August 23, 2014. A professional Florida based golfer named Chris Kennedy is being credited with starting the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that has exploded around the world and gone viral on social media.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is stunt to support Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and asks people to pour a bucket of ice cold water on themselves in a bid to raise awareness and money through Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.
Also Watch Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods
“My wife and I are what in the world did we just start,” said Chris Kennedy to Ten News in Tampa Bay. It reportedly got its start among golfers as a way to support pet charities.
His Ice Bucket Challenge is reported to be the first connected to ALS for his wife’s cousin, Anthony Senerchia, in New York, who has battled ALS for 11 years. Chris Kennedy challenged three people, and then they challenged three people and so on.
“It spread like wildfire through the town through their family and after a week we received 300 to 400 videos of people in New York,” said Chris Kennedy to Ten News.
Chris’s wife set up a YouTube Channel for Senerchia to watch the videos at home.
Kennedy’s video helped launch over a million video postings on social sites from famous golfers like Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods, Golf Channel’s Win McMurry, heads of state like former President George W. Bush to famous athletes.
Wikipedia History
The challenge first received increased media attention in the United States on June 30, 2014, when personalities of the program Morning Drive, which airs weekdays on Golf Channel, televised the social-media phenomenon, and performed a live, on-air Ice Bucket Challenge. Soon after, the challenge was brought to mainstream audiences when television anchor Matt Lauer did the Ice Bucket Challenge on July 15, 2014 on NBC’s The Today Show at Greg Norman’s request.
On the same day, golfer Chris Kennedy did the challenge and then challenged his cousin Jeanette Senerchia of Pelham, NY, whose husband, Anthony, has had ALS for 11 years. A day later she did the challenge while her 6-year-old daughter filmed her in front of their house. Senerchia’s network on Facebook connected with Pat Quinn, a 31-year-old in Yonkers, NY, who was diagnosed with ALS in March 2013. Quinn called upon his friends and family. Soon, his whole network was posting challenges, including family in Florida, friends in Ireland and Greece, and a bar full of locals, which was broadcast on local television.
