The game had a different official name
The game played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on 15 January 1967 was not billed as the Super Bowl. Its official title was the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. It matched the champions of the older National Football League, the Green Bay Packers, against the champions of the younger American Football League, the Kansas City Chiefs. The “Super Bowl” name was already circulating, but only informally, and it took a few years before it became the official title and, later, Roman numerals were added to number the games retroactively.
This article is about the name and how it spread. The game itself, and the business behind it, are covered elsewhere.
Lamar Hunt and the toy
The name is usually credited to Lamar Hunt, the founder of the AFL and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs. As the usual account goes, during the 1966 discussions that followed the merger agreement between the two leagues, Hunt casually used the phrase “Super Bowl” in conversation. He is said to have been inspired by his children’s toy, a hard rubber ball sold as the Super Ball, which bounced unusually high.
Hunt later described the suggestion as a passing joke. He is generally reported to have thought it a poor name for something so important, and said it was meant as a temporary name until a better one was found. No better one arrived, and the label stuck. Accounts differ on small details, such as exactly when and to whom he first said it, so it is safest to describe the origin in general terms.
Why “Bowl”
The word “bowl” was already familiar in American football. College football had its postseason Bowl games, including the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Cotton Bowl, and the word came from the bowl-shaped stadium of the original Rose Bowl, which opened in the early 1920s. Adding “super” made a natural joke: it was a bigger game than any of those.
The league’s commissioner, Pete Rozelle, is generally reported to have preferred a more formal title, and he is sometimes credited with favouring something like “The Big One”. The formal title was therefore used on the day.
How the name spread
Sportswriters liked the shorter name and used it from early in 1967, and the public followed. Within a couple of years it was in common use even in the press materials of the league. The official title for the third game, in January 1969, was the Super Bowl, and the Roman numerals system arrived by the time the fifth game was played in 1971, with the earlier games numbered backwards to fit. By then the first game had become, in effect, Super Bowl I.
Hunt’s wider contribution is often overlooked. He was an owner who pushed for the AFL and later for the merger, and the trophy for the winner was renamed in honour of Vince Lombardi after his death in 1970. The AFC championship trophy was later named after Hunt.
Names before the name
Before the merger, the idea of a game between the two leagues’ champions had been discussed for years under a variety of descriptions, usually just as a “world championship” meeting. That phrase had an obvious problem, since the contest involved only American professional teams, and it sounded grander than the occasion. The informal Super Bowl label avoided that problem. It was short, easy to say in a headline and not tied to any claim about the world.
Why the name matters
The story shows how an offhand remark can become a brand. The name now covers a cultural event that reaches far beyond the sport, and the weight of that phrase today would have been hard to imagine in 1967, when seats at the Coliseum went unsold. By the time Super Bowl II was played in January 1968, the name was in wide use in the press, and each later game helped to fix it in public language. It was fully fixed by the time Joe Namath’s Jets won the third game in January 1969.
A careful reading shows that the “first Super Bowl” is a name applied afterward. In 1967 the players, fans and officials were attending something that did not yet have a settled label.