Tag: college football

Stand Up and Cheer

Stand Up and Cheer

As a sophomore at Kenyon College in 1965, I ignored the opportunities offered by the college’s eminent teaching faculty, the many vibrant service organizations, an inclusive athletic program, several ambitious journals, and the excellent theater department. I was what was then known as a “wastrel”, a squanderer, a ne’er-do-well, a profession I maintained in part for the subsequent four decades. I did enjoy music however, particularly a cappella music, and had just enough initiative to dragoon a dozen unwary associates into the “Kokosingers”, a name referencing the college’s setting above the Kokosing River in Central Ohio. The group still exists; more than sixty of us, including the current group, assembled from across the decades to perform at the college’s 200th birthday celebration. 

A few of us from my generation live in New England and rehearse and perform as “Koke Klassics”, trotting out old tunes and a number of relatively new numbers for the edification or amusement of captive audiences, most of whom meet us in resident facilities for seniors. The pleasure in singing  is ours, no matter how responsive the audience; Our program includes standards from The Great American Songbook, a few relatively contemporary numbers, and a few old college songs. I returned from a college reunion with a “fight”song that appears to have emerged at Kenyon at the turn of the Twentieth Century.  It’s been fun recovering the four-part “Stand Up and Cheer For Dear Old Kenyon”, including what was apparently a boisterous college cheer, “Hika, Hika, Hey!”, but my attempts to track down the origin of that cheer have not brought much success.

It’s clear it was a football cheer, and, in fact, seems to have been a common expression of greeting when meeting on the college’s historic Middle Path, maybe up to the 1930’s. I intend to offer it when I next walk Middle Path; we’ll see if it catches on again.

I did find some good information in the December 15, 1905 edition of The Collegian, including the identification of “The Big Six Conference” – Kenyon, Wesleyan, Oberlin, Case, OSU, and Western Reserve. In the 1905 season Kenyon beat Wittenberg (2-0), Otterbein (17-0), and Ohio Wesleyan (20-0), but got pretty well thumped elsewhere, losing to Ohio State 23-0. In 1898, Kenyon played both Ohio State and Michigan. 

Hika Hika Hey!

I went back to the 1905 Collegian again in the hope of finding a guide to Kenyon’s cheers at the turn of the (last). century and realized that the entire issue was directed toward the viability of football at Kenyon and in collegiate life. I did find a “Hika” reference as well as a reference to “Wahoo” as the comparable rejoinder from Ohio State, but also came away surprised and impressed by the quality of journalism the paper offered.

The Collegian was printed every other Friday in 1905. Fred J. Hartman ’06 was editor. Here’s two paragraphs from the lead story describing what was then a national conversation, the second of which contains the Hika reference:

“Kenyon has closed its fifteenth season of intercollegiate football. The termination of the season finds the game of football in a position which demands an answer to the question the Collegian of eight years ago asked, “Shall the game be crushed out of American schools , or shall it, altered and improved, to be continued as the great American game?”

The piece continues –

“As to the antagonistic spirit aroused in the intercollegiate games, the experience of the past season calls for an absolute denial. For never before, since Kenyon has been a member of The Big Six, has such a friendly disposition been awakened in her contests with other members of that organization. In her games with Oberlin, Case, Ohio State, and Ohio Wesleyan, sincere and genuine good feeling was a marked feature. It is seldom that the “Hika” and the “Wahoo” are exchanged in that spirit which was so manifest on the Columbus gridiron as the case on November 4th. Consequently, the Kenyon followers have no flaw to pick along this direction.”

I suspect “genuine good feeling” is less commonly observed in the contemporary experience of football at Michigan or Ohio State, but I have no flaw to pick in my observation of the great rivalries among colleges not tangled in the frantic semi-professionalism of major market collegiate sports. “Stand Up and Cheer” was adapted by E.W. Peake, Class of 1911 and includes the line, “For today we raise the Mauve above the Red and Gray,” “Mauve” denoting Kenyon’s signature hue, purple containing more gray and blue than magenta, and Ohio State’s colors, now more commonly known as Scarlet and Gray. 

