Name-a-Day Calendar, July 29: South Carolina Gamecocks
Page 265 of 365
Chosen in: 1902 (began popular use in 1903)
Chosen by: An incendiary group of students
What is now the University of South Carolina1 was founded in 1801 and began playing baseball and football in 1892. According to university archivist Elizabeth West, the “Gamecocks” nickname comes from the fallout surrounding a football game against bitter rival Clemson.
On October 30, 1902, South Carolina defeated Clemson’s Tigers 12-6. During the postgame celebration, some South Carolina students sketched a drawing of a gamecock having defeated a tiger in battle. It’s unclear why these students chose to represent their school with a gamecock, but there are two primary theories: 1) cockfighting was still a popular form of entertainment at the time and, more popularly, 2) “Fighting Gamecock” was the nickname of South Carolina legend Thomas Sumter, who served as a brigadier general during the Revolutionary War and was later elected to both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate to represent the state.
This game took place during the South Carolina State Fair, the day before a large parade. So when Clemson students caught wind of this drawing, they warned the South Carolina students not to bring it to the parade. I’m honestly not sure what they expected to happen, but of course the drawing appeared at the parade, and Clemson’s students were furious.
Intent on destroying the drawing, over 200 members of their cadet corps stormed South Carolina’s campus with swords. A few dozen South Carolina students grabbed some knives and pistols and rushed toward them, apparently ready to go to war to defend this drawing. Just before that war broke out, the police made it to the scene and nipped it in the bud. They ordered that the drawing be burned, a task the two opposing gangs completed together.2
But the gamecock lived on as a symbol of the University of South Carolina. By the next year, most print sources regularly referred to the school’s teams as the Gamecocks.
Today, South Carolina is represented by two gamecock mascots: a costumed bird named Cocky and a live rooster named (after a minor legal dispute) Sir Big Spur.
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The name switched between “South Carolina College” and the current “University of South Carolina” three separate times and was also briefly known as “South Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanics” in the early 1880s. It’s been the University of South Carolina for good since 1906.
The schools would then cancel their annual football game until 1909.