Sir Big Spur leads his own pep rally during a visit to the Horseshoe in October.

Fair-feathered fan

Alumnus takes Sir Big Spur out to the ballgame

You’ve no doubt seen and heard him at a Carolina baseball or football game: beautiful but fierce, Sir Big Spur announces himself with a refined screech and a flap of his Technicolor wings.

The seven-year-old, eight-pound, Old English, black-breasted red gamecock is owned by Carolina alumnus Mary Snelling, who received a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1976 and a master’s degree in health education in 1979. A friend gave her the bird, her boyfriend Ron Albertelli takes care of it, and together the couple takes it to games.

“Gamecocks really are fighting birds—they are born that way,” said Snelling, who is manager of a Veterans Administration outpatient clinic in Aiken, her hometown. “At one game recently, we put Sir Big Spur in the shade to stay cool. He was perched next to a shiny hubcap on a car, and before we knew it, he had started to fight his reflection because he thought it was another bird.”

After about 11 years of taking a gamecock to every Carolina baseball game, last year Snelling was asked by the University to bring the bird to football games.

“We’re huge Gamecock fans, and we’ll go anywhere the University asks us to go,” she said. “We went to a nursing home recently where they were having a Carolina football bash. We go to fan day every August. And we’ve been to Omaha three times with the baseball team.”

As for the bird, he travels well and likes people.

“While you would never describe a gamecock as ‘sweet,’ just before games we do hold Sir Big Spur and he lets fans pet him,” said Snelling, who now has about 15 gamecock roosters and hens.

“They are pampered pets,” she said. “The tricky part about caring for fighting chickens is that roosters have to be separated or they will fight each other. We have separate pens for each of the roosters, and we’ve built the pens so that no predators can get in.”

The Gamecock lifestyle started for Snelling when she was a freshman at Carolina. She originally thought about being a pediatrician, but found nursing more to her liking. Along the way, she discovered she wanted to do cardiac rehabilitation.

“That’s why I went to graduate school: I was hoping to get on with the VA hospital doing cardiac rehab, and Carolina was one of the few places that had a program in cardiac rehab at that time,” she said.

“One of the most influential professors I had was Russ Pate, who is now a professor in the University’s exercise science department, vice provost for health sciences, and director of the Children’s Physical Activity Research Group,” she said. “He changed my life. He is authentic, and he practices what he preaches. He talks about exercising and eating right, and he’s a runner. I do a lot of exercising and I maintain a healthy weight. That gives me an opportunity to tell other people how you can do that.”

Staying in shape also helps Snelling keep up with Sir Big Spur. He has quite a following. For some people, it’s a game day tradition to come by and pet him before kickoff. And he’s been featured in several regional publications, as well as ESPN the Magazine. At home baseball games, he is attached to a three-foot-long tether and likes to strut his stuff atop Carolina’s first-base dugout. At football games, he can be seen on the sidelines, perched on his very own miniature goal posts.

Learn more about this fearsome fowl at sirbigspur.com.