Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and Jerry's sitting in for Dave. Let's get
Speaker 1: started with the wave.
Speaker 2: I am glad you did this. I was kind of
Speaker 2: curious about the origins of the old wave.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I don't know what you mean. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's now kind of all over the world in various places,
Speaker 2: But it started out as an American thing that people
Speaker 2: would do in the stands at sports games, where one
Speaker 2: bit at a time, and all around the whole stadium,
Speaker 2: people would stand up and raise their arms up over
Speaker 2: their head, and if you look at it as it
Speaker 2: goes around the stadium, it looks like a wave is
Speaker 2: moving across the fans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because after they raised their arms over their heads
Speaker 1: standing up, they would sit back down and the next
Speaker 1: section would do it and it would just move seamlessly
Speaker 1: when done correctly. For my money, it's one of the
Speaker 1: best things that could ever happen to you is to
Speaker 1: be in a really good wave. Oh my god, I
Speaker 1: find them so thrilling. I was really surprised to find
Speaker 1: that some people not only hate the wave, they're like
Speaker 1: they denigrate people who like the wave or who do
Speaker 1: the wave. Okay, don't get it. What do you think
Speaker 1: about the wave?
Speaker 2: I was afraid you're gonna ask me that I knew it.
Speaker 2: I'm not a waiver per se. I don't bemoan it.
Speaker 2: I'm not one of these people that's like there's a
Speaker 2: game going on, blah blah blah. Okay, nothing like that.
Speaker 2: I just I got to a certain point where I like,
Speaker 2: I don't want to just stand up and throw my
Speaker 2: arms in the air and wave them like.
Speaker 3: I just don't care.
Speaker 2: Sometimes if I'm in the right mood and this is
Speaker 2: so lazy, I won't stand up, but I'll throw my
Speaker 2: arms up just to be, you know, kind of.
Speaker 3: A good sport.
Speaker 1: I've seen that, sure, And you know.
Speaker 2: Now that Ruby is old enough to go to sporting events,
Speaker 2: I will of course do full wave participant because that's
Speaker 2: something like a kid would really enjoy. I'm not gonna
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna rain on her parade.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And now that I think about it, I might
Speaker 1: like the wave so much because I haven't done it
Speaker 1: since I was a kid, essentially, so they.
Speaker 2: Don't do it at the Wrigley Field. We went through
Speaker 2: the Cubs game together.
Speaker 1: And I don't think there was a wave was there, No,
Speaker 1: they didn't, and Chuck, I was watching videos of waves today.
Speaker 1: They are a sorry shadow of their former self. If
Speaker 1: you want to see a good wave, I found a
Speaker 1: video called the Wave at Michigan Stadium nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: That's a wave the way that we used to do
Speaker 1: it in the eighties. So go check that video out
Speaker 1: and you'll be like, Wow, that's a pretty good wave.
Speaker 3: Wave Michigan Stadium, huh.
Speaker 1: Yep, nineteen eighty four. Don't forget that part. So as
Speaker 1: wholesome as I think the wave is, it turns out
Speaker 1: there's actually like a fair bit of controversy around it,
Speaker 1: specifically around who invented the wave. And what's mind boggling
Speaker 1: is there's two people who claim to have invented it,
Speaker 1: and they seem to have independently come up with it
Speaker 1: or debuted it within two weeks of one another.
Speaker 2: In that nuts Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty crazy story,
Speaker 2: and crazy being the key word here because crazy with
Speaker 2: the K. George Henderson is our first entrant into the
Speaker 2: wave invention sweepstakes because he was a San Jose Jose
Speaker 2: State cheerleader who graduated college I guess, and this is
Speaker 2: in the nineteen seventies and then was just sort of
Speaker 2: a freelance cheerleader for different pro teams and was working
Speaker 2: an a's game on October fifteenth, nineteen eighty one, a
Speaker 2: baseball game for the Oakland Athletics playing the Yankees in Oakland,
Speaker 2: And you can watch this on YouTube footage from that
Speaker 2: game where Crazy George has a drum and he gets
Speaker 2: fans to do a version of the wave. In this version, though,
Speaker 2: it's sort of one section goes and then the next
Speaker 2: section goes, whereas a true wave is just a continuous
Speaker 2: sort of motion and sections be damned.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's much more fluid. But there are a couple
Speaker 1: of points in that footage of that first wave in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, in October fifteenth, where they're going fast
Speaker 1: enough that it seems like there it does look like
Speaker 1: a wave for a second. But I get what you're saying.
