KANSAS CITY, Mo. — There’s no shortage of photos in the office of Kansas City Chiefs team president Mark Donovan. Of his family, of Chiefs memorabilia — fairly standard stuff.

But there’s also one small picture, located in a frame behind his desk, that stands out. There’s a man with fussy brown hair in a smeared white uniform, a red No. 16 adorning his chest, sitting in a cheap, gray folding chair. There’s a green Fresca bottle between his feet, and in between his right thumb and index finger, a lit cigarette pulled closely to his lips, captured precisely with his cheeks sucked in, mid-drag.

The man is Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson, and the photo is from halftime of the very first Super Bowl, played way back on Jan. 15, 1967. And when Donovan noticed that a colleague down the hall had placed a larger version of this photo — one that has gained more life in recent years — on top of a credenza a few years back, Donovan knew he had to have one, too.

“It’s one of my favorite photos,” Donovan told Yahoo Sports, flashing a wide-eyed smile. “There’s a lot of reasons why it’s there.”

For starters, the photo includes Dawson, a Chiefs legend.

View photos LIFE Magazine's iconic photo of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson smoking at halftime of Super Bowl I. (Photo by Bill Ray/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images) More

Another reason he chose it is because of his love for football history and the oddball way the photo captures a time when the game was very, very different. So different that any Chiefs or San Francisco 49ers player caught smoking during Super Bowl LIV on Feb. 2 would be excoriated, not celebrated.

“It’s got so much to it that makes that photo so special,” Donovan said.

The origins of the classic Len Dawson photo

Fred Arbanas doesn’t remember a whole lot about halftime of Super Bowl I. Too many years have gone by for the former tight end who played for the Chiefs from 1962-1970. But he can tell you one thing: Dawson wasn’t the only player smoking during halftime of that game, when the Chiefs, who went on to lose 35-10, trailed the Green Bay Packers by only four points at the break.

“I’d smoke a cigar, and probably more than half the guys smoked cigarettes back then,” Arbanas, a Chiefs Hall of Famer, told Yahoo Sports. “A lot of times, you’d come into our locker room and you could hardly see, it’d be so smoky in there. There were plenty of other guys smoking cigarettes, too, but Lenny’s the quarterback — he’s the one that they snapped.”

While other Chiefs remember it differently — “You might see one or two guys … the whole locker room wouldn’t be that way,” said Hall of Fame linebacker and devout non-smoker Bobby Bell — smoking was at least common enough that this particular photo, taken by LIFE Magazine’s Bill Ray, was considered so unremarkable that LIFE never used it in print.

It has gained popularity in recent years, ever since Time posted 28 of Ray’s unpublished photos from the event on Jan. 1, 2014. Ever since then, the Chiefs who were around back then have found themselves fielding questions about how a football player could have been smoking in the middle of what would eventually become one of sport’s biggest and most physically demanding spectacles.

“I’ve had people make comments about it, and I give them the same answer I just gave you about all the smoking that went on at halftime,” Arbanas said. “Nothing bad had been brought up about cigarette smoking, or any type of smoking, back then. Guys would be smoking cigarettes to relax, and most of the people our age started smoking when they were like 12 years old back then. It wasn’t a health issue at that time.”

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