Houston
The most coveted fashion statement at Super Bowl week? It’s not a $40 T-shirt, or a goofy set of Nike pregame
cleats, or even one of those fancy-man wide-lapel Tom Ford suits thatTom Brady likes to slink around in.
Rather, it’s an accessory: a diamond-encrusted piece of jewelry, roughly the size of a persimmon, as understated
as a Kiss concert, and weighing as much as a small dog:
A Super Bowl ring.
Large, shiny, and engulfing meaty fingers for decades, the Super Bowl ring is the most famous trinket in
American sports, desired by everyone in the NFL, especially Brady, who on Sunday will hunt a fifth one for his
39-year-old thumb. The Patriots’s rings even caught the eye of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who
reportedly bogarted one belonging to New England owner Robert Kraft.
Here at the week-long Super Bowl conclave, Super Bowl rings are worshipped with Tolkien-level awe.
And yet it’s a fairly ridiculous piece of jewelry, which almost no one who owns ever wears.
“I don’t,” the New England Patriots linebacker Rob Ninkovich said the other night to the Journal’s Jim
Chairusmi. “I’m afraid if I fall in water, I’ll sink to the bottom.”
“Would you wear something that expensive everywhere you go?” asked Ninkovich’s teammate, Dont’a
Hightower. Hightower said he keeps his Super Bowl ring “locked up.”
Even Brady, who isn’t afraid of accessorizing—he’s rocked everything from a pocket square to a man bag to a
baby goat in the pages of GQ—confessed he doesn’t wear any one of his four rings.
I’m not trying to tell you that these guys hate their Super Bowl rings. They don’t. But somewhere along the
way, these rings stopped being rings, and became essentially unwearable objet d’art. It’s the same for World
Series rings and other sports. They pop up on fingers for special events or TV or dramatic presentations—
Miami basketball kingpin Pat Riley theatrically dumped his ring collection on a table when trying to seduce
LeBron James—but you have to be an egomaniac to wear one every day.
That’s weird to me. I wanted to know: Shouldn’t the Super Bowl ring be a…ring?
In the old days, it was. The first Super Bowl ring commissioned for the Green Bay Packers isn’t much gaudier
than what you got when you graduated high school. You could wear an undefeated 1972 Dolphins Super Bowl
ring to a dinner party and it might not get noticed.
It wasn’t until the 1980’s that “ring creep” took over and the thing became supersized and cluttered with
diamonds and began to look like a Damien Hirst skull.
I asked a few jewelry designers what they might do if given the chance to revise the Super Bowl ring.
The designer Temple St. Clair said the problem is not size. Super Bowl rings should remain “monumental,” she
said. The issue, St. Clair believes, is that the design has become “monotonous and somewhat interchangeable.”
“They could afford a refined and refreshed look at the design and execution, giving nod to the ritual and myth
of our athletic traditions,” St. Clair said. “I would be happy to help.”
Here’s designer Jessica Biales: “I would make it a classic signet ring shape with a football-shaped center in
enamel. I would use the team colors for the stitching of the football. To add some understated bling, the football
could be surrounded by a channel of diamonds.”
The designer Mollie Good of Walters Faith also likes a signet-style design with a center stone, with a “clean
font” depicting the team name and the year of the win. Designer Jorge Adeler said he would offer “handmade,
one of a kind rings” unique to each player, based around an ancient Roman coin featuring the god of victory,
Victoria.
All of these ideas sound pretty cool, no?
I know I’m fighting a lonely aesthetic battle here. And I know if I won a Super Bowl, it would be really hard to
stand up in the locker room and say, You know what, guys? I’m thinking we should get something smaller and
more tasteful that we can wear when we take our kids to Panera.
“Super Bowl rings are iconic precisely becauseof their boldness and scale,” said Simon Doonan,the creative
ambassador at Barneys. “Reducing their dimension in an attempt to make them ‘tasteful’ would be an epic,
tragic mistake.”
GQ’s style editor, Mark Anthony Green, thinks I want Super Bowl rings to be something they’re not anymore.
“The ring is much more of a trophy than a fashion item,” he said. Green likes rings as accessories, but admitted
that if he won a Super Bowl, he’d want his ring to be “as big as the moment.”
I’m never going to win this one, am I? I’m just trying to look out for the smaller guy here, like a certain Patriots
boss and former Giants assistant who seldom wears any of the phenomenal six Super Bowl rings he owns.
“With little hands like mine, they are a little big,” Bill Belichick said.
Direct link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/lets-make-super-bowl-rings-better-1486079447?tesla=y