The wave (also Mexican wave outside North America) is a type of metachronal rhythm achieved in a packed stadium or other large seated venue, when successive groups of spectators briefly stand and raise their arms. Immediately upon stretching to full height, the spectator returns to the usual seated position.
The result is a wave of standing spectators that travels through the crowd, even though individual spectators never move away from their seats. In many large arenas the crowd is seated in a contiguous circuit all the way around the sport field, and so the wave is able to travel continuously around the arena; in discontiguous seating arrangements, the wave can instead reflect back and forth through the crowd. When the gap in seating is narrow, the wave can sometimes pass through it. Usually only one wave crest will be present at any given time in an arena, although simultaneous, counter-rotating waves have been produced.
The wave first appeared in U.S. sports events in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Televised instances at many matches of the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico brought it to a global audience and led to the name "Mexican wave" in English-speaking countries outside North America.
Krazy George Henderson perfected the wave at National Hockey League games, followed later by the earliest available video documentation of a wave, which he led on October 15, 1981, at a Major League Baseball game in Oakland, California. 'Krazy' Inventor of the Wave Celebrates , JANIE McCAULEY, The Washington Post, Jimmy Christopher, The Wave Magazine (retrieved 22 August 2010 at Internet Archive Wayback Machine) This wave was broadcast on TV, and George has used a videotape of the event to bolster his claim as the inventor of the wave. On October 31, 1981, a wave was created at a University of Washington football game against Stanford at Husky Stadium in Seattle, and the cheer continued to appear during the rest of that year's football season. Although the people who created the first wave in Seattle have acknowledged Henderson's wave at a baseball stadium, they claimed to have popularized the phenomenon.
Henderson believes that the wave originally was inspired by accident when he was leading cheers at a Colorado Rockies National Hockey League game at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado, in 1979. His routine was to have one side of the arena jump and cheer, then have the opposite side respond. One night in late 1979, there was a delayed response from one section of fans, leading to them jumping to their feet a few seconds later than the section beside them. The next section of fans followed suit, and the first wave circled McNichols Arena of its own accord. In The Game of Our Lives, a 1981 book about the Oilers' 1980–81 season, journalist Peter Gzowski described this routine, which did not yet have a name but was already a standard in Henderson's repertoire: "He will start a cheer in one corner and then roll it around the arena, with each section rising from its seat as it yells."
Actually ...there were two Waves. I was a cheerleader at the University of Washington from 1968 to 1972 when we started the first Wave. We tried to have card tricks but the kids would imbibe too much and the card tricks would get all goofed up; then we'd try card tricks with the kids using their bodies as cards and that wouldn't work. Finally we tried a Wave in the student section and it caught on but that Wave was different from this Wave. It would go from the bottom to top instead of side to side.The first wave at the University of Washington's Husky Stadium occurred on Halloween 1981, at the prompting of Dave Hunter (Husky band trumpet player) and the visiting alumni cheerleader Weller. In 1982 Husky head coach Don James pointed to crowd noise from the wave as a competitive advantage when playing home games at Husky Stadium.
The wave had been picked up by fans at the nearby Kingdome prior to the Seattle Seahawks' first playoff appearance in 1983.
Prior to the redevelopment of the Melbourne Cricket Ground between 2002 and 2006, spectators seated in the Members' Stand (reserved for members of the Melbourne Cricket Club) would refuse to engage in the wave, and would be booed by other spectators at the ground, before the wave would resume on the other side of the stand. Sociologist John Carroll described the practice of "booing the Members" as dismissive of any claim to authority or superior social status on the members' part, although good-natured and based on the egalitarian nature of watching sports. (As a postscript to the "booing the Members" phenomenon, even when the Members stand was closed due to the reconstruction work, the crowd would still boo, despite the Members' stand being completely empty. When waves were banned (see below), large sections of the Members participated in the protest waves.) Such a feature is also observed at Lord's, another cricket ground, where the Members in that arena also rarely participate and are booed by the crowd.
Cricket Australia formally banned the wave at home games in 2007 on the grounds that liquids and other objects thrown in the air during the wave posed a danger. The move was not well-received and in some cases served to increase the prevalence of the wave at those games. In one such example, Adam Gilchrist, the Australian wicketkeeper, participated in the banned wave from the playing field. The ban continues to be intermittently imposed and lifted by Cricket Australia and Australian police.
On 23 June 2019, during the Rocket League Championship Series (video game e-sports) Season 7 Finals at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, the audience set a new record for a longest continuous wave lasting for 28 minutes and 35 seconds. The previous record was 17 minutes and 14 seconds set by Tube and their fans at a concert at the Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya, Japan on 23 September 2015.
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