Pier Six brawl

[Jonathan Lighter]

George,  1933 considerably beats anything I have.  In my experience, this is primarily a sportswriter's term, though a friend of mine in grad school used it on occasion.

JL

George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: George Thompson
Subject: Pier Six brawl
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Listening to the MYMets game on the radio last night, I was reminded of a phrase I used to hear from my father. One of the broadcasters remarked at his surprise at hearing Bob Murphy, the former broadcaster who had just died, describe a fight on the field as a "Pier Six brawl". The present broadcaster had not heard the expression, and supposed it was a relict of Murphy's time in the Marines. (Murphy was nearly 80 and had grown up in I think Kansas & Oklahoma, where I believe they do not have piers. Brawls, yes, but not piers.) I don't listen to the Mets often enough to know the broadcasters by their voices; both are more or less young, and at least one is a NYer.

My father used to use the term, and the variant "a real Pier Sixer", with reference to prizefights, mostly. As I recall, he thought it referred to a Pier Six on the Brooklyn waterfront, which he would have known in the 1910s and 1920s. However, the earliest appearance I find in Proquest's NYTimes/LATimes/ChicagoTrib/WashPost is from the LATimes, February 25, 1933, with reference to a prizefight: "It was a fine old Pier Six brawl. . . ." (Searching "Pier Six brawl"; I also searched just "Pier Six" and found a number of earlier stories but doubt that any contained a variant of this phrase. The ones I checked, the ones that seemed most likely, didn't.)

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.


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