Born in New Orleans 50 years ago, the Superdome was conceived in Houston a decade earlier, when Louisiana governor John McKeithen gazed upon the new Astrodome and declared, Caesar-like: “I want one of these, only bigger.” That phrase, “only bigger,” is the Super Bowl’s unspoken motto, for it only ever increases in size, expanding exponentially like the universe.
Like the universe, the Super Bowl was conjured from nothing. Alan Page played in four of them as a defensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings, two of them in New Orleans, and remembers what a dubious idea it was to pit the champions of the NFL against their counterparts in the AFL. “From a player’s perspective it was almost comical,” Page says of Super Bowl I in 1967. “Because the difference between the two leagues was so significant. There wasn’t much better in terms of historical greatness than the Green Bay Packers of the 1960s. And they’re playing the Kansas City Chiefs? Why? Why are they doing this? What is the point here? In ’68, it was like, They’re doing this again?! I would not have predicted it would have come to all this.”
But the Super Bowl survived, then thrived, then ate everything in its path. In many ways, the game’s modern ethos—its unholy trinity of football, showbiz and gluttony—was hothoused in New Orleans, where John Madden first encountered the turducken in 1996. “I always thought New Orleans might be the best venue,” says Jack Ham, the Hall of Fame linebacker on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ dynasty that won four Super Bowls, the first of them over Page and the Vikings in the Crescent City 50 years ago. “We got down there on Sunday, a week ahead of the game, and [coach] Chuck Noll gave us no curfew. Vikings fans and Steelers fans were enjoying themselves on Bourbon Street. We were thoroughly enjoying ourselves. And after two days in New Orleans, our captain, Andy Russell, went to Chuck and said, ‘Please give us a curfew.’ ”
In that way, New Orleans is the Super Bowl’s spiritual home, host to a record-tying 11 games; biblical cradle of the Manning brothers; and hometown of Al Hirt, who played trumpet in four of the first 12 halftime shows. The Bayou State’s World Famed Grambling State University Tiger Marching Band has played six, or as many as Madonna, Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga combined. It wasn’t just the Superdome that was born on the Bayou. So was the Super Bowl.
That indoor stadium was supposed to have hosted Super Bowl IX 50 years ago, too, but four years after its 1971 groundbreaking, the Superdome somehow wasn’t finished. Still, the city offered other attractions. When the members of the Steelers’ Steel Curtain front four arrived in town the first week of January in 1975 to measure themselves against the Purple People Eaters—the Vikings’ front four anchored by Page—they went straight to a shrimp bar named Desire. (Paging Blanche DuBois.)
Desire was and remains the oyster bar in the Royal Sonesta hotel. “The defensive line, we dropped our bags off at the hotel, we went to the Desire bar and we sat there and we drank every bottle of Heineken they had,” Hall of Fame defensive tackle Mean Joe Greene recalled for the mini documentary, Dawn of a Dynasty, that the Steelers produced to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the game. That night, the Pittsburgh front four formed a Peel Curtain, denuding shrimp of their shells and beer bottles of their labels. When defensive end Dwight White was rushed to a local hospital that night, where he remained until shortly before the game, Greene wondered if the sudden illness had been an act of food-borne “sabotage,” though it turned out to be a severe case of pneumonia and pleurisy.
In the days leading up to the game on Jan. 12, 1975, Bourbon Street pulsated like a morning-after headache. Game tickets priced at $20 were being scalped for $30. Celebrities from another geological epoch of show business arrived with creaking joints. Literally so, in the case of Ray Bolger (the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz), who along with Fred MacMurray (My Three Sons), Ernest Borgnine (McHale’s Navy) and Robert Goulet (performing that week at the Fairmont Hotel) was among the 80,000 ticket holders.
Pat O’Brien’s, Bourbon Street purveyor of the Hurricane, would have its biggest day ever that week. As hard-hatted Steelers fans, horn-hatted Vikings fans and a few members of the Steelers themselves commingled in the French Quarter, New Orleans floated on a river of rum. Laissez les bon temps Goulet.
