You’ve definitely heard this expression (or used it yourself). My dad used to say this a lot. In the course of watching sporting events, he trotted it out regularly as the clock was winding down and there was a seemingly insurmountable point differential. The complete expression is “the game isn’t over until the fat lady sings.” Or, excuse me, I stand corrected. Per The Internet: the correct expression is “‘the opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings.’ It is said that this expression was first used by a sports writer, Dan Cook, writing for the San Antonio News-Express, Texas, round about the year 1976.”
My dad played quarterback at Stonehill college in the 1950s, and was a lifelong football fan. My dad had few passions (or vices) and this was one of the only things I remember him reliably making time for: watching college football on Saturdays and pro ball on Sundays during the football season.
My dad’s use of this expression was so frequent and so predictable in lopsided games that it started to lose credibility. I decided to call him on it during a 1984 college game that only had seconds left. The team that was trailing had possession, but the entire length of the field to go. Like clockwork, with less than a minute to go, my dad said “it ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings” and I retorted with an eye roll “come ON! This game is ov-ah!”
To my everlasting chagrin, that game is known as the “Miracle in Miami” because Boston College’s quarterback, Doug Flutie, threw a 48 yard hail mary pass and scored a touchdown to win the game against the ‘Cains.
Epic fail trying to prove my father wrong, and he didn’t let me forget it. I mean here it is, 35 years later, and I’m still smarting from it. But maybe it’s poetic justice, getting a lesson about fat tail distributions early in life, setting me up to think like a risk manager and capitalize on it professionally down the road.
When I worked at Goldman before the last financial meltdown, we would get pushback from traders on the ratings downgrade triggers we insisted on putting in place to trade credit derivatives with AAA rated AIG when Goldman was only single A, this seemed illogical and unnecessary to them. I’d go so far as to say they thought it was hubris. But we stuck to our guns on protections just in case this low probability, high severity scenario came to pass. Which — spoiler alert — it did just a few years later. And it ended up being AIG that was tarred with the hubris brush. Did the “Hail Flutie” subliminally influence me as one of the many data points that pointed to that unlikely, but still possible outcome?
Let’s don’t stop rooting for the underdog, even if we rarely get to see them pull through in such spectacular fashion.