.

He didn't see the humor in that. He felt like he was the hammer and was going to go knocking people's heads off. And he wanted his teammates to feel the same way. It was very discerning to me when I saw the guys in the locker room putting on Mickey mouse caps because the National Football League had called the American Football League a Mickey Mouse team. So I didn't really get into that humor. Listen, I was covering guys in the American Football League like jack rabbits. You didn't have any jack rabbits over there. They had big, limbering, long-legged guys that were made great targets for me to drop the hammer on.

Okay, so I want to say that the hammer has done it for me. I want to watch this game. I am in The buildup that I can imagine happening at the time is all climaxing in 50 million Americans gathering around watching the first of its kind, this NFL-A-FL television show called the Super Bowl. And that brings us back to your quest, Devin Gordon. Because where are you in your quest to see what America saw all those many years ago?

So I've found out that, the footage resides in a fortress-like place right here in New York City, and there is a lawyer representing the wizard behind the curtain who has this footage, who it belongs to, and what you need to do is call this man, this lawyer named Steve Harwood and get him to ask the owner of the tape for permission. I've been trying for years I couldn't get that. I can only imagine how annoying you were. Yeah, I mean, I would call periodically, like every year or two.

and just leave these plaintive messages. And I also couldn't understand why they weren't calling me the bad. Like, what's the big deal here? I just want to see Super Bowl 1, help my lifelong dream come true. And I heard nothing. And then finally, I get, you know, the voicemail message that I've been waiting years for. Steve Harwood, the lawyer finally gets back in touch with me. Kevin, this is Steve Harwood.

I know you've been trying to reach me about getting access to the Super Bowl 1 tape. I'll see what I can do to get you access. So, Devin, the day has arrived. You get to finally see the broadcast tape of Super Bowl 1. And paint the picture for me. Like, you show up. So it's this place called the Paley Center for Media in Midtown Manhattan. It's basically a library of Congress for film and television.

and who's there to greet you? The archivist, the point person, if you are trying to see Super Bowl 1 is a man named Ron Simon. And it just turns out that, like me, you know, Ron's biggest grail of television is Super Bowl 1. This is the thing that he's been most excited

to find as well. To find that game was always a holy grail for us because it sort of spoke to an American tradition and you always want to go back to where it began. And we've been looking for that game for a long time here at the Paley Center for Media. We had a most wanted list of shows that we were searching for, and certainly the first Super Bowl, was always at the top of the list. So everyone knew we wanted it, but no one could find it.

It's interesting that I deal in media, but there's still fakes out there. So I saw a lot of fakes before I got to see the real thing. I can only imagine the scammers who came to Ron being like, I have your million dollar tape. And so how does Ron know when he has the real thing? The first hint that this thing was real was the story that came along with it.

And the story was told by a guy named Troy Haupt who lives in the Outer Banks and he's in the late 50s. And when he showed up with two canisters of film, he didn't entirely know what was on them. And he wasn't necessarily claiming that he definitely had a copy, which is sort of what made Ron's ears go up. We knew from the very opening images that this was indeed a telecast. This was the broadcast material.

It was not something was made up. It was not film, but it was actually a recording of the television broadcast of Super Bowl 1. Troy told this just remarkable story of how it came into his possession. A friend of his saw the SI article, calls him, and says, hey, you know, remember when we were kids in Shemokin, Pennsylvania, and there were these two film reels in your attic that were labeled Super Bowl 1? Of course, it's Shamokin. Shomoken, Pennsylvania. It's the perfect all-American title. Yeah, a certain West Bumble f***ed to not say qua. Yeah, and his mother, of course, still lives there. The canisters are still in the attic where they were left decades ago.

Who has the ability to record something like this at that point in time? It was a guy who worked at a tape repair. Tape recording compared, like primitive VCRs. So he is at work, and in order to do his job, he's taping stuff off of television. He taped Supy Sales, tape Ed Sullivan Show, Super Bowl Sunday, he taped Super Bowl 1. Instead of doing what NBC did and what CBS did, he saved it. He brought it home. And the next thing that happens is he's diagnosed with terminal cancer.

And his dying wish is to give these tapes to his ex-wife just in case they're valuable and might be able to pay for college for his son, Troy, who he does not know and has basically only met a couple times. So that's how Troy winds up in Midtown Manhattan at the Pelley Center. The butterfly effect of a guy randomly choosing on a seemingly haphazard day. like, I should tape this thing. Yeah, it's so haphazard that you also realize this is the only one. This didn't happen again.

Like, the fact that this exists is remarkable, but it also, in a weird way, proves that there's not going to be another. So Troy has gotten this verified that the Holy Grail is, in fact, authentic. And so I assume step two is, give me my money. I mean, he thinks he's got the lottery ticket of a lifetime, right? So once he knows he's got the real thing, once it's, he goes to the NFL and says, I understand that this is worth a lot of money. I understand that people have been looking for this for a very long time. I have it.