Three days before Super Bowl IX, the team’s press conferences were held hostage to a self-promotional sideshow, foreshadowing the modern monster called Media Day.
That Thursday, Rams teammates Fred Dryer and Lance Rentzel, wearing 1930s newspaper-reporter outfits from a Los Angeles costume shop, crashed both teams’ interview sessions. The pair were commissioned by Sport magazine editor Dick Schaap to do two things: “We’re here to ask the dumbest questions we can and to mooch as much food and beer as we possibly can,” Dryer announced, and they proceeded to do just that, joining the 1,700 credentialed press, including 800 members of the still-dominant print media feasting at an endless buffet of seafood, cocktails and clichés.
“The Super Bowl is for the writers, not the players,” Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton said, and he wasn’t wrong. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle had a professional background in—and towels monogrammed as—P.R. And so Tarkenton was asked by Dryer and Rentzel, his former teammates, about the harmful effects of sex on football, and the harmful effects of football on sex, and if he had a preference for—nudge nudge, wink wink—“grass” over artificial turf.
Rentzel, who’d been suspended for the 1973 season because of a marijuana conviction, declined to rise to a real reporter’s question about his own preference for grass, at which time Dryer interjected: “There will be a cow bin full of amphetamines on the sideline.”
NFL executives were outraged, but the generation-dividing humor, rife with drug references and sexual innuendo, was very much of its time. Nine months after Super Bowl IX, it would infiltrate network TV with the debut of Saturday Night Live. Asked, with mock gravity, about the momentousness of playing in Super Bowl IX, Tarkenton told Dryer and Rentzel: “I can’t begin to describe the emotion involved. This is absolutely the most important, moving experience of our lives.”
It’s entirely possible that playing along like a collaborative member of an improv ensemble helped Tarkenton to become—in January 1977, a few weeks after playing in Super Bowl XI—the host of SNL. He still doesn’t know why he hosted, because no one has ever told him. He answered the phone one day—he didn’t have an agent—and someone who had never acted before was asked to host a show he had never heard of.
But Tarkenton had worked every offseason since his rookie year in 1961, when he knocked on the doors of shipping clerks in the Dakotas on behalf of Wilson Truck System of Sioux Falls, S.D. So when SNL offered to pay him, he quickly accepted their invitation.
“We lost that Super Bowl [XI] to the Raiders and I went to New York and started rehearsing the Thursday night before the show,” Tarkenton said recently from his home in Atlanta. “These guys and girls were so good, so smart, and I was so far out of my comfort zone. They had me in five skits and I said to John Belushi in rehearsals, ‘I want you to do ’em. I can’t be you, but I can watch you [play my roles] and learn from that.’ ” And so, on the live show, Tarkenton did his best to play Belushi playing Tarkenton. “Belushi was a great actor,” says Tarkenton, “and I just tried to mimic him.”
In the cold open, Tarkenton told Belushi: “I think I forgot the first joke in the monologue?” To which the star asked the quarterback: “Are you telling me it’s true what they say about you, that you can’t win the big one?” Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and a generation of comedy stars looked on with mock concern before they shouted, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” Not surprisingly, the quarterback famous for scrambling when a play broke down looked comfortable.
In the next five decades, hosting duty would regularly accrue to Super Bowl heroes, including Joe Montana, John Madden, the Manning brothers, Tom Brady and Travis Kelce. But Tarkenton will forever be the first athlete of any kind to host SNL. And the road to “Live from New York” traveled through New Orleans.
Super Bowl IX wasn’t the last Super Bowl of the ancient era nor the first Super Bowl of the modern era, but both things at the same time. Tulane Stadium and the Superdome were both standing, neither one quite adequate, one on its way out, one on its way up. But then New Orleans itself has one foot in this world and one foot in the next, “one foot on the platform and the other on the train,” as the Animals put it in their paean to the city’s brothels, “House of the Rising Sun.”
