SOURCE: The Toronto Star

Long ago and not so far away, the NFL, led by its former commissioner, the late, great Pete Rozelle, discovered the magical link between gambling and the Super Bowl. Once the link was established, then, like any good player, the NFL looked for daylight, took the ball and ran with it. The league hasn't stopped since.

At the start, the problem was how to generate interest in two teams playing at a neutral site, with limited numbers of tickets available to the participants' home fans and following a two-week layoff before what often has been a four-hour super bore. How do you make it compelling for fanatics and casual fans alike?

The answer was gambling.

Point spreads, money lines, halftime re-betting, high-payoff parlays, over/unders – those are just the basics. Then you've got proposition bets (exotics) and squares (most often found at your neighborhood bar) to make sure that people stay tuned to the bitter end. Even in blowouts, Super Bowl ratings remain constant and every ratings point translates into higher television rights fees next time around. It's the sports marketing triumph of the 20th century.

Where did it all kick off? The grainy television image is still fresh in the minds of NFL fans of a certain age. The brash young Jets quarterback, Joe Willie Namath, sitting poolside in Miami Beach, sipping on a tall, cool drink. There he was again, the '60s definition of über-cool, as a guest at the Miami Touchdown Club, issuing his famous promise to an incredulous national sports media that his AFL-champion underdogs would upset coach Don Shula's mighty Baltimore Colts.

"We're gonna win the game, I guarantee it," Namath bragged.

The former Alabama star went out and threw for 206 yards and took advantage of five Colts turnovers, as he and his Jets teammates backed up his boast with a well-crafted 16-7 dismantling of the NFL's best team despite going in as a 19-point underdog. That Namath was later in his career suspended briefly for associating with known gamblers is one of life's great sporting ironies.

Prior to that groundbreaking Super Bowl III, football fans in North America had treated the first two world championship contests as mere exhibitions of the NFL's superiority. Why should they bother gambling on the game? Only the margin of victory was in doubt, right?

But, following that Jets upset, the leagues merged completely and Super Bowl Sunday was on its way to where it sits today, a virtual national holiday with an estimated $1 billion (all figures U.S.) being gambled legally in Nevada, online and with traditional local bookies. Blame it on Broadway Joe and his little Jets team that could.

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