Short Stuff: The wAve

Summary

Stuff You Should Know: Short Stuff – The Wave

Hosted by Josh and Chuck, with Jerry filling in for Dave.

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Introduction

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, titled "Short Stuff: The Wave", hosts Josh and Chuck delve into the fascinating history, cultural impact, and scientific analysis of the iconic crowd phenomenon known as "The Wave." Skipping over the usual advertisements and intros, the hosts engage in a spirited discussion exploring the origins, evolution, and diverse opinions surrounding this beloved sports tradition.

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Origins of The Wave

Chuck kicks off the conversation by expressing curiosity about the origins of The Wave:

"[00:48] Chuck: If you don't know what you mean. Yeah. It's now kind of all over the world in various places. But it started out as American thing that people would do in the stands at sports games..."

Josh adds to the explanation, highlighting the mechanics of The Wave:

"[01:17] Josh: Yeah. Because after they raised their arms over their head standing up, they would sit back down and the next section would do it and it would just move seamlessly when done correctly..."

The Wave, as described, involves spectators standing and raising their arms in sequence around a stadium, creating a wave-like motion that traverses the crowd.

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Crazy George Henderson vs. Rob Weller: The Inventors' Duel

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to unraveling the contentious claimants to the invention of The Wave: Crazy George Henderson and Rob Weller.

Crazy George Henderson's Claim:

"[03:08] Josh: Yep, 1984. Don't forget that part. So as wholesome as I think the Wave is, it turns out there's actually like a fair bit of controversy around it..."

Chuck recounts Henderson's attempt to popularize The Wave during an Oakland Athletics game in 1981:

"[04:28] Chuck: George Henderson is our first entrance into the wave invention sweepstakes because he was a San Jose State cheerleader who graduated college... He gets fans to do a version of the wave."

However, this early version was more of a "proto wave," lacking the fluidity that defines the modern Wave.

Rob Weller's Claim:

"[05:49] Chuck: The second entrant into the Wave sweepstakes is a guy named Rob Weller. He's from Tacoma, Washington, and was... he was known as the Yel King, AKA the greatest cheerleader in UW history..."

Weller introduced an alternative version called the "expandable cheer," which deviated from Henderson's approach. A pivotal moment occurred during a Halloween game in 1981, where band director Bill Bissell suggested adjusting Weller's expandable cheer to propagate outward rather than upward, leading to the refined Wave:

"[07:13] Chuck: So he did the Wave. He had people do the Wave, but it was section by section and it would go from bottom to top."

This collaboration between Weller and Bissell is credited with shaping The Wave into its recognizable form.

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Adoption and Spread of The Wave

By the mid-1980s, The Wave had firmly taken root in American sports culture, albeit with variations across different stadiums. Chuck notes:

"[10:31] Josh: So, by the mid-1980s, the wave had really caught on, though. No matter who invented it, every stadium had their own version."

Notable adaptations included the "silent wave" at Michigan Stadium and creative twists like jingling car keys to accompany the motion. The Wave's popularity extended beyond baseball, embedding itself in various sporting events worldwide.

The Mexican Wave Phenomenon

While The Wave originated in the United States, it gained international acclaim during the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico. Josh highlights:

"[12:16] Chuck: Because it started in Mexico."

The term "Mexican Wave" emerged globally, as fans across the world witnessed and adopted this spirited crowd activity during the World Cup, cementing its status as a universal sports tradition.

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Scientific Analysis of The Wave

Intriguingly, The Wave has attracted academic interest. In 2002, physicists from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences conducted a study published in the esteemed journal Nature, analyzing the dynamics of The Wave through computer models. Chuck summarizes their findings:

"[13:30] Josh: It was in America. In the United States, I should say, for the rest of the world, if you're talking about the wave, you might be listening and being like, I think I know what they're talking about. We don't call it the wave. We call it the Mexican wave."

Key parameters examined included:

1. Distance Between Spectators: The spacing of individuals influences the wave's propagation speed and continuity.
2. Number of Neighbors Visible: This affects how quickly the wave can spread across the crowd.
3. Readiness to Participate: The willingness of individuals to join in is crucial for sustaining the wave.

A notable discovery was that merely 20 to 30 enthusiastic participants could successfully initiate The Wave, especially in a receptive and jovial crowd environment.

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Controversies and Criticisms

Despite its popularity, The Wave isn't without its detractors. Critics argue that The Wave can detract from the game's focus and sometimes disrupt the atmosphere. Josh reflects on the mixed sentiments:

"[15:19] Josh: So there are people out there who are like, I don't like the wave. I don't like it if we're up 7 to nothing. I don't like it."

