ESPN: The inside story of South Carolina's Sir Big Spur mascot naming controversy

It was a quintessential story for the college football offseason — a dispute over a live rooster mascot and its name — that managed to find a happy end. Now ESPN has shed new light into the controversy, how it came about and how the fracas surrounding Sir Big Spur was finally resolved.

A quick refresher: For decades now, South Carolina has featured a live rooster nicknamed “Sir Big Spur” at sporting events. This offseason, the long time Sir Big Spur handlers decided to pass on their duties to new handlers. The contention arose when these older handlers took issue with the new handlers opting not to cut off Sir’s comb — the red floppy organ on top of a rooster’s head.

That’s oversimplified version. Now, ESPN’s Ryan McGee has delivered the goods on this offseason ordeal.

For starters, there were contracts drawn up to specify the ownership and use of the nickname “Sir Big Spur,” which was created by the original handlers — Mary Snelling and Ron Abertelli — but used widely by the university. In the story, McGee notes Mr. Big Spur had some high-powered legal representation.

“For years, Sir Big Spur has retained significant legal counsel in Charleston’s Joe Rice, a Gamecocks superfan best known for negotiating massive settlements with Big Tobacco and after the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico,” McGee wrote.

Snelling and Albertelli, considering retirement, had tried to give the rooster to the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia but were rebuffed because the zoo keeper was a Clemson graduate. Instead, Beth and Van Clark stepped up.

When Snelling and Albertelli saw the new handlers hadn’t cut the comb off of what was intended to be Sir Big Spur VII, they were upset. Cutting off the comb is a common practice for roosters to be used in cockfights (illegal in all 50 U.S. states) to prevent excess bleeding. But the comb is an important organ for the rooster, which cannot sweat, to keep cool. With the heat at Williams-Brice Stadium beating down for much of the season, the Clarks kept the comb. Snelling and Albertelli were heated when they saw this during the South Carolina spring game.

“He looks like Barney the Barnyard Rooster,” Snelling told the Charleston Post and Courier.

And the most recent contract governing the use of the Sir Big Spur moniker had expired on Aug. 1, 2022. This left an opening for Snelling and Albertelli to withhold use of the ever-popular nickname.

Enter: “Cock Commander.”

As the story would indicate, it was just a simple news write up in The Columbia State with a poll attached to the bottom. It took mere hours for it to traverse the corners of the internet, especially among the college sports-obsessed. At this point, the story of how the “Cock Commander” nickname captured the hearts and minds of college football fans has been well treaded, but McGee showed how a 2004 blunder from the The Daily Gamecock — the student paper at South Carolina — gifted us this wonderful story 18 years later.

South Carolina was playing bitter in-state rival Clemson that week in 2004. Hours were long and sleep was scarce. A placeholder cutline on a photo of the South Carolina mascot — the one with a human in costume — in front of a burning Clemson tiger, read as follows:

“I am the Cock Commander. All other cocks must bow before the Cock Commander. Yo soy el Cock Commander.”

Except the placeholder got printed and the following days paper were adorned, and the alliterative moniker would lie in wait for 18 years, thanks to Sarah Ellis, who worked at The Gamecock then and The State, now.

According to McGee’s story, she tossed out the name that would eventually dominate the poll.

“We threw it out in the newsroom for ideas, and some good ones came back,” Dwayne McLemore, sports editor at The State, said in the ESPN story. “We’ve all been around South Carolina long enough to know that sometimes you’re going to get some inappropriate ideas with Gamecocks. That just comes with the territory. Always has.

Of the 18,869 votes cast in the online poll — an online poll about renaming a live rooster mascot — 14,760, or 70% were for Cock Commander. The people had spoken, but they would not be heard.

Behind the scenes, the athletic department at South Carolina — led by athletic director Ray Tanner — had been working on finding a replacement nickname. They had settled on “The General,” an homage to Revolutionary War general Thomas Sumter, who the British mockingly nicknamed the “Fighting Gamecock.”

The General — which had garnered just 2% of the votes in the online poll — was a miss.

“I thought it was Cock Commander, honestly,” South Carolina quarterback Spencer Rattler said shortly after the new name was announced.

So how did the name everyone wanted — Sir Big Spur — come back? A hush-hush meeting just before the start of South Carolina’s football season on Sept. 1 between Tanner, the Clarks, Snelling and Albertelli took place. There is speculation that what was supposed to be Sir Big Spur VII has simply been swapped out for Sir Big Spur VIII, a comb-less rooster replacement.

What, exactly, was agreed to remains unclear, but two things are certain.

One: The rooster that showed up at South Carolina’s home opener against Georgia State did not have a comb.

Two: He was called “Sir Big Spur.”