Jack Whitaker had one piece of advice for Jim Nantz when he was assigned his first Super Bowl play-by-play gig.
“Be ready for the opening kickoff,” Whitaker told Nantz in early 2007 before Super Bowl XLI.
You see, Whitaker had called the second half of Super Bowl I, and what now would be unfathomable, happened after halftime. The Packers kicked off to the Chiefs … and then they kicked off again.
There was no penalty — or any explanation at all — for CBS’ Whitaker to tell the audience.
“As it was happening, he wasn’t sure what exactly had transpired,” Nantz, who is on the call for Super Bowl 50 between the Panthers and Broncos on Sunday, said of his longtime friend, now 91.
“It took a little while until the information was relayed to him. NBC wasn’t back from commercial, so basically there was a phantom play in the history of the Super Bowl.
It’s hard to imagine. So, the CBS feed got that phantom play and that was his opening play and it really bothered him. It was just an unsettling way to begin.”
That is just one example of the many differences in the game now and then.
Where Super Bowl I had 11 cameras, Super Bowl 50 will have 70. Where there was a half-hour pregame show in 1966, there are seven hours on CBS this year. A 30-second commercial spot cost advertisers $42,500 for Super Bowl I, while CBS is charging as much as $5 million this year. Marching bands from the University of Arizona and Michigan have been replaced by Coldplay — a step backwards in some people’s opinion.
SiriusXM analyst and former Cowboys exec Gil Brandt remembers that first Super Bowl well. He remembers that Packers coach Vince Lombardi didn’t want to bring his team to Los Angeles until two days before the game, but was threatened by commissioner Pete Rozelle with “the largest fine ever administered in this league.” He recalls an impromptu Commissioner’s Party where the AFL and NFL attendees were on opposite sides of the room “like it was segregated.”
“I would say there’s about 25 media that whole week,” said Brandt, whose Cowboys had lost to the Packers in the NFL Championship game two weeks prior.
“No formal press conferences of any kind at all. It was just no big deal at all. It got about as much attention and radio and newspaper print as the Oregon State-USC basketball game earlier in the year.”
Back to the opening kickoff.
Nantz had Whitaker’s advice in his head when the Bears and Colts started Super Bowl XLI and Devin Hester took that kickoff 92 yards for a touchdown.
“I just kept thinking this is crazy karma here. Did he know?” Nantz said.
“You can hear the astonishment in my voice. At the time, the emotion, I just kept thinking about Jack. It was such a sweet memory for me … But I took that advice not only in the literal sense, but be ready cause you never know what’s going to happen, if the next snap is going to be the play that is going be the game-changer or be one of the iconic plays in the history of the Super Bowl.”