Life and death hold hands here. The most famous of New Orleans’s above-ground graves is the pyramid-shaped tomb of the actor Nicolas Cage whose pharaonic mausoleum is a leading tourist attraction despite its absentee tenant being very much alive.
It’s a city of dancing pallbearers and jazz funerals. “The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds—the cemeteries—and they’re a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here,” observed Bob Dylan, a fan of the city’s “palatial mausoleums ... of women and men who have sinned and who’ve died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn’t pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.”
And so Super Bowl LIX will be, by definition, the most modern Super Bowl ever played, at least until next year’s, but not so different from Super Bowl IX, played 50 years and four miles away. That game had one foot in the Super Bowl’s past and one in its future, one foot on the platform, the other on the train. It was, like Nicolas Cage, at once a ghost and vibrantly alive.
Tulane Stadium was held together by rust. Steelers running back Rocky Bleier, surveying the intramural soccer field at Tulane University where the football field used to be, would say from a 50-year remove: “For me, my teammates and Steelers fans everywhere, this is hallowed ground.”
For everyone else, it was a disappointment not to be inside the Superdome. NFL owners would pass a rule requiring stadiums, in the future, to be open for two full seasons before hosting a Super Bowl. CBS set another precedent by barnacling onto Super Bowl IX, which would air on NBC. Before there was a Puppy Bowl, Kitten Bowl or Lingerie Bowl on non-rights-holding networks, there was the Super Bowl–themed episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show that aired on Saturday, Jan. 11, 1975, the night before Super Bowl IX.
The series was largely set in the newsroom of WJM-TV in Minneapolis. In the opening credits Mary Richards always soaped up her blue Ford Mustang while wearing the purple Vikings No. 10 jersey of Francis Asbury Tarkenton, who says now: “I was aware of it, but I never met her. It wasn’t something I was proud of or not proud of. I never gave it much thought.”
The house that stood in for Mary’s apartment building in the opening credits and every establishing shot was and still is six blocks from the Minneapolis house that Page lives in to this day. “It’s basically around the corner,” he says. “I see it all the time.”
The Super Bowl episode of MTM prefigured the current phenomenon in which everyone is, or would appear to be, gambling on football. And though odds and prop bets are now baked into the broadcasts, and the league has official gaming partners, Lou Grant (Ed Asner) and Ted Baxter (Ted Knight) placed their bets from the WJM newsroom with a men’s room attendant who moonlighted as a bookie.
In “The System,” as the episode was called, Lou and Ted made $2,000 betting on the regular season. The final scene took place, as the chyron noted, on “January 12, 1975, Super Bowl Sunday.” A small crowd gathered in Mary’s apartment to watch the game, unaware that Lou had bet it all on the Steelers to win.
An estimated 68 million Americans bet $23 billion on the Super Bowl in 2024, though the essential emotions of sports betting haven’t changed since 1975.
“Why do you put yourself through this agony week after week?” Mary asked Lou, whose Steelers lost on the show by 12 points.
Enraged, Lou replies: “Because I’m having a good time!”
The real Super Bowl IX began beneath a gray sky when the Vikings’ Fred Cox kicked off. Cox would make more money as a chiropractor and inventor of the Nerf football than he did as a placekicker, and players on both sides of that defensive quagmire would need his back care. “Some games you get beat up and notice it, some games you get beat up and it’s just part of the game,” says Page, charged with stopping Steelers running back Franco Harris, who would rush for 158 yards. “This one was like you’d been in a train wreck.”
The Steelers led 2–0 at halftime on a safety. The Heineken-fueled Steel Curtain was nearly impenetrable, leaving Ham little to do in the linebacking corps. “You don’t run into the teeth of a stunt 4–3 that has [tackles] Joe Greene and Ernie Holmes,” Ham says now. “That game was really a coming out party for our front four.”
