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FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

WINGDING! WINGDING!

YE-E-E-A-A-A-A-AY!!!

On mulling over this typical college cheer — the famous Wingding War Cry of the Wingding School of Mines — I wonder whether cheerleading has kept pace with the general forward movement in college athletics. Is there a lag in cheering? Is the “rooter-king,” as the handbooks of the subject describe the head cheerleader, muffing his larger responsibilities? Are we neglecting the new reservoirs of uproar?

The answer to these questions must be an unequivocal yes. Cheerleading, and consequently cheering, are right where they were twenty years ago. They have clung to the concepts of the campus while college games have overflowed into the ball parks and arenas of the outside world. Organized cheering still depends on students and alumni, a minor fraction nowadays of any Garden or stadium crowd. The rest of the spectators are on their own, even though it has long been established that undirected enthusiasm, which sometimes comes down to no enthusiasm whatever, has no place in American sports. The situation is abhorrent, and we should not be misled by the prancings of however many young women in white boots, vestigial skirts, hussars’ jackets, and shakos. Their connection with college sports, putative at best, is usually most conspicuous between the halves; they are not to be counted on for crises in the game, although some of them can drum very loudly indeed.

In proposing a wider participation in college cheers, I think it is safe to assume that no great difficulty is presented by the cheers themselves: their form is simple, the vocabulary austere, the ideas stripped down to stark essentials. Nothing in the Wingding War Cry, for example, should defy the reading capacity, or the memory, of the average football or basketball crowd. Read it over and see how readily the scheme of reiterating the single word fight (sometimes spelled fite) could be mastered by the slowestwitted in the Wingding section, or even by those not witted at all.

The same can be argued for the Rah Yell of Wingding’s traditional rival —foe in most college songs, because it’s awfully hard to make anything rhyme with rival - Berserk College. The Rah Yell is simplicity itself: —

Rah! (Pause)

BER-serk! BER-serk!

Rah! Rah! Rah!

Here we have two basic cheers complete, yet requiring only a threeword vocabulary, fight, rah, and ye-a-y, beyond the name of the college concerned. Astonishingly few additional words are needed for almost all the other yells: go, win, hold, hit, team, and beat. (Those who do not know the name of the college for which they are cheering should ask the usher at the end of the first period.) The whole thing can be rounded out by “We wanna touchdown (basket) “ and some elementary phonetics —siss-ss-s-s-s, bo-oo-m, ba-a-ah, grrr-r-rr, etc.

Thus, while “Go! Berserk! Go!” is quickening the pulse of the invaders (or “ The Baboons” as all Berserk teams are affectionately known to sports writers), an equally formidable incantation inflames the men of Wingding (“The Woodchucks”): “Fite! Wingding! Fite!”

I shall omit consideration of the more complex cheers, those which spell out the name of the college and those using really hard words like alagazam, kilikilik, hellabalu, wahhoo-wah, whiskum-biskum, and such. It would be premature, at this time, to expect the kind of new rooters whom I have in mind to yell these words effectively. Similarly, this is not the point at which they should be introduced to college songs: “All Hail, Wingding,”to the tune of Finlandia, seems to wander a good deal and to come off somewhat raggedly even with the Wingding Glee Club solidly behind it in the stands. These refinements could come later, once the cheering is in hand.

How then to make a beginning, the first step towards 100 per cent crowdresponse with every voice raised in the Wingding War Cry? In answering this question, the key figure, we find, is the head cheerleader, the rooterking himself. His status needs a radical overhauling. We must build him up, tear away his anonymity. In prestige he should equal the coach, and his wage ought to match that of the top-salaried player.

With the right attention from sports editors, the cheerleader would command a complete following in short order. A story would break that he was flunking Advanced Acrobatics 17 and barely holding a C — in Creative Tumbling: would he be lost to Wingding that Saturday? What about his throat — strep, as the boys at the cigar store are hinting, or just hoarseness? The pre-game tension would be electric. And quite beyond trimmings of this sort, anyone who can persuade people to chant words like whiskum-biskum Penn State) ought to be worth writing about anyhow.

After graduation, a good rooterking, suitably publicized, could look ahead to a career of cheerleading at professional games of all kinds. Think what a rooter-king could do to visiting pitchers.

College sports have long since attained the stature of a full-blown profession, like real estate or dowsing or optometry. It remains for cheerleading to take its rightful place beside them.

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