South Carolina’s live mascot is back with new owners. Inside the life of Sir Big Spur
Beth Clark walked into a chicken pen on her 14-acre homestead. It was a particularly hot afternoon in Edgefield, so she brought an ice cube tray filled with frozen water and corn to a swarm of hens and South Carolina’s most popular rooster, Sir Big Spur.
A few minutes later, Beth returned to the coop to bring Sir Big Spur inside the home she shares with her husband, Van Clark. She walked into her living room and sat down in a reclining chair, putting the rooster at ease in her lap.
Sir Big Spur made himself comfortable while Van fed him purple grapes, his favorite.
“I think he likes being held,” Beth said.
“He does,” Van quipped back. “He’s really, really great. You can pass him off to anybody to get a picture.”
Sir Big Spur’s often calm demeanor is not in the nature of an Old English black-breasted red gamecock. The birds are naturally persistent, domineering and protective, Van said, which is why they’re most commonly known as “fighting gamecocks.”
Today’s Sir Big Spur is South Carolina’s fifth live mascot in a 22-year lineage started by his previous owners, Ron Albertelli and Mary Snelling. The tradition took its first break since 1999 amid the SEC’s ban on live mascots as part of its COVID-19 restrictions last year.
The Clarks, both USC graduates, have taken care of Sir Big Spur since June 2020, but they’ll attend their first football game as his owners at South Carolina’s season opener against Eastern Illinois this Saturday.
“Hopefully we’re gonna get the entire experience of it right now,” Van said. “We haven’t really experienced everything about it.”
Sir Big Spur’s big move
The live mascot tradition dates back to the late 1990s, when Snelling received a gamecock as a present from her father. Snelling and her father later won a contest to go to dinner with Ray Tanner, South Carolina’s head baseball coach at the time, and they pitched the idea of bringing the rooster to a baseball game. He went to his first baseball game in 1999, and Sir Big Spur started attending football games in 2006.
Two decades into their live mascot program, Snelling and Albertelli had been looking for help when Van Clark first noticed a South Carolina trailer parked outside of Albertelli’s fabrication shop in 2019.
Van introduced himself to Albertelli and learned he was looking for some assistance with Sir Big Spur. He was immediately interested, and the Clarks went to dinner with Albertelli and Snelling, who invited them to learn the ropes at football games that season.
Albertelli and Snelling eventually decided to transition their Sir Big Spur program over to Van, a retired high school band director and active alumni of the USC School of Music, and Beth, a retired art teacher with a passion for animals.
“It just seemed like a really good fit for our time,” Van said. “We’re both retired from teaching at this particular time, so we’re able to do some things with the program whenever we need to do it.”
The program carries a bevy of responsibilities. The current Sir Big Spur is heading into his sixth year, and the Clarks are in the process of identifying a successor from a group of five young roosters.
“You have to plan ahead,” Van said. “You have to breed them, then you have to grow them up, and then you have to try to train them.”
Raising the young roosters has presented challenges. When they were three months old, the five roosters seemingly grew into their naturally domineering spirit overnight.
Beth woke up at 5:30 one morning to find a coop of fighting birds that needed to be separated quickly. Then, the Clarks rushed to build multiple new coops for each to live in their own space.
The pandemic cancellation did help the Clarks transition into the Sir Big Spur lifestyle. They had space in the day to build new pens and manage energetic roosters.
“It gave us a little bit of time to do that without the pressures of having to go to a game,” Van said. “We’d naturally rather go to a game, but we’ll have that.”
Back in game mode
Sir Big Spur, tethered to his remote-controlled “roost roller,” is getting back into the gameday routine after last year’s break. As his roost roller plays music and flashes lights, Sir Big Spur moves around and crows.
The Clarks plan to get Sir Big Spur on the roost roller for some trial runs to get used to the sound and the movement before he makes an appearance in Gamecock Park on Saturday. It’s been almost two years since Sir Big Spur has been spotted on the sidelines at Williams-Brice Stadium. He has some adjusting to do.
The Clarks are also getting Sir Big Spur ready for his in-game appearances. Van and Beth play recorded South Carolina football games outside for the rooster, another part of the acclimation process. He appears to like it.
“He actually responds to it a lot of times,” Van said.
Sir Big Spur has visited a few South Carolina events since pandemic restrictions eased, and the Clarks plan to travel to every home and away football game this season. He attended the South Carolina spring football game, this summer’s alumni golf tournament, and he recently visited with the Carolina Band, USC’s marching band.
He can become overwhelmed, and the Clarks know how to tell when he’s getting a little agitated. Like any animal, the rooster has limits.
“Sir Big Spur is really good,” Van said. “This particular bird is great, but you have to be very careful. They’re not a cute and cuddly pet, you know? You have to be aware at all times.”
A loud rooster crow wailed from Van’s cell phone — his ringtone for incoming calls. Sir Big Spur, once resting calmly in Beth’s lap, immediately perked up, crowing right back to the phone.
Don’t let his docile moments fool you. Sir Big Spur is still a fighting gamecock, and in Van’s eyes, there isn’t a better mascot in the country.
“It’s a perfect mascot,” Van said. “What he’s doing right there is he’s being domineering. He wants to dominate. He hears another rooster, but that’s what they want. That’s what they want to do. … It’s really about the characteristics of the animal, why it’s such a great mascot.”
This story was originally published September 2, 2021 at 12:02 PM.
