Last time the Kansas City Chiefs were in the Super Bowl in New Orleans, it was to decide the 1969 AFL-NFL Championship. That was the year of my birth.
For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about that span of time in America. And I thought I’d go on a little time-travel adventure, by watching the complete CBS broadcast of that long-ago national spectacle and look for some clues about what happened to the county where I earned my birthright citizenship.
Join me?
“This stadium isn’t the center of the world, the United States or even New Orleans,” are Jack Whitaker’s opening lines from the empty bleachers in Tulane Stadium, “but tonight’s three hours, it will be the most important place in the sports world.”
United Airlines and Firestone Tires and Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer sponsor the “Countdown to Kickoff” pregame show.
Things get weird very quickly.
A Firestone commercial shows a car driving behind a panel truck full of guys throwing old car parts and hunks of metal and glass and rocks on the road in front of it. “Test after test shows [the new Firestone tire] can give you up to 40,000 miles. If you’re a sensible and law-abiding driver, even 50,000 or more.” (Even with guys driving in a truck in front of you throwing shit on the road?)
Whitaker returns to tell us that 25 miles of TV cables are required to bring us the Super Bowl broadcast, before another commercial takes us into a classy wooden bar and asks us to, “Imagine, for a moment, that you’re in the Gay Nineties, in the best spot in town. You’re here to enjoy the great premium beer of the day, Pabst Blue Ribbon. You can still enjoy this good, old time flavor today …”
A few Viking players talk about how they’re trying to approach the Super Bowl like any other game. Now we meet some of the Chiefs. These men—the Vikings too—all look and talk like they are 45 years old.

Kansas City quarterback Len Dawson says the players don’t eat anything on the day of the game, “You don’t even consider eating the day of the ballgame. In fact the last meal that you have on Saturday evening prior to a Sunday game had better be a good one because that’s gonna be your nourishment for the next 24 hours or so. And you can’t sleep the night before a ballgame, it’s virtually impossible. You must sleep two days before a ballgame—the most nerve-wracking time. It’s really murder.” No eating or sleeping for 24 hours before a game? Apparently these boys subsisted on earnestness alone.
Now Whitaker stands on the sidelines as game time approaches. Pregame festivities include hot air balloons, one for each team. The AFL balloon is not yet inflated when the NFL one takes off, apparently accidentally and with a man hanging off the basket. It and its Viking-clad passenger crashes to earth around the five yard line and is drug insanely into the stands by the wind, while the Southern University Marching Band Plays on. “And, look out!” Whitaker says as the camera turns away. The untoward incident isn’t mentioned again. (Nor, except obliquely after the game, is a gambling scandal involving Chiefs’ Dawson that dominated pregame coverage.)
Now legendary New Orleans trumpeter Al Hirt, wearing a horned Viking helmet, plays some dueling jubilant jazz at midfield along with another famed trumpeter—from the Tonight Show Band, Doc Severinsen, who is wearing a floor-length Native American headdress. (What, no Dizzy Gillespie? No Louis Armstrong? Yes, the year I was born, four trumpeters were household names. They say life is short, but I’ve been around long enough to go from knowing four famous trumpeters to becoming a Swiftie.)
The game is about to begin. Jack Buck and Pat Summerall have the call. The teams are introduced. The Chiefs defensive linemen look huge and athletic just running out onto the field. Though they are favored by 11 points, the Vikings look like a bunch of seasoned union plumbers.

“The good taste of a Kent was made for a day like today.” (Cigarette commercials weren’t banned until 1971.)
Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad, Alan Bean and Dick Gordon are honored on the field. (Conrad and Bean would become the third and fourth men to walk on the moon. The comic Norm Macdonald later did a funny routine about how no one has ever heard of anybody who landed on the moon after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.)
The next time you hear someone complain about someone getting a little too creative with the National Anthem, play ’em this version, with its decided “get off my lawn” spirit. I bet President Trump would like this one. I bet he could even perform it!
The Vikings get the ball first, get a couple first downs but bog down and punt to the Chiefs. The Chiefs’ first drive results in a field goal, and so does its second. The big underdogs lead 6-0.
Schmidt’s: “One beautiful beer.”
The Vikings and Chiefs exchange turnovers. Early in the second quarter, the game is already a gray, dirty grind. The gridiron, which you’d think would be groomed to showcase the glamor of professional football in living color, looks like an engorged septic drain field.

