The biggest annual event in American sports is, by most credible accounts, named after a bouncy rubber ball a team owner's children played with in the mid-1960s.
The Super Ball: A 1960s Toy Sensation
The Super Ball was developed by chemist Norman Stingley as a side project while working at a California rubber company in the early 1960s. Wham-O put it on the market in 1964, where it became a genuine mid-1960s sensation, the kind of toy that briefly seemed to be everywhere.
Lamar Hunt's Slip of the Tongue
Lamar Hunt, the Kansas City Chiefs' founding owner, is widely credited with coining 'Super Bowl' in the summer of 1966, during a meeting where NFL and AFL officials were planning the first championship game between their two newly merging leagues. According to the most-repeated version of the story, Hunt's own children, Sharron and Lamar Jr., owned Super Balls, and Hunt more or less interchanged the phonetics of 'ball' and 'bowl' mid-sentence, blurting out that the new championship should be called the 'Super Bowl.'
Not the Official Name at First
Despite the story, 'Super Bowl' wasn't the game's actual official name when it debuted on January 15, 1967 — that first game was officially billed as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. 'Super Bowl' was used unofficially from that very first game, but wasn't formally adopted as the event's official name until the fourth edition, in 1970.
From a Toy Reference to a National Cultural Event
The gap between that offhand 1966 comment and today's Super Bowl — a global television event with a nine-figure production budget, a halftime show booking A-list global superstars, and tickets reselling for tens of thousands of dollars — is genuinely one of the more improbable origin stories in modern sports branding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was the first Super Bowl actually called the Super Bowl?
Not officially — it was billed as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game in 1967. 'Super Bowl' was used unofficially from the start but only became the official name from the fourth game, in 1970.
What toy inspired the Super Bowl's name?
The Super Ball, a bouncy rubber ball toy released by Wham-O in 1964, reportedly referenced by Lamar Hunt because his own children owned one.
Who is credited with naming the Super Bowl?
Lamar Hunt, founding owner of the Kansas City Chiefs (then the Dallas Texans), during 1966 merger-planning discussions between the NFL and AFL.
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