I don’t mourn the loss of rivalry with Ohio State, a fool’s attachment, but I regret the absence of the sort of rivalry my wife’s alma mater, Williams, enjoys with Amherst, a college of similar size, tradition, and ambition. I had written a sentence that began, “Nobody gets very excited on the eve of …”, intending to pick a name from the contemporary ranks of football opponents, chose Oberlin as the most similar in terms of academic reputation, went to the Oberlin athletic site to make sure they were as unenthused as I suspected we were, only to find this article:

“Recounting Oberlin’s Storied Rivalry with Kenyon College,” wherein the author suggests: “It is often said that familiarity breeds contempt, and this has certainly been the case for Oberlin and its longtime rival, Kenyon College. Formed from frequent athletic matches and the similarity between the two schools, this rivalry has been embedded in the cultures of both schools; the Yeomen and the Owls have been close competitors for as long as students and faculty can remember.”

Oberlin’s first football team was coached in 1892 by John Heisman, of Heisman Trophy fame, an outstanding player and coach who led Oberlin to an undefeated season, both coaching and occasionally playing, defeating Ohio State twice and the University of Michigan once. This dominant team was known as The “O” Men. I remember being pretty impressed with “Yeomen” as a team name, assuming it came from somewhere in the various iterations of the tales of Robin Hood, as virtuous land owners stood up to the cabal headed by a rapacious and usurping Prince John. Turns out, just an upgrade on “O” Men. On other hand, Kenyon’s teams were nicknamed “The Lords”after a founding benefactor, Lord Kenyon. A generation of “Lords” and “Ladies” played before good sense prevailed and Kenyon’s team became The Owls, referencing the owls that call from the depths of the Kokosing River. Amherst also sported an affiliation with nobility, competing as the Lord Jeffs until they adopted the wooly mammoth as their familiar.

An interesting and unexpected window into the absence of “genuine good feeling” with regard to Kenyon, however, opened as I parked my car displaying a Kenyon license plate at an event in Williamstown honoring the former coach of the Williams swimming and diving program, a wonderful man and an important figure in my wife’s time at Williams. Kenyon won something like 31 consecutive NCAA swimming championships during the years that many of those swimming for Williams had competed. For one fleeting moment, as a former Williams swimmer spotted my Kenyon plate, I felt the pull of rivalry.

“Gambier is so NOT a town compared to Williamstown!” The reference to Kenyon’s location may be the least injurious slight to which the college will ever be victim, and I walked away unscathed, slightly puzzled, but aware that for some, my college had provided a meaningful rivalry. 

This dive into college rivalries has been diverting and has given me just enough momentum to post the first article in several months.

Just to provide a slight touch of perspective, however, the most impressive team of the late 1800s were the 1899 Sewanee Tigers, winner of 12 games between October 21 and December 2, defeating:

Georgia, Georgia Tech, Tennessee, Southwestern Presbyterian, Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU, Ole Miss, Cumberland, Auburn, and North Carolina.

The 18 “Iron Men” of Sewanee played all 12 games on the road.

Oh, and they were unscored upon. 

Wait! The Big Ten Has 14 Teams and One Of Them Is Rutgers?

Wait! The Big Ten Has 14 Teams and One Of Them Is Rutgers?

To every thing there is a season, and long, steamy summer days clearly belong to baseball, but, without ignoring the crucial games just before the All Star break, I start to look to the fall and football, allowing myself to leaf through Street and Smith’s College Football Preview.  Chucking neutrality aside, I check Michigan’s place in the pre-season guesswork, assuming that guide is likely to be accurate if Michigan is properly placed in the mix of teams contending for a national championship then turn to the wealth of other information in the hefty magazine including presentation of pre-season All Americans at each position and evaluations of each team’s depth and strength.  Teams are ranked within their conference, the likely champions getting the most ink, the runners-up quarter page blurbs.

Conferences – aye, there’s the rub.  Michigan, a founding member of the Big 10, a midwestern conference made up of flagship public universities (with the exception of Independent Northwestern), now plays Penn State, Maryland, and Rutgers.  The conference can’t even call themselves the Big 10 anymore; the conference is now its own logo – BIG – which has been craftily shaded so the uninformed viewer can almost see a 10 hidden in the letters but will see two divisions of seven each season until sanity returns.

The flux in which we live has accustomed me to change, but I do treasure tradition and pageantry, pomp, circumstance, and rabid rivalry.  Once upon a time, most rivalries took place within long-established athletic conferences, but college athletics, I am told, generates a considerable amount of income, roughly SEVEN BILLION dollars which colleges and universities count on to … to … well, to do whatever it is that they do when they are not playing games, but to get to SEVEN BILLION, conferences had to add championship games to have one last mega-event before the bowl games.  The old familiar cozy conferences simply no longer brought in enough revenue, so abracadabra, tradition be damned and geography ignored.

