Jackson got fined $35,000 for making “a menacing gesture” and for “inappropriate language,” since he’d also mouthed a profanity, the one so often associated with the middle finger. “I kind of wanted to put up the middle finger to him,” Jackson said, “but I didn’t do that because I felt like I was really being watched so I kind of halfway did it.” He hadn’t meant to simulate a gun at all. Jackson appeared to aim an imaginary weapon - not a handgun, but a hand gun - at the heckler. “It’s not the middle finger,” Thompson says, “but it’s middle-finger adjacent.”Īlso on the same Saturday - the night of so many fingers - Josh Jackson of the Phoenix Suns got into trouble by responding to a Los Angeles Clippers fan who’d been heckling him. At first observers saw it as a middle finger but - upon further review - it turned out he’d actually extended his ring finger, apparently as a way of saying he and his Warriors have NBA championship rings and the Grizzlies don’t.
On the same night that the Tennessee and Michigan players delivered double-barreled salutes, Kevin Durant flashed a single finger at the Memphis crowd in the closing seconds of Golden State’s loss to the Grizzlies. “They airbrushed out the finger from some of the cards that were released, but obviously the image survived.”Īchorn, editorial page editor of the Providence Journal, says Radbourn was known for a sense of humor and a taste for drink: “One of his relatives claimed he drank up to a quart of whiskey a day at the height of his career.” And now Old Hoss is sometimes better known for a single finger on his left hand than for winning 59 games in a single season with his right. “He’s got this innocent expression on his face and then he’s doing that on the side,” Achorn says. Radbourn biographer Edward Achorn chose that image for the cover of his book Fifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had. And lest you think that the placement of his digit could have been some sort of benign accident, Radbourn went rogue again in 1887, when he appeared on an early baseball card with hand on hip, middle finger extended. He won a record 59 games for the Providence Grays in 1884, just a couple of seasons before his hide-in-plain-sight middle-finger photo. Old Hoss is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. “And we know what the trophy will look like.” "That belongs in the middle finger Hall of Fame,” Thompson says. Color analyst Don Meredith delivered a colorful riposte: He thinks his team “is No. The Oakland Raiders were pummeling the Houston Oilers 34-0 at the Astrodome on Monday Night Football in 1972 when cameras panning the crowd found an unhappy Oilers fan who offered a middle-fingered hello.
Thompson is founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University - and one of the great moments of sports-television history intersects with one of the great moments of middle-finger history. “If Old Hoss can appear in a photograph from the 19th Century,” Robert Thompson tells USA TODAY Sports, “that’s enough tradition for me to say that the middle finger is a part of the great American pastime.” More: NBA's Week 1 conclusions: Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo is the front-runner for MVP More: Eight potential candidates to be the next Yankees manager That means Tennessee’s Rashaan Gaulden and Michigan’s Lavert Hill are the latest exemplars of an uncivil sporting tradition begun at least as far back as 1886 by workhorse pitcher Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn. Ah, but the first known photograph of someone flipping the bird comes from American sports. So the finger form for F-you goes back two millennia and more. The Romans had a name for the obscene insult: digitus impudicus - impudent finger. Diogenes raised his to Demosthenes in ancient Greece.
Their double-digit discourtesies were sophomoric in tone but historic in nature: The middle finger predates the Middle Ages. A Michigan player offered the same twin salute to the Penn State crowd on the same night. Corrections/clarifications: A previous version of this story included an incorrect nickname for Don Meredith.Ī football player from the University of Tennessee raised a pair of middle fingers to the University of Alabama student section Saturday.
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