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Anthony Davis eyebrows licensed: 5 strange pro sports trademarks

Anthony Davis, the presumed first overall pick of the 2012 NBA Draft, has trademarked his famed unibrow and phrases like "Fear the brow" and "raise the brow." 2012 has been  a big year for sports trademarks. Here are 5 of the best.

4. "Tebowing" - Tim Tebow

Julio Cortez/AP/File
New York Jets quarterback Tim Tebow, left, talks to defensive back Eric Smith in a partial "Tebowing" pose during Jets training camp in Florham Park, N.J. earlier this month. Tebow may not have coined the term "Tebowing," but that probably won't stop him from owning the rights to it.

  • By Schuyler Velasco Correspondent

The “Tebowing” pose became so ubiquitous for a few months last winter that it’s easy to forget where it started – tebowing.com, a website started by real estate agent and Tebow fan Jared Kleinstein  after one of Tebow’s patented come-from-behind victories during his stint quarterbacking the Denver Broncos. Kleinstein filed a trademark request on “Tebowing” nearly two months before the quarterback, but his request was denied because he has no relation to Tebow.

The Tebow copyright battles didn’t end there. Shortly after Tebow signed with the New York Jets, Nike and Reebok took to federal court over which company had the right to sell Tebow Jets merchandise. In May, Tebow’s lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to a shirt company manufacturing shirts featuring a refashioned Jets logo with the words “My Jesus,” in place of “NY Jets.” The NFL followed with its own cease and desist letter to the company for infringing on an NFL logo.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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