Drench Celebration

The only acceptable response to winning the Super Bowl.

"If you’ve never had a Gatorade bath, you haven’t done anything very exceptional."

— Mike Ditka

When a character or a team are celebrating the victory of winning the Big Game of the season, whether it's baseball, football, soccer or any other game, there are tons of ways to celebrate your victory. Some go for picking up the coach or hero of the hour in a celebratory matter. But then, if you've just won a long, hard-fought physical contest you're going to be hot, tired, and sweaty along with jubilant and impulsive - why not use the rest of the hydration fluid in that cooler to show just how they're so hot they need to cool off, in a manner of speaking? So just dump that cooler of liquid over the coach's head, often water or Gatorade, as well over the winners themselves.

Truth in Television - the first widely-known instance was the 1986 New York Giants winning the Super Bowl, with Lawrence Taylor dumping Gatorade on coach Bill Parcells.

Sub-Trope of Sports Story Tropes, Bizarre Beverage Use, and Victory and Defeat. Contrast Bucket Booby-Trap, which is mostly with prank objectives rather than just celebrating.

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Examples:

Comic Strips

• Parodied in one Big Nate strip where, after winning a game of soccer in the winter, Nate and friends try to drench Coach Calhoun in Gatorade. However, the drink had frozen solid in the container and instead slides out in a single mass of ice, knocking Calhoun out cold.
• In this◊ Mother Goose and Grimm strip, Grimm and Attila do this to Mother Goose, after she was able to finish her crossword puzzles in record time.
• In one Peanuts strip, Lucy decides to drench Charlie Brown with water, despite their team never having won a game. When she does follow through with it, Linus screams "Are you out of your mind? Charlie Brown is gonna hate you for the rest of your life!"
  Charlie Brown: [in shock] Did we win?
• One Pearls Before Swine strip had Rat doing this to Pig after the latter won a game of dominoes.

Film — Animated

• In Chicken Little, Chicken Little gets soaked in sports drink after winning the baseball game. This gets lampshaded as being part and parcel with "the glory" by the sportscaster.

Film — Live-Action

• In the Adam Sandler version of The Longest Yard, two of the cons pour Gatorade over the warden after the Mean Machine wins the game. The unamused warden gives them both a week in the hotbox for it.
  "Who gives a shit?"
• The Mighty Ducks: There's a brief scene of the Ducks celebrating their semifinal win by spraying shaken-up soda cans all over the locker room, with Fulton Reed heaving a cooler full of ice and dousing Coach Bombay.
• Subverted in Snow Dogs a pair of teenagers try to dump Gatorade on the Jerkass celebrity dogsledder after he wins the race, and he gets knocked out by a block of blue ice.
• Van Wilder: Freshman Year: After the football team finally win a game, they grab the Gatorade coolers, pass the coach and dump them on the scantily clad cheerleaders.
• Wrongfully Accused: At the end of Ryan's violin performance at the concert, two men dump Gatorade on him and then he manages to get dry by the time the camera returns to him.

Live-Action TV

• An episode of Even Stevens has Louis help the school's baseball team's star pitcher, Twitty, improve his game. When Twitty strikes out the last hitter of an inning, Louis dumps a bucket of Gatorade on the coach, who angrily points out it's only the top of the sixth.
• Go On "Go for the Gold Watch": While Ryan is celebrating that his show is the #1 rated radio show in LA, Terrell Owens pulls out a Gatorade cooler and dumps it on him.
  Terrell: We're celebrating NFL style!
• Odd Squad: At the end of "Bad Luck Bears", Coach Roberts and a benchwarming teammate douse Olive in water after she leads the Burly Bears to a win against the Rambunctious Rams.
• The Professionals. In "Wild Justice", after using Doyle to win a motocross race, Bodie deliberately antagonizes his rival in an outlaw biker gang by shaking a champagne bottle and spraying the bikers with the contents.
  Bodie: Is that the champagne for the winners? I don't think you lads really deserve this, you know. But I think I'll be generous.
• One episode of Seinfeld had this in retrospect. In Improv comedy club, a friend of Jerry's was on the softball team. They won a game and Kramer convinced him to pour a cooler full of Gatorade over the coach's head. The coach ended up dying of exposure and the friend developed a drug problem out of guilt.

Video Games

• In The King of Fighters '98, one of Yashiro Nanakase's winposes is picking a bottle of water and get dumped with it as he yelling when it happens.

Webcomics

• This is how Sam Pardus is exposed as a domesticated feline in Kevin & Kell - upon being named "Coach of the Year", the hunting team dumps Gatorade on him, which causes his leopard-paint disguise to wash off.

Web Original

• Seen in BIGTOP BURGER: after the Zomburger crew manages to shoot Bigtop Burger's Steve out of his food truck with a cannon, the leader of the crew, Cesare, tells everyone else to pour Gatorade on Conrad (who manned the cannon). Unfortunately, their victory is short-lived since Steve soon shows up to retaliate.
• Cyanide and Happiness has a more medical variant in which the doctor, after a successful surgery, gets a bucket of blood on him as celebration.
• One clip of "Funny Fails" on YouTube shows three young people celebrating a new flat-screen TV with champagne. The cork pops, and a fountain of fizz pours onto the new device ... which promptly goes dead. As does the celebration.
• Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG
  • In Mr. Welch's list of 100 Ways to Annoy Wargamers, #48 is dumping a glass of Gatorage on your commander model when you win.
  • Some of Welch's spins on this trope are downright frightening.
    963. After critting with a cannon, we can't dump a barrel of gunpowder over the gunner's mate.
    1733. Dousing a character in beer is acceptable after a victory. Then setting him on fire is not.

Western Animation

• Mojo Jojo gets Gatorade thrown on him in The Powerpuff Girls special Dance Pantsed after his softball team wins a game. He is then sent off to jail.
• In The Owl House episode "Any Sport in a Storm", Viney dumps a tub of an unidentified red liquid (presumably a sports drink, though one can never be sure with the Boiling Isles) on Hunter after he scores the winning point in the Flyer Derby match.
• The Simpsons
  • "MoneyBART": After Lisa leads Bart's baseball team to victory using statistical analysis like the film, Moneyball, some of the players pour Gatorade over her laptop computer in celebration with obvious results.
  • "Moms I'd Like to Forget": When the fourth grade class think they have won a game of dodgeball, Nelson takes the opportunity to dump the drinks cooler on Krabappel.
    Krabappel: Hey! I'm not the coach! There is no coach!
    Nelson: I know... I just wanted to see if you were wearing a bra.
    (Krabappel puts a hand to her chest and smiles at Nelson)
• South Park: In "Sarcastaball", a team does it to their coach with Butters' Creamy Goo in an ad for it.
• This was a Running Gag in the Peanuts special You're In The Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, where after Snoopy's football team, the Birds, are triumphant in beating the other teams, the teammates dump a cooler of Chirpade over his head, except for the third and final game, where they do this to Lucy instead.
• In Regular Show: The Movie, (Scene fades to sunset as the guys and the spaceship are back in the crater and Skips is repairing the spaceship. Muscle Man soon sees Mordecai, Rigby, Benson and Pops standing triumphantly. Everyone soon approaches each other.)

  Muscle Man: Well? Did you guys save the universe?

  Benson: Does this answer your question? (He pulls out a bottle of sparkling grape cider and pops it open, causing everyone to celebrate. Muscle Man fires the gun upward, Pops throws lollipops, and Mordecai and Rigby dump a container of sports drink on Benson and then gets mad.) WHOA! WHOA!! What are you doing?!

  Mordecai: Sorry. We found it in Skips' van.

  Rigby: You can't celebrate without dumping sports drink on somebody.

Real Life

• Pioneered in American football by Lawrence Taylor, who took to dumping the leftover Gatorade cooler on coach Bill Parcells during the 1986 season including their Super Bowl championship.
• A Cooler Drenching is the reward of the triumphant coach after the NRL Grand Final.
• This happens a lot in Formula One racing events where the winner got splashed by carbonated alcoholic beverages (usually champagne).^note When races are held in Muslim countries that prohibit alcohol consumption, rose water is the typical substitute. As Trope Codifier of racing sports, other racing competitions such as NASCAR use the same kind of celebration for race winners. The tradition in motor racing began accidentally in 1966, when Jo Siffert was presented with a magnum of champagne after winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the bottle erupted as he opened it.
  • Taken to borderline Squick levels with Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo, where he has made a trend of doing a "Shoey" - basically drinking his podium champagne straight from his shoe.
• Baseball teams do this, especially after walk-off wins. If a game goes into extra innings, players start using the bucket as a trash can—bubblegum, sunflower seeds, and peanuts in addition to the Gatorade gets dumped on the night's hero. The longer the game goes, the grosser.
  • The Washington Nationals have the tradition of pouring Hershey's chocolate sauce on the player who hit the walk-off, which was started by ace pitcher Max Scherzer.
  • Teams will often upgrade to spraying champagne all over the locker room when they clinch important postseason milestones like making the playoffs or winning the World Series.
• When Duke's Mayo took over the sponsorship of the college football bowl game played in Charlotte, NC, it was humorously suggested that the winning coach get mayonnaise dumped over his head. In 2021, Duke's Mayo offered a donation of $10,000 to a charity of the team's choice if the winning coach gets drenched in their product. Both coaches, Shane Beamer of the South Carolina Gamecocks and Mack Brown of the North Carolina Tar Heels, took them up on it; in the end, Beamer got the drench. The game has continued with this tradition.
• It's not the only bowl game with an unusual victory shower:
  • The Cheez-It Citrus Bowl uses Cheez-Its, snack crackers made by Kellogg's before it spun off its North American cereal business and became Kellanova. Before the spinoff, said shower was used for the Cheez-It Bowl, now known as the Pop-Tarts Bowl.^note Also a Kellogg's brand inherited by Kellanova. It doesn't use a drench celebration, but the winning team does get to eat Pop-Tarts placed in the trophy, and also gets to eat a Pop-Tart replica of the live costumed mascot.
  • The DirecTV Holiday Bowl started using eggnog in 2023.^note On its social media accounts, the bowl calls it "nog on the noggin".
  • The Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, sponsored by the Idaho Potato Commission,^note the marketing board for the state's potato farmers takes a slightly different tack. Instead of using potatoes, it uses a potato product—french fries.
  • The Scooter's Coffee Frisco Bowl uses said brand of coffee.
  • The Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl, sponsored by WK Kellogg Co (the aforementioned spinoff from the original Kellogg's)^note Kellogg's is used as a brand name by both Kellanova and WK Kellogg. and bearing the name of the longtime advertising mascot for its Frosted Flakes cereal, uses said cereal.
• A would-be Drench Celebration turned into an all-time gaffe in a 2018 college football game between LSU and Texas A&M. As explained by ESPN's "C'Mon Man":
  "Late in the fourth quarter, A&M needs a score but the quarterback throws an interception. On the LSU sideline, Coach Ed Orgeron gets a Gatorade bath — but wait! After review, the quarterback's knee was down, negating the turnover. Unfortunately for Coach O, the Aggies get some time, they force overtime. Not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six — seven overtimes, and he's drenched in Gatorade! And guess what? LSU lost!"