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What's in a Name? |
A BIG RED REASSESSMENT
iN THE AUTUMN OF 1905, A CORNELL
cheerleader offered a $25 prize
for, as the story goes, "a Cornell
football fight song indigenous in
words and music." Rym Berry 1904,
later Cornell's graduate manager of
athletics from 1919 to 1935 and a
columnist for the Alumni News until
1950, responded with a ditty that included
the following refrain: "Make the scream of
the north wind yield . . . to the strength of
the yell . . . from the men of Cornell . . . as
the Big Red team takes the field!"
"To the best of my knowledge and
belief the appellation ‘Big Red Team' was
never used before that," Berry claimed in
a 1940 letter. "It fit the meter and the
rhythm." The song--"The Big Red
Team"--was performed at a football game
two weeks later. And we've been the
Big Red ever since.
There are more
imaginative collegiate nicknames out there--hello,
Santa Cruz Banana Slugs,Whittier College
Poets, and Battlin' Beavers of Blackburn
College. Creativity, however, is not the
norm in the Ivy League. Yale? There are
some forty Bulldogs in college athletics.
Columbia? There are more than thirty
Lions. Princeton is one of at least fortyfour
Tigers, and Brown is one of about
two dozen Bears. Sorry, Penn, but there
are even a handful of Quakers.
Harvard alone is simply the Crimson,
but it floats in a sea of like-named rivals:
the Crimson Tide, the Crimson Wave, the
Crimson Storm, and the Crimson Eagles.
And while there are Green Knights, Green
Terror, Green Wave, and even the North
Texas Mean Green, there is but a
single (Dartmouth) Big Green
team.
As for Big Red, we have plenty of
company. When the Cornell men's
squash team takes on a squad from a
tiny liberal arts school in Ohio called
Denison University (as it does rather frequently),
it is the Big Red versus the Big
Red.Moreover, for much of middle America,
the words "Big Red" are associated
with regional powerhouses that often dwarf Cornell's athletic reputation.
 Consider: The last line of "Dear
Old Nebraska U," sung by University
of Nebraska Cornhuskers fans, is "Go
Big Red! Go Big Red! Go Big Red!"
Every year, the University of Wisconsin
Badgers hold a postseason football
banquet called the "Big Red Rally."
Indiana University hosts annual athletic
competitions with names like the Big Red
Invitational and the Big Red Shootout.
The Fighting Razorback mascot of the
University of Arkansas is known as Big
Red. At Western Kentucky University,
where fans wave red flags and cheer for
the Hilltoppers, the football offices are
located at 1 Big Red Way. Even Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, our frequent hockey
foe, chooses one game each year as a fan
appreciation event known as the Big Red
Freakout. (Once, in 1982, Cornell was the
invited opponent.)
If we wanted to be special, perhaps
there's a better nickname out there--
something more distinctive, specifically
evocative of the region or the university.
The Cornell Cayugas? The Cornell Cows?
How about a nod to Carl Sagan: the Cornell
Cosmos?
Or it could be that Rym Berry had the
right idea all along--a simple name conveying
strength and energy in a couple of
syllables. Perhaps, after a century of Big
Red, tradition trumps creativity.
Besides, what would we do with our
old sweatshirts?
--Brad Herzog '90 |
