The history and stories behind the prize every player wants: A Super Bowl ring
ATLANTA — Many of the players lucky enough to have a Super Bowl ring tell a similar tale.
They figured if they ever won one, they’d never put it away.
“I really believed prior to winning our first Super Bowl in 1992, if I ever was able to accomplish that, I’d wear the ring pretty much every day,” Troy Aikman, who has three rings from his time as Dallas Cowboys quarterback, said.
“I thought it was the best thing ever at that moment. Never once did I think, ‘I’m not going to ever wear this,'” Greg Jennings, who won one with the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XLV, said. “I thought, ‘This is going to be part of my life, everything.’”
Then the players realize a couple things. First, the rings are enormous. And everyone wants to stop and talk about them; they’re the ultimate conversation piece. Aikman said he rarely wears his anymore. Jennings had his on while doing radio interviews this week at the Super Bowl, but he wears it so infrequently his wife Nicole said she thinks their children have seen it only a couple times.
“When I first got it, I probably wore it for the first two months,” London Fletcher, a linebacker on the 1999 St. Louis Rams, said. “Then you put it away. It draws a lot of attention. It’s a pretty big ring.”
“I already draw enough attention,” Hall of Fame running back and two-time Super Bowl champ Terrell Davis said. “I’m not walking around with a ring drawing that kind of attention.”
So the rings mostly stay in safe-deposit boxes, usually coming out only for special occasions. That’s OK, because it’s not about the ring itself. It’s about everything the ring represents.
“When I look at my rings, they tell a story,” Patriots special teams captain Matthew Slater said. “Yeah, they tell a story that we won a Super Bowl, but I think the real story is the men on that team and the relationship and bond we had. You spend more time with the men in that locker room than you do with your family. So to me the rings embody relationship, brotherhood, love and memories I’ll have the rest of my life.”
We spend a lot of time talking about Super Bowl rings. It has become shorthand for someone’s legacy. We all know by now that Tom Brady has five rings and Philip Rivers never won a ring. But what about the rings themselves? How did they get to be the central focus of all the men who will play in Super Bowl LIII on Sunday?
Super Bowl ring tidbit: The first known championship rings go back to a World Series winner, the 1922 New York Giants. Before then, pocket watches were a popular gift to champions. The NBA has always given out rings, dating back to the first champs, the 1947 Philadelphia Warriors. It’s harder to find the origin of the first NFL championship ring. The Pro Football Hall of Fame has a ring from Eagles quarterback Tommy Thompson, given to the team after winning the titles in 1948-49. So rings were a thing well before the Super Bowl (though as late as 1962 the Packers gave out watches), though the exact start of the tradition in the NFL is unclear. We do know each Super Bowl championship team has given out rings. The ring for Super Bowl I was commissioned by Packers coach Vince Lombardi.
How Super Bowl rings are made
The process of making the rings themselves takes months. Each team selects the company to make their rings and to date, only four companies have made Super Bowl rings. Jostens has made the most Super Bowl rings, at 34.
The process begins a few days after the Super Bowl. The company will meet with team, usually the owner and perhaps a few other members of the organization, to start the design process. There are ideas, renderings and samples. The design phase usually lasts six-to-eight weeks, Jostens VP/COO of professional sports Chris Poitras said.
“What we tell our teams is if you can imagine it, it’s our reality to make it happen,” Poitras said.
The rings then take about six weeks to produce. Poitras said how many rings are made depends on the team, and it can range between 300 and 1,000, depending on how many people in the organization are awarded one. The NFL gives an allowance of $5,000 per ring for up to 150 rings, though teams go over that.
Poitras said between 42-48 individuals at Jostens will touch each ring. There are 28 patents involved in producing each ring. The Josten rings are made in Denton, Texas, at the largest ring manufacturing facility in North America. Then the teams will usually have a lavish ceremony, typically around the mandatory minicamp in June, to give them out.
“I loved it man. It came out perfect,” said Rams cornerback Aqib Talib, who won Super Bowl 50 with the Broncos. “I wouldn’t change nothing on it.”
Super Bowl ring tidbit: There are usually some hidden meanings within the design of each ring, some of which are never divulged publicly, Poitras said. For example, the 2016 Patriots rings had 283 diamonds, to symbolize their comeback from a 28-3 deficit against the Falcons in Super Bowl LI. The bezel of the Eagles’ ring had 127 diamonds to honor the trick play “Philly Special” as the jersey numbers of the three players who touched the ball (Corey Clement, Trey Burton and Nick Foles) add up to 127.