Additional criticisms include:

• Distracting Timing: Initiating The Wave during crucial moments of a game can be seen as disrespectful or disruptive.
• Authenticity of Sports Fandom: Some purists believe engaging in The Wave indicates a lack of genuine interest in the sport.

In response to these criticisms, a movement called Stop the Wave emerged, advocating against the practice. Even Rob Weller considered joining this movement but ultimately decided against it to preserve the joy The Wave brings to many fans.

"[15:39] Josh: So, yeah, some people who don't like it say that it detracts focus from the game... There is a website called stopthewave.net, which is now a Facebook group..."

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Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy of The Wave

Despite the debates surrounding its inception and impact, The Wave has remained a cherished tradition in sports arenas worldwide. Its ability to unify thousands of fans in a synchronized display of enthusiasm underscores its significance beyond mere entertainment. As Josh aptly concludes:

"[16:52] Chuck: Do the Wave instead."

The Wave continues to symbolize the communal spirit of sports, bridging individual experiences into a collective celebration.

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Notable Quotes:

• "For my money, it's one of the best things that could ever happen to you is to be in a really good wave. Oh, my God. I find them so thrilling." – Josh [01:17]
• "He had people do the Wave, but it was section by section and it would go from bottom to top." – Chuck [07:28]
• "Stop the Wave movement with bumper stickers and everything. And then he stopped himself." – Josh [16:34]

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Podcast Production: "Stuff You Should Know" is a production of iHeartRadio, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and other major platforms.

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This summary captures the essence of the discussion between Josh and Chuck, highlighting the key points about The Wave's history, cultural significance, scientific interest, and the debates it has sparked among sports fans.

Transcript

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[Josh]

Hey, and welcome to the Short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. Let's get started with the wave.

[Chuck]

I am glad you did this. I was kind of curious about the origins of the old wave.

[Josh]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck]

If you don't know what you mean. Yeah. It's now kind of all over the world in various places. But it started out as American thing that people would do in the stands at sports games where one bit at a time and all around the whole stadium, people would stand up and raise their arms up over their head. And if you look at it as it goes around the stadium, it looks like a wave is moving across the fans.

[Josh]

Yeah. Because after they raised their arms over their head standing up, they would sit back down and the next section would do it and it would just move seamlessly when done correctly. For my money, it's one of the best things that could ever happen to you is to be in a really good wave. Oh, my God. I find them so thrilling. I was really surprised to find that some people not only hate the wave, they're like, they denigrate people who like the wave or who do the wave.

[Chuck]

Okay.

[Josh]

Don't get it. What do you think about the wave?

[Chuck]

I was afraid you were gonna ask me that.

[Josh]

I knew it.

[Chuck]

I'm not a waiver, per se. I don't bemoan it. I'm not one of these people that's like, there's a game going on, blah, blah, blah.

[Josh]

Okay.

[Chuck]

Nothing like that. I just, I got to a certain point where I, like, I don't want to just stand up and throw my arms in the air and wave them like, I just don't care sometimes if I'm in the right mood. And this is so lazy, I won't stand up, but I'll throw my arms up just to be, you know, kind of a good sport.

[Josh]

I've seen that. Sure.

[Chuck]

And you know, now that Ruby is old enough to go to sporting events, I Will of course do full wave participant, because that's something like a kid would really enjoy. I'm not going to. I'm not going to rain on her parade.

[Josh]

Yeah. And now that I think about it, I might like the wave so much because I haven't done it since I was a kid, essentially.

[Chuck]

So they don't do it at the Wrigley Field. We went to the Cubs game together and I don't think there was a wave, was there?

[Josh]

No, they didn't. And Chuck, I was watching videos of waves today. They are a sorry shadow of their former self. If you want to see a good wave, I found a video called the Wave at Michigan Stadium, 1984. That's a wave the way that we used to do it in the 80s. So go check that video out and you'll be like, wow, that's a pretty good wave.

[Chuck]

Wave, Michigan stadium, huh?

[Josh]

Yep, 1984. Don't forget that part. So as wholesome as I think the Wave is, it turns out there's actually like a fair bit of controversy around it, specifically around who invented the wave. And what's mind boggling is there's two people who claim to have invented it and they seem to have independently come up with it or debuted it within two weeks of one another. Isn't that nuts?

[Chuck]

Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty crazy story. And crazy being the key word here because crazy with a K. George Henderson is our first entrance into the wave invention sweepstakes because he was a San Jose Jose State cheerleader who graduated college, I guess, and this is in the 1970s, and then was just sort of a freelance cheerleader for different pro teams and was working an A's game on October 15, 1981, a baseball game for the Oakland Athletics playing the Yankees in Oakland. And you can watch this on YouTube footage from that game where Crazy George has a drum and he gets fans to do a version of the wave. In this version, though, it's sort of one section goes and then the next section goes. Whereas a true wave is just a continuous sort of motion. And sections be damned.

