Name-a-Day Calendar, January 4: Cornell Big Red
Page 59 of 365
Chosen in: 1905
Chosen by: Alumnus Romeyn “Rym” Berry via lyrics to the football fight song
Cornell University is the youngest Ivy League institution, having been founded in 1865. The first sport to catch on at the nascent school was rowing, which began in the early 1870s and spawned a few songs that became popular at events and around campus.
Football originally had an uphill battle to gain acceptance at the university. In 1874, a group of students started a team and successfully scheduled a game against Michigan. This would have been the first intercollegiate football game in the history of either school but Cornell president Andrew D. White hated football and refused to grant his students leave to travel to Cleveland for the game.
White would remain in office until 1885, so attempts to start a football program would have to be put on hold for over a decade. The school finally got one going in 1887, but even then, they were a decade behind the rowing team in growing a culture and audience around campus. That isn’t to say they were a bad program; once they got their bearings, they won far more games than they lost and routinely beat some big name schools by scores like 66-0 and 58-12.1 Cornell football gave us Pop Warner, who joined the team as a student-athlete in 1892 and would come back for two stints as its head coach from 1897-1898 and from 1904-1906.
In 1905, the middle of Warner’s second stint, the team wanted a fight song to expand their cultural footprint the same way that music had done for the rowing team, so they held a contest to compose one. Songwriter Romeyn “Rym” Berry ‘04 teamed up with composer Charles E. Tourison ‘06 to write an entry. Though the team was often called the “Carnelian and White” due to the color of their jerseys, they had no official name, so Berry just referred to them in the lyrics as “the big, red team”. That ended up being the title of the song and the song ended up winning the contest. It was an immediate hit and people began using the “Big Red” nickname to refer to all of Cornell’s sports teams.
While other chants and fight songs have since surpassed it in popularity, “The Big Red Team” lives on, its composition a key landmark in Cornell’s quest to become the highest rank in the Ivy League.
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Both of these were against Michigan, on November 16, 1889, and November 21, 1891, respectively.