Easy to spot by the bright yellow T-shirts they wear and the fruit they wave, the "Blue Jay Bananas" sit right next to the Hopkins Band for all home games and many away games as well.
"Five of us fell into this tradition purely by accident in 1981," explains founding member Chris Tsien '74. "Hopkins was playing Harvard at Manhassett High in Long Island and we had taken the band bus to the game. It was nasty weatherÄcold, rainyÄand one of our members, Diane Reese, had brought along a bagful of bananas. We destroyed Harvard that day, and so, like Red Auerbach with his victory cigar, we pulled out the bananas during the fourth quarter and waved them around."
The question as to when to start waving the fruit is not taken lightly by this vociferous group of fans. "The bananas come out with what we consider to be the winning goalÄthe 'they can't catch us now' goal," says Tsien. At the end of the game, Tsien and his fellow Bananas toss a single banana down to the player who, in their judgment, has put in the best performance.
Though the group has numbered as many as 20 some seasons, their core consists of eight loyal Blue Jays fans: Tsien and his wife Susan Tucker, Holly Phelps and her husband Joel Gardner, David Cohen, Dick Wallace, Lee Shang, and Colin Flynn.
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