Major stories and events
Rice Stadium hosted Houston's first Super Bowl in 1974.
In March of 1972, NFL owners voted Houston to host Super Bowl VIII at their spring meetings in Honolulu.
Led by Oilers owner Bud Adams, Mayor Louie Welch and Harris County judge Bill Elliott, Houston’s politicians and business leaders celebrated the NFL’s decision to play its eighth Super Bowl — and its first in Texas — in the Bayou City.
The celebration didn’t last long, though, because Houston had less than two years to prepare for Super Bowl VIII, which would be played on Jan. 13, 1974, at Rice Stadium. It was the first Super Bowl to be played outside Los Angeles, Miami and New Orleans, and the first to be played in a stadium that didn’t house an NFL team. The Oilers moved from Rice Stadium into the Astrodome in 1968.
A crowd of 71,882 watched Miami defeat Minnesota 24-7 on a foggy, cold and damp afternoon in one of the Super Bowls that doesn’t make too many greatest lists. History has been kinder: 14 players and coaches who participated in the game are enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The victory was the second in a row for coach Don Shula and the Dolphins, who had gone 17-0 the season before.
Shula remembers Super Bowl VIII as “a great finish to a two-year period of excellence. We were perfect in 1972 and 15-2 in 1973, and it was something that has never been equaled. And time has only added to the magnitude of the accomplishment.”
The Vikings, coached by Bud Grant, went on to lose two more Super Bowls in the next three years.
“That was probably our best team,” quarterback Fran Tarkenton said of the 1973 Vikings. “We had a great team for about four years, but we ended up being like the Red Sox or Cubs. It sure would have been nice to have won a Super Bowl.”
The Dolphins stayed at the Marriott on North Braeswood and the Vikings at the Sheraton Town and Country. The downtown Hyatt Regency was the media headquarters, and the commissioner’s party was at the Astrodome.
The hoopla pales in comparison to the Super Bowls of today, but it was impressive for 1974. The Dome was decked out with facades of western saloons and frontier towns alongside live cattle in pens on the sta- dium floor for barbecuemunching fans to ogle.
Maxine Mesinger, the Chronicle’s longtime society columnist, reported that the NFL spent the astounding sum of $25 per person for the 2,800 guests.
Grant, whose team lost Super Bowl IV to the Chiefs, knew he needed an edge against the Dolphins, who had won 31 of their last 33 games, and thought he could get it by switching some of the pressure from his players to himself. And so the Great Stone Face went ballistic on HISD’s Delmar Stadium, where the Vikings practiced.
Delmar paled in comparison to the Oilers’ well-stocked practice facility near the Astrodome, which is where the Dolphins worked out. The Delmar locker room was small and antiquated, and trainers had to clean bird dung from the benches.
“I don’t think our players have seen something like this since junior high school,” Grant said. “It’s something their kids would play in on a Saturday afternoon. Just look at this locker room. It’s terrible.”
Grant, who wasn’t exaggerating, was nonetheless fined $5,000 by NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. But at least for a day, Grant accomplished his goal.
The Dolphins were old hands at Super Bowls, but they also faced controversy. Team owner Joe Robbie paid for players’ wives to fly to Houston but refused to foot the bill for the single players’ mothers or significant others. “A lot of that was just two or three guys who wanted to argue about something,” running back Larry Csonka said.
As for the game itself, well, it wasn’t competitive at all. The Dolphins blew out the Vikings, leading 14-0 in the first quarter, 17-0 at halftime and 24-0 in the third quarter.
Miami’s “No Name Defense” outplayed Minnesota’s famous “Purple People Eaters” defense. The Dolphins limited Tarkenton and Minnesota’s offense to 238 yards, including 72 rushing.
Said Miami safety Dick Anderson: “From a domination and execution standpoint, that game in Houston probably was the highlight of the Dolphins’ two years (as champions). Csonka ran through holes that were so wide it was scary. On defense, we were pretty nondescript. All we did was get the ball back every three downs.”
This game was so lopsided Miami quarterback Bob Griese threw only seven passes, completing six for 73 yards. Csonka was voted the game’s Most Valuable Player after carrying 33 times for 145 yards and two touchdowns.
“Early in the day, we were wondering if we were going to be able to see the ball or if the fans could see the field,” Csonka said. “But things cleared up. The game may have been a little boring, but I thought it was a beautiful day.”
It meant another title for the Dolphins, an NFL dynasty for the first part of the decade. In their vacant locker room after the game, these words were scrawled across coach Don Shula’s chalkboard: “Best ever.”
Among the journalists covering Super Bowl VIII was Hunter S. Thompson, Ph.D., the dean of gonzo journalism and national affairs editor of Rolling Stone, who wrote about his experiences in an article titled “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl: No Rest for the Wretched.”
For all his eccentricities, however, the good doctor knew football. After a chat in Houston with Swift, he became convinced Miami’s dynasty was about to be undone by the upstart World Football League’s pursuit of Csonka, Jim Kiick and Paul Warfield and the resulting economic shakedown that was bound to follow.
“The ’73 Dolphins, I suspect, will be to pro football what the ’64 Yankees were to baseball, the final flower of an era whose time has come and gone,” Thompson wrote.
He was nearly right. Miami did lose its three superstars to the short-lived WFL. The NFL has had other dominant teams, but only the Pittsburgh Steelers, who replaced Miami as the NFL’s next dynasty, in 1979 fielded the last Super Bowl team composed entirely of players who had never played for another team.
“That was the start of it,” Griese said. “There was good and bad to it. It was good for the fans and the team owners to keep their teams together. You could almost name every player who started on every team back then. But it was bad for the players, because they couldn’t go out to get the money that their talents would bear.”