It is not called the Super Bowl because supermen play in it. The name struck Kansas City Chiefs Owner Lamar Hunt in the gentle course of watching one of his children at play with a resilient rubber ball. Super Ball. Super Bowl. But how resilient are the players? For two full decades now the buildup has grown, and grown, way past the point of overwhelming just the game. Over 100 million people have been counted in its audience and over $1 million has been paid for a minute of their attention. Sometimes the contest seems the least of the spectacle, and the ball-playing children are easily forgotten. Here, as gathered by TIME Sport Writer Tom Callahan, is a revisiting: recollections grand and small. It is not a collection of dramatic war stories but a selection of corresponding jigsaw pieces, one from each game, the sum of which may suggest something of the human experience.
I Green Bay Packers 35 Kansas City Chiefs 10"If I'd known it was going to get this big, I'd have kept the football," says Packer Receiver Max McGee, 53, who scored the first super touchdown after staying out all night entertaining "a very nice girl from Chicago." He never expected to play. "I was over the hill." But Boyd Dowler fell injured, "and the next thing I knew Bart Starr was audibling a quick little post pattern, my wake-up call. I had a philosophy: quarterbacks making $100,000 shouldn't throw passes behind receivers making $30,000. So, trying not to get killed, I reached back to knock the ball down, and somehow the point just hit me in the palm and stuck." Retired within a year, McGee opened a Mexican restaurant, Chi-Chi's, which multiplied into franchises. His worth now is measured in the tens of millions of dollars, and racehorses in which he once invested pari-mutuelly are now his pets. "I got lucky," he says.
II Green Bay Packers 33 Oakland Raiders 14Starting as a rookie in 1968, the guard Gene Upshaw would sample a Raider Super Bowl in every decade. "Like crawling, walking and running," says the current executive director of the Players Association. "Remember, the first four games were called the A.F.L.-N.F.L. World Championship. The A.F.L.ers wondered if it was going to last." Just for playing in the Super Bowl, the Raiders received rings, but Receiver Fred Biletnikoff took to calling them losers' rings, and the name stuck. Upshaw, 40, says, "To tell you the truth, I don't even know where mine is." He had once dreamed of playing for the Green Bay Packers, of leading the famed Packer sweep. "After we lost, I went over to their dressing room and sat down next to the great tackle Henry Jordan." Jordan predicted that Upshaw would be back for a number of title games and advised him to savor them. "After my '80s Super Bowl, I had two seasons left. For some reason, I couldn't leave the dressing room. I was the last player there. The attendants were cleaning up. I guess I was holding on to it, like Jordan said. Holding on as long as I could."