GEORGETOWN, TEXAS — A sonogram offers an important portal into a developing fetus — yielding a womb with a view, if you will — to ensure expectant parents all is going swimmingly well in utero. But when that ultrasound examination yields a visual image of the fetus flashing a Longhorns hand gesture in seeming defiance of Aggie-loving, maroon-bleeding parents….well, it does give some pause.
A Central Texas couple — both Texas A&M alumni expecting their first child — were surprised (to say the least) when the sonogram revealed their baby putting up, albeit perhaps inadvertently, the instantly recognizable “Hook ‘Em horns” hand sign showing support for UT-Austin. It’s a nod to the school’s longtime steer mascot, Bevo, as the fingers on the hand are formed in the shape of a pair of horn, with the pinky and index finger extended with the other fingers tucked away.
You need to see it for yourself to believe it. It’s all over social media:
Had this occurred in a household of Longhorns boosters, that’d be one thing. But as mom-to-be Samantha Perkins told the KVUE news station in Austin, both she and her husband were in the Corps of Cadets at A&M, and she even played in the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band during her college years.
“I wear maroon every game day weekend if I’m here in Austin,” she told the news station, referring to her alma mater’s school colors. The expectant couple lives in Georgetown, Texas, just outside of Austin, with a devotion to their alma mater going back three generations, she explained: “My grandpa was class of ’38 in the Aggie band, and so growing up that’s where I wanted to go to school,” she told KVUE. “I didn’t apply anywhere else.”
Up until A&M left the Big 12 Conference to join the Southeastern Conference, the Aggie-Longhorns rivalry was one of the fiercest in college sports. Each school mentions the other in its fight song (“…and it’s goodbye to A&M” go part of the Texas Fight song lyric while the entire second verse of the Aggie War Hymn is about Texas).
Despite A&M’s Big 12 exit, the rivalry continues unabated as both schools continue competing in band contest and academically. As a result, the hand gesture is ubiquitous in Austin where people throw up the sign not only during football games but as a greeting promoting collegiality or as emphasis in wrapping up conversations on the virtues of UT-Austin.
Yet equally galvanizing as it is to flash the hand gesture is Lonhgorns’ shared hatred of rival Texas A&M. Hatred might be too strong a term, but it’s a deep-seated rivalry going back decades.
It was football that begat the mutual resentment, with the very name of the school mascot to which the hook ’em horns alludes rooted in gridiron competition. Legend hat it that Bevo earned his moniker after a group of Texas A&M students branded the mascot with “13-0,” the Aggies’ winning score from the 1915 football match-up. Longhorns offered a fix to the vandalism by altering the “13” to a “B,” the dash to an “E,” and then added a “V” in front of the “0.”
The story might be apocryphal, but it’s a darn good one that bespeaks the depth of the long-standing sports feud.
Which is all to explain why the sight of a forming baby in the womb flashing the Longhorns gesture is kind of a big deal in an Aggie household. Yet despite such in utero mischief from her baby boy scheduled to enter the world in January, the mom said both she and her husband value a good education over academic rivalry and wouldn’t exert influence over their boy: “We would be happy with any school that he might choose,” she told KVUE even while acknowledging personal academic preference for her offspring.
Like any expectant mom, she was just relieved to see a healthy baby in her womb via the sonogram displaying that time-honored barometer of health, “ten fingers and ten toes” — even if some of those digits were used to form the hook ’em horns gesture otherwise verboten in a home filled with Aggies.
>>> Read the full story at KVUE
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