Wanna know why college kids from all over the country are spending their beer money at Kinko's these days to create large cardboard heads to take to basketball games? Then, go check out Sports Illustrated writer George Dohrmann's excellent new piece on "Big Heads." It details exactly why you see huge cardboard cutouts featuring the faces of President Obama, Dwight Schrute, and Drake every time you turn on a college basketball game today. And, it also explains how the craze got started.
According to the piece, a San Diego State University student named Conor Mongan came up with the idea of cutting out large cardboard celebrity faces and waving them behind the baskets of opposing teams to try and distract them while they attempted free throws way back in 2002. He came up with it after seeing a disturbing photo of Michael Jackson's face on his TV screen. It made him cringe when he saw it and, within a few days, he'd printed up a large cardboard cutout of MJ's photo that he used to distract a player on Long Beach State University in the middle of a game.
Slightly disrespectful to the King of Pop? Yup! But, it also turned out to be really effective. And, from there, an entire movement was born. Check out the rest of the piece over here to see how "big heads" have grown since then. Really interesting stuff.
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[via SI]
