LAS VEGAS -- Brent Musburger covered the first Super Bowl as a sports columnist for the now defunct Chicago American newspaper.
"One of my favorite anecdotes from that game is [NFL] Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who I had known when he was a PR man, actually gave me tickets -- which I still have," said Musburger, 84. "I could not give them away. It was not a sellout crowd."
In fact, that Packers-Chiefs AFL-NFL World Championship Game -- as it was originally called -- at the Los Angeles Coliseum on Jan. 15, 1967, is the only Super Bowl that did not sell out.
Super Bowl 1 also didn't generate much buzz about betting. Green Bay beat Kansas City 35-10 and covered as a 14-point favorite. There is no record of the total on the game.
"It was not a huge betting event," Musburger said. "There was very, very little chatter about the point spread. It was just not discussed."
That changed dramatically in Super Bowl 3, when the Jets stunned the Colts 16-7 as 18-point underdogs after New York quarterback "Broadway" Joe Namath famously guaranteed victory in one of the greatest upsets in sports history.
"Gambling has always been a huge part of the NFL, including the founding, but it didn't really become a huge public story until Super Bowl 3," said Musburger. "Then it took off from there, and it hasn't slowed down. The money today is staggering to me."
More than 50 million Americans wagered $16 billion on last year's Super Bowl -- the single biggest sports betting event of the year -- according to estimates by the American Gaming Association.
Here is a glance at some of the biggest moments and innovations in the history of betting on the Super Bowl, which has generated $1.4 billion in wagers over the last 10 years at Nevada sportsbooks.
'Black Sunday'
Two years after the movie "Black Sunday" hit theaters in 1977, another Super Bowl disaster played out in Las Vegas, where sportsbooks were buried by bettors who middled Super Bowl 13 between the Steelers and Cowboys.
Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, who was the basis for Robert De Niro's character in Martin Scorsese's classic mob movie "Casino," opened the first sportsbook in a Strip casino in 1976 at the Stardust.
In 1979, Rosenthal ran a Super Bowl promotion offering Stardust bettors the chance to lay 3 1/2 points with Pittsburgh and take 4 1/2 points with Dallas. The Steelers' 35-31 victory -- landing right in the middle on 4 -- made winners of virtually everybody who bet on it.
Bookmakers lost an estimated $3 million -- $13.5 million in today's dollars -- on the day they dubbed "Black Sunday."
'The Fridge'
William "The Refrigerator" Perry inadvertently ignited the Super Bowl prop bet craze in 1986, when Caesars Palace posted odds on the Bears defensive lineman to score a touchdown in Super Bowl 20.
Bettors pounded the prop and won big when "The Fridge" plowed into the end zone late in the third quarter of Chicago's 46-10 blowout of the New England Patriots.
"At that time, Fridge hadn't appeared in the backfield or carried the ball almost the entire second half of the season, and Coach [Mike] Ditka had said publicly that he would never carry the ball again. So we were pretty confident he would not score," said former Caesars sportsbook director Art Manteris, who created the prop with young ticket writer Chuck Esposito, now the Red Rock Resort sportsbook director.
"The second half of the game, he comes rumbling in from the sidelines. Walter Payton never scored in that game, and the Fridge did. It was an ill-fated venture because it was a one-way prop. That prop opened 20-1 and closed 2-1. We took a pretty big bath on that prop."
Manteris said "The Refrigerator" cost Caesars $200,000.
"I had just started," Esposito said. "And it almost ended when he scored."
Manteris was still brooding about the loss when then-Caesars chairman Henry Gluck called to thank him for coming up with the prop.
"I was shocked," Manteris said. "I told him, 'I know we did very poorly on that prop.' He said, 'I don't care about that. You got us worldwide publicity we couldn't buy.'"
Legalize it
In 2018, the Supreme Court paved the way for other states to take wagers when it struck down the federal ban on sports betting. More than $300 billion has been bet at American sportsbooks since then, and sports gambling is now legal in 38 states.
Despite the rapid spread of legal sports betting, Nevada books have continued to flourish, generating a record Super Bowl handle of $179.8 million in 2022.
The handle dipped to $153.2 million last year, when, for the first time, the Super Bowl took place in a state with legal sports betting in Arizona.
But Nevada bookmakers expect the state to set a new record handle in the first Super Bowl in the world's gambling capital.
In conversations with 15 longtime Las Vegas oddsmakers, 14 said they never thought the city would host the Super Bowl. The one true believer was Michael "Roxy" Roxborough, America's preeminent oddsmaker in the 1980s and 1990s.
"I learned years ago to 'never say never' when it comes to what Las Vegas can do," he said. "If somebody told me Las Vegas would host a presidential inauguration or a Mars launch, I wouldn't bet against it."