Here’s the skinny on the “We Are Marshall” chant

      From the very first time I watched the movie We Are Marshall, I’ve always had this annoying feeling about how the chant was used in that film. If you didn’t know any better, you would think that the chant actually existed at the time of the 1970 plane crash. Not only that, but it was also popular among the fans as well as the Marshall student body.

       That’s just not true.

       But as I’ve learned over the past few months, that doesn’t mean that the chant was a myth created by Warner Brothers. The chant was real and it existed long before the glory years of Thundering Herd football in the 1990s.

       Fact is, the chant had its beginnings not long after the crash. And it all began with Marshall’s cheerleaders from back in that day.

       Carol Richardson McCullough was not a Marshall student at the time of the tragedy. She arrived at MU two years later and became a Herd cheerleader in the early ‘70s. Not long after the beginning of the new year, I received message from Carol on Facebook and she provided a time frame as to when the chant first came into existence.

       “Regarding the movie title chant,” Carol wrote, “I can safely say we DID use that cheer as early as 1973. That’s the same year I started cheering on the varsity squad. In fact, I remember one of the cheerleaders (Marilyn Johnson) who taught it to me, and it went like this.”

       We Are (clap-clap)

       Mar-shall (clap-clap)

       We Are (clap-clap)

       Mar-shall (clap-clap)