Unpublished Super Bowl I Photos Suggest Smoking Bad, Winning Good

Here's the Chiefs' Len Dawson sucking hard on a cancer stick at halftime of the 1967 AFL-NFL World Championship Game, a.k.a, Super Bowl I. It's a compelling picture, if only because it depicts a Hall of Fame quarterback looking sort of badass for reasons that have nothing to do with his on-field skills.

[See more unpublished photos of the Chiefs and Packers from Super Bowl I.]

Dawson and the Chiefs lost that game, of course, to Green Bay — Starr, Nitschke, Adderley, Gregg, Taylor, McGee and the rest — by a score of 35-10. Now, no one's saying that cigarettes cost Kansas City the game. But it's unlikely they helped. Am I right?

Anyway, all of this got me wondering how many pro football players today smoke (cigarettes, not weed). I smoked for a long, long time — Lucky Strikes, unfiltered, if you must know; LSMFT, damn it — stopped years ago, and still occasionally crave one.

Cigarettes are evil. Cigarettes are cool.

The end.

Ben Cosgrove is the editor of LIFE.com. Picture This is his weekly (and occasionally more frequent) feature for The Stacks.

Photo Credit: Bill Ray—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images