You've seen The Wave. It's everywhere. Football games, baseball games, soccer matches, and Olympic stadiums.
It has become a universal, shared experience. A rolling, flowing, surging river of joy.
The truth is, regardless of what you may have heard, it was invented at Husky Stadium in Seattle.
The man who started it on a fall day in 1981 is Robb Weller.
"Back in the '70s," Weller remembered, "they called me the hippy cheerleader because I had a beard."
He was a "yell king", and if you ever saw him back in the day working the crowd, then you remember witnessing a man completely in control.
"We had big speakers down on the field," Weller said. "And as a yell leader, I worked the microphone for four hours during a game."
He graduated in 1972 and went to work in television. He was working in Chicago, beginning what would be a fantastic career in television.
Then, he got a call from the University of Washington. They wanted him to come back to be a yell king one more time, for homecoming against Stanford.
During the game, he led the crowd in something he'd done back in the early days. It was essentially what we would now call The Wave, except it went up and then down the grandstand instead of laterally around the stadium.
Almost immediately following the action, the Huskies intercepted the ball from Stanford quarterback John Elway.
Bill Bissell was the band leader for the Huskies in those days. He approached Weller with a directive: "do it again."
Weller resisted. He remembers the conversation that followed as if it were yesterday.
I said, 'OK, I will, but I'm going to let it rest for a bit.' He said, 'No, do it again. Go up and down, go side by side, but do it again.' And he walked away in a huff. And I thought, 'He's always telling me what to do.' Then I thought, 'Side by side, that's interesting,.' So I said 'Let's try this. I'm going to start at the goal line and run to the fifty, and as I run past you guys stand up and then sit down. Everybody got it?' And I run and I get... and they're doing what they're supposed to do. And this whole thing is starting around Husky Stadium."For a moment, imagine that you've never seen The Wave in your life and now it's happening before your eyes. That's what the moment was like for Weller, the returning yell leader from 1972.
"All of a sudden it's going around, it's at the tunnel, it's at the horseshoe...people now are starting to yell and scream, they can't figure out what's happening," Weller said. "But it's coming their wa., and they see it."
"You didn't have to tell them anything. They saw it coming!" Weller added. "They stood up and did The Wave. Did we call it The Wave? No. But, it kept going around and around, we did it all afternoon, and we beat Stanford, by the way."
And that's how it started.
Now, there's a guy in Oakland named Crazy George who says that he invented The Wave two weeks before the Washington-Stanford game. He offers up some video of an Oakland A's game as evidence.
There is a problem though: it's not a wave at all.
What Crazy George did was get people to stand up and sit down one section at a time. And then he started doing it in rapid succession. One section, then another, then another.
It's a clunky, herky-jerky effect. It does go around the stadium, but it is not The Wave.
Crazy George has loudly proclaimed himself the inventor of The Wave. And some have awarded him the crown, in spite of the fact that his "wave" had no wave to it at all.
If you were to freeze the video of his exercise at any one point, you would see a section of people all standing at once. That is not a wave!
Weller went on to be famous for other reasons. He was the host of Entertainment Tonight, ABC's The Home Show, and the gameshow "Win, Lose or Draw."
He started a very successful production company as well. He's had a great ride. These days he splits time between Los Angeles and Olympia.
We got him to visit an empty Husky Stadium one more time to look again at the place where he used to command the crowd, and where he invented something that has conquered every ballpark, stadium, and arena on the planet.
We started by going up and down, for years, and then we started around the stadium," Weller said. "Fluid. A wave. I didn't name it, somebody else did. But it looked like a wave, didn't it? I guess we really did invent The Wave."He laughs at the fact that some purists don't like The Wave and resist it at every turn. But he sees those oceans of bodies rising and receding when he goes to games.
He knows that his moment of inspiration on a fall day in 1981 created something lasting and special.
From his home in Olympia he smiled and said, "people still like doing it, people are part of the team, part of the action. It will go on...forever!"
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