Dear Mr. President: The Time Has Come For Us To Reclaim Our Most Famous Chant

"Just as importantly, I am going to spend a great deal of time listening. I want to hear from our students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends. I want to know what you think we do well, where you believe we can improve, and what ideas you have for helping UF continue to grow and lead.” — Dr. Stuart Bell, in his first statement as president.

The historical case against it is thin. And I categorically reject the notion that a cheer born on a football field in Gainesville was somehow secretly channeling a disputed, century-old rumor about alligator hunting

 

There are symbols of our past that are painful and haunting — the kind that trigger a memory of something horrific that may or may not have actually happened. But eventually, we find a way to move on. We have to. That's how healing works.

I was raised as a son of the South, where we've mastered the art of moving on — where we learned to drink in the fragrance of magnolias to offset the stench of burnt homesteads and destroyed lives.

Ancient history, you say? I can recall the stories my grandmother told me, stories her own grandparents told her, about Sherman marching through the South, torching houses and villages and farms, leaving families and homes in heaps of rubble. Even some of my own blood felt that pain. These aren't wives' tales. They're eyewitness testimony, handed down through generations.

Plenty of people stayed bitter about that for a long, long time — understandably so, since they were done in by their own countrymen.

To this day, some folks still cling to those nightmarish memories. Most believe the war was about slavery. I've heard strong arguments it was as much an economic grab dressed up in territorial ambition. Doesn't much matter which. What matters is we've learned that sometimes the best thing you can do with your mistakes is learn from them, turn the page and move on.

And if we can take our darkest chapters — our Civil War, our ugliest secrets — and find a way to set them down, surely we can do the same with a slang term that got swept up in an ugly, reinterpreted history it may never have actually belonged to.

Which brings me to the conundrum of "Gator Bait."

Once upon a time, it was the most beloved cheer in The Swamp — a call-and-response war chant that rattled visiting teams and rallied the home crowd. Then, in June 2020, University of Florida President Kent Fuchs put it in mothballs, citing "horrific historic racist imagery associated with the phrase" even while admitting he knew of "no evidence of racism associated with our 'Gator Bait' cheer at UF sporting events."

Read that again. The university banned its own cheer while conceding it found no proof the cheer itself was ever used with racist intent. That's not evidence. That's an abundance of caution steamrolling a tradition.

War chants have been around as long as men have gathered in groups to compete. The most successful and globally recognized one, the Maori Haka, "originated as a fierce physical challenge and battle cry to intimidate enemies," historically performed "to invoke the favor of the gods before combat." Today it remains legendary for "building deep unity and projecting raw, unbreakable strength." 


Here's what actually gets lost in the rush to bury Gator Bait: The historical case against it is thin.

As one summary of the record puts it, "the supposed actual use of black children as bait in alligator hunting is repeatedly mentioned in primary sources, especially newspaper and magazine articles published between the 1880s and 1920s. But since most of them are vague and possibly jocular, their reliability is disputed. Historians and fact-checking website Snopes found no solid evidence that the practice was real, dismissing these accounts as rumors or racist tall tales."

Other researchers push back, arguing the sheer volume of these old accounts, plus specific details in some of them, means they "cannot be summarily dismissed as fabricated," and that some may reflect a real — though likely not widespread — practice.

Read carefully, that's a historian's shrug, not a smoking gun. And I categorically reject the notion that a cheer born on a football field in Gainesville was somehow secretly channeling a disputed, century-old rumor about alligator hunting. Our GatorBait chant was about intimidating Georgia and Tennessee, not about anything else. It grew out of pride in a mascot, not malice toward anybody.

I think I've finally found the right name for what happened to "GatorBait." Linguists call them contranyms, or auto-antonyms — words that flip into their own opposite over time.

"Awful" is the textbook case. In the 1300s it meant "worthy of awe," something that inspired reverence and wonder. By the Victorian era, it had curdled into meaning something terrible. Same word, opposite meaning, centuries apart.

There are plenty of others. "Terrific" used to mean terrifying, causing fear — now it means excellent. "Nice" was once an insult meaning foolish or ignorant — now it's a compliment. "Literally" used to mean strictly true, without exaggeration — now half the country uses it as an intensifier while exaggerating wildly.

Words get repurposed, reclaimed, and flat-out reversed all the time, and we don't set fire to the language every time it happens.

Stephen A. Smith built a whole broadcasting persona on saying a guy is "a baaad man" as the highest compliment in sports. Bad, in that case, means good. Nobody's confused. Context tells you everything.

So here's my pitch: Reject the racist interpretation, because the evidence for it never held up. Reclaim "GatorBait" as exactly what it always was on Saturdays in The Swamp — a battle cry, a piece of our history, a chant that belongs to Gator Nation and nobody else's grievance.

I'm counting on the leadership of new UF President Dr. Stuart Bell, confirmed by the Florida Board of Governors on July 1 after a two-year search that finally gave the university a permanent hand on the wheel. Word around Gainesville is he's a very baaad man. And it was reassuring to see him show up and ask for input already on Monday. That’s what stabdup guys do right away.

Bring back the chant, Doc. Let 'em hear it echo off the upper deck in The Swamp one more time.

We buried a lot in this country because it was easier than fighting about it. Sometimes that's the wise move. But sometimes turning the page means having the nerve to write a new chapter instead of leaving the page blank.