Though the NFL has filmed just about everything throughout its history — especially since the late, great Ed Sabol formed Blair Motion Pictures in 1962, which became NFL Films in 1964. But if there’s one iconic bit of footage you’ve never seen unless you were tuned in to either NBC or CBS on January 15, 1967, it’s a full copy of Super Bowl I, which celebrates its 53rd anniversary today.
The game, which saw Vince Lombardi’s Packers beat Hank Stram’s Chiefs, was the first real battle between the National and American Football Leagues, and was one of the first conditions of the merger between the two leagues, which was ratified in 1966. You’d think there’s be reams of film of such a major event after the fact, but you would be wrong.
As reported by Jared Diamond of the Wall Street Journal, there is one known copy of the full game in existence, and it’s owned by Troy Haupt, a 50-year-old nurse anesthetist who lives in North Carolina. Haupt found the reels in his mother’s attic in Pennsylvania. Neither NBC nor CBS had preserved their original game footage — back then, it was common to erase and re-use film reels to save money.
When Haupt went to the NFL with his discovery, the NFL offered him $30,000 for the film (Sports Illustrated had valued the film at $1 million), and the league also threatened legal action if Haupt did anything else with what the NFL deemed its intellectual property.
So, the footage remains in Haupt’s possession, and one of the most historic games in sports history remains unseen. The NFL had its original 30-minute NFL Films-produced highlights of the game, as it has done for every Super Bowl, and the NFL Network put together a longer special a couple of years back with all the available footage, but you can’t see the whole game at this point.
“I had hoped the NFL would work with us, but we never wanted to go after their multibillion-dollar legal department,” Haupt, who now has the footage in a vault, said. “Our family is not set up to do that kind of thing.”
Jeremy Coon, a producer and editor on the 2004 movie “Napoleon Dynamite,” and his collaborator Tim Skousen, have launched a Kickstarter with the intention of buying the footage from Haupt and bringing it to the viewing public. The two filmmakers are already working on a documentary about Super Bowl I, and if they raise the needed money to buy the film from Haupt for $750,000, they have vowed to stream the whole game for free before Super Bowl LV in February, 2021.
One assumes the rest of the requested money is for the inevitable battle with the NFL’s legal team.
“It’s too easy for the NFL to put pressure on the little guy,” Skousen told the Journal. “But thousands of little guys who are their biggest fans is a lot harder.”
“The NFL can make things difficult,” Coon said. “But that’s why we have a legal fund, so that we can go the distance.”
Skousen and Coon also contacted copyright expert David Nimmer, who told them that they might be able to successfully argue that since the NFL did not preserve the full footage of Super Bowl I, the league would have no standing in a court of law.
The NFL could “no longer say that there were any copies ‘that are fixed in a tangible medium expression’—they had been destroyed,” Nimmer said.
It’s a long, tangled web for a lot of people to navigate for the simple pleasure of watching an iconic game in its entirety, but if Uncle Rico could throw a football over them mountains, anything is possible.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”