Our countdown to the 2014 college football season continues as just 2 days separate us from kickoff between the South Carolina Gamecocks and Texas A&M Aggies at Williams-Brice Stadium on August 28.
Who wears #2: No one. Which brings us to the story we teased yesterday about the 1902 season…
Gamecocks football in 1902
Record: 6-1
Coach: C.R. Williams
The year 1902. The first ever Rose Bowl was held on January 1 as Michigan played Stanford. The first teddy bear was made, named, of course, in honor of then-President Teddy Roosevelt. Trains were the most common means of transportation to travel long distances.
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And on October 30, 1902, the darkest day in the South Carolina/Clemson rivalry took place. It was on a Thursday, as part of a tradition known as “Big Thursday” which lasted until 1959, and the Gamecocks would win, 12-6. The action actually began
after
the game. Clemson’s cadets (the university was a military school until 1955, when it began admitting civilians and women) stuck around to attend the State Fair, which was happening concurrently with the game. That’s when things got out of hand.
"The cadets became upset though when a Main Street tobacco merchant hung a transparency in his window depicting a gamecock crowing over a ragged looking tiger. The South Carolina students soon obtained the transparency and paraded it around the fairgrounds and then up and down Main Street. The Carolina students went even further parading the transparency in the annual State Fair parade on Friday evening. Now thoroughly insulted the Clemson cadets, upon being dismissed at the parade’s end at the State Capitol on Main Street, armed with bayonets and sabers marched the two blocks over to the Sumter Street entrance of the Horse Shoe campus of South Carolina College. Some 30 South Carolina students barricaded themselves behind a hastily constructed low wall armed with pistols, shotguns, and clubs among other weapons. According to the official University of South Carolina history, freshman Rion McKissick, later USC President, was asked by a senior if he was armed, upon replying in the affirmative, McKissick was instructed to “Make every shot count.”"
More can be found at this link, but things got so out of control that the two schools came to a mutual agreement to cancel the rivalry. It would return, of course, in 1909, and has gone uninterrupted ever since.