20 Bizarre Sports Traditions Fans Took Seriously Before The 1960s

The Chicago Cubs’ infamous “Curse of the Billy Goat” supposedly began on October 6, 1945, when William Sianis purchased a ticket for himself and his pet goat, Murphy. The fans didn’t like the stink, and P.K. Wrigley had Murphy and Sianis removed from Wrigley Field. As he was escorted out of the stadium, Sianis allegedly placed a curse on the team. The Cubs went on to lose the 1945 World Series, and fans and sportswriters later pointed to the curse as the reason for the 71-year title drought that followed. All because poor Murphy was a little too smelly for the ballpark!

The winner of the Iowa-Minnesota football game receives a bronze pig trophy every year. Its origin story isn’t pretty, though. After Minnesota players targeted Black star halfback Ozzie Simmons in the 1934 game, Iowa’s governor warned that fans might riot if he were intentionally hurt in the 1935 rematch. Minnesota’s governor calmed tempers with a joke, wagering a pig on the game’s outcome. After a 13-6 Gopher win, Iowa delivered a 265-pounder named “Floyd of Rosedale.” Floyd died of cholera the next year, and a bronze replica was commissioned in 1936.

Dozens were arrested and hospitalized after an eight-day riot erupted in Manhattan streets in September of 1922 after gangs began attacking men who were violating an early-1900s custom against wearing straw hats after September 15. Traditionally, crowds at baseball games would steal and stomp on any boaters spotted after the deadline. This year they took it to the streets. (The baseball in question was being played at the Polo Grounds, as Yankee Stadium hadn’t yet opened.)

In a football game against Centre College on January 2, 1922, in Dallas, Texas, A&M was running short on healthy players when the school’s coach, Dana X. Bible, called upon E. King Gill, who was in the press box helping the reporters ID the players. Gill went to the sideline, donned a uniform, and stood ready to play the entire game, but never got in. Texas A&M won the game 22-14, and to this day, students stand throughout the entire game to honor Gill as their 12th Man.

From the 1900s into the early 1950s, fans waited along the route to hand Tour de France riders lit cigarettes, wine, and beer during mountain climbs. Cyclists and their trainers believed that smoking opened their lungs to take in more air, and that alcohol helped dull fatigue. These were no more than myths, but they were undeniably a fun tradition! The custom of smoking and drinking in the Alps and Pyrenees disappeared once sports medicine made advances in the late 1950s.

When Louis Meyer won his third Indy 500 on May 30, 1936, he drank cold buttermilk in Victory Lane as his mother had encouraged him to do since he was a small child. A newsreel photographer captured Meyer holding up three fingers while sipping the beverage, and an executive from the Milk Foundation, mistaking the buttermilk for milk, pressured the track to make the tradition permanent, and it remained so until 1946. The tradition then lapsed for almost a decade as the track president preferred to use a silver chalice of water. The tradition finally returned for good when the American Dairy Association made it permanent in 1956.

On March 17, 1955, NHL president Clarence Campbell suspended star player Maurice Richard for the remainder of the season and the playoffs. Fans confronted Campbell at the next Canadiens home game at the Montreal Forum, throwing galoshes and shoes onto the ice. A tear gas canister was thrown into the crowd, causing an evacuation and cancellation of the game, and rioting in the streets of Montreal.

Back in the 1920s and ’30s, it was tough to get a grip on a new, shiny baseball. Solutions like dirt, shoe polish, or tobacco juice just darkened the balls in ugly colors. But in 1938, Philadelphia Athletics coach Russell “Lena” Blackburne found a mud (from a location still a Blackburne family secret) in a New Jersey tributary of the Delaware River that took the shine off new balls without discoloring the leather. MLB soon standardized the use of this secret mud league-wide, and every MLB ball is still prepared with it today.

On August 24, 1941, five Brooklyn Dodger fans, led by brass worker Shorty Laurice, entered Ebbets Field carrying un-tuned trumpets, drums, cymbals and trombones. Laurice’s five-piece band, whose members lacked musical prowess on purpose, would march to the dugout after a player was ejected or struck out, playing a mournful tune and finishing with a crash on the cymbals. Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail and team president Branch Rickey eventually invited the band to all home games free of charge. One of my favorite examples of reverse psychology!

