This weekend, the entire world will stop for a few hours and take in the biggest event of the year. Super Bowl LIX will kick off at 6:30 Eastern time between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, and between 120-150 million Americans will watch the game. The international audience is expected to reach an additional 75 million viewers.
This year’s game is expected to attract even larger audiences than last year’s, which saw 123 million Americans glued to their television sets watching the Chiefs knock off the San Francisco 49ers in overtime. The Chiefs are attempting to become the first team in the Super Bowl era to win three straight championships. The Green Bay Packers won three straight NFL championships, but that was before the Super Bowl era.
No matter what happens in the game, one constant will occur just after the game ends: the winning quarterback will announce to the world that he’s “going to Disney World.” This tradition started in the 1980s and continues to this day, with Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes doing the honors after Kansas City’s win last year.
But how did this start? And who was the first quarterback to utter those famous words?
The Beginnings of “I’m Going to Disney World”
According to Mental Floss, the tradition didn’t start with a marketing agency or Disney’s higher-ups; instead, it came from Jane Eisner, the wife of then-CEO Michael Eisner.
According to Eisner, he, his wife, George Lucas, Dick Rutan, and Jeana Yeager, who had just become the first people to fly around the world without stopping, were out to dinner to celebrate the opening of Star Tours at Disneyland. Eisner turned to Rutan and Yeager during the dinner conversation and asked them, “now that you’ve reached the pinnacle of your aspirations, what do you plan on doing next?”
Rutan responded, “I’m going to Disneyland.” Jane Eisner turned to her husband and said, “That would make a great slogan.”
As Super Bowl XXI approached, Disney decided it would be the perfect place to debut their new slogan. Disney approached the two quarterbacks and offered them $75,000 to look into the camera after winning the game and say, “I’m going to Disneyland,” and “I’m going to Disney World.”
At first, Phil Simms of the New York Giants was reluctant to get involved. However, after Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway agreed, Simms decided to take part.
Tom Elrod, Disney’s president of marketing and entertainment in 1987, told Sports Illustrated:
We wanted it to be authentic, but that meant being the first camera on the field, in the most frenetic environment you could possibly imagine. We’d be competing with broadcast crews and journalists and hangers-on and teammates, just to have some guy look into a camera and say, ‘I’m going to Disney World.’ It’s wild if you think about it. That first year, I don’t think anyone thought that was achievable.
The New York Giants would go on to win their first Super Bowl, and after the game, Simms uttered the famous lines three separate times as he kept messing them up. And the rest was Super Bowl history.
The tradition now includes a trip to the Parks for the winning quarterback and his own commercial. The winning quarterback now gets paid significantly more, and for Disney, the publicity after the biggest television event of the year could be worth up to $1 billion.
So, no matter who wins the actual game, a trip to Disneyland and Disney World will await one of the two quarterbacks in this weekend’s game.
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