Speaker 1: It's not what he was doing, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it was a version. It was a proto wave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a proto wave. But Crazy George Henderson says, no,
Speaker 1: this was the wave. I've been working on this for years.
Speaker 1: Before that game in Oakland, he used to be a
Speaker 1: professional cheerleader at the Colorado Rockies NHL franchise games in
Speaker 1: Denver back in the late seventies, and he started coming
Speaker 1: up with the wave there, but there were so few
Speaker 1: people at those games it didn't really amount to very much.
Speaker 1: And also these games weren't very well covered, so he
Speaker 1: never got people to do the wave in any substantial
Speaker 1: way on camera. It wasn't until that Oakland A's game
Speaker 1: that he was able to document it on camera, posted
Speaker 1: it on the Internet and was like, ipso facto, I
Speaker 1: created the wave.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: And if stop your email now, if you're thinking, Josh, Josh,
Speaker 2: the Colorado Rockies are a baseball team that weren't even
Speaker 2: around in the seventies, that was an NHL franchise first,
Speaker 2: and they would eventually become the New Jersey Devils.
Speaker 1: I had it right, You had it right.
Speaker 2: The second entrant into the Wave sweepstakes is a guy
Speaker 2: named Rob Weller. He's from Tacoma, Washington, and.
Speaker 3: Was this is so great.
Speaker 2: He was known as the yel King aka the greatest
Speaker 2: cheerleader in U dub history. So he would go on
Speaker 2: to host Entertainment Tonight in the early eighties. So I
Speaker 2: was a big fan because I was a little ten
Speaker 2: year old that loved Entertainment Tonight.
Speaker 1: Do you remember him?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh really? Okay? Cool?
Speaker 2: Oh dude, I watched Entertainment Tonight every night. I remember
Speaker 2: when it debuted. I was so excited. It's really funny
Speaker 2: because it was like movie news and that's all I
Speaker 2: cared about. Okay, but he called his and I'm surprised
Speaker 2: this didn't Frankly, surprises didn't stick.
Speaker 3: He called it the expandable cheer.
Speaker 1: Right, he had like the right idea. At first, he
Speaker 1: was just going the wrong way. So he did the wave.
Speaker 1: He had people do the wave, but it was section
Speaker 1: by section and it would go from bottom to top.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So at this one game on Halloween nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: two weeks after that, Oakland A's game, he was having
Speaker 1: people do the Expandable cheer, and at halftime the band
Speaker 1: director Bill Bissell, came over. He said, he let me
Speaker 1: ask you something. Have you ever thought about taking that
Speaker 1: expandable wave and sending it outward rather than upward and
Speaker 1: the wrong way? Rob Weller picked his jaw off the ground. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hugged Bill Bissel tighter than he's ever hugged anybody else
Speaker 1: in his life. And set about starting the wave.
Speaker 2: That's right, And maybe we should take a break here
Speaker 2: and talk about the fight that ensued right after this. Okay,
Speaker 2: So these two guys both lay claim to the wave.
Speaker 2: They have thought about it in a very childish manner
Speaker 2: over the years. I think it's fairly tongue in cheek.
Speaker 2: It's gotta be, you don't think so.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's possible, but it's also possible that
Speaker 1: it's not really all that tongue in cheek.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: Well Bissell, the band director that you mentioned before that
Speaker 2: expanded it outward with Weller's content, says, well, first of all,
Speaker 2: that other wave, it's not a true oval. There was
Speaker 2: a baseball stadium. It's a diamond, and so that doesn't count.
