Just Nod

Quiz casually glimpsed on an episode of  History Channel's Pawn Stars while working on something else: Which sports team had the first bobblehead doll?  
Answer: New York Knicks.

Infielders Yin and Yang of the Cathay Elders, famous 
for their devastating double plays in the 1780 World Series 
against the London Opium Eaters
(Pair of Qianlong Period Chinese Decorated Clay Nodding Figures

circa 1780.  From ronaldphillipsantiques.com)

It didn't sound right to me.  Basketball before baseball?  Well do I remember those feelings of envy at the bobbling baseball boys on the shelves of friends I visited as a youth during the first explosion of bobbleheads in the 1960s. True, I'd never been to a professional game and for that matter had no particular interest in it, but the wide-eyed glee on the insansely bouncing face was infectious.

"Doesn't sound right" is merely a pretext for procrastination.  I poked around a bit and sure enough, the factoid blithely passed off as true on Pawn Stars was in short order shown to be problematic.  The year cited widely before 2014 for the earliest sports bobblehead was 1920 for the alleged New York Knicks figurine. One obvious problem,  (which after years of propagation without attribution, appears to have gone unnoticed until it was raised by a user named Zach on stackexchange.com): the Knicks didn't exist before 1946.

Alamelu Sankaranarayanan of the Rawalpindi Mongeese
(Thanjavur Doll - wikipedia.org)

Ok, there was a Knickerbockers baseball team in New York in the early days of baseball, the inspiration for the basketball team's name,  source of the term Knickerbocker Rules for the formal set of rules that slowly evolved to become baseball as we know it today, and one of the sides (the other being the New York Nines) in what is widely cited as one of the earliest games (if not the earliest) of organized baseball in 1845.  Maybe it was a baseball bobblehead after all.  But no, that team's last recorded season was 1868.

Ok, then the elusive Knicks prototype bobblehead debuted after 1946.  Sure enough, in the contemporary wave of bobblehead popularity, the Knicks take a backseat to no one in the purveyance of bobbling memorablia for fans and collectors.  But if the Knicks were the originators of the sports bobblehead, why is it so difficult to confirm the earliest example of it for the team?  Would any sports team with an ownership to a statistic ever deign to hide that light under a bushel basket?

In spite of several minutes of googling and browsing by yours truly, the origin of the Knicks myth remains a mystery.  Several of the authoritative sites commonly linked to for bobblehead history appear to have either removed any reference to the fact, or qualified the information as contested.  As of today there doesn't appear to be an explanation for the Knicks story or an alternative candidate for the origin of the sports bobblehead.  But it's clear from the abundance of tendrils still left in place out there all over the web from the Knicks story that whoever figures it out will be filling in a huge bobblehead shaped hole.

What if there were a disputed Sports First ... and Nobody Cared?

Sounds like a job for unspeakable (as heck).

Krebs and Gillis of the Central City Beatniks