Home run hero Bobby Thomson’s famous hit was only one of many shots deemed globally audible.
The shot heard ’round the world.
The phrase is cropping up in obits for home run hero Bobby Thomson, but his was only one of many shots deemed globally audible.
On Oct. 3, 1951, the New York Giants outfielder famously hit a three run homer off Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca at the Polo Grounds to cap a dramatic comeback and clinch the National League pennant. It became known as “the shot heard ’round the world” largely in reference to all the American servicemen stationed in Korea who were listening to the radio broadcast of the game.
But the phrase had a long history before Thomson stepped up to the plate. According to our sources, it was coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1837 poem “Concord Hymn,” where he used it to describe the opening salvo of the American Revolutionary War in 1775.
”By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard ‘round the world.”
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 is also widely referred to as “the shot heard around the world,” providing as it did the spark that incited World War I. Assassin Gavrilo Princip actually fired two shots in the attack, the first killing Ferdinand’s wife Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg. The plot also involved bombs, one of which, though failing to find its target, killed 20 bystanders.
In 2006, Newsweek used the headline “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in an article about Vice President Dick Cheney’s accidental shooting of quail hunting partner Harry Whittington. Thankfully this shot did not prove to be fatal.
As in Thomson’s case, the phrase has proven particularly irresistible in the American sports world. In golf, it’s used to refer to Gene Sarazen’s double eagle in the 1935 Masters Tournament. In basketball, it’s the last-ditch tying basket by Ernie Caverley in the 1946 NIT Championship game. In hockey, a goal that lifted Canada over the U.S.S.R. in 1972, and in soccer, the goal that secured U.S. qualification for the 1990 World Cup.
In many ways the world is a smaller place than it was in 1951, and there will no doubt be future events with enough resonance and reach that sportswriters and other media pundits will be tempted to invoke the phrase. Though such pleas will surely go unheeded, we hereby propose “the shot heard ‘round the world” be entombed along with with Bobby Thomson, lest its power be diluted through repetition.