The Vikings gained 21 yards rushing on 17 attempts, and even that was not to endure. After an audit by New York Post football writer Paul Zimmerman, who would soon become Sports Illustrated football guru Dr. Z, the Vikings were deducted four yards. Their only score was a blocked punt recovered in the end zone. Cox missed the extra point. “There were three bad teams out there,” Vikings coach Bud Grant said shortly after the 16–6 final. “Us, Pittsburgh and the officials.”
The enduring highlight of Super Bowl IX, then, is Pittsburgh owner Art Rooney Sr. accepting his first Lombardi Trophy, 42 years after founding the franchise. But another image echoes every now and then at other Super Bowls, with their long history of exhibitionism.
At the end of halftime, as the two teams warmed up, a Havana-born burlesque dancer named Sandra Sexton shed her fur coat and semi-streaked across the field in boots and a beige bikini. Security intercepted her before Sexton could embrace Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw, but as they led her away, the guards paused behind one end zone to let her pose for photographers. Within hours she was back at work: headlining at the 500 Club, located at the corner of St. Louis and Bourbon Streets—and also at the T-junction of Football, Showbiz and New Orleans.
For the men who played it, specific memories of the game have grown elusive after half a century. Page only learned from Wikipedia that he had sacked Bradshaw that day. Tarkenton couldn’t tell you if they’d played at Tulane Stadium or the Superdome. “It was a long time ago,” says Ham, who now calls football games on the radio for his alma mater, Penn State, and still lives in western Pennsylvania, where being a Steeler is a lifetime sinecure, full of benefits. Because of those Super Bowl wins, Greene would make perhaps the most famous sports commercial of all time, for Coca-Cola, and Bradshaw is a studio analyst on Fox.
The Vikings lost four Super Bowls in the 1970s but would thrive nevertheless. Page, the NFL’s MVP in 1971, retired from a long career as a Minnesota Supreme Court justice but remains an education philanthropist, namesake of two schools, and chauffeur to four grandchildren who call him “Gruber,” short for “Grandpa Uber.”
Gruber is seldom given to nostalgia over football, but the Vikings’ great run this season had him pondering what a Super Bowl win would mean to Minnesota. “I’m not even sure how to explain why it would be good for the community because at the end of day the Super Bowl is just a game,” he says. “But there’s something about sport—whatever sport—that magically brings people together. I don’t know that I’ve ever understood it or ever will. But I know that it does.”
Tarkenton, the league MVP in 1975 and the all-time passing leader for 17 years, became a successful businessman and TV personality but doesn’t believe a Super Bowl win is any kind of balm. “I didn’t live and die with winning Super Bowls,” he says. “I won the state championship in high school, won the SEC, went to the Orange Bowl and won it. You win these things and they go away. You lose them and they go away. It’s not life-changing.”
Ham has felt the enduring joy the Super Bowls have brought to Pittsburghers and beyond. “Not that I’d be in therapy if we’d gone four times and lost, but it is defining,” he says. “Probably too much. I see both points of view, where Fran walks away and moves on in his life. I get that. But it does kind of define you as a football player.” Reserve Steelers linebacker Ed Bradley, Ham notes, had his own official group of supporters. “In Pittsburgh,” he says, “the backups had fan clubs.”
Tulane Stadium was condemned the day the Superdome opened, on Aug. 3, 1975, though the rust-hulk was still hosting events the following summer, when baton-wielding police and pot-smoking spectators fought violently during a ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. Its successor to big events in New Orleans is now called Caesars Superdome, named after the gaming empire that was named after the Roman emperor who would no doubt recognize, in the Roman numerals and gladiatorial combat, something familiar in Super Bowl LIX, combining as it does the ancient and the modern, while underscoring the timeless appeal of bread and circuses.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as New Orleans Is the Super Bowl’s Spiritual Home.