The coach poured it on, and he responded in kind

One of football’s most joyous, comical traditions, one that was played out again Sunday at the Super Bowl, was born not of spirit but of spite. Jim Burt conceived the Gatorade Shower as an act of vengeance.

More simply put, Burt was ticked off at his coach.

The former New York Giants and San Francisco 49ers nose tackle, acting on impulse, says he hatched the idea of emptying the contents of a cooler over the head of Bill Parcells during a 1984 game because, in the days leading up to it, the then-Giants coach had bullied and berated him in an attempt to rally his troops.

The psychological ploy seemed to work, the Giants cruising to a 37-13 victory over the Washington Redskins en route to a wild-card playoff berth.

But as the clock wound down on the Giants’ rout at the Meadowlands, Burt couldn’t shake the memory of a humiliating week of practice, one in which Parcells ceaselessly belittled the 6-foot-1, 260-pound defensive lineman, at one point ordering him to jab 20-pound dumbbells into a padded wall for 45 minutes.

“He wanted to send a message to everybody and it was through me,” Burt says from his home in Saddle River, N.J., where the 48-year-old father of two makes a living selling real estate. “Later on, he told me, ‘You were the only one tough enough to endure that, mentally and physically.’ ”

But at the time, of course, Burt couldn’t see that.

He saw only red.

Then he had a thought.

“He had to pay a price too,” Burt says of Parcells, who guided the Giants to their first Super Bowl victory two seasons later. “So I poured the Gatorade over his head. It wasn’t even planned. I said, ‘OK, he did that to me, I’ve got to do this to him.’ He couldn’t get mad. If he did, you’d have to laugh at him because of the torture that he’d put me through. So I said, ‘OK, I’m going to play a little joke on him now so that we can be even.’ It was funny for me. . . .

“There had been a lot of anger built up, but once the game was over and we won it, it was pure jubilation because it was just such a sense of relief.”

Burt’s teammates were on pins and needles as he moved in on the coach -- “They were kind of freaked out,” he says -- but when Parcells smiled a sticky smile after the impromptu sideline dunking, a fructose-fueled football tradition was born.

“Harry Carson liked it and he started doing it,” Burt says of his former teammate, who took over the dousing duties and was mistakenly credited with originating the celebratory act. “Coach Parcells is a superstitious guy, so for the next few years with the Giants, it became kind of a ritual. Now, it’s all over the place.”

Indeed, victories large and small, in good weather and bad, are marked with players pouring liquid refreshment over coaches’ heads, the most recent example coming Sunday when the New York Giants soaked Tom Coughlin.

Even Parcells understood.

“It’s fun,” the famously rigid coach once was quoted as saying of his ritual sideline dunkings. “If you have fun, fine. It’s not all life and death.”

Still, Burt says, “I never thought that it would catch on like that. I think the success of our team and being in New York, we got a lot of exposure and it became a cool thing to do. You see high school kids doing it now, and it’s all over college. I look at it and I just laugh. It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

Burt says that he and Parcells had a “great relationship.” He credits the coach with pushing him to heights he could not have imagined when he went undrafted in 1981 despite having been an All-American at Miami.

“I feel very grateful that he did what he did,” says Burt, who played 11 NFL seasons, was an All-Pro pick with the Giants in 1986 and won Super Bowls with both the Giants and 49ers. “It wasn’t pleasant. It’s almost like a parent disciplining you and you hate it, but later on you know it was good for you. I’m very grateful that I had him as a coach because he motivated me and the other players to win a Super Bowl together. Without him, I don’t think we would have won that Super Bowl.”

Not being drafted was a powerful motivator too, he says.

“There’s no doubt about that,” notes Burt, whose son, Jimmy, played baseball at Miami and whose daughter, Ashley, will be a freshman soccer player for the Hurricanes next fall. “And having coaches like Bill Parcells and a few others who never let you forget that, you’re always on your toes, from Year 1 to Year 11.”

On occasion, though, one needs to blow off steam.

“In the NFL, the pressure is so great,” Burt says. “So when you won a game, you had a little time to unwind a little bit and it was just pure fun.”

And out came the bucket.

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jerome.crowe@latimes.com