When One Cheer Is Enough

The University of Mississippi in Oxford has many claims to fame, but it’s graduates will tell you that the best one is the famous cheer that is exclaimed with pride, joy and a twist of irony: Hotty toddy/ Gosh almighty/ who in the hell are we? Hey!/ Flim Flam, Bim Bam,/ Ole Miss, by damn! While no one can tell you the deeper meanings of this yell, the cheer was a caustic affront to athletic foes and to the Southern Baptist Convention where curse words like “hell” and “damn” were considered an abomination unto the Lord. No one can explain “flim flam” and “bim bam”. Besides, who needs three cheers when one hotty toddy will do?

When I was an innocent adolescent, football was king of all sports for southern boys. I started playing when I was seven and did not quit until I was eighteen. In the early 1950s, we could only listen to the Ole Miss games on the radio and imagine the running backs and tight ends and quarterbacks doing their darndest to beat the other team. We’d tune into announcer Bill Goodrich and hear him utter his famous “Whew-hoo, mercy!” at the end of outstanding plays.

Before you could say “hotty toddy”, television crept into our homes. The first television broadcast I ever watched was the Sugar Bowl from Tulane stadium in New Orleans. Since Mississippi did not have any television stations, we drove all the way to Memphis to watch it on Uncle Paul’s brand new TV set as Georgia Tech soundly defeated Ole Miss. [Uncle Paul Dorman, by the way, was a news anchor in Memphis on station WREC, from high atop the Peabody Hotel. He had the right stuff that enabled him to move from radio to television during those awkward transitions.]

Once that new media cat was out of the bag, and televisions made the world fit into little black and white screens in our dens, Katy could no longer bar the door. Football, for example, became much larger than the Southeastern Conference. We could watch UCLA or Ohio State in the Rose Bowl after the ladies were enthralled by the floral parade through Pasadena. Then we moved to the NFL and watched the professionals who could earn gazillions of dollars and make me wonder why I quit football when I was eighteen.

When you think about the transformative power of television in our lives over the past seven decades or so, you don’t know whether to cheer or not. It has had some very positive effects and brought our world together in awe of things like landing on the moon. We’d watch Walter Cronkite tell us the news from around the globe and know “that’s the way it was”. We were shocked by the horrors of racism as we watched police dogs attack African Americans in neighboring Alabama. The aftershock made its way to Congress, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law enough to grant all our citizens all the rights they deserve.

Last month, our smart televisions invaded our homes with their telecast of homegrown terrorism as a mob of white supremacists plundered our Capitol and threatened to kill our legislatures after their cheerleader-in-chief pointed toward the enemy and urged them to “Fight like hell!” And, if you’ll pardon my Southeastern Conference vernacular, “by damn” if they didn’t do exactly as they were told. Armed to the hilt with Rebel flags and lynching nooses, all hell broke loose and spilled those ungodly but undeniable images into our American memory and collective conscience.