The Kansas City Chiefs are honoring the only woman to attend all 57 Super Bowls

By Faith Karimi, CNN

(CNN) — As the Kansas City Chiefs battle in Sunday’s Super Bowl, sharp-eyed fans may spot a patch on the players’ jerseys bearing the letters “NKH.”

The initials, in gold letters inside a football, aren’t a fancy new logo — they’re a tribute to Norma Knobel Hunt, a former minority owner of the Chiefs whose life and career were deeply intertwined with the Kansas City franchise and the early history of the National Football League.

Hunt died last June at 85, leaving a remarkable legacy. She is believed to be the only woman who’s attended all 57 Super Bowls. And she’s credited with indirectly helping her late husband, Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt, come up with the “Super Bowl” name for the championship game.

“Norma was a football fan first and foremost. And she will forever be linked to one of the greatest franchises in sports history,” said Lyndsey D’Arcangelo, a women’s sports advocate and author of “Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League.”

“Her legacy isn’t just about being an NFL owner, but more as an invested fan of the game. Women were often kept on the outside in all aspects of football. Only recently have we begun to explore and recognize the contributions and participation women have made to the game,” D’Arcangelo said.

The Super Bowl was born after the venerable National Football League agreed in 1966 to merge with its upstart rival, the American Football League. The Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 1970 — and then didn’t win another for 50 years.

But Hunt said she attended 40 Super Bowls with her husband over the years, describing the event as the “epitome of shared joy.” 

She was part of pro football’s biggest moments

Norma Hunt’s life in football spanned more than half a century.

A former teacher, she met her husband in 1963. Back then, the Chiefs were called the Dallas Texans and played in Texas. She was part of a group of women who sold tickets for the team, and she met Lamar Hunt at one of those events. According to an account on the Chiefs’ website, her assured personality and passion for the game made an impression on him.

“Women liked her,” author Michael MacCambridge wrote in his biography of Lamar Hunt, who died in 2006.  “Men were drawn to her, and she became adept at putting people at ease, often while talking about sports.”

Hunt was part of some of football’s biggest moments as her husband transformed the landscape of American sports. She was there when the franchise moved to Kansas City and changed its name. She was there when her husband founded the American Football League and became a principal negotiator in its merger with the National Football League, creating what would become the most popular and lucrative pro sports league in America.

“Many NFL owners looked down on the AFL as the junior league,” Joe Browne, the NFL’s longtime public relations executive, said in 2020. “Lamar was the exception.”

Away from the spotlight, Norma Hunt served as a sounding board for her husband and quietly shaped many of his decisions. After his death in 2006, she and their children became owners of the franchise.

Her visibility at Chiefs games and community events is also indicative of how much she loved the team and the game of football itself,” D’Arcangelo said. “Even as a minority owner after Lamar passed away, she remained engaged, not only as an owner but also as a fan.”

D’Arcangelo said the Hunt family name is woven into the fabric of not just NFL history, but the sports industry as a whole. Norma Hunt was credited with encouraging her husband to invest in soccer, and the couple owned a Dallas soccer team until the 1980s.

The name ‘Super Bowl’ was inspired by their child’s toy

The couple’s lifetime connection to the Super Bowl goes deeper than Lamar Hunt’s work in merging the two football leagues.

When it came time to name the expanded league’s title game, team owners insisted on the unwieldy and very unsexy, “AFL-NFL Championship Game.” In 1967 NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle began soliciting ideas for a new name, which yielded such suggestions as the Merger Bowl, the Summit Bowl and simply, The Game.

Around then Norma Hunt had bought her young children Superballs, extra-bouncy rubber balls that were a popular toy at the time. During a meeting with other team owners, her husband Lamar half-jokingly referred to the championship game as the “Super bowl,” a play on words inspired by the toy, the NFL says on its website.

In the summer of 1966, Lamar Hunt wrote a letter to Rozelle, saying, “I have kiddingly called it the ‘Super Bowl,’ which obviously can be improved upon.”

He was wrong. By the expanded NFL’s third title game in 1969, the media had picked up on his proposal. The league officially adopted the Super Bowl name that year.

But her husband underestimated back then how big the Super Bowl would become, Norma Hunt said.

“He said, ‘I believe that this game will become one of the most important sporting events in America,’” she told an interviewer in 2020. “And later, after going to many Super Bowls … he said, …. It’s so much more amazing than I could ever have dreamed.’ “

After the Chiefs’ win against the Baltimore Ravens last month in the AFC championship game, quarterback Patrick Mahomes said he’d fulfilled a promise to win for Norma Hunt.

Now, on an even bigger stage at the Super Bowl, her initials on the team’s jerseys are a reminder of how her legacy endures.

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