Copy and pasted from elsewhere:
How did the Cougar Shark Attack get started? Have you ever wondered why the Jaws theme plays when we're on defense and the crowd instinctively knows to start the chomp? It's a tradition that does seem out of place considering that our mascot is the Cougar. So, the question is how did it get started?
I've got very clear memories in my mind of when I first observed this phenomena at Martin Stadium but I've never had the chance to confirm my suspicions with the primary suspect. Well, my mission when the Seattle Cougar football event rolled into town was to ask this guy if he remembers the start of the Cougar Shark Attack the same way that I do.
Read on to see if you agree with my memories of how the Shark Attack started or if you have a different theory.
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By the way, this is the sort of thing that can quickly become urban legend…..and I kind of like it that way. Here's how the story goes.
As a teenager I remember very clearly watching a dude that I thought was the biggest badass I'd ever seen roam the Palouse. He seemed to play with an aggression and speed that just gave me pride to be a Cougar fan. That player was Anthony McLanahan. He had the body type, persona, and speed of a guy that would set the tone for a series of linebackers at WSU that sustained us for a decade. The names of Childs, Hayes, Fields, Darling, Gleason, Derting, Moore and many others can trace their lineage back to one guy…..Zeus….that was his nickname.
So, how does Zeus relate to the Cougar Shark Attack? Well, as I was watching games I started to just watch this guy play. It didn't matter what the hell was going on. I just wanted to see what Zeus was going to do next. That's when I started to notice it. McLanahan would make a play and he would do this chomping motion….exhorting his teammates to do the same. I watched for a couple more games and I started to notice that it was catching on. It was becoming the team celebration and they were asking the crowd to do it now. As the season wore on it became an epidemic. We'd see it at timeouts, it was a sort of dance at times and best of all we were seeing the crowd and the team in unison with it.
Fast forward several years. I'm in college at WSU now and the Cougar Shark Attack has become the standard for crowd cheering when we're on defense at football and basketball games but the source of this cheer had become shrouded as years went by. Everyone seemed to have a different idea of how it got started. I always felt like I knew as fact that Zeus had started it all. I would usually keep quiet on the theory unless I was about six beers deep and then I'd go off on the Zeus conspiracy theory.
Fast forward another decade to decade and a half and I'm at A Night with Cougar Football and I'm introduced to McLanahan. The perfect time to test and see if my theory holds water. We talk for awhile about various topics and then finally the topic of Cougar defense comes up. I tell him that I've got to ask about The Cougar Shark Attack. I tell him that as I remember it, that whole thing got started with him. He doesn't even miss a beat and starts giving me the inside scoop on how he remembers starting things. He told me it was actually between three guys. Himself, Ronnie Childs and Mike Zimmer. Mike Zimmer was our defensive coordinator at the time. He's gone on to become one of the best defensive coordinators in the NFL and is currently working for the Cincinnati Bengals. As McLanahan tells it, it started in film session. McLanahan did it once and Zimmer picked up on it and made a few comments. The following week it was Ronnie Childs and McLanahan doing it and Zimmer fueled the fire even more in film session. Before you know it, the team is doing it and it spreads to the fans.
