Crime & Safety

Long Beach Polar Bears Eye $3M Mark

Local club and Make-A-Wish Foundation to celebrate 13th annual fundraiser on Super Bowl Sunday.

This year, they’re looking to reach $3 million.

After joining hands with the Make-A-Wish Foundation thirteen years ago and raising more than $2 million since then, the Long Beach Polar Bear Club will hold their annual Polar Bear Splash on Super Bowl Sunday with the goal of hitting that new figure.

At last year’s event, some 5,000 people jumped in the icy-cold water off Riverside Boulevard beach and helped raise more than $550,000, and the club and fundraiser’s founders — Pete Meyers, Kevin McCarthy and Michael Bradley — expect that with the local buzz surrounding this year’s game, featuring the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, they can raise just as much money and succeed, according to the Long Beach Herald.

Meyer said: “I think this year with the New York Giants and the Super Bowl, it will top the crowd from last year. If we match what we did last year, the Polar Bears will have raised $3 million in funds.”

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Long Beach’s Super Bowl Sunday tradition has its origins in the West End in 1998, when just before Super Bowl XXXII McCarthy decided to celebrate his 40th birthday by jumping in the ocean and Meyers joined him.

Enter their friends Mike and Patti Bradley, who that year had lost their son Paulie, 4, to cancer. They were among about a dozen people who took part in the plunge the next year. Mike’s brother PJ, a Long Beach police officer, suggested that they memorialize Paulie by turning the annual Long Beach Polar Bears plunge into a fundraiser for Make-A-Wish Foundation — which grants wishes for children with life-threatening medical conditions — and they did in 2000. The first year they raised $12,000.

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By 2009, an estimated 3,500 people entered the ocean during the annual splash, and event organizers aimed to try to break a Guinness World Record for the largest group of swimmers to simultaneously participate in a polar bear dip, a record that was help by 309 people in Finland.           

While temperatures this Sunday are expected to climb into the mid-40s, Meyers had recalled that the toughest outing was in 2007, when the mercury dipped into the low 20s and teens and winds were whipping.

“It was brutal,” Meyers he said before the 2009 event. “That was the coldest I ever was in my entire life.”      

For information on Sunday's event that starts at 12:30 p.m. at Riverside Boulevard beach, including transportation schedules, visit the City of Long Beach's website.     


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