A few of the conferences have not changed over the course of my lifetime as a fan; the Ivy League, for example, has been made up of the same eight distinguished colleges since 1954; almost all of the rest of the Division I conferences have changed both in composition and character.  Some of the changes made sense up to a point; the Big Five Conference made up of Cal, USC, UCLA, Stanford, and Washington became the Big Six with the addition of Washington State and then the Pacific 8 with the addition of Oregon and Oregon State.  As Arizona and Arizona State were poached from the Western Athletic Conference (WAC), the conference became the PAC 10.  The thoughtful reader will have noted that Arizona does not (yet) enjoy a Pacific coastline, but at least is within driving distance of the ocean, whereas Colorado and Utah, the institutions recently departed from the Big 12 and the Mountain West Conference, are considerably less Pacific.  Oh, and the Big 12 has ten teams.  I’m just saying.

The slide began in the late ’90s, but by 2013, madness had truly set in, traditional rivalries were abandoned, and the familiar regional associations gave way to collections that seem jury-rigged Frankenconfrences; odd bits of one were attached to limbs of another.  In retrospect, the dissolution of the Big 8 (Nebraska, Iowa State, Colorado, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State) allowed the first of the new super-conferences to spawn imitators as its members joined with Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor, and Texas Tech to create the Big 12, large enough that competition was divided into the Big 12 North and the Big 12 South, which mirrors the division of the Southeastern Conference (SEC) which was also split when the SEC picked off Arkansas which had defected from the conference depth-charged when the Texas colleges jumped into the Big 12 and South Carolina which had been homeless since ditching the ACC and the dominance of the North Carolina colleges.

But, wait!  There’s more.  The already over-large SEC added Texas A&M and Missouri, both of which deserted the Big 12, which made that conference shaky, especially as there were widespread rumors that Texas was about to bolt as well.  Texas is the straw that stirs the drink in the region with access to television money the others do not see, just as Notre Dame with its own independent contract with NBC had the golden ticket, allowing them to play a schedule of their choosing in football while playing basketball in the Big East, that is, until the Golden Domers by virtue of what must have been a Papal encyclical, have remained independent in football, bound to play only five games within their new home, the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), but regular members in all other sports … except hockey, which now joins the BIG.

Let’s remember that like the Big East, the ACC has been most notably a basketball conference.  Why then, oh why, would Notre Dame join up, being as the clever will have noted, not on the Atlantic or even adjacent to states that are?  Why would the ACC, having its own well established traditions welcome feisty and independent Notre Dame?  Probably a union of like-minded academic institutions?  We think not.

There is this.  On any given Saturday, lacking the expensive football package from my cable provider, I am lucky if I can find more than one televised game from any single conference.  Generally, the conference game I will see is some sort of match-up, a rivalry game or a game on which a title might depend.  Of the twelve to fourteen teams in the conference, only two or four at most hit the screen.  Maybe NBC could work in one more?  Oh, that’s right!  They have a contract with Notre Dame.  Every Notre Dame game will have a national audience, and that suggests that Notre Dame and every team playing Notre Dame gets a share of national television bounty.  So, unlovely ACC football gets a shot in the arm, a national audience, name recognition while recruiting outside the Atlantic region, and dough that is split up among the members of the conference.  Yes, The North Carolina State Wolfpack is assured a national audience this fall as are Wake Forest’s Demon Deacons

Notre Dame gets to play most its traditional (and very telegenic) rivals (USC, Navy, Boston College, and Michigan State),  games that offer little challenge at crucial resting points in the season (Temple, Miami University of Ohio, and Navy), and two games against teams (Georgia and Stanford) that are strong enough to boost Notre Dame’s chances of landing a playoff spot or juicy bowl game.

Win-win.

My beef isn’t with making money or trying to enhance the recruiting profile outside of the region; college sports are no longer the bastion of purely amateur athletics played for the beauty of the game.  I am saddened, however, that Missouri no longer plays Nebraska, that Syracuse no longer battles Georgetown in basketball.  This spring, Johns Hopkins joins the BIG in lacrosse, leaving its own traditional regional rivalries behind.  Traditions seem to have died a quick death with the stroke of a pen.

OK, maybe I’m slightly miffed that Notre Dame didn’t elect to keep Michigan among its “must-have” independent games, or maybe I’m just a fussy curmudgeon. In any case,  I’ve got two months, fourteen days, and eight hours to get over myself before the opening game against Florida, and my therapist is on speed dial.