Where did all the bling come from?
The Super Bowl rings didn’t start as the blinding, heavy pieces they have become. The Packers’ Super Bowl I ring had a solitaire one carat diamond in the middle.
Shaun Gayle was a safety on the 1985 Chicago Bears, and he was wearing his ring this week as he did his media job for Sky Sports. It’s not exactly a modest ring, but it’s not as gaudy as the modern rings either. Gayle said the Bears captains that season got to help design the ring, and Walter Payton handled most of the details.
“The rings today are like small trophies on your hand,” Gayle said. “That’s why I like mine. And it represents such a great time in your life.”
The rings grew and grew. The 1996 Packers put their logo on the ring, and that became a standard. The 1997 Broncos added orange to their logo on the ring, and other teams followed suit in making the logos on the rings colorful. The ironic thing is that as rings grew, with each team trying to out-bling the past champion, the rings became impractical.
“It’s too big to wear,” Patriots running back James White said. “It’s really big.”
Super Bowl ring tidbit: Fobs were a common gift to NFL champions in the early days of the league. The fob given to the 1920 Akron Pros, the first NFL champions, is on display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The weirdest gift in the pre-ring era has to be from the 1933 Chicago Bears. They were given a bearskin — yes, a bearskin — after winning a championship.
The ring nobody wants
The Rams and the Patriots will each get rings, no matter who wins Super Bowl LIII. The Super Bowl runner-up gets a conference championship ring, but good luck finding proof that any actually exist. You won’t find players wearing them to special events. They sigh and grimace when asked what they think of their second-place ring.
“From my perspective, we expected to win that Super Bowl,” Fletcher, whose Rams lost to the Patriots in a Super Bowl 17 years ago, said. “So that ring is a reminder of not accomplishing our goals.”
The rings are handed out, and it is a heck of an accomplishment to win a conference championship, but those rings rarely see the light of day.
“I have it, but I don’t really like it,” Patriots linebacker Kyle Van Noy, a member of last year’s team that lost to the Eagles in the Super Bowl, said. “Then you’re OK with participation, right?”
Super Bowl ring tidbit: It’s often said you can’t buy a Super Bowl ring, though technically that’s not true. Every once in a while a Super Bowl ring will come up for auction. The known record price for a Super Bowl ring is a “friends and family” ring for Tom Brady (teams will sometimes commission a “friends and family” collection for purchase) that sold for $344,927 last year according to ESPN. The ring had 265 diamonds instead of thee 283 on Brady’s actual ring, but it mostly looked the same as the original. That Brady “friends and family” ring was appraised at $29,700, ESPN said.
The ring is the thing
There are unusual stories about Super Bowl rings. Walter Payton’s 1985 ring was found in a couch many years ago, previously thought to be lost forever. A miscommunication led to Russian president Vladimir Putin keeping Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s 2004 Super Bowl ring, which led to plenty of controversy. It has been told often that the largest ring ever produced was a size 25 to Bears defensive tackle William “The Refrigerator” Perry (and average man has a size 10), and it was so large it took two machines together to make it.
For all the funny and unusual tales with Super Bowl rings, players get wistful when you ask. They may have the ring hidden in a safe-deposit box, but those rings have incredible meaning to everyone who owns one.
“Opened the box and I was like, damn, this is it,” Patriots safety Patrick Chung said. “I’ve worked all these years to get this, to leave a legacy. It’s great.”
Eagles defensive end Chris Long wore his two rings, one with the Patriots and one with the Eagles, together for the first time on Saturday night. He wanted them on if he won the Walter Payton Man of the Year award, which he did.
“It’s a part of my journey, and if we won tonight it was important for me to represent those two years,” Long said. “The rings are cool, but the memories are amazing.”
Although Jennings doesn’t have his on often, when he wears it he said the memories of that 2010 championship season come back, the playoff wins and the relationships with his teammates and everything else that Super Bowl teammates share forever.
“It has a lot of sentimental value,” Jennings said on radio row this week in the Super Bowl media center. “It’s like our entire season wrapped up in a ring. Not everyone in this facility is walking around with one of these.”
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Frank Schwab is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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