Remembering Ole Shitty Tom, the ghost that haunts Egg Bowl week

Welcome to Egg Bowl week.

Ole Miss and Mississippi State will do their annual battle on Thursday night in Starkville, and that means that this little shop’s singularly favorite Thanksgiving tradition returns. That’s right: it’s the reemergence of the Egg Bowl’s lone tattered ghost, Ole Shitty Tom.

In November of 2013, our most esteemed tweeter The Ghost of Jay Cutler quoted a CLANGA Twitter user’s tweet and loosed off the following masterpiece:

That’s fucking hilarious, and it predates my tenure here at RCR, so I need to commemorate it and establish a time capsule that we can update every year from here on out.

(“Ole shitty,” by the way, would appear to be an autocorrect or something of that nature on presumably “Ole shit” or some such, a truly devastating own of The School Up North.)

Now, before we get to the mythology of Ole Shitty Tom, we need to discuss mechanics. Specifically the mechanics of why a tweet so simple as this should enshrine a mythical figure named Ole Shitty Tom in the annals of RCR and Ole Miss football history. Ole Shitty Tom stretches a long arc through both mythohistories, and this is our explainer.

Ole Shitty Tom is the creation of a hilarious switcheroo.

As the premier curators of tweets on Twitter on the web, we need to say a few things about the Ole Shitty Tom tweet’s syntax. Very good Twitter user @michaelshurden1 — presumably a CLANGA supporter, and a person who has