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ESPN Daily

Claw & Order: The Ballad of South Carolina Mascot Sir Big Spur

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What’s in a name? When it comes to the University of South Carolina’s live rooster mascot Sir Big Spur, the answer is a whole lot of ruffled feathers. Over the course of four fowl weeks, the Gamecocks’ mascot went from Sir Big Spur, to the Cock Commander (kind of) to The General, to Sir Big Spur again. So with something of an identity crisis hatching in Columbia, we called up Ryan McGee to stick his beak in this story and give us the strange-but-true history of the Gamecocks’ mascot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Ryan McGee, I like to think that ESPN Daily is run like, you know, not a democracy, but like a constitutional democracy

0:07.0

Where we redraft, we see what's in the works at ESPN

0:11.3

We look and survey the landscape and we come to some conclusion collectively about what we should be covering

0:21.6

But then sometimes you look at a spreadsheet and you're like, okay, Ryan McGee on the ballot of Sir Big Spur

0:27.9

The strange but true tale of a live mascot handler feud and you're like, we are absolutely doing this

0:34.0

We call that low hanging fruit, I believe and also love the fact that whether it's E60 or whether it's ESPN.com or back in the day

0:42.0

ESPN in magazine if it involves any sort of livestock for whatever reason they call me. It's always been that way

0:48.1

And so as our resident beast master McGee like what are we about to hear about?

0:53.6

What is the deal with the animals that you bring us today?

0:57.7

Listen, I'll do respect to Aga, to Ralfi, to Bevo, what has happened with Sir Big Spur

1:06.8

This this span centuries

1:09.9

This goes back to the American Revolution. This goes back to Magellan and it always goes back to upstate South Carolina

1:17.4

Where I graduated high school where former friends now war over what you are and aren't supposed to do with a rooster to make sure that it's a gamecock and what you can call that gamecock and

1:30.2

And ultimately if I'm going to be ever be fired because of the FCC violations that I have committed over the last two weeks talking about the cock commander

1:41.1

We're going to talk about chickens. We're going to talk about Columbia, South Carolina

1:44.5

We're going to talk about feuds and I like to call it claw-and-order

2:00.2

In the college sports justice system mascot based offenses are considered especially heinous in

2:06.6

Columbia South Carolina the dedicated journalists who investigate these vicious

2:10.8

felonies are members of an elite squad known as the SEC victims unit

2:17.5

These are their stories

2:20.6

I'm Pablo Torre. It's Friday, September 23rd. This is ESPN Daily

2:26.0

We all know door and window projects can be a lot whether you're making home upgrades or you're a contractor on the job site

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