Q: After reading your recent article about Hank Stram’s coining a football sense of “matriculate,” I remembered reading a long way back that Stram also coined “Super Bowl.”
A: No, Hank Stram didn’t coin the term “Super Bowl.” The first person to use it for the football championship game was Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs. Interestingly, Hunt had hired Stram, then a little-known assistant football coach at the University of Miami, as the first head coach of the Chiefs.
Hunt used the term on July 15, 1966, in a discussion with Joe McGuff, sports editor of the Kansas City Star, about a merger between the American Football League and the National Football League:
“I think one of the first things we’ll consider is the site of the Super bowl—that’s my term for the championship game between the two leagues” (Kansas City Star, July 17, 1966). The “b” of “bowl” was capitalized the next day in an Associated Press article that appeared in dozens of other newspapers.
Hunt suggested later that he may have thought of the name because his two children, Lamar Jr., then 10, and Sharon, 8, were playing all the time with a bouncy toy called the Super Ball.
The term had shown up a few years earlier in reference to a bowling championship: “What would they call the new Bowl game? The Super Bowl?” (Corona [CA] Daily Independent, Oct. 25, 1956). The term “bowl” here meant “place for bowling” or “event involving bowling,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED says the football usage ultimately comes from the use of “bowl” to mean “an oval or bowl-shaped stadium intended or used primarily for college football; (later) a stadium known as a venue for bowl games.”
The dictionary’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded here, cites remarks by Arthur Twining Hadley, president of Yale University, about the naming of the Yale Bowl, the college football stadium in New Haven, CT:
“I am glad that Yale, in spite of its classical traditions, prefers the good old word ‘bowl,’ with its savor of manly English sport, to the ‘coliseum’ of the Romans or the ‘stadium’ of the Greeks” (Yale Alumni Weekly, July 4, 1913).
The OED suggests that “Super Bowl” was specifically influenced by “Rose Bowl” and “similar names of college championship games,” and cites this reference to the first football “bowl game,” played at the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, CA:
“Cougars inaugurated bowl game by beating Brown” (Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 1, 1931).
Finally, let’s take a look at the origins of the word “bowl.” The noun, spelled bolen in Old English, is derived from bullǭ, a prehistoric Germanic root for a round object. The earliest OED citation is from Bald’s Leechbook, an Anglo-Saxon medical text written around the mid-ninth century.
This passage, which we’ve expanded by restoring an ellipsis, describes a treatment for toothache, which in ancient times was believed to be caused by parasitic tooth worms:
“Wið toþ wærce, gif wyrm ete, genim eald holen leaf & heorot crop neoþeweardne & saluian ufewearde, bewyl twy dæl on wætre, geot on bollan & geona ymb; þonne feallað þa wyrmas on þone bollan.”
(“For tooth ache, if worm eats [a tooth], take an old holly leaf & the lower part of heorot crop [perhaps hartwort] & the upper part of sage, boil two portions in water, pour into a bowl, and open [the mouth] over it; then the worms will fall into the bowl.”)
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