观赛时制造噪音的“雷鸣棒”是谁发明的？
Who Made That Inflatable Noisemaker?

As soccer fans arrived at Portland’s Civic Stadium on Sept. 7, 1997, they were handed an unfamiliar implement: a pair of long balloons, sponsored by Nike, designed to make their cheering louder. “That was the first time I saw those inflatable things that people bang together,” says Tab Ramos, a starting player on that U.S. men’s soccer team and now an assistant coach. The sellout crowd for the World Cup qualifier, among the noisiest that Ramos had ever heard, reached maximum cacophony when he scored the winning goal. “The stadium sounded like it was going to fall down,” he says.

1997年9月7日，足球球迷们来到波特兰的公民体育场，手中拿着一种陌生的道具：一对长气球，由耐克赞助，是用来让加油的声音更响亮的。“那时我第一次看见这种人们一起敲的充气玩意，”塔布·拉莫斯(Tab Ramos)说，他是那一届美国男子足球队中的新手，如今担任助理教练。那是一场世界杯的资格赛，观众席上坐满了人，拉莫斯从来没听过那么喧闹的声音，当他打入一粒制胜球后，刺耳的声音达到了巅峰。“整个体育场好像都要塌了，”他说。

这种敲打能发出震耳噪音的气球最终被命名为“雷鸣棒”或“加油棒”。

Nike got the idea for the balloons from two brothers, Jim and Ed Lundberg. Jim was living in South Korea when Ed, a middle-school football coach from the Seattle area, came for a visit and saw the noisemakers — which he called bangers — at a baseball game. Thinking that there could be a market for them in the United States, the brothers ordered several thousand from the company that manufactured them, Kisung Ad. Ed tried to sell them at a SuperSonics game, but there were few takers. So the brothers arranged to hand them out at an A League soccer match, where they were spotted by a Nike representative.

为耐克带来这个气球的点子的是吉姆和艾德·朗德伯格(Jim and Lundberg)兄弟。吉姆定居在韩国。艾德则在西雅图地区的中学里担任橄榄球教练，他去看望吉姆的时候，在一场棒球比赛中发现了这种制造噪音的东西——他管它叫做“响棒”。兄弟俩觉得这种东西在美国会有市场，就从生产商Kisung Ad那里订购了几千个。艾德试着在西雅图超音速队的比赛上推销它，但是没人问津。于是两人又到足球大联盟的比赛上去分发，就在那里，一位耐克的代表发现了他们。

When Nike got in touch with Jim, he ordered thousands more balloons from Kisung Ad and sent them over for the soccer match in Portland. Other sponsors started asking for them too, so Jim set up a company in Beijing to manufacture the balloons himself. “It was the most run-down facility you’ve ever seen,” says Marc Epstein, an inventor. “An old building that was almost abandoned.” At first, Jim would deliver them by hand, stowing them in his luggage on flights back to the United States.

耐克公司和吉姆接触后，他又从Kisung Ad订购了几千个这种气球，运到波特兰的足球赛场上。其他赞助商也开始要这种气球，于是吉姆在北京成立了一个公司，自己生产。“这是你见过的最破败的厂房，”发明家马克·爱泼斯坦(Marc Epstein)说，“坐落在一栋陈旧、快要废弃的建筑里。”起先，吉姆亲自送货，坐飞机回美国的时候把它们放在行李里托运。

The noisemakers spread from soccer to the N.B.A. and other sports. In 1998, an Illinois-based manufacturer of promotional items called Vonco entered the market for the polyethylene tubes. “We went back and forth on the name,” says Jim Porto, a vice president at the company. After rejecting BangStix and GamedayStix, Porto chose to call them ThunderStix. “The noise it makes is kind of like a clap of thunder,” he says.

这种制造噪音的东西从足球场传到了NBA赛场，乃至其他体育竞技场上。1998年，伊利诺斯州制作促销用品的生产商翁科(Vonco)也进入了这个聚乙烯管状物的市场。“我们反复考虑商品的名字，”公司副总裁吉姆·伯托(Jim Bort)说，伯托否决了“爆响棒”和“比赛日棒”，最终把它们称为“雷鸣棒”(ThunderStix)。“它发出的声音就像雷鸣般的掌声。”

Both Vonco’s ThunderStix and Jim Lundberg’s bangers — by then called CheerStix — really caught on in 2002, when in July, the Anaheim Angels introduced the noisemakers to Major League Baseball and made them famous during their World Series run that fall.

翁科的“雷鸣棒”也好，吉姆的“响棒”（当时已更名为“加油棒”）也好，到2002年大放异彩，7月，洛杉矶安纳海姆天使队把这种制造声响的东西引入了美国职业棒球大联盟，令它们在当年秋天他们的世界系列赛(World Series)中名噪一时。

When did the original Korean manufacturer start making the noisemakers? Lundberg says that the first bangers he saw in Seoul were different from the ones we have today. Instead of two balloons that were smacked together, each fan folded a single balloon in half to make a V-shape, then banged the ends. The idea to split them into a pair of smaller balloons arose in a meeting in the early nineties between the former president of Kisung Ad, who now runs a company called BalloonStix, and the marketing director of the LG Twins, a Korean baseball team. The Twins were the first team to use the invention and promptly won the championship.

原本的韩国生产者最早是从什么时候开始生产这种东西的？朗德伯格说，他第一次在首尔看见这种加油棒的时候，它的样子和我们现在用的不大一样。它们不是两个气球拿来敲，而是球迷手中拿着一个中间折了一下呈V型的气球，然后敲击两头。20世纪90年代初，Kisung Ad公司的前总裁提出把它分成两个小气球，如今这位总裁经营着一家公司，名叫“气球棒”(BalloonStix)，他也是韩国棒球队LG双子队的市场总监。双子队是第一支使用这个发明的球队，很快就赢得了联赛冠军。

本文最初发表于2014年6月15日。

翻译：董楠