The photo came in on a Thursday night in the fall of 2004.
It was Clemson week at South Carolina, and the journalists at the university’s student newspaper, The Daily Gamecock, were about to start assembling a front-page piece about the annual football rivalry.
Photographer Charlie Davenport had already captured the perfect photo of Cocky, South Carolina’s mascot. There he was, with his hands outstretched while a fake tiger burned in a roaring fire behind him. Sophomore page designer Chas McCarthy saw the photo and felt inspired.
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“I see Cocky the mascot, and he’s kind of just balling out in front of a giant tiger on fire and I was like, ‘This guy, he’s the leader,'” McCarthy told The Athletic on Thursday night. “He’s gonna rally the students. He’s marshaling the troops. He’s the Cock Commander.”
McCarthy had been at The Daily Gamecock long enough at that point to understand that while, yes, the student paper was serious about journalism, it also had its fun. So he whipped up a rather um, colorful caption for the photo’s cutline, initially intended as a joke that he figured would surely get edited out before the paper went to print later that night:
“I am the Cock Commander,” McCarthy wrote. “All other cocks must bow before the Cock Commander. Yo soy el Cock Commander.”
I mean, it's history. https://t.co/XQu1Nt2vbp pic.twitter.com/aocAMiOoRj
— Sarah Ellis (@ellissk04) August 24, 2022
Adam Beam, the editor of the Daily Gamecock at the time, later wrote in a column that he spotted the caption moments after his staff had sent the paper to print and called the printer in a panic. He would be re-sending the front page with a new, more G-rated caption, he told them. The only problem?
To your credit, you explained for all to see. pic.twitter.com/vdty3lKIlr
— Doug Fisher (@dougfisher) August 24, 2022
It didn’t get changed before students picked up the paper the next morning.
“I do remember some laughs and giggles,” McCarthy said.
Nearly 18 years after that night, McCarthy’s caption was the inspiration behind a viral moment Thursday afternoon on Twitter that had college football buzzing.
As The Post and Courier newspaper recently reported, the Gamecocks need a new name for their live rooster. Formerly known as “Sir Big Spur,” the school’s live mascot is currently nameless, stemming from a disagreement between the previous owners — who trademarked the name — and the current owners. According to the newspaper, the disagreement is centered around the rooster’s comb on its head. The previous owners trimmed the rooster’s comb to make it look more imposing. The current owners have elected not to trim the comb, citing the animal’s health. The previous owners said they would not renew the contract with the school for the name if the rooster still had the comb.
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So when Dwayne McLemore, the sports editor at The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., enlisted the help of his newsroom for possible names that readers could vote on this week in a poll for the animal’s new name, enterprise editor and reporter Sarah Ellis had just the idea.
“He posted it in our public channel for the newsroom,” Ellis said. “So I sent Dwayne a private message (and) said, ‘This probably won’t be very funny, but the first thing that came to mind was this old story from The Daily Gamecock about the Cock Commander, just the legendary caption.’
“Dwayne took my suggestion. … And so then I just kind of went down the rabbit hole (on Twitter) and was seeing all the things that people were saying.”
Ellis graduated from South Carolina in 2014 and worked at The Daily Gamecock for the majority of her four years as an undergraduate student. She had heard about McCarthy’s cutline as a cautionary tale of sorts about the unintended consequences of using graphic jokes as a placeholder for photo captions or headlines. But McCarthy’s work was also legendary. So she decided to pay homage to the OG Cock Commander with her suggestion.
“Cock Commander” started to go viral after Matt Baker of The Tampa Bay Times tweeted about the poll. By Thursday afternoon, the phrase was trending on Twitter. And by Thursday night, Baker’s tweet had more than 3,200 retweets and 4,200-plus likes. The State’s poll took off, too, with the nomination garnering more than 10,000 votes as of 10:30 p.m. ET, good for 79 percent of all votes. The next-highest vote getter, “Cluck Norris,” had 5 percent of the vote.
“I wrote it down and honestly, I can remember copy editors over my shoulder at some point being like, ‘That’s hilarious, but you need to delete it now,’” McCarthy said.
“After Sarah revealed that she suggested it and kind of hinted at the origin, my wife sends this to me and I’m like, ‘Oh my God. What’s happening? This viral moment may get back to the source. Which is me.’”
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According to The Post and Courier, South Carolina intends to announce its new name between now and Sept. 3, when it opens the season against Georgia State. It likely will opt for something a little more … family friendly. But Baker isn’t surprised the story took off in the manner that it did. This is college football, after all.
“It involves pettiness, a ridiculous mascot, the SEC and puns,” he wrote in a message. “It’s perfect.”
As for McCarthy, he now has two children, works in sales — selling fine wine, spirits and craft beer for Advintage Distributing — and still lives in Columbia. He met his wife at the student newspaper the following year and figures the story had to have come up quickly in their conversations. He might have been embarrassed at the time, but he can laugh about his legacy now.
“Up until maybe a day or two ago, it was probably really only a dozen people that knew it was me who wrote that,” he said. “Probably a few more today and obviously many more in the future.”
Ellis said this type of stuff is par for the course for a paper that covers the Gamecocks regularly.
“I live in Columbia so we make a lot of cock puns,” she said. “It’s daily life as an editor and as a human. It’s great.”
(Photo: Randy Sartin / USA Today)