You want it. And what ends up happening is they make him an offer that's considerably less than a million dollars. They offer him $30,000. You know, we can speculate all the reasons why maybe they don't want to be shaken down or something. They feel like they're being shaken down for something that's technically theirs, right? The NBC and CBS own the broadcast, but the NFL owns what's on the camera, right? They own the thing that we're showing, right? So they basically say to Troy, we're going to pay you $30,000, take it or leave it, and you cannot show this to anyone.

No one. So no one can profit on this. Oh, wow. And then the only way that he's allowed to show it is within the context of this museum with permission, because there's, There's no profit, there's no money, there's no advertising, there's no marketing. It's like a vault. You're watching it in a vault. Well, now what I'm imagining has changed.

Before it was like, you know, Lord of the Rings, you on this fantastic quest. And now it feels like a prison visit. Yeah. I mean, effectively, the Super Bowl vanished for half a century. It resurfaced for a brief moment. And now it's back under lock and key again. It's essentially vanished. again. So how many people have actually seen the broadcast copy? Less than five. Yeah,

if we're excluding people from the Paley Center, less than five. And so when you look into this arc of the covenant, your face is unmelted, but what did you see? They take you into kind of a reading room at a giant library where there's television set up. They queued up the game at a terminal. They made us turn off cameras. They took away my cell phone. I wanted you to wear a wire and you refused unethical principles. Just narrate the game very subtly under my breath.

All I could do is take notes. So finally, I'm going to see this thing. The experience is immediately like a time machine. You're transported into 1967, consuming television, consuming culture, the way that people did then. And one of the things you're struck by is why having historical artifacts like this matters. Not only are the broadcasters educating you about how to watch football, in some ways they're educating you about how to watch television.

Like when they do a slow motion replay, it actually says slow motion on the television because they were worried that 1960s. viewers wouldn't understand what was happening. What is this witchcraft? Why is it moving so slow? Right, right. There's no game clock, as we mentioned, because that didn't work. Right.

Almost catastrophically. So it's a really weird experience to watch a football game having no idea how much time is on the clock, how much time is left. I remember they got to the end of the first quarter and the announcers, you know, go, that's the end of the first quarter. And I'm like, oh, it is? I had no idea. The other thing about the Super Bowl, though, is commercials. Yeah.

What is the commercial game like at this point? Well, you do understand why millions and millions of Americans have lung cancer. 50% cigarette ads. And the rest of it is alcohol. That tracks. It was really cool on a personal level of my father's big smoker back in those days. And his cigarette brand had an advertisement during the first. What was his?

True, true brand cigarettes, which. I don't even think exists anymore. It's true when you spoke two, you get all the flavor and the filter two. True. Filter cigarettes. Apparently, they just came out with a menthol variety when Super Bowl 1 was happening. But as for the flow of the game itself, what actually happens on the fields in Super Bowl 1, how do you tell that story now?

How is that story changed for you, having actually watched what America saw at the time? You realize what a competitive, legitimate game it was from the outset. the chiefs were good, particularly their defense, and especially their defensive line, was really good. In fact, it was probably the highest performing unit on either side. And very early on, they sacked Bart Stark on two consecutive plays. And that's one of the things you get right away. They're real. They're legit.

In fact, they're so tough that our friend, the hammer, does exactly what he had been promising to do before the game, which is that he did indeed on the first series, knock out Boy Dowler. Boy Dower, he runs a slant on me. I gave him a shot. He goes up with an injured shoulder. We didn't see him anymore. He didn't come back into the game at all. The problem is, Dowler coming out means that this guy, Max McGee, an old-timer who is not expected to play.

A real old-timey name. The hammer knocking out the starter means Max McGee comes in. And I can only imagine the hammer salivating at now trying to take out this dude. Oh, yeah. I mean, he looks at Max McGee, and he's like, this guy's a thousand years old. Let me at him. But Max McGee is always on the other side. Let me throw these pork and beans at him. He'll go down with one shot. He's always on the other side of the field. And I'm dying to get over there, get a piece of Max McGee, but they never put him on my side. I was waiting for them to throw passes at me because I was going to end somebody's career if they kept picking on me.

But they do one doggone pass at me. And very quickly, Max McGee opens the scoring. He makes a great one-handed catch on a lousy pass from Bard's story. He scores the first touchdown ever in Super Bowl history, which is remarkable because Max McGee was very hungover from his parting the night before, to the point where when he was startled by Vince Lombardi being called into the game, he couldn't find his helmet. He had to borrow another player's helmet to go into the game.

