'Hook 'em' creator remembers the day

AUSTIN (KXAN) - "We had what I would call a mediocre football team , and we were trying to make up in spirit what we lacked in football talent," so remembers retired Judge Harley Clark, who was the Longhorns' head cheerleader who came up with the "Hook 'em" hand symbol 55 years ago.

The Texas A&M "Gig 'em" thumb symbol was created in 1930, the week of the Aggies' big game against the Texas Christian Horned Frogs.

In 1955, Harley figured the University of Texas needed a symbol of its own.

At a Gregory Gym pep rally the day before the crucial final game against TCU, Harley recalls, "I had everybody make their hands into a 'Hook 'em' sign, the head of a Longhorn. I had them all lift them up. I said, 'I'm going to proclaim that our official hand sign tomorrow at the game and thereafter whenever Longhorns get together.'"

One problem: Harley had not cleared the idea with the school administration. In his telling, Dean Arno Nowatny came out of the stands to chew Harley out.

"He came up behind me and grabbed my right elbow, turned me around and said, 'Harley, I'm furious with you.' He said, 'Look at that. They're going to start doing this all the time.'"

Harley said the dean claimed that particular symbol was considered an obscene gesture in some places.

"You could see the fury in his eyes," said Harley. "He stepped up real close to me and made a perfect 'Hook 'em' sign, stuck it in my face and asked if I knew what that meant in Sicily."

At the game the next day, the hand sign caught on. Everyone was doing it.

Afterward, a glum-faced Nowatny approached Harley.

"I said, 'Dean, you need to calm down. You need to look on the bright side. Instead of our mascot being a Longhorn, it could have been a unicorn,'" Harley recalls ... with a laugh. Hook 'em.