[Josh]

Yeah, it's much more fluid. But there are a couple of points in that footage of that first wave in 1981, in October 15th, where they're going fast enough that it seems like they're. It does look like a wave for a second. But I get what you're saying. It's not what he was doing, right?

[Chuck]

Yeah. So it was a version. It was a proto wave.

[Josh]

Yeah, it was a proto wave. But Crazy George Henderson says no this was the Wave. I've been working on this for years. Before that game in Oakland, he used to be a professional cheerleader at the Colorado Rockies NHL franchise games in Denver back in the late 70s. And he started coming up with the Wave there, but there were so few people at those games, it didn't really amount to very much. And also these games weren't very well covered. So he never got people to do the Wave in any substantial way on camera. It wasn't until that Oakland A's game that he was able to document it on camera, posted it on the Internet, and was like, ipso facto, I created the Wave.

[Chuck]

That's right. And stop your email now if you're thinking. Josh. Josh. The Colorado Rockies are a baseball team that weren't even around in the 70s. That was an NHL franchise first, and they would eventually become the New Jersey Devils.

[Josh]

I had it right.

[Chuck]

You had it right. The second entrant into the Wave sweepstakes is a guy named Rob Weller. He's from Tacoma, Washington, and was. This is so great. He was known as the Yel King, AKA the greatest cheerleader in UW history. So he would go on to host Entertainment Tonight in the early 80s. So I was a big fan because I was a little 10 year old that loved Entertainment Tonight.

[Josh]

Do you remember him?

[Chuck]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh]

Oh, really? Okay, cool.

[Chuck]

Oh, dude. I watched Entertainment Tonight every night from. I remember when it debuted, I was so excited.

[Josh]

It was really funny because it was.

[Chuck]

Like movie news and that's all I cared about.

[Josh]

Okay.

[Chuck]

But he called his. And I'm surprised this didn't. Frankly, surprise. This didn't stick. He called it the expandable cheer.

[Josh]

Right. He had like the right idea at first. He was just going the wrong way. So he did the Wave. He had people do the Wave, but it was section by section and it would go from bottom to top.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

So at this one game on Halloween, 1981, two weeks after that, Oakland A's game, he was having people do the expandable cheer. And at halftime, the band director, Bill Bissell came over. He said, hey, let me ask you something. Have you ever thought about taking that expandable wave and sending it outward rather than upward?

[Chuck]

You're expanding the wrong way.

[Josh]

Rob Weller picked his jaw off the ground, hugged Bill Bissell tighter than he's ever hugged anybody else in his life, and set about starting the Wave.

[Chuck]

That's right. And maybe we should take a break here and talk about the fight that ensued right after this.

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[Chuck]

Okay, so these two guys both lay claim to the wave. They have fought about it in a very childish manner over the years. I think it's fairly tongue in cheek. It's gotta be.

[Josh]

I don't know.

[Chuck]

You don't think so?

[Josh]

I don't know. It's possible. But it's also possible that it's not really all that tongue in cheek.

[Chuck]

Okay, well, Bissell, the band director that you mentioned before that expanded it outward with Weller's consent, says, well, first of all, that other wave, it's not a true oval. That was a baseball stadium, it's a diamond. And so that doesn't count. I throw water all over that argument. Because you could do a wave in a square room. You could do it in a. Yeah, a literal square room as long as you kept that motion constant.

[Josh]

Right. He also pointed out that poo poo on that. Sure. His second point was that it was nothing more than a stand up cheer, section by section. Right.

[Chuck]

He's got a point there.

[Josh]

He definitely has a point there. He goes on to say in the press, as far as I'm concerned, Crazy George can climb a pole and sit on it. Which is an awful thing to say because if you've ever seen the Victims of Vlad the Impaler. That's not a pleasant way to go.

[Chuck]

Oh, he meant be impaled.

[Josh]

No, but he didn't think it through. He didn't think about the consequences. Bill Bissell didn't.

[Chuck]

Yeah. By the mid-1980s, the wave had really caught on, though. No matter who invented it, every stadium had their own version. It might have a special name. I believe Michigan that you talked about had what was called the silent wave.

[Josh]

It was creepy.

[Chuck]

Some places they would jingle their car keys, stuff like that. Sometimes they got really creative, and the waves would go around opposite each other and meet in the middle.

[Josh]

That's awesome.

[Chuck]

But this is about when people started saying, this thing is sort of disrupting my enjoyment of the game a little bit.

[Josh]

Yeah. Just real quick, can't you see somebody doing a jingling car keys wave, like stand up and they don't have any keys, and they sit down and they're like, I really need to get a car.

