The true story behind ‘Cock Commander’ as USC fans discuss new name for live mascot

Sorry, Gamecock fans, but USC isn’t renaming its live rooster mascot Cock Commander.

The menacing moniker was a trending topic Thursday on Twitter after an article from The State included a poll for some very unofficial possible new names for South Carolina’s live mascot. Among the choices — which included such names as Coop, Kickin’ Chicken and Cluck Norris — Cock Commander was far and away the voters’ choice.

Fans and national sports voices flooded social media with responses and names of their own. Even national pundit Mike Golic Jr. chimed in with an intricate Twitter illustration that included the words, “in this house we call him Cock Commander.”

USC will announce a new name for the rooster sometime before the first football game Sept. 3. (It won’t be named Cock Commander, according to a source familiar with the branding process.) The mascot formerly known as Sir Big Spur is getting renamed after a dispute between the bird’s new and original owners, according to reporting done by The (Charleston) Post & Courier.

As for the name Cock Commander, that predates The State’s fan poll.

The name originated in 2004 from the University of South Carolina student newspaper — then known as The Gamecock — in an edition published just before USC played Clemson in their annual rivalry game. When working on newspapers, page designers often used placeholder captions underneath photos before adding in real ones later.

One particular caption, under the featured photo on the front page, read — “I am the Cock Commander. All other cocks must bow before the Cock Commander. Yo soy el Cock Commander.”

The paper’s editor at the time — Adam Beam, who went on to work as a political reporter for The State and now reports for the Associated Press in California — noticed the caption and attempted to resend the front page to the printers, he later wrote in an alumni column for the newspaper.

“So I typed something like this: Cocky fires up the crowd at the annual Tigerburn Thursday night by the Russell House,” Beam wrote in his column.

Despite his efforts, the original caption remained in the newspapers that circulated across campus.

From there, the legend of the Cock Commander lived on in the lore of those who worked for the USC student newspaper — particularly as a lesson of a shenanigan no one wanted to repeat. While an honest mistake, it amused readers at the time.

“They had loved the picture just as we thought,” Beam wrote. “They loved the cutline even more.”

Eighteen years later, Cock Commander was going viral across the college football world.