Other Uses For Brooms
- In baseball, when the home team is close to accomplishing a sweep (having won the first two games of a three-game series or first three games of a four-game series), some fans will bring brooms to the ballpark and brandish them as a way of taunting the visiting team. (Examples: Arkansas vs LSU- 2011; Red Sox v. Yankees—May 13–15, 2011 and June 7–9, 2011)
- In broomball, broomsticks have their heads removed and are used to push a ball into a goal, on an ice surface. The game is similar to hockey, except players do not wear skates.
- During World War II, American submarine crews would hoist a broom onto their boat's fore-truck when returning to port to indicate that they had "swept" the seas clean of enemy shipping. The tradition has been devalued in recent years by submarine crews who fly a broom simply when returning from their boat's shake-down cruise. This tradition no doubt stems from the action of the Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp who tied a broom to his main mast after defeating the British admiral Robert Blake at the Battle of Dungeness in 1652. This has often been interpreted as a message that he would sweep the British from the seas. This story remains unsubstantiated, but may have its origin in the tradition of hoisting a broom as a sign that a ship was for sale, which seems more likely as Tromp had captured two of Blake's ships in the battle. It is also sometimes said that the story of Tromp hoisting a broom was an embellishment on an earlier English joke that Tromp displayed a broom because his ships were useless against the English and he wished to be rid of them. If true, this could be taken as confirmation of the tradition.
Read more about this topic: Broomstick