Of fight songs and fighting birds

Alan Piercy is the author of A Gamecock Odyssey: University of South Carolina Sports in the Independent Era (1971-1991). The following was originally published on Alan’s South By Southeast newsletter.

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How Paul Dietzel’s attention to detail revolutionized the look and feel of Gamecock athletics beyond the playing field

A banner headline in The State on the morning of April 7, 1966 proclaimed, “A New Era in USC Athletics Begins.” Forty-one year old Paul Dietzel had agreed to take on the dual role of head football coach and athletics director at the University of South Carolina, replacing Marvin Bass. 

Dietzel came to Carolina from the US Military Academy, where he led his Army teams to a 21-18-2 record over four seasons. He was the first non-graduate of the Military Academy to become its head football coach. 

Prior to his post at West Point, Deitzel enjoyed a highly successful run in Baton Rogue, Louisiana, where he led the LSU Tigers to a 46-24-3 record and a national championship to conclude the 1958 season. 

Tall and trim, with blue-gray eyes, wavy blond hair, and a boyish smile, Dietzel was movie star handsome. He possessed an infectious enthusiasm, a championship resume, and represented a second banner hire for USC athletics, following basketball’s Frank McGuire two years earlier.

The University of South Carolina, which had been a relative doormat athletically for most of its thirteen years as a founding member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, was making major investments and splashy hires in upgrading its coaches, and soon thereafter, its facilities. 

Indeed, Dietzel transformed USC’s Columbia campus in his role of athletics director, overseeing the completion of Carolina Coliseum (1968), the building of Rex Enright Spring Sports Complex and Roost Dormitory, including an upgraded baseball diamond (1969), and the expansion of Carolina Stadium, later rechristened Williams-Brice Stadium (1971). 

Dietzel’s transformational accomplishments as athletics director ultimately overshadowed his somewhat uneven results as head football coach, though he did secure what remains the program’s only outright conference championship with the 1969 ACC title.

But before all of that, Dietzel turned his attention in an unlikely direction – namely updating the Gamecock logo and fight song in 1966 and ‘68 respectively. 

“Something more defiant-looking”

In the early decades of USC athletics, Gamecock teams were represented by a variety of logos. Nondescript roosters crowing or strutting in some fashion. They were generic barnyard portrayals, not officially sanctioned by the university. 

In the early 1950s, Gamecock Club officials approached Jack Smyrl, a staff artist with The State, about drawing an image they could more effectively market for club events. Smyrl obliged, creating the first official Gamecock logo, for which he received the princely sum of ten dollars. 

The logo, which appeared on the cover of a USC-Georgia game program in 1962, also adorned the Carolina Fieldhouse center court for the final decade of that building’s existence. 

An accomplished artist himself, Dietzel possessed a flair for creative branding. He secured the services of artists at Columbia’s R.L. Bryan Company to draw an updated Gamecock logo, with vague instructions for “something more defiant looking.” The updated image presented a more aggressive bird in advancing posture, facing left to right, with tail feathers flowing behind. Its lower claw clutched a streaming banner bearing the words “Scholarship-Leadership.”

Legend has it that Dietzel’s initials were craftily incorporated into the Gamecock’s tail feathers. Was it a sly tribute by the artist to Dietzel, or did the coach tweak the original design? Andy Demetra, a former radio voice of Gamecock basketball and baseball broadcasts, penned an article for his “Inside the Chart” series in the Oct. 2, 2013 edition of Spurs & Feathers Magazine exploring the myth. Unfortunately, Dietzel passed away in September of that year before Demetra was able to secure the details. 

The full answer may be obscured by time and uncertainty, but the “PD” does come into focus among the upper tail feathers, and remains a fitting tribute to the man most responsible for modernizing Gamecock athletics in the 1960s and 70s.¹

Old Fight Song takes a “Step to the Rear”

Two years after Dietzel’s logo update, he turned his attention to, of all things, the Carolina fight song. 

Prior to the 1968 football season, USC band director James Pritchett secured an arrangement of the Elmer Bernstein song, “Step to the Rear,” from the Broadway musical, How Now, Dow Jones. The marching band played the song during the opening game of that season, an otherwise unremarkable 14-7 home loss to Duke. 

The tune caught Dietzel’s ear, and looking for a spark after the loss, (or perhaps a diversion), he approached Pritchett about replacing the current fight song with “Step to the Rear.” Dietzel wrote updated lyrics, though he insisted he not be identified as the author, fearing the basketball program (namely, Dietzel’s “frenemy” Frank McGuire) might not accept the song if it was known that the lyrics were written by the football coach.

The Carolina Band introduced “The Fighting Gamecocks Lead the Way” during halftime ceremonies of the Gamecock’s final home matchup with Virginia Tech on Nov. 16, 1968, with the anonymously-penned lyrics printed in the game program. The new fight song quickly caught on, and is still in use today. 

As for the old fight song, “Carolina Let Your Voices Ring,” (now simply known as “Old Fight Song”), the Carolina Band still plays a stirring rendition during its football pregame show. It’s a punchy tune, and to this writer’s ear, more in keeping with a traditional college fight song than the jaunty, show tune-inspired “Step to the Rear.” 

There’s an interesting history to the old fight song as well. According to USC Libraries’ Digital Archives, the tune was the result of a 1933 fraternity contest to create a fight song for athletic contests. The fraternity promised $500 for the winning submission. That’s an amount roughly equivalent to $12,000 today – a handsome sum, especially in the depths of the Great Depression! 

USC student M. Carrere Salley gamely composed the winning lyrics, after which the prize was abruptly reduced to $300. After some delay, no doubt narrated by a frenzied scramble of fundraising within the fraternity, Salley eventually managed to collect $50 and settled for that. He noted good-naturedly that he would have entered the contest even if there had been no prize. 

In a 1968 letter to Dietzel, Salley noted the song was lightly used until band director James Pritchett revived it, designating it as the primary fight song from 1959 until the introduction of the new fight song. 

The things of which tradition is made

A $10 drawing by a mid-century newspaper artist, a long-forgotten fraternity contest, a little-known Broadway tune, and the initials of a former coach craftily disguised within an otherwise ubiquitous logo. The origins of these Carolina traditions are faint whispers now, often overlooked among the more pressing game day diversions of drum and brass, the din of a big crowd, and the wafting tailgate aromas of mustard-tinged pork. 

But they are worth remembering all the same.

Notes:

When Jim Carlen replaced Dietzel as head football coach and athletics director in December, 1974, Team dentist Bill Smith, a side-hustling graphic artist, assisted in updating the Gamecock logo. The revised Gamecock appeared sans banner and framed with a bold Block C. It debuted on USC’s revamped football helmets during the 1975 season and, with minor tweaks, remains in use today. 

During his time in Baton Rouge, Dietzel also wrote the lyrics to one of LSU’s fight songs, “Hey Fightin’ Tigers,” which was adapted from “Hey, Look Me Over,” a tune from the Broadway musical, “Wildcat.” Anybody noticing a pattern here?

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