Richard Hayes and the Snowy TV Picture of the First Super Bowl Broadcast

Last updated on 19 Mar 2026

Richard Hayes can still feel the weight of that January afternoon settling into the house—an ordinary living room becoming, for a few hours, the most important place in the world because his dad said it should be.

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"My dad insisted we watch the game because it was supposed to be something new—the first championship between the AFL and NFL. The television picture wasn’t great, but the excitement in the room made up for it. My father explained the teams and what it all meant while my brother and I sat cross-legged on the floor. Nobody called it “Super Bowl I” yet. It was just a big game. But by halftime we all sensed something special was happening."

The Living Room Felt Like a Front Row Seat

The item Richard Hayes remembers isn’t a ticket stub or a program—it's that family living room television itself, doing its best to hold onto a broadcast in January 1967. The picture didn’t come in clean, and that almost makes the moment more believable: history rarely arrives in perfect focus. It shows up soft around the edges, and you lean in anyway.

A father explains the game to his two sons as they sit cross-legged watching a fuzzy 1967 football broadcast on a living room television. — Richard Hayes remembers the picture wasn’t perfect—only the feeling in the room was.

Richard Hayes and his brother on the floor—cross-legged, close enough to the screen to catch every flicker—weren’t just watching grown men collide on a field. They were watching their father light up with the kind of certainty dads get when they know they’re giving you something you’ll need later. Not money, not advice. A shared reference point. A story you can return to when you want to remember what it felt like to be a kid and trust the adult in the room.

Before It Had a Name, It Had a Feeling

What Richard Hayes holds onto is the strange simplicity of it: nobody in the room was saying “Super Bowl I.” It wasn’t branded into legend yet. It was “the game,” the one Richard Hayes’s dad insisted mattered because it stitched two leagues together—AFL and NFL—and promised something new.

That’s the part that lands hardest: his father serving as translator and tour guide, explaining who was who and why it counted, making sure his sons didn’t just see players moving across a field but understood the stakes underneath it. In that explanation, Richard Hayes wasn’t only learning football. He was learning how his dad approached the world: pay attention when something is changing, because someday people will ask where you were when it happened.

Halftime, and the Quiet Realization

By halftime, Richard Hayes says they all “sensed something special was happening,” and that line carries the whole room inside it—the hum of the set, the closeness of the floor, the father’s voice still doing the work of meaning-making. Not a dramatic announcement, not a formal declaration. Just that shared, unmistakable shift when an ordinary afternoon starts to feel like it’s going to last.

Years later, the score and the headlines belong to the world. Richard Hayes’s version belongs to the house: the imperfect picture and the perfect attention, the way excitement can fill a room so completely that you stop noticing what’s missing. That’s what a first really is—not a label or a trophy, but a moment when you look around and realize everyone you love is here, and everyone is watching the same thing, and somehow that’s enough to make it historic.