Texas hat trick
n.— «I was doing a game many years ago. A player scored four goals. I thought that I had heard someone refer to that as a “Texas hat trick,” so that’s what I called it. Everybody gave me these weird looks. They had never heard the phrase. I asked around for the next couple of days, but I couldn’t find anybody who had heard of it. I was a little embarrassed, but then I thought “what the heck’ that will become my own invention.» —“He shoots, he scores a Texas hat trick” by Randy Zarnke News-Miner (Fairbanks, Alaska) Feb. 21, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
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Damn straight. : )
I used the phrase “Texas Hat Trick” in an article I wrote, and people who had been in hockey all their lives never heard of it! I used it in my headline of all places! Someone mentioned it to me, and I told them to go look it up if they didn’t believe me. They said they heard of a hat trick, but not with Texas added to it! Oh well, I know it’s out there and that’s all that matters. I didn’t make it up people!!
You probably “heard that” on television around 1995 up Alaska way for that is when I was announcing various games – basketball, volleyball, indoor soccer, ice hockey – at the Arctic Winter Games.
NBC Alaska did a bit on my sportaholic frenzy while I was there and in the piece caught “he scores a Texas Hat Trick” in one of the games I was doing where a player notched four. I coined that phrase around 1982….
The game may have also been shown on your local public access station at the time.
The other phrase I coined many many years ago is “Bango” drawn out for a spike in volleyball.
Thanks for listening.
Curtis J. Phillips
Alberta Canada
The Texas Hat Trick, as I believed, had been used before and I was not the first to use it. Thanks to some research by fans on a website by Barry Popik we discover it was used as far back as 1969….