British football fans once turned wartime warning devices into stadium noisemakers. Hand-cranked rattles used by Air Raid Precautions during World War II to warn of gas attacks were brought back by soldiers and painted in team colors by working-class fans. They weren’t official club items, but fans whirled them above their heads, shaking the terraces with noise through the late 1950s. Clubs eventually banned the rattles in the late 1960s and 1970s for safety reasons. Definitely one way to make sure your team heard you cheering!

If a brass cowbell went ringing somewhere in the stands at a Brooklyn Dodgers game, or a frying pan was being banged loudly, chances are Hilda Chester was responsible. Chester was one of the Dodgers’ most famous fans, and before becoming a fixture in the bleachers, she reportedly worked as a peanut bagger and later as a sports-page seller outside Ebbets Field. Health problems forced her to give up that work, but certainly not the Dodgers. The bleacher-bouncing, umpire-heckling Chester went on to become one of baseball’s most colorful characters from the 1930s until the Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1957.

The Stanford Axe became one of college sports’ strangest rivalry trophies after Stanford fans brought a ceremonial axe to an 1899 baseball game against the University of California, Berkeley. Cal students stole it after the game and kept it for 31 years. In 1930, a group of Stanford students finally stole it back, using tear gas as part of their elaborate heist. After years of rivalry over the axe, the schools agreed in 1933 to make it an official trophy awarded to the winner of their annual football game, ending the theft attempts. Probably for the best!

In the early 1900s, there was a pitcher named Rube Waddell who was considered one of the most talented, yet easily distracted players. Opposing team fans found they could interrupt his concentration during his start by bringing puppies to the park and blowing fire whistles around it. I mean, who could resist puppies?

At Cooper’s Hill near Brockworth, Gloucestershire, people have spent generations racing down a steep, rugged slope after a giant wheel of cheese. Known as Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling, the tradition has no known date of origin but has been held for centuries. Racers and spectators both take part in the chaos, and the line between the two can get a little blurry. Whoever first looked at that hill and thought, “Let’s chase cheese down it,” certainly left a legacy!

The term “hat trick,” referring to three goals by a hockey player in a game, comes from a promotion in the 1940s. Henri Henri of Montreal and Sammy Taft of Toronto would each give out fedoras to any player scoring three goals in a game, and one early example was Alex Kaleta receiving a free hat. The trick took hold, and the term became standard hockey vernacular.

Calcio Storico Fiorentino, combining elements of rugby, wrestling, and street fighting, is a violent ball game deriving from Renaissance Florence. Though not played continuously since the Renaissance, Calcio has been maintained by the city as a recurring expression of local identity rather than as a modern professional sport. It was deliberately revived in May 1930 in the Piazza Santa Croce, as part of a historical commemoration.

The Toomer’s Corner post-game celebration is most associated with rolling TP, but it actually started in the 1950s with fans tossing telegraph ticker tape from the office reporting the score across trees and power lines near Auburn’s Toomer’s Corner to celebrate football wins. TP tossing started in the late 1960s and 1970s, but the ticker tape is what really started it all.

The jug that is now the prize in one of college football’s oldest annual rivalries is the remains of a mere water jug. Suspicious that the fans might spike the water for the Michigan team, coach Fielding Yost brought along a 30-cent jug to the 1903 game with Minnesota. Afterward, the Michigan team left it behind. Minnesota kept it, and it is now a trophy. So random, but hey, it works.

Royal Shrovetide Football has been played for centuries in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, and is one of England’s most unusual folk sports to survive into the modern age. Hundreds of players split into two sides, the Up’ards and Down’ards, and spend hours trying to get the ball to goals several miles apart across fields and streets. The game has minimal rules, so calling it “football” almost feels like an understatement. It’s basically an entire town chasing one ball!

Every spring, Detroit Red Wings fans throw octopuses onto the ice during the playoffs. Strange choice of mascot? Sure, but it goes back to April 15, 1952, when fish market owners Pete and Jerry Cusimano carried a dead octopus into Olympia Stadium and threw it onto the ice during Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Its eight legs represented the eight playoff wins Detroit needed at the time to claim the Stanley Cup. And wouldn’t you know it, Detroit won the game 3-0 and finished the postseason undefeated with an 8-0 record. The NHL playoff format has since expanded, but Detroit fans still throw octopuses onto the ice in tribute to those original eight wins.

This content was created with the help of AI.