How a failed basketball championship bid created a million-dollar trademarked phrase
In short: The term three-peat was coined in 1988 by the Los Angeles Lakers during a failed attempt to win three consecutive NBA titles. Though the team fell short, their head coach Pat Riley secured a lucrative trademark on the word, eventually profiting from other teams' later successes.
The term three-peat, a portmanteau of three and repeat, emerged from the high-stakes environment of professional basketball. During the 1988–89 NBA season, the Los Angeles Lakers aimed to secure a third straight championship. According to head coach Pat Riley, it was player Byron Scott who first used the phrase to describe the team's objective. While the Lakers failed to achieve the feat that year, the term entered the cultural lexicon, with the Oxford English Dictionary noting its first appearance as a noun in Newsday in 1988 and as a verb in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1989.
The commercial life of the phrase began when Bijan Khezri, a businessman, filed a trademark application for three-peat in November 1988. He later assigned the rights to Riles & Co., a company owned by Pat Riley. In 1989, the trademark was officially registered under U.S. Registration Number 1552980. This move proved remarkably prescient; although the Lakers missed their 1989 goal, Riles & Co. successfully collected royalties whenever other teams, such as the Chicago Bulls or the New York Yankees, achieved three consecutive championships in the following decades.
The trademark has faced persistent legal challenges from those arguing the term has become too generic for exclusive ownership. However, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has consistently upheld its validity, most notably in the 2001 case of Christopher Wade v. Riles & Co. Attempts to circumvent the trademark, such as a 2005 effort to register Three-Pete for the USC Trojans football team, were blocked by the Patent Office on the grounds that the variation was not sufficiently distinct from the original. Today, the term remains a protected asset, serving as a rare example of a sports-world catchphrase functioning as a long-term revenue stream.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Three-peat
- Also: Three-peat | sports | Britannica
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