Why Do We Call It the Super Bowl?

Every year, more than 100 million viewers tune in to the Super Bowl, an event that has grown into as much a cultural spectacle as a championship game. First held on January 15, 1967, the Super Bowl might never have existed without sports entrepreneur Lamar Hunt.

In the late 1950s, Arkansas-born businessman Lamar Hunt failed to secure a license from the National Football League (NFL) to start a Dallas football team. Instead, he became a principal founder of the American Football League (AFL). He also established the Dallas Texans football team in 1952 (later becoming the Kansas City Chiefs), which he owned until his death in 2006.

The upstart AFL proved a game-changing success, and in the mid-1960s, the NFL approached Hunt with a merger proposal. To ease the transition, the two leagues planned a series of season-ending title games between their respective champions. Like baseball’s World Series, the event would bring the best players from both organizations onto the same field.

When it came time to choose a name for the contest, Hunt made history once again. In the summer of 1966, Hunt and other football kingpins met to iron out the details of the inaugural title game but couldn’t nail down a catchy moniker. Officially, the event would be known as the “First AFL-NFL World Championship Game.” Its organizers referred to it as the “final game,” the “championship game” and other iterations that never quite caught on.

During one of these meetings, Hunt blurted out an alternative with staying power: the “Super Bowl.”

He soon admitted that his children’s latest obsession, an ultra-bouncy ball called the “SuperBall,” had likely inspired his flash of brilliance. (The word “bowl” was already in use for college football championships at the time.) Other members of the planning committee began tossing the name around, and before long, the media picked up on it.

The Hunt kids’ beloved SuperBall was the brainchild of chemist Norman Stingley, who developed it as a side project while working for a California rubber company in the early 1960s. He discovered that highly pressurized synthetic rubber had remarkable bounce when shaped into a sphere. Stingley’s employer passed on the innovation, but toy manufacturer Wham-O—maker of the Hula Hoop and Frisbee—understood its appeal and bought the concept. By the summer of 1965, the SuperBall was one of America’s most popular playthings.

Although fans quickly adopted the “Super Bowl” title, it had its detractors—including NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle. Rozelle hated the word “super,” which he considered too colloquial, wrote Super Bowl founding father Don Weiss in his 2002 memoir The Making of the Super Bowl.

In 1969, a contest was held to rebrand the championship under a new label. None of the submissions—Weiss mentioned “Ultimate Bowl” and “Premier Bowl” as the best of the bunch—won over the judges.

Even Hunt himself felt lukewarm about the term he coined. “I guess it is a little corny, but it looks like we’re stuck with it,” he told an Associated Press reporter in January 1970. After describing the connection to his children’s bouncy ball, he said, “Kinda silly, isn’t it? I’m not proud of it. But nobody’s come up with anything better.”