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The
Greatest College Cheer
"Brek-ek-ek-ex
ko-ax, ko-ax" leapt from the pages of Aristophanes—and spurred
the baseball team to a championship season.
May
1998
by Judith Ann Schiff
Judith
Ann Schiff is Chief Research Archivist at Sterling Memorial Library's
Department of Manuscripts and Archives.
In movies
of the white-flannels-and-raccoon-coat era, we frequently encounter enthusiastic collegians shouting "brek-ek-ek-ex"
at sporting events. Behind that cinematic cliche is a real
cheer invented by Yale students in the 1880s. But what is the source
of these curious utterances? Fortunately for historians, the cheer
in various spellings and versions was so widely known and used by
the early 1900s that the originators held a reunion to record its
history.
In April 1903, 12 members
of the "13" Club, an eating club of the Class of 1886,
agreed on these facts: On the afternoon of January 24, 1884, two
members were studying the text of Aristophanes' Frogs. As they scanned the text of the chorus of frogs
on the banks of the river Styx, one discovered a line well suited
to "make a great noise," and the cheer "Brek-ek-ek-ex
ko-ax, ko-ax" was born. They then added the words "oh-op-op"—Greek
for "hello"—taken from another line spoken by Charon.
A third friend possessed of a deep bass voice contributed the final
line, "Parabalou" (or "lay to") also spoken
by Charon as his boat approaches the shore.
The three abandoned
their studies that afternoon in favor of practicing the cheer, which
they performed for the rest of the members that evening at a celebratory
supper at a local restaurant. At midnight the party broke up, and
the club crossed the campus "shouting their battle-cry."
Approaching Durfee Hall, they spied a light in the window of their
beloved Greek instructor, Frank B. Tarbell, Class of 1873, and dedicated
a performance of the Greek cheer to him. Most of the college was
awakened and pleasantly puzzled by its meaning, but the Class of
1886 appropriated it as its own. After their graduation it was adopted
by the University at large.
The cheer
was introduced to the public at
an athletic event for the first time at the Yale-Dartmouth baseball
game held at Hamilton Park on June 2, 1884. Dartmouth was ahead
nine runs to two at the end of the fifth inning. In desperation,
one of the senior players dashed to the bleachers and asked the
sophomores to test the powers of their ear-piercing cheer on the
fading Yale nine. As if by magic, the Dartmouth pitcher lost his
arm and his teammates their heads while the energized Yale team
scored six runs in one inning. The final tally of 12 to 11 in Yale's
favor led to a championship for the team and the continued use of
the cheer through an era in which Greek was otherwise declining
in popularity. Other schools copied the hit cheer and often parodied
it, as did Penn with its "Brackey Corax Corix, Roree."
After the "13"
Club's history of the cheer was published in the Yale Alumni
Weekly, a member of the Class of 1883 quickly disputed it in
a letter to the editor. George Johnston wrote that he remembered
well a night in the winter of 1880-81 when he and other sophomores
made an immense bonfire fueled by barrels from the new opera house
being built across Chapel Street. They were also studying The
Frogs under professor Thomas Day Seymour. While the flames crackled
and soared, they joined hands and danced madly about chanting the
frogs' chorus. The sophomores continued to shout the chorus on all
occasions with many variations, and Johnston recalled that the Class
of 1884 did as well. The development of the immortal cheer was gradual,
he felt, but he gave credit to the Class of 1886 for final embellishments.
A graduate of the Class
of 1881 then claimed its introduction by his class, while a younger
alumnus of the Class of 1893 complained about the speeding up of
its delivery. Over the years it had changed from sedate to quick,
rapid, and faster yet. The Class of 1903, he said, split the air
with a "Breketiax, Quacks Quacks," which made it virtually
impossible to recognize. In 1912, Douglas Moore '15, a future Pulitzer
Prize-winning composer, set the cheer to music with the title Parabalou. Today, the Budweiser frogs' chorus may be the better known, but
the Yale frogs' refrain is definitely the classic. 
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