WSJ football article (use of Roman numerals to identify Super Bowl games).
January 25, 2000
Super Bowl Will Be Game of X's
And O's -- and a Few V's, Too
By SAM WALKER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Jerry Jones, the effervescent owner of the Dallas Cowboys, remembers nearly
every detail about the Super Bowls his teams have played in -- from the head
coaches to the host cities. But ask him whether his team won Super Bowl
XXIX or Super Bowl XXVIII and his eyes take on a glassy look.
"I'll let you figure it out," he says. "And then I'll agree with you."
Ever wonder why America's biggest sporting event is always described with
Roman numerals, even though millions of people don't have the foggiest idea
what they mean? In the past three decades, this once-innocent marketing
gimmick by the National Football League has grown into one of the more
distinctive traditions in sports. But as the league adds more X's, V's and I's
with each passing year, it has also become a nuisance for a lot of people --
from T-shirt designers to radio hosts who have to translate these numerals into
plain English.
Power Sweep, on II
"It used to be kind of cute," says Rick Burton, a sports-marketing professor at
the University of Oregon. "I don't think anybody expected it to go this far."
The league isn't exactly shy about the practice. If Emperor Nero showed up
for this Sunday's game in Atlanta with a pair of tickets, he might think he had
stumbled onto a modern Circus Maximus. Instead of "Super Bowl 34," the
numeral XXXIV will be plastered all over the Georgia Dome, from the nacho
carts to the midfield turf. And if you think that numeral is klunky, just wait:
With a record seven digits tacked to its backside, Super Bowl XXXVIII might
be too expansive for the Goodyear Blimp.
"These numbers are like an accordion," says Bob Hope, an Atlanta
sports-marketing consultant.
Even in its leaner forms, this tradition has created headaches for people like Jim
Fish, director of the Baltimore County Public Library. A few years ago, his
staff was peppered with complaints from library customers who said they
couldn't open any Super Bowl Internet sites. The problem: antismut software
on the library's computers kept mistaking "Super Bowl XXX" for something
naughty. "We finally turned the whole filtering system off," Mr. Fish says.
"People were getting aggravated."
The Betting Line
About the only person who welcomed that Super Bowl double-entendre was
Russ Culver, then the sports book manager at Palace Station Casino in Las
Vegas. He used two-foot plastic letters to slap "Super Bowl" and "XXX" on the
casino's giant sign, which is clearly visible from a busy highway. "It definitely
went over big in Vegas," he says.
Flash forward to another inconvenienced group: the NFL's licensed merchants.
Eddie White, a vice president at Logo Athletic Inc. of Indianapolis, says one of
the most stressful events at his office each year is the day the official Super
Bowl logo arrives from the NFL. The concern: All those numerals sometimes
make the insignia look wider than a nose tackle. These days, he says, as many
as five employees will spend weeks tweaking the logo to keep it from looking
"too horizontal" on, say, a polo shirt.
"It's a technical challenge for us," Mr. White says. "We don't want to give
people a logo that stretches under their armpits."
The first few Super Bowls didn't even use Roman numerals. The numbers
didn't show up until Super Bowl V in 1971, when then-NFL Commissioner
Pete Rozelle decided they might lend the annual games an aura of pomp and
circumstance. They needed it -- particularly given the mundane pedigree of the
name of the game itself. The first three contests weren't known as Super
Bowls; they were called the "World Championship Game." Then, one day,
Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, noticed his children bouncing
one of those hyper-springy "super balls" around. The rest is history.
Today, league officials attribute some of the Super Bowl's success (it was
watched by 128 million Americans last year) to the gravitas the Roman
numerals conveyed in the early years. Few NFL veterans tolerate any carping
about them now. Says Tex Schramm, a former Cowboys team president and
one of the league's elder statesmen: "The only people who don't like them are
the people who can't read them."
But that is a lot of people. Although definitive stats on Roman-numeral literacy
are hard to come by, one leading indicator is the number of public high-school
students currently studying Latin. Rick LaFleur, head of the classics
department at the University of Georgia, puts that figure at 250,000 -- down
from 700,000 in the early 1960s. Mr. LaFleur says Latin, and the numerals
associated with it, suffered in the '60s and '70s from a sociological shift that
looked askance at all things associated with warlike cultures and "dead white
imperialist males." The ancient Romans pretty much fit that bill.
Et Tu, Adrian?
Nonetheless, the Super Bowl's adoption of Roman numerals has been widely
copied by both Hollywood (remember all those Rocky movies?) and big
business (Apple Computer named its new Macintosh operating system with a
Roman X). And it's striking how little public defiance the NFL's numerals have
stirred up over the years. The league sues anybody who meddles with its Super
Bowl trademarks, but there's nothing they can do about newspaper columns,
sports-bar chalkboards and those homemade banners in the end zone.
Why do so many regular people blindly count a football game the way the
Vatican counts popes? "We've all been brainwashed," theorizes Bob Dorfman,
executive creative director at Pickett Advertising in San Francisco.
Still, some fans think a backlash is beginning to emerge. If you read a Super
Bowl story in the Orange County Register, for example, don't count on seeing
any Roman numerals. Chris Anderson, the paper's former editor and current
publisher, banned them years ago -- as a public service. "Our readers talk in
terms of Arabic numbers," says Mr. Anderson. He thinks the Roman numerals
are "rather pompous."
Though he should be a big NFL supporter on this issue, Adam Blistein of the
American Philological Association in Philadelphia says the ancient Romans --
despite their many contributions -- pretty much fumbled on the numerical
front. He notes that if the NFL is still around in 2354, the league will have to
deal with Super Bowl CCCLXXXVIII. "That's ridiculous," Mr. Blistein says. "It
amazes me that people actually did math back then." Even so, the tradition still
resonates with people who can remember the league's humble origins and the
fact that the first Super Bowl didn't even sell out. In under five seconds,
Wellington Mara, the silver-maned co-owner of the New York Giants, can
rattle off the exact numerals of the Super Bowls his teams have won.
"X-X-I and X-X-V," he says, flashing a broad smile of accomplishment. "Do I
get a prize for that?"
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