Speaker 2: I throw water all over that argument, because you could
Speaker 2: do a wave in a square room. You could do
Speaker 2: it in a yeah, a literal square room, as long
Speaker 2: as you kept that motion constant.
Speaker 1: Right. He also pointed out the whoopoo on that. Sure.
Speaker 1: His second point was that it was nothing more than
Speaker 1: a stand up cheer section by section. Right, He's got
Speaker 1: a point there, He definitely has a point there. He
Speaker 1: goes on to say in the press as far as
Speaker 1: I'm concerned, crazy George can climb a hole and sit
Speaker 1: on it, which is an awful thing to say, because
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen the victims of Vlodny and Paler,
Speaker 1: that's not a pleasant way to go.
Speaker 3: Oh, he meant him being paled.
Speaker 1: No, but he didn't think it through. He didn't think
Speaker 1: about the consequences. Bill Bissel didn't.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: By the mid nineteen eighties, the wave had really caught
Speaker 2: on the No matter who invented it, every stadium had
Speaker 2: their own version. It might have a special name. I
Speaker 2: believe Michigan that you talked about had what was called
Speaker 2: the silent Waves.
Speaker 1: Creepy.
Speaker 2: Some places they would jingle their car keys stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it got really creative and the waves would would
Speaker 2: go around opposite each other and.
Speaker 3: Meet in the middle.
Speaker 2: It's awesome, But this is about when people started saying,
Speaker 2: this thing is sort of disrupting my enjoyment of the
Speaker 2: game a little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just real quick, can't you see somebody doing a
Speaker 1: jingling car keys wave, Like, stand up and they don't
Speaker 1: have any keys and they sit down and they're like,
Speaker 1: I really need to get.
Speaker 3: A car, yeah, or the key fob just doesn't.
Speaker 1: Do the same, right, So what was this nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: four that it had really kind of spread in just
Speaker 1: a few years. Yeah, that was in America, in the
Speaker 1: United States. I should say, for the rest of the world,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about the wave, you might be listening
Speaker 1: and being like, I think I know what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: We don't call it the wave. We call it the
Speaker 1: Mexican Wave. And that's true. So the rest of the
Speaker 1: world outside of the United States calls the wave the
Speaker 1: Mexican Wave. And there's a really good reason why.
Speaker 2: That's right, because it started in Mexico, that's right, specifically,
Speaker 2: or it was spread internationally in Mexico rather.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it started in the United States and it
Speaker 1: spread like a wave down to Mexico. And Mexico hosted
Speaker 1: the World Cup in nineteen eighty six, and by this time,
Speaker 1: the people of Mexico had been doing the wave for years,
Speaker 1: and during a game, they did the wave and the
Speaker 1: world was just taken aback and fell in love with
Speaker 1: the wave. And still today you can see football games,
Speaker 1: meaning soccer where people are doing the wave. They love it,
Speaker 1: but they call it the Mexican Wave.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: And if you're sitting at home, thinking, well, guys, this
Speaker 2: is pretty good. I know little history here, but I mean,
Speaker 2: you guys usually dig into the science of things, sir.
Speaker 2: Surely there's been a scientific studies about the wave, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: believe it or not.
Speaker 3: There have been.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and two, there was some physicists from
Speaker 2: the Hungarian Academy of Sciences that built computer models analyzing
Speaker 2: lots and lots of waves at sporting events.
Speaker 3: They actually released this.
Speaker 2: In Nature, the periodical Nature very respected and NPR reported
Speaker 2: on it, and they had three key parameters that they
Speaker 2: kind of looked at, which was the distance between the
Speaker 2: sports goers, how many neighbors that an audience member an
Speaker 2: audience member, that's a weird way to say somebody at
Speaker 2: a football game, but whatever, how many.
Speaker 3: Neighbors that you could see.
Speaker 2: And then the readiness or probability of an individual to
Speaker 2: start standing up, assuming others nearby are already standing. What
Speaker 2: in the world does that even mean.
