This Sunday, some 189 million Americans will watch the Super Bowl. Very, very few of those people will pause their snacking and drinking and cheering to ponder how an iconic cultural spectacle ended up with such a ridiculous-sounding name.
The issue is not the fact that the game is called a bowl; championship games have been called bowls since the construction of the Rose Bowl stadium in 1922. The stadium’s design was inspired by the Yale Bowl (built in 1914) and was similarly named for its distinctive shape. Championship games subsequently became bowls when they commanded a large enough audience to warrant a bowl-like stadium venue; eventually the naming convention become synonymous with any championship game or other momentous matchup. There was never a doubt that the AFC-NFC title game would be a bowl of some sort.
But, of all things, the Super Bowl? Super seems like the slang of wholesome 1950s teenagers (as in, “Gee whiz, that'd be super!”), ditzy Valley-girl types (“He was suuuuuuuper drunk last night,” “She’s, like, super skinny,” and “That’s super sweet of you!”) and grandparents talking to toddlers (“Isn’t that just super-duper?”). There are also the ubiquitous cultural references. Superman. Supermodels. Superfoods. And who can forget South Park’s “Super Fun Time” or the animated Al Gore insisting that he’s “super duper serial”?
Then, of course, there’re the hours we have lost to Super Smash Bros. And back in 1965, just before the Super Bowl was born, there was the “SuperBall”: a toy ball that bounced to astonishing heights and invariably whizzed back to hit its owner in the face. The SuperBall craze swept the nation; by December 1965, millions had been sold—including some five-dozen that a presidential advisor had shipped to the White House for the amusement of staff members.
Media outlets had been informally using the words super and Super Bowl since the AFL-NFL merger in 1966; one New York Times columnist described the title game as "a new superduper football game for what amounts to the championship of the world,” and the Washington Post called it “professional football's ultimate production, a highly appealing 'Super Bowl' that promises extra pizzaz at season's end.” On the first Super Bowl Sunday, the headline on the Time’s sports page read, “The Super Bowl: Football's Day of Decision Stirs Nation.”
But it was the SuperBall that ultimately inspired Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt to suggest making Super Bowl the official name of the game. Yet Hunt originally meant his suggestion as a joke. Hunt had urged the new NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, to come up with some catchy name for the league’s title game, before adding, “I have kiddingly called it the Super Bowl, which can obviously be improved upon.” Like me, Hunt felt the moniker lacked something essential (gravitas or glory, perhaps?).
Commissioner Rozelle found the name equally sophomoric, and Hunt has said that, indeed, “[the entire merger committee] agreed it was far too corny to be the name of the new title game.” Thus, for the first two years the event was billed as the “AFL-NFL World Championship Game.”
Yet as “Super Bowl” quickly eclipsed “AFL-NFL World Championship Game” in popularity, the league capitulated to the name recognition, trademarking the term in 1969. “Super Bowl” had won.
Hunt described the role of the media in an interview with the L.A. Times: "I was just sort of kidding at first when I mentioned Super Bowl in the meetings... But then the other owners started using it and the press picked it up." The third championship game (played in January 1969) became the first officially called the Super Bowl.
With the name settled, the league turned to the question of numbering. The merger committee had already decided to number the title games instead of referring to them by year (as is the college football convention) because the championship was to be played in a different calendar year than the regular season. The problem now was that “Super Bowl 1”, “Super Bowl 2”, etc. looked, for lack of a better word, basic. Implementing another of Hunt’s suggestions, the league began using Roman numerals to lend prestige to a championship that, back then, was still a small-time event (remember, the first three halftime performers were high-school and college marching bands). I might also suggest that they needed all the prestige they could get to offset that fact that it was called the Super Bowl.
But now, XLIX years later, the NFL has come to an impasse with the numbering of this year’s Super Bowl. NFL Creative Services designed more than 70 versions of “Super Bowl L” before deciding that a lone numeral “L” would “be a problem” because it “looks unusual within the design world.” In other words, because “L” is for “loser”.
So Super Bowl 50 it is. In a stroke of brilliant branding, the NFL has also christened this the “Golden Super Bowl”—a two-for-one reference to the game’s golden anniversary and its Golden State-venue; there are, of course, gold-trimmed jerseys, merchandise and 50-yard lines to match.
After fifty years, the name Super Bowl has become distinct from the silliness of the word super itself. In fact, the phrase’s cultural significance has spawned a whole new, figurative sense of Super Bowl, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the most notable or important event or prize in any field.” Fittingly, the game’s annual advertising bonanza is often cleverly called the “Super Bowl of marketing”—in the literal and figurative senses.
Today’s football fans tend to just accept the name, focusing instead on more practical crusades—like the push to reschedule the festivities for “Super Bowl Saturday” and avoid the annual ritual of calling in sick the morning after the game. This is probably more worthwhile than a re-naming campaign. And admittedly, while “Super Bowl” still sounds stupid, the frenzy surrounding the game has become almost ridiculous enough to live up to its name. Besides, if we do want to inject more sophistication (or at least more truth) into the whole enterprise, we could always take comedian Jim Gaffigan up on his offer to rechristen Super Bowl Sunday, “Eat Like Jim Gaffigan Day.”
Lauren Forman is a Trinity senior. Her column runs on alternate Fridays. To suggest a word for a future column, please email Lauren at lauren.forman@duke.edu or tweet her at @lauren_forman.
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