How the late Stuart Scott came up with ‘Boo-yah!’

We’d hang out in the garage of one of Fred’s neighbors, Gilbert Shelton, a kindly older black man. Mr. G. would spend the day making bamboo chairs there, and we’d sit around and soak up his wisdom. One day, Mr. G said, Hey, fellas, did you hear that thunder last night? Nah, Mr. G, I didn’t hear anything, I said. You didn’t hear it? he said. Goodness, it was loud. It was like: Boo-yah! He yelled it so loud, it startled me as if it were real thunder. Fred started laughing. How’d that thunder go again, Mr. G? BOO-YAH! And another of our inside jokes was born. On the playground or in our streets, it came to represent a blast of energy. Someone laid somebody out in the secondary? Boo-yah! Someone went yard on the diamond? Boo-yah! Someone said something about your mama that totally shut you up? Boo-yah! Years later, when the phrase caught on and became part of my national identity, I was as surprised as anyone else, because I was just talking the language of my youth.

As Stephen A. Crockett Jr. pointed out on The Root—as did Jeremy Stahl right here in his Sports Nut piece—Booyah! was indicative of the way that Scott injected the language of hip-hop into ESPN’s typically whitebread sportscasts. Before Scott brought it into the mainstream, Booyah! had been chiefly associated with the West Coast rap scene, an onomatopoetic imitation of gunfire that got extended into a signal of surprise, aggressive strength, or delight. The earliest examples of booyah (also spelled boo-yah, boo-ya, boo-yaa, boo-yeah, etc.) are all clustered in Los Angeles. (It’s not to be confused with another booyah, a kind of stew popular in the Upper Midwest, or with the Navy SEAL battle cry, Hooyah!) When UCLA undergrads in the late ’80s were asked to define the word by linguistics professor Pamela Munro, they came up with wham, bang, crack, as in, The car hit us and booyah, my head flew into the windshield.