Speaker 1: It's saying whether the person involved as a grump or not.
Speaker 1: How many grumps do you have in the stands? Essentially right.
Speaker 2: Interestingly, out of all this, I think the most interesting
Speaker 2: part is that they narrowed it down to like twenty
Speaker 2: or thirty people is all it takes to start a wave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not only that, they roll clockwise almost invariably, and yeah,
Speaker 1: they move at a speed of about twenty seats per second,
Speaker 1: these scientists figured out. But yeah, that is that's not
Speaker 1: very many people to start a wave, especially if the
Speaker 1: crowd's in a good mood. And that's a really important point.
Speaker 1: If you start a wave at a critical moment in
Speaker 1: a game, you're going to get shouted at, even by
Speaker 1: people who liked the wave, because that is the wrong
Speaker 1: time to do it. There's a time for the wave
Speaker 1: and there's a time for not the wave.
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to picture, like, you know, bottom of
Speaker 2: the nine, two outs, bases loaded, and guy's.
Speaker 1: Like, come on, everybody, Yeah, let's give them a wave.
Speaker 3: It's like, yeah, you're not supposed to do it.
Speaker 2: Do it when it's a little boring and the crowd
Speaker 2: needs you know, everyone's drinking a little bit, everyone's having
Speaker 2: a good time.
Speaker 3: Maybe they're a little bored.
Speaker 2: Maybe they're up seven to nothing in a baseball game
Speaker 2: at the home field, and so people are like, well,
Speaker 2: let's do something. That's a great time to start the wave.
Speaker 2: I've never started a wave I've been a part of.
Speaker 2: The saddest thing is when someone attempts to start the
Speaker 2: wave and it just doesn't happen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a very shame sit down, Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: It's like being the one person to start the standing
Speaker 1: ovation and no one else liked the show as much
Speaker 1: as they did.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The great comedian Gary Gollman talks about standing ovations and he's.
Speaker 3: Like, you're going to be standing in a minute to
Speaker 3: leave anyway.
Speaker 1: Right, you might as well, right, exactly. So there are
Speaker 1: people out there who are like, I don't like the wave.
Speaker 1: I don't like it if we're up seven to nothing,
Speaker 1: I don't like it. If it's a boring game. People
Speaker 1: need to be paying attention to the game, and if
Speaker 1: you are into the wave, you're not a real sports fan.
Speaker 1: Some people think like that.
Speaker 2: Right announcers. You'll hear announcers get grumpy about it sometimes.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, some people who don't like it say that
Speaker 1: it detracts focus from the game. Other people are like,
Speaker 1: you know, if you do it at the wrong time,
Speaker 1: you could cost the home team the game. Now, the
Speaker 1: chances of that are pretty slim, but those things have
Speaker 1: enough momentum that there was a website called Stopthewave dot Net,
Speaker 1: which is now a Facebook group and Tumblr. The Texas
Speaker 1: Rangers on their scoreboard. They had a message back in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two that said that fans participating the wave
Speaker 1: risk pulled muscles and that children found doing it will
Speaker 1: be sold to the circus. And funny even Weller, Rob Weller,
Speaker 1: your friend from entertainment. Tonight he turned on his own creation.
Speaker 1: If he was actually the creator, he was going to
Speaker 1: start a stop the Wave movement with bumper stickers and everything,
Speaker 1: and then he stopped himself. He realized, like people still
Speaker 1: like it. It brings people joy. Who am I to
Speaker 1: try to get people to stop doing it?
Speaker 2: That's right, And he's a great man. He's no John Tesh.
Speaker 2: But I say keep the wave going, even though I'm
Speaker 2: not the most enthusiastic waiver and stop that tomahawk chop
Speaker 2: Atlanta Braves and Kansas City chiefs in Florida State seminoles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's as pernicious as kudzu.
Speaker 3: Do the wave instead.
Speaker 1: That's it for short stuff. Everybody. Short Stuff is out.
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