MIAMI -- The proof is there on page 6F, tucked between a bowling ad and a story on the 1968 Davis Cup match between Spain and South Africa.
"World Championship Football. Super Bowl. Jan. 14," the 3x6 ad says above an image of two players stretching for a pass. "Tickets on sale for $6 and $8. Reserved seats at Orange Bowl Committee ticket office."Surprising but true: When Miami was the site of its first Super Bowl 31 years ago, the NFL relied on newspaper ads to help sell tickets.
"It was totally unlike today," said Edwin Pope, longtime sports columnist for The Miami Herald, which ran the ad. "Fans went to the games then. Now? Forget it, unless you're very rich."
There hasn't been a public sale of Super Bowl tickets in 25 years. Prices have increased 50-fold at face value, perhaps five times that again on the resale market. Limousines and corporate hospitality tents dominate the scene.
The only way the average painted-chest, giant-foam-fingered diehard gets in these days is to hit the lottery or take out an ad.
"SUPER BOWL TICKETS WANTED (Needed) by fans, as many as 6. Please!" reads one ad.
"You have a lot of major sporting events -- the World Cup, the Masters, the Final Four, but the Super Bowl is the big one that everybody wants to see," said Mark Halpern, a Fort Lauderdale ticket broker.
The inaugural Super Bowl attracted only 61,946 fans to the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1967, the event's only non-sellout. When the game moved to the Orange Bowl the following year, it still was a hard sell.
Most fans considered the AFL vastly inferior to the older NFL. Green Bay's demolition of Kansas City at Los Angeles did nothing to dispel that notion.
Miami Dolphins season-ticket holders could buy a Super Bowl ticket for every season ticket held. It still wasn't enough.
The NFL leaned on Miami businesses to help, with such entities as long-departed National Airlines receiving several tickets to use in promotions.
"We traveled to the site in October," said Don Weiss, the retired NFL executive director who organized the first 14 Super Bowls. "We'd go around to the talk shows, hyping the game. It was a sell atmosphere in those days."
Some 20,000 tickets went on public sale just before Thanksgiving 1967. It took about a month to sell them all, Weiss said.
It was much the same when the Super Bowl returned to Miami the following year. That was when Joe Namath changed perceptions of the game.
Three days before Namath's New York Jets faced the heavily favored Baltimore Colts, the brash quarterback guaranteed a win.
The Jets won 16-7. And when Kansas City beat Minnesota the following year, it established the AFL -- soon to be the AFC -- as an equal. Within a few years, the Super Bowl changed dramatically.
The last public sale of Super Bowl tickets was for the 1971 game at Miami. The practice of offering season-ticket holders in the host city a one-for-one deal ended in 1972.
Now, the NFL has very specific percentages for ticket allocation. The league keeps 25.3 percent -- about 15,000 tickets this year -- for its use, with about two-thirds of those going to sponsors, advertisers and the TV network showing the game.
Each of the participating teams gets 17.5 percent of the tickets. The host team receives 10 percent and each of the other 27 teams gets 1.1 percent. When club officials meet their needs for staff and business associates, the rest -- usually about half -- go into a lottery for season-ticket holders.
"You wind up making a lot of people unhappy," Dolphins president Eddie Jones said. "People don't understand why they don't win. But that's what a lottery is."
For the desperate, there are the ticket brokers. But be prepared for a huge markup -- the going rate last week was $1,750 for an upper end-zone seat, without even knowing the participants.
It's illegal in Florida to buy or sell tickets for more than $1 above face value. So Halpern's Front & Center Entertainment sells them as part of a package that includes programs, souvenirs and other perks.
Super Bowl ticket scarcity can be stressful for brokers. For last year's game at San Diego, Halpern contracted to sell some seats for $1,200, then had to shell out $2,000 to acquire the seats.
"You just bite the bullet and pay more money," said Halpern, who wouldn't divulge how much he lost. "You take the hit and take care of your customers."