[Chuck]

Yeah. Or the key fob just doesn't do the same thing.

[Josh]

Right. So what was this 1984 that had really kind of spread in just a few years? Yeah. That was in America. In the United States, I should say, for the rest of the world, if you're talking about the wave, you might be listening and being like, I think I know what they're talking about. We don't call it the wave. We call it the Mexican wave. And that's true. The rest of the world outside of the United States calls the wave the Mexican wave. And there's a really good reason why that's right.

[Chuck]

Because it started in Mexico.

[Josh]

That's right.

[Chuck]

Specifically or was spread internationally in Mexico, rather.

[Josh]

Yeah. So it started in the United States and it spread like a wave down to Mexico. And Mexico hosted the World cup in 1986. And by this time, the people of Mexico had been doing the wave for years. And during a game, they did the wave, and the world was just taken aback and fell in love with the wave. And still today, you can see football games, meaning soccer, where people are doing the wave. They love it, but they call it the Mexican way.

[Chuck]

That's right. And if you're sitting at home thinking, guys, this is pretty good. I know a little history here, but, I mean, you guys usually dig into the science of things. Surely there's been scientific studies about the wave, right?

[Josh]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

Believe it or not, there have been. In 2002, there was some physicists from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences that built computer models, analyzing lots and lots of waves at sporting events. They actually Released this in Nature, the periodical Nature, Very respected, and NPR reported on it. And they had three key parameters that they kind of looked at, which was the distance between the sports goers, how many neighbors that an audience member. An audience member. That's a weird way to say somebody at a football game, but whatever. How many neighbors that you could see. And then the readiness or probability of an individual to start standing up, assuming others nearby are already standing. What in the world does that even mean?

[Josh]

It's saying whether the person involved is a grump or not. How many grumps do you have in the stands, essentially?

[Chuck]

Right. Interestingly, out of all this, I think the most interesting part is that they narrowed it down to like 20 or 30 people is all it takes to start a wave.

[Josh]

Yeah. Not only that, they roll clockwise almost invariably, and they move at a speed of about 20 seats per second, these scientists figured out. But, yeah, that's not very many people to start a wave, especially if the crowd's in a good mood. And that's a really important point. If you start a wave at a critical moment in a game, you're going to get shouted at, even by people who like the wave, because that is the wrong time to do it. There's a time for the wave and there's a time for not the wave.

[Chuck]

I'm just trying to picture, like, you know, bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded, and guys like, come on.

[Josh]

Everybody, let's give them a wave.

[Chuck]

It's like, yeah, you're not supposed to do it. Do it when it's a little boring and the crowd needs, you know, everyone's drinking a little bit, everyone's having a good time. Maybe they're a little bored. Maybe they're up 7 to nothing in a baseball game at the home field. And so people are like, well, let's do something that's a great time to start the wave. I've never started a wave I've been a part of. The saddest thing is when someone attempts to start the wave and it just doesn't happen. It's a very shameful sit down.

[Josh]

Yeah, it is. It's like being the one person to start the standing ovation and no one else liked the show as much as they did.

[Chuck]

Yeah. The great comedian Gary Gullman talks about standing ovations and he's like, you're going to be standing in a minute to leave anyway.

[Josh]

Right. Might as well. Right, Exactly. So there are people out there who are like, I don't like the wave. I don't like it if we're up 7 to nothing. I don't like it. If it's a boring game, people need to be paying attention to the game. And if you are into the Wave, you're not a real sports fan. Some people think like that, right?

[Chuck]

Announcers. You'll hear announcers get grumpy about it sometimes.

[Josh]

So, yeah, some people who don't like it say that it detracts focus from the game. Other people are like, you know, do it at the wrong time. You could cost the home team the game. The chances of that are pretty slim. But those things have enough momentum that there is a website called stopthewave.net, which is now a Facebook group, and Tumblr the Texas Rangers on their scoreboard. They had a message back in 2022 that said that fans participating in the wave risk pulled muscles and that children found doing it will be sold to the circus. And even Weller. Rob Weller, your friend from Entertainment Tonight, he turned on his own creation. If he was actually the creator, he was going to start a Stop the Wave movement with bumper stickers and everything. And then he stopped himself. He realized, like, people still like it. It brings people joy. Who am I to try to get people to stop doing it?

[Chuck]

That's right. And he's a great man. He's no John Tesh. But I say keep the Wave going, even though I'm not the most enthusiastic. Waiver. And stop that tomahawk chop. Atlanta Braves and Kansas City Chiefs and Florida State Seminoles.

[Josh]

Yeah, that's as pernicious as Kudzu.

[Chuck]

Do the Wave instead.

[Josh]

That's it for Short stuff, everybody. Short stuff is out.

[Chuck]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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[Chuck]

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