(already subscribe? log in).

A super name for the Super Bowl

the word

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 05, 2012|By Erin McKean

Lucas Oil stadium in Indianapolis, the site of Super Bowl XLVI. (Chris Graythen/Getty Images )

Today will see the New England Patriots playing the New York Giants in Indianapolis, in what is billed (in the lofty Roman numerals XLVI) as the 46th Super Bowl game. As the announcers will no doubt remind us over and over, the Super Bowl is one of the most-watched events of the television year; last year, Super Bowl XLV was seen by more than 111 million people, making it the most-watched television show ever. With so many people paying attention, the name “Super Bowl” seems almost understated. Why not the Amazing Tremendous Mega-Stupendous Awesome Bowl?

It may be a remnant of “Mad-Men”-era understatement, or just left over from a time where branding wasn’t the main concern of every organization, but there’s something comforting about the simplicity of the “Super Bowl” name. It’s not the “Insert Corporate Name Here Bowl,” as many of the college bowl games have become--“Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl,” anyone? Nor is it as dryly literal as, say, the PGA Players Championship. The name “Super Bowl” neatly balances the descriptive with the evocative. And it’s perhaps partly for that reason that, in less than 50 years, the event by that name has grown to seem like such a natural and solid fixture of our national calendar.

The Super Bowl originally had a more prosaic name: The first two games were officially called the “AFL-NFL Championship Game,” with “Super Bowl” becoming official with the third game in 1968. (The Roman numerals didn’t show up until the fifth Super Bowl game, in 1970.) The name “Super Bowl” is credited to Lamar Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs and the founder of the American Football League, who said he took the name from his daughter’s Wham-O Super Ball toy. (The word bowl used for football games most likely comes from the bowl-shaped Yale Bowl stadium.) Pete Rozelle, the league’s commissioner, didn’t like the word super--according to the league’s publicity director at the time, Don Weiss (interviewed by Michael MacCambridge for his book “America’s Game”), Rozelle thought it had “no sophistication.”

The NFL has a trademark on Super Bowl, and also on Super Sunday. In 2006 the NFL tried to trademark another prominent phrase used around today’s matchup: The Big Game. After vigorous protests not only by Stanford University and the University of California, who have been playing a Big Game against each other since 1892, but also by KFC, Anheuser-Busch, and Domino’s Pizza, all of whom have run Big Game promotions or advertising (in what’s known as “ambush marketing,” where evocative terms are used to associate products with the Super Bowl without using the words Super Bowl), the trademark request was withdrawn the next year.