So there's a little bit of like Dion Waiters to Max McGee, right? Like off the field, Kent totally trust them. All of which is to say that when the Green Bay Packers heavily favored go into halftime, I imagine Vince Lombardi's feeling a bit tense about the score, which is what at this point? 14 to 10, not bad. This is we've got a game on our hands. The NFL's legit. The Chiefs are legit.

Let's go. Right. And meanwhile, in America's living rooms, it's halftime. And this is, I mean, look, man, we think of the Super Bowl. like ushers performing this year in Vegas. So what do you see when it comes to, yeah, the pop culture aspect of this thing? We already know there were jet packs, right?

We've seen the jet packs. Amazing. Unfortunately, on Troy Halps tape at the Paley Center, his father didn't record halftime. And he actually missed the first seven minutes of the third quarter. We'll never know why. Wait, wait. So no more jet packs.

No jet packs on this copy. Yeah. And he is missing a pretty significant, not just lengthwise, but in terms of what happened in the game, he's missing an important chunk of the game. So if you're starting to wonder maybe why the NFL didn't write a million dollar check, this was not a perfect document. It's an amazing thing to exist, but it's missing the halftime show and it's missing the first seven minutes of the third quarter. And in that third quarter, when it kicks off, what happens in reality? I mean, this brings us back to the cluster-hickiness of the first Super Bowl, which is, is there are two networks covering the game. NBC has an interview with Bob Hulp at halftime that runs way over, so far over that coming back from commercial break, they miss the opening second half kickoff.

NBC's producers threw a fit, and the officials made them re-kick the second half opening kickoff at the Super Bowl. And what I kept thinking when I first heard about this is who is the person who had to go up and tell Vince Lombardi that we have to redo the kickoff because NBC missed it. Right. And in fact, this, I don't know of that this is not a thing that happened.

Could never, ever happen. Vince Lombardi actually put the game under protest because he was so pissed off about the Marie King. He didn't need to because the game turned very quickly in the third quarter, not on Troy's tape, unfortunately, but you can find bad footage. of this particular play online. It's an important play. Packers are up 14 to 10.

Kansas City has the ball to open the third quarter. Len Dawson throws an interception to Willie Wood of the Green Bay Packers who returns at 50 yards. The next play, the Packers score a touchdown. Now it's 21 to 10. And the air just kind of went out of the Chiefs. So I want to give a little grace to Troy's dad,

who again, like a prophet, it in so many senses, miss some key stuff. And so when he hits record again, what do you, Devin, Gordon, see on the tape? You know, what I was so curious to see, having fallen in love with Fred the Hammer Williamson, was how did his game go? Yes.

There's really only three moments where Fred Williamson figures into the Super Bowl. The first is when he knocks out Boy Daller and puts Max McGee on the field, but that's off camera. You don't even see Fred Williamson do that. The second time is when he knocks out another Packers receiver, just like he said he would, Carol Dale. And the announcers even mention what a rough hit it was, but they call him Fred Robinson twice.

So even in his finest hour in the Super Bowl, he's getting disrespected. The only time you really see him involved in the action is with three minutes left, the Packers are now up 35 to 10. This game is over. The Packers put in their backup running back name Donnie Anderson. and Fred Williamson goes up to tackle him, goes in low, and gets kneed in the head and knocked unconscious. And then while he's on the ground, one of his teammates steps on him and breaks his arm.

Oh. And the Packers on the sideline, who have been listening to the hammer talk all this smack all week about what he was going to do, and actually did do, to their wide receivers, see that he's been knocked out. And they start cheering, they start screaming, they're singing, if I had a hammer. The hammer gets put out on his...

The hammer gets hammered. On his ass. Yeah. This was one of the key moments of the game that they actually have. They really laid him out. I mean, he's on the ground for five minutes. Like, they cut to commercial break. He's on the ground.

They come back from commercial break. He's still on the ground. This 220-pound cornerback is just... Just laid out cold. Afterwards, you know, when Fred is describing this play, you know, what he's describing is not wanting to be carried off the field. That's why he's staying down on the ground. He doesn't want to be carried off.

He wants to walk off under his own. power. So I go down and I'm stunned a little bit and over on the sideline I can hear him, we got the hammer, we got the hammer, we got the hammer, we got the yeah, right. I'm not getting up and walking off the damn field, okay? I'm embarrassed, first of all,

it's going to look obvious that they got me and they didn't because Donnie Anderson knee hit me on the head. So while the hammer is hammered flat out on the ground, the Packers from the far side line are screaming at him. They're loving this. They're having a great time. In fact, I asked Jerry Kramer about it, and he never sounded more delighted in our phone conversation than when he got to recall this moment. The hammer. The hammer got it. Freddie Williamson,

I guess, was the hammer. He said that he delivered a blow horizontal to the Earth's surface with such a great velocity and power that he has personally been responsible for cracking five helmets in the NFL. And so the hammer went down, he was knocked out. So we're laying there on the field. And all of our guys are going, the hammer! The hammer got it. This was sort of the last moment of the game.

