As a Boy Scout in 1959, it cost me $1 to attend my first National Football League game. I saw the Green Bay Packers, a small-town team that had suddenly become formidable under rookie coach Vince Lombardi, defeat the glamorous but fading L.A. Rams 38-20 at the Coliseum.
It would have cost me $6 (or $12 for a premium seat) to attend Super Bowl I in January 1967, at the Coliseum. I was a UCSB student on a budget, and the price was too steep. Because the game between Green Bay and the Kansas City Chiefs was not sold out — more than 30,000 seats were empty — it was blacked out on televisions within a 75-mile radius. Santa Barbara hoteliers welcomed football fans who came here to watch the CBS telecast.
During the week before the big game — unlike this week when the Bay Area is swarming with media moguls, celebrities, and fans in anticipation of the 50th Super Bowl — the Packers spent a rather quiet six days practicing behind curtained fences at UCSB’s newly built Campus Stadium. A dozen or so reporters attended Lombardi’s daily press briefings at the Santa Barbara Inn. The players were hardly visible in public. Bart Starr and Carroll Dale made their only official appearance at a Christian Business Men’s breakfast meeting at the El Encanto Hotel.