The sluggish action on the field betrays none of the ebullience of Chiefs’ coach Hank Stram, who we would later learn was mic’d up by NFL Films and shouting things like, “Just keep matriculating the ball down the field, boys!”
American Airlines boasts about being the only airline that uses computers. “I don’t know how the other airlines do it!” says a comely young reservations agent. Also: “If it doesn’t say ‘Goodyear,’ it can’t be Polyglas.”
Another Kansas City field goal makes it 9-0.
An American Airlines stewardess tells us about the time she fell in love with a passenger: a little boy who was flying by himself. After landing, he asked her for a kiss. “Cathy brings a little something extra to the job. That’s the American way.”
A guy in a suit knocks on a scuzzy apartment door. A bearded hippie answers. “Yeah, man?” “I’m your New York Life agent and I came to offer you some happiness.” “Outta sight, Grover! Sit yourself down.” “Look, wouldn’t you be happier knowing your wife and child had basic financial security … Now that’s the kind of happiness you get with New York Life Insurance, dig?”
A muffed kickoff reception leads to a Kansas City touchdown. It’s now 16-0 and it feels worse than that. “We’re watching history in the making,” Jack Buck says. “And, is history repeating itself?” he adds, obviously referring to the previous year’s earth-shattering upset of the heavily favored NFL champion Baltimore Colts by the AFL underdog New York Jets.
“Yeah, me and my Winstons … we got a a real good thing.”
“I’m a believer in Amoco gasoline!”
Buck looks forward to halftime, promising “one of the greatest shows you’ve ever seen, so don’t go away.” He’s as good as his word, from Al Hirt playing “Saints Go Marching In” and “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” to a pretty heavy reenactment of The War of 1812.




“You only go around once in life and you’ve gotta grab for all the gusto you can, even in the beer you drink … When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer.”
The Vikings slog down the field for a touchdown as the sun comes out, tenuously. 16-7, late third quarter.
Soon, though, the Chiefs are matriculating the ball down the field. A third-down screen pass from Dawson to the big wide receiver Otis Taylor results in a 47-yard touchdown. It’s 23-7, with a long and pointless fourth quarter left to play.
Eventually Stram is carried off the field by his players—the custom then. In later years, the players would instead dump a barrel of Gatorade on the coach’s head. What do the winners do to their coach now?
As we see the Chiefs march triumphantly into their dressing room, Buck advises us that the trophy presentation and interviews “will be awhile. The Kansas City team will conduct a team prayer.”
Frank Gifford interviews the U.S. Secretary for Education and Welfare in the Chiefs’ locker room? He assures Gifford that President Nixon called to talk to someone on the winning team.
And now Jack Whittaker again sits in an empty Tulane Stadium, underneath a lonely light standard. “The 1970 Super Bowl was played by two teams that perhaps reflect the times of the 1970s. This was middle America. This was the Super Bowl of the silent majority. The Minnesota Vikings, from the center of the Northland, up where the Mississippi begins. Kansas City, from the geographical center of our country, a prairie town grown big and cosmopolitan. The game played here in New Orleans, the center of the South, delta land, where the Mississippi ends. It was Central Time Zone, all the way …”
Fifty-five years later, that darn silent majority is back on top again. Only, this version doesn’t like the Chiefs much, suspecting some kind of conspiracy involving NFL referees, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, tight end Travis Kielce and Kelce’s girlfriend Taylor Swift. It’s complicated and confusing.
But then, wasn’t it always?