Well, Colorado wave haters, it appears that we have ourselves to blame for the phenomenon. Although the first recorded wave occurred in 1981 at the Oakland Coliseum, longtime crowd cheerleader Krazy George Henderson, credited with inventing the wave, says it was actually a Colorado crowd that helped him solidify the idea.
On an April 10 episode of the Snap Judgement podcast by NPR and PRX, Henderson joined to discuss how he invented the wave. On the podcast, he said his time as a cheerleader for the National Hockey League’s Colorado Rockies in the late 1970s is where he realized how awesome the wave could be.
Henderson first got into cheerleading when he attended San Jose State University. According to Snap Judgement, a friend brought him to a football game and gave him a drum to play. From there, Henderson's love for crowd work bloomed. To this day Henderson, now eighty years old, still plays the drum at San Jose State games and has cheered professionally for Major League Soccer's San Jose Earthquakes for fifty years.
After a short post-college stint as a wood shop teacher, Henderson got back into cheerleading. He booked a gig with the National Hockey League's Colorado Rockies, which played in Denver briefly from 1976 to 1982. (After that, the team moved to New Jersey to become today’s New Jersey Devils and Denver was without an NHL team until the 1990s.)
The Rockies didn’t have a terribly outstanding history as a hockey team, but the team’s fans made their mark on history by spontaneously erupting into the first mini-wave, Hendersen shared on the podcast.
According to a 2013 ESPN story on the wave, Henderson was inspired by a cheer done at San Jose State where three sections of the stadium would be identified to stand and cheer “San”, then “Jose”, then “State” in succession. He brought that inspiration to a Rockies game in the late 1970s, though it is unclear exactly what year.
Henderson said on Snap Judgement that the team had brought him in due to a need to get the fans more engaged. “It was a smaller crowd,” he recalled. “They hardly ever do more than 7,000 a game. They were just a struggling franchise in the NHL. ...There was three sections that had a lot of people.”
He told those three sections to stand up and sit down and yell “Go!” when he pointed at them.
“When I went, they did, ‘Go! Go! Go!” Henderson continued. “I stopped. But the next section stood up.”
From there, the other fans all stood, throwing their arms in the air and shouting.
On National Reach as High as You Can Day, meet someone who did just that—and changed stadium culture forever. This week...
Posted by San Jose State University on Tuesday, April 15, 2025
After the Colorado crowd helped Henderson create the wave, he would occasionally use the cheer at other events, including at high schools. Once he returned to California to cheer for the Oakland A’s, he decided it was time to start the wave at a large stadium for the first time during an October 15, 1981, playoff game against the New York Yankees.
“We'd already lost two games away, so we had to win or we're out of the playoffs,” Henderson told Snap Judgement. “I thought that wave was needed and I knew what it could do, the energy it could add to a stadium.”
The cheer took off across the Coliseum. Sure, the Yankees still took the game (and the series), but Henderson was the real winner.
Since then, there’s been many attempts by other institutions to say they invented the wave, but Henderson has video proof of himself orchestrating the cheer earlier than anyone else had attempted it. And, according to the wave's creator, Colorado played a critical part in that historic crowd choreography.
Check out this video of the first recorded wave:
