About

"Mashed Potatoes!" is a catchphrase shouted by spectators during men's golf tournament games and popularized after videos of people yelling the phrase during Tiger Woods' teeshot were uploaded onto YouTube. While the puzzling stunt has been observed since as early as during the 2010 PGA tournament, the meaning behind the catchphrase itself remains little known to this day.

Origin

On August 15th, 2010, YouTuber patc7287 uploaded a video from the 2010 PGA Championship titled "Guy yells mashed potatoes after tiger swing." The yell can be heard at :25 in the following video:

Spread

On December 4th, 2011, a thread submitted by Redditor DeadislandMakesitsad titled "So my friend followed Tiger Woods today and yelled Mashed Potatoes after he hit his teeshot on 18"^[4] reached the front page of Reddit and received over 10,000 up votes within 4 days. The video showed Tiger Woods teeshot during the final round of the Chevron World Challenge and the "mashed potatoes" scream can be heard at :07 in the following video:

The following day, the video was covered on various news blogs including The Huffington Post^[8], Golf.com^[9], Bleacher Report^[10], Deadspin^[5], Mentality Magazine^[6] and NBC Sports.^[7] On December 6th, USA Today^[3] published an article about the video and noted that it wasn't the first time the phrase had been shouted. On December 8th, ESPN identified the screamers from the December 4th video as former golf teammates Andrew Widmar, Andreas Adler and Parker Page who admitted they were not the first to yell the phrase:

"I wish I could take credit," Widmar said, but really it came from previous (but not as widely noticed) instances, with Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Tiger himself all having been mashed potatoed at tournaments.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search queries for "mashed potatoes tiger woods" rose significantly on December 4th, 2011, the same day the video reached the front page of Reddit.

External References