How the Super Bowl Was Born: From Rival Leagues to a National Holiday
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, The Super Bowl wasn’t always America’s biggest event. Emmy Award–winning producer and author Dennis Deninger tells how a rejected expansion bid, the rise of the AFL, and secret merger talks led to the creation of a new championship game.
From its unsold seats and modest halftime shows to its transformation into a cultural and economic juggernaut, this is the story of how the Super Bowl grew from a league experiment into America’s secular holiday. Deninger is the author of The Football Game That Changed America.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:13.8 | And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:18.1 | Each year on Super Bowl Sunday, Americans eat 1.4 billion chicken wings, order 12.5 million |
| 0:26.7 | pizzas and drink 325 million gallons of beer. How did these turn of events come to be? |
| 0:35.6 | Here to tell the story of the origins of the Super Bowl is Dennis Deninger, an Emmy |
| 0:41.5 | award-winning live sports producer and the author of The Football Game That Changed |
| 0:46.6 | America, how the NFL created a national holiday. |
| 0:51.3 | Take it away, Dennis. |
| 0:53.5 | Back in 1958, the booming post-war years, a young man named |
| 0:58.8 | Lamar Hunter, who was only 26 years old, decided to put an expansion team in Dallas. |
| 1:08.5 | There is no professional sports team of any kind in the state of Texas, and he had a lot of money. |
| 1:14.5 | H.L. Hunt was his father, and he was a multi-billion dollar oil tycoon. |
| 1:19.8 | So Lamar Hunt goes to the NFL, and the answer he got was no. |
| 1:25.6 | The NFL owners liked the fact that there were 12 of them, and they were splitting all of the |
| 1:31.3 | dollars that the NFL made, and they didn't want to cut the pie into smaller pieces. |
| 1:36.1 | The commissioner at the time, Bert Bell, said to young Lamar Hunt, listen, if you can get |
| 1:42.0 | Walter Wolfner, the owner of the Chicago Cardinals to sell his team, |
| 1:48.0 | will let you move it to Dallas. |
| 1:50.0 | The Chicago Cardinals, they were the four step-sister to the Bears. |
| 1:54.2 | They didn't win very many games. |
| 1:56.0 | They didn't get a lot of money. |
... |
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