Use in Sporting Events
Part 2 of the song has often been played at various sporting events in Canada and the United States, particularly when the home team scores (or wins). It was played first in a sport setting at Kalamazoo Wings hockey games in 1974 when Kevin O'Brien, the public relations and marketing director, started using it during games. When he went to work for the Colorado Rockies hockey team in 1976, he brought the song with him. After the demise of the Colorado Rockies, the Denver Nuggets and Denver Broncos picked up the tradition and are the first NBA and NFL teams to play the song during games.
The nickname "The Hey Song" refers to fact that the only intelligible word in Part 2 is the exclamation of "hey", punctuating the end of several instrumental phrases and repeated three times at the song's chorus. At sporting events, fans often insert their own "hey", or sometimes other chanted syllables.
In 1999 Glitter was convicted of possessing child pornography in England, and in 2006 of child sexual abuse charges in Vietnam. After the second conviction was upheld in court, the NFL asked teams to stop playing the song. Glitter was dismayed by this result as he is a fan of the San Diego Chargers and had choreographed some of the team's cheerleading cadences in 1989.
The NFL has allowed a cover version of the song by the Tube Tops 2000 to be played. Other professional and college teams in the US and Canada have discontinued using the song.
Read more about this topic: Rock And Roll (Gary Glitter Song)
Famous quotes containing the words sporting and/or events:
“The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)