January 2011
112 posts
“Be the best villain you can be… LeBron needs to accept this, embrace this. He’s no longer the hero riding in on his horse. He needs to change the white hat to a black hat.”
— Reggie Miller” —
— Reggie Miller” —
How The Super Bowl Got Its Name: The Real Story →
theatlantic.com
Henry Fetter dismantles a legend about the origins of the title:
According to various accounts over the years, including those in the New York Times in 1983 and the Wall Street Journal in 2000, after the first three contests were called the “World Championship Game,” “one day, Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, noticed his children bouncing one of those hyper-springy ‘super ball’ around. The rest is history.”
The problem with this story is that, whatever may have appeared on the face of the tickets, and whatever pro football officialdom had decreed, the “AFL-NFL Championship Game” was popularly being called the “Super Bowl” from the first time it was played. As the headline on the first page of the New York Timessports section read that very first Super Sunday—January 15, 1967—”The Super Bowl: Football’s Day of Decision Stirs Nation.” The lead in the Los Angeles Times’ report on the game the next day read, “Like a stern parent chastizing a mischievous child, the Green Bay Packers soundly thrashed the upstart Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 Sunday in Memorial Coliseum in the first Super Bowl game.”Read the full article here.
Phew, glad they didn’t call it the Fantastic Bowl.
