Basketball’s big heads: a gallery of a sporting craze
BASKETBALL is not sport that has gripped Anorak – until now. The fans are winning us over by holding aloft giant faces when the opposition goes to shoot.
The last great craze in British football was the inflatable banana:
It was the 1988/89 football season that saw the inflatables craze really take off…. Frank had moved up to a six-foot crocodile but the rest of the fans had caught up with him. At a pub outside Hull he was joined by fans carrying a toucan, a seven foot golf club, a spitfire, a Red Baron and two bananas. At the ground there were still more: parrots, gorillas, panthers and literally hundreds of bananas… The movements reached it apogee in 1987 when four fans appeared at West Bromwich Albion’s ground carrying an inflatable paddling pool. Sharks and penguins were both represented. (Arsenal fans favoured the inflatable fried egg.)
At one end of the terrace stood Godzilla. Six foot tall, green and mean, this dinosaur was a match for anybody. At the other end of the terrace stood Frankenstein’s Monster. Slowly they baean to converge towards the centre of the terrace. The crowd roared.
Oh, how envious are we of the giant disembodied head. If the movement has hero it is Jackson Blankenship, a freshman at Alabama, who uses a massive photograph of his own face. Well, at least this way the fans can work out who not to sit behind. The pioneer was Conor Mongan:
“I was thinking of the most visually disturbing elements that could get into the peripheral of the shooter and kind of throw them off.”
Who would make the best head?
Posted: 20th, February 2012 | In: Key Posts, Sports Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
