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!