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)
Further reading
Ash in Huntsville, Alabama, wonders about the phrase all stove up, which is how his body feels after a long day’s work. It comes from the expression to stave in, meaning “to smash in,” as when something smashes in the staves of a barrel. This...
Sam in St. Charles, Illinois, says that when he mentioned a big old water tower nearby, his mother corrected him, saying the water tower wasn’t old, it was new. Can’t you use big old or big ol’ in that way? Of course you can! The...
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….