This was the final, meaningful, consequential play. It came with three minutes left. The Packers were already up 35 to 10. They had the game in hand. And that's how it ended. Packers win the first Super Bowl 35 to 10 with a score that sounds way more lopsis. than what this game really was.

I mean, this was a 35 to 10 game that established the validity of the Kansas City Chiefs and the AFL. So typically, when you win a Super Bowl 35 to 10, you hoist a Lombardi trophy. It occurs to me that Lombardi is hoisting a trophy that has not yet been named after him. And so the post game, you know,

that ceremony, that ritual looks like what? Yeah, everybody just runs off the field, you know, which they don't do now, right? Like, if you win, you stay there. Yeah, awkward interactions. Yeah, awkward interacting. Giving way to the ceremony of the stage being arrested. They bring out the stage.

There's the owner. There's a whole thing. And we know it beat by beat. And none of that had really been figured out yet. Right. The media is just, all you see on the broadcast is just in the tunnel underneath the seats, just like pack of media just crammed in waiting to get led into the Packers locker room for the Super Bowl trophy presentation there. And it is really big.

add television because the poor Super Bowl reporter, the sideline reporter is just like, oh, what an amazing day. And we're still just waiting here for the presentation. And he's just repeating himself because people don't know how to ad lib on live television in 1967. The choreography, the dance steps, they're attempting all of this for literally the first time. Yeah. And I like to imagine people at home just being like, sure, I'll watch five minutes of people standing around. And here we are, waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and watching them sort of fumble through the post-game celebration and trophy presentation you get that time machine feeling again you're like oh my god i'm really at the beginning of this thing i really do see the vaguest DNA of what this

primordial ooze out of which um my obsession as an eight-year-old was born yeah so devon on sunday as we all gather around for Super Bowl 58. And people are going to be talking about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey and Brock Purdy and Kyle Shanhan and everybody. Who are you going to be thinking about? I'm going to be thinking about the hammer. I mean, he lost Super Bowl 1,

but he was probably the trailblazer, the thing in Super Bowl 1 that most resembles who we are as a culture, as a sports culture, what the Super Bowl is today. The rest of that stuff all faded, but, but Fred. Well, yeah, what happens to Fred after the tape ends and history marches on? Well, Fred very quickly leaves pro football because what he told me was it was too boring. He got bored.

He only played another year or two. And if it were anyone else, I would call bullshit. But for the hammer, his life was just getting started. Like, it got way more interesting. You know, by 1972, he signed a three-picture, $1 million deal with Universal to create a sort of black James Bond character named Jefferson Bolt. Bolt. That man Bolt. The highest flying, slickest, meanest dude you ever face is Jefferson Bolt on the case. I love this. Fred is the smartest person here. Fred is the progenitor of Travis Kelsey. Yes. No, all of the stuff.

that we know the Super Bowl has now, this unholy mix of entertainment and sports, in some sense, is embodied by the guy who was lying prostrate on the field. The guy who had the worst Super Bowl out of anyone, never on the screen. And when he's on the screen, he's basically getting humiliated. But he goes on to be one of the biggest black exploitation and box office successes among African-American actors in the 1970s. He's still making movies to this day. production company is called po-boy productions.

He's still going. He's still Fred the Hammer-Williamson to this day. And so the thing I need to return to is the thing that I circled and pinned. You may remember, dear listeners, that Fred the Hammer-Williamson apparently was in Playgirl? Yeah, yeah. So how does that fit into this story? I mean, I think it's a sense of what a big star he was. that was the heyday of Playgirl.

He told me a story about how he wanted to do it before Jim Brown got a chance to because he was very competitive with Jim Brown, the other former NFL black exploitation star. But they asked, he did it, but he had some conditions. A lot of guys were doing Playgirl, but I thought it was very stupid that they showed her stuff. I said, I'll do Playgirl, but I'm not showing my stuff. My body is for view, but my stuff ain't from you. Once you had, I was sitting on my floor, my legs right open with a little pussycat,

between my legs holding a little pussycat. What was the response to that? Had that come off? What do you think? Big time, big time. I made all the guys who weren't naked showing their stuff look like idiots. He did play a girl, but he did not show his pork and beans.

That's right. And if you're not watching on YouTube of the Refuge News Network, I pity you because that is exactly what the hammer describes. There he is with a white cat, delicately and very deliberately blocking his stuff. I just like that your childhood quest culminates in this. Playgirl centerfold, just like I predicted when I was eight years old. Devin Gordon, thank you for establishing that there are at least some things

that should never truly be seen. Pablo, thank you for making a childhood dream come true. This has been Pablo Torre finds out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.