This story expands on “‘From Sparti and His Spear to Pete and His Pistol,” a WyoHistory.org article by University Archivist John Waggener that tells the story of the first Pistol Pete mascot, Don Bogdan.
When Don Bogdan handed his San Jose State roommate a drum at a football game in 1967, he had no idea he was launching one of the most unique careers in sports entertainment history.
George Henderson, who would become known worldwide as “Krazy George,” credits Bogdan with transforming his path. “My whole life would have never changed without Don Bogdan,” Henderson recalled in a 2023 oral history interview. “He put me on a whole other track that I never knew.” That track would lead Henderson to become forever associated with one of the most recognizable stadium traditions in the world: the Wave.
Henderson’s journey from accidental cheerleader to professional sports icon began simply. Bogdan, already an enthusiastic San Jose State fan, brought a drum and bugle to a football game and convinced his roommate to join him. “I couldn’t play the bugle—that takes talent,” Henderson remembered. “So he handed me the drum. I would hit it once in a while.”
By the third game, they had three student sections following them. When the head cheerleader approached them at season’s end and asked, “Why don’t you guys go out for cheerleader?” Henderson resisted. But Bogdan was, as Henderson describes him, “possessed” and “driven.” Bogdan insisted they try out. Despite Henderson’s admittedly terrible performance at the formal routines, both made the squad for the 1968-69 seasons. While Bogdan went on to create the elaborate fiberglass Sparti costume and later become Wyoming’s first Pistol Pete, Henderson continued cheerleading and became a professional.
Henderson traces the Wave back to his evolution as a crowd-engagement specialist. At San Jose State in 1968, he pioneered a sectional cheer with three student sections standing in sequence to spell out “San-Jose-State.” He refined the concept in 1980 while working for the Colorado Rockies NHL team in Denver, creating a continuous cheer where sections would stand and sit in sequence around the arena.
But Henderson claimed that the technique reached its full form on October 15, 1981, at an Oakland Athletics playoff game. Henderson describes starting the cheer with four sections, watching it die, having those sections boo to embarrass the rest of the crowd, then trying again. On the third attempt, the wave traveled all the way around the stadium. On the fourth, “it was like a freight train,” Henderson recalled. “It just never stopped for like, you know, six, eight times.”
The crowd reaction was so powerful that Henderson marks this as the day he “invented” the Wave, though he acknowledges he had been developing the concept for years. The tradition spread rapidly through professional sports and exploded globally when it appeared at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, where international audiences dubbed it “the Mexican Wave.”
Henderson’s professional cheerleading career spanned more than 100 teams and over 3,000 games across five decades, making him possibly the only person in history to make a living solely by leading crowd cheers at sporting events—no corporate appearances, no mall promotions, just three hours a week firing up fans. His friendship with Don Bogdan remained strong throughout their lives, and in 1987, they even opened a restaurant together called Krazy’s in Aptos, California, featuring eleven TV screens, three satellite dishes, a garden railroad circling the ceiling, and a Formula race car mounted upside down above the dining room.
When Bogdan was diagnosed with cancer and died in 2014, Henderson preserved his friend’s legacy by donating Bogdan’s original Sparti costume to San Jose State University for permanent display. The story of these two San Jose State roommates—one who created Wyoming’s Pistol Pete, the other who created the Wave—reminds us that the innovations that define modern sports culture often begin with simple moments: a drum handed to a friend, an invitation to try something new, and the relentless enthusiasm to make crowds come alive.
This story is based on an oral history interview with George Henderson conducted by John Waggener on September 19, 2023. The interview is part of the Donald Bogdan Pistol Pete papers at the AHC.
Note: The invention of the Wave is disputed, with the University of Washington also claiming to have originated the tradition on October 31, 1981.