There's no fork in the road for garnet-and-black fans

By Geoff LoCicero

It's the kind of decision no one should ever have to make—right up there with biscuits or cornbread ... banana pudding or pecan pie.

USC or Carolina? That's like asking a Gamecock fan to choose between garnet and black, or between a daughter and a son. It can't be done.

That's the way it is at the University of South Carolina. It's a package deal. All or nothing. For us or against us. In or out. Whole hog or vegetarian—and you know how we love our barbecue in these parts.

Those polarizing passions fuel the eternal optimism of Gamecock fans in what has become a rite of fall. Win or lose, Williams-Brice Stadium is packed for every home game. The ABCs of indoctrination double as a spelling lesson for young Gamecock fans: chants of “U-S-C, U-S-C,” and cheers of “C-a-r-o-l-i-n-a ... Gooooooo Cocks!”

It's only natural that the “University of South Carolina”—25 characters, 28 including spaces—would wish to find a more succinct title. The State newspaper is credited with shortening the mascot name from Game Cocks to Gamecocks in 1903—every space counts. Over time Carolina and USC found their way into University vernacular, and anyone who's ever donned garnet and black—as USC fans did at the first football game against Furman—has known that those terms are synonymous with the flagship university of the Palmetto State.

But not everyone wears garnet and black. And, as everyone knows, a certain West Coast university has glommed onto the USC acronym, despite the fact that it opened its doors 80 years after this University.

OK, so they have won 10 national championships in football and fielded six Heisman Trophy winners. So what? The Trojans were last seen in these parts with their tails between their legs, limping out of a town in 1983 with a 38-14 loss in a game billed as USC East vs. USC West. And in 2005, garnet-and-black fans are reveling in the fact that this USC has Steve Spurrier.

Up the road a piece, the wine-and-cheese Chapel Hill crowd think Carolina is their birthright, along with basketball national championships—four in men's, one in women's. But the're also irrational, spoiled, and not entitled to basketball titles or the Carolina title. The joke was that former coach Dean Smith was the only person who ever held Michael Jordan's scoring average under 20 points a game in college, and Tar Heel fans continually chafed that Smith's strict system handcuffed his talent and cost UNC even more championships.

And UNC was ducking USC for months before finally agreeing to renew their football rivalry in 2007 and 2010. Here's guessing the Chardonnay and Brie won't go down as smoothly against Spurrier and Company. Wonder when UNC can get William & Mary back on the schedule?

If there's a trend, at least on the sports front, it's that everyone winds up here. Larry Davis played basketball for two seasons at UNC, winning a national championship in 1993, before transferring to USC for two seasons, winning an SEC championship in 1996-97. Where will Davis' twin sons, Kory and Kendall, go to college? A lot can happen between now and 2022 when they would start college, but if Davis has his way, they'll be Gamecocks.

Long before Davis, Frank McGuire won one of those national titles at North Carolina, left for Columbia in 1964 and retired 16 seasons later as the Gamecocks' winningest coach. Curtis Frye, a North Carolina native, was an assistant track coach at UNC, before becoming head coach at USC, where he won the women's outdoor national championship in 2002.

Brian Roberts, who had a breakout season as an All-Star second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles in 2005, transferred from UNC to USC before turning pro. Mike McGee, a former Duke football player and coach who should have no love for Chapel Hill, was lured from that USC to this USC, where he spent 13 years before retiring this past July.

Garnet-and-black fans needn't spend too much time thinking about the maroon-and-gold nouveau riche in the West and that powder-blue pack to the North. Both the University of Southern California and the University of North Carolina have plenty of their own issues with naming conventions. Feel free to rub it in.

That USC, for example, is so picky that it tosses out a perfectly natural abbreviation, Southern Cal. “We have a kind of concerted effort to stay away from Southern Cal within the university,” said Tim Tessalone, sports information director for that USC. “Southern Cal is an outsider term. To us it's kind of like when people say Frisco instead of San Francisco.

“Nobody would say ‘South Car’ or ‘North Car.’ We really try to stick with the University of Southern California or USC.” Never mind that the University of California at Berkeley, a neighbor and conference rival, gets along fine as Cal.

Maybe this makes sense in La-La Land, where a tough decision is chinchilla or mink ... silicone or saline. This Johnny-come-lately, given its proximity to Hollywood, may very well be using the industry's best special effects and tons of makeup to hide its blemishes under a fake tan.

Then there's that Carolina, or should we say the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has too many characters to waste precious time counting. This is the university that constantly wants to remind you, through countless bumper stickers, that it has the universe's most famous alumnus, God—a distinction it gave itself only because when it was time to pick team colors, the Tar Heels could do no better than putting their heads together, bending their necks up at the sky, and thinking—voila!—blue.

So with that tradition in mind, it's no wonder that a university blessed with both UNC and Chapel Hill—a town that can be confused with nothing else on God's green earth, not to mention in His blue skies—still insists on the mouthful-title, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Fortunately, it's always spelled out, which sounds more highfalutin and avoids the possibility of the barely pronounceable acronym UNCCH. Still, you get the feeling there's at least one yahoo driving around the Research Triangle with the license plate GOUNCCH.

Let's just say that Greenpeace, PETA, and Nietzsche enthusiasts should get together, rent an office in Chapel Hill, and take apart the traditions one by one. How can tarred heels be considered safe for the environment? Isn't the idea of a battering ram extremely cruel and intolerant? How can God be a Tar Heel if there is no God?

Ultimately, isn't it nice to be right where we are, with the perfectly acceptable options of USC and Carolina? Sometimes one is appropriate, sometimes the other. Sometimes one just sounds right.

When I was working in the sports department at The State in 1995, a new sports editor made the mistake of mandating references to “USC-Clemson” for all coverage the week of the football game. That lasted about a day, after readers flooded the phone lines with calls to point out the obvious: It's Carolina-Clemson. The problem? The editor had previously worked on the other side of the border, at The Charlotte Observer.

“I'm from the old school, so it's Carolina,” says Tom Price, who enrolled at the University in January 1948, graduated in 1951, returned as sports information director from 1962 to 1992 and is now considered the athletic department historian.

Bob Spear, longtime sports columnist for The State, moved to Columbia from Atlanta in 1955. As far as he knows, the University of South Carolina has been USC “forever. I have no idea when it started.” As for Carolina, “Ever since we moved to Columbia, I heard the Carolina reference meaning USC.”

Maybe Spear is on to something: Carolina is USC. And if I remember my algebra correctly, that means USC is Carolina. I'd like to see Southern Cal and UNCCH argue with that logic.