Although you watch it every year, what do you really know about the Super Bowl?
This Sunday, the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks are facing off in Super Bowl XLIX. The Super Bowl has a long history of memorable moments, and, with Marshawn Lynch’s Skittles and the Patriots (maybe) deflated balls alone, even more memorable moments are certainly bound to happen this weekend.
But before everything goes down this time around, here are eight things you can learn about the game and share at your viewing party … even if your favorite part is actually the commercials.
1. Someone has snuck into over 30 Super Bowls including the very first championship.
Dion Rich has gate-crashed many, many big events including the Oscars and Olympics, but he has snuck into the Super Bowl the most. In a 1993 Los Angeles Times profile, Rich explained his motives, “It was my hobby. The guys at home expected me to be on the tube or in the papers every year. I couldn’t let them down. I made it on TV or in some publication in 21 of the first 22 Super Bowls.” In the photo above, you can see rich even hoisting Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry after they won Super Bowl XII.
Unfortunately, security knows his face these days, checkpoints have increased since 2001, and Rich is no longer able to crash the Super Bowl. According to NY Daily News, his last successful attempt was the New Orleans Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002. Even in the ’90s, Rich told the Los Angeles Times:
After so many years it gets to be a real job. People see me on the sidelines all the time and think it’s easy. It’s not easy, it takes a lot of conniving and ingenuity and contacts. Every year they made it tougher … It just wasn’t that much fun anymore.
–
BONUS: According to legend, the Super Bowl got its name from the “Super Ball” toy.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame has had a super ball (shown in the photo above) on display to commemorate Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt’s apparent coining of the game name after his children’s toy. According to Henry D. Fetter of The Atlantic, when Fetter was asked how he originally came up with the name, he said, “My own feeling is that it probably registered in my head because my daughter Sharron and my son Lamar Jr. had a children’s toy called a Super Ball and I probably interchanged the phonetics of “bowl” and “ball.”
But Fetter doesn’t believe that Hunt actually came up with the name. Going by Hunt’s account, by the time he said “Super Bowl,” the term was already starting to take off in newspapers to refer to the previously unnamed championship game. Fetter believes that there is no clear person to point to as the origin and instead the name was sort of collectively decided.
For what it’s worth, according to the Chiefs media page, Hunt is also credited with coming up using Roman numerals in the name and putting Coach Vince Lombardi’s name on the trophy.
Image: Flickr user Matt McGee
All images Getty unless otherwise noted.
