Cheers

I recently read about an English soccer club’s cheer, and it brought back memories — both pleasant and otherwise — of cheers from days gone by. London’s Millwall soccer club supporters periodically give their trademark cheer, “No one likes us, we don’t care!” How perfect!

Chanting phrases during sporting events must go way back, possibly to the Roman gladiator arenas. (“We like lions, yes we do! We like lions, how ’bout you?”) It gets the crowd excited, and there’s a certain power in knowing the same words as everyone else in a big crowd. This was certainly the case when I saw Paul McCartney last summer. Neil Diamond fans also know exactly what I mean. On the other hand, adding extravagant dance moves as in the “Macarena” is pushing things too far, in my opinion.

Lots of sports cheers are pretty lame and quite predictable, such as “L-E-T-S-G-O, Let’s Go!” or the ever-predictable “Push ’em back, push ’em back, way back!” An ability to spell correctly seems to be at a premium for many cheers, epitomized by the perennial letter “D” followed by part of a fence, for “Defense.” How clever!

Many cheers seem to revolve around vaguely sexual themes, such as the one used some time ago at Cape Central High when a referee seemed less than perfect: “Nuts and bolts, nuts and bolts, we got screwed!” And my favorite cheer of all time came about because of a very speedy receiver on Austin Peay’s college football team, who was called “Fly” Williams. Their chant when on offense was, “The Fly is open, let’s go Peay!” Again, perfect.

Cheers can also say a lot about what type of institution is involved. For example, my sister attended Colorado College in the 1970s, and their cheer was a variation of that chanted by many very geeky schools featuring uber-smart students: “Pericles, Sophocles, Peloponnisian War! X-squared, Y-squared, H2SO4! Secant, tangent, cosine, sine; three point one four one five nine!” You can bet hearing this would intimidate opposing students.

On the other hand, some cheers seem to go against the grain in terms of who produced them. I always think of Quaker schools — and Quakers in general — as being non-violent, Richard Nixon notwithstanding. Yet various Quaker schools in the U.S., such as Guilford, Haverford and Swarthmore, claim this cheer as their own: “Fight, fight, inner light! Kill, Quakers, kill! Knock ‘em down, beat ’em senseless! Do it ‘till we reach consensus!” Now that’s a cheer!

Although political parties don’t generally use sports-type cheers, perhaps they should consider them, given today’s extremely partisan atmosphere. For example, the Democrats might want to use this one: “Hey, hey, ho, ho! T-Rump he has got to go! Ho, ho!” The Republicans could then counter with, “Ho, ho, hey, hey! R-U-S-S-I-and-A! Hey, hey!” And Illinois politicians in general could chant something like, “We’re crooks, we cheat! That’s why we all cannot be beat!”

So let’s give a cheer to those clever folks who make up the cheers we hear at sporting events: “Two, four, six, eight! Who do we appreciate?” Or possibly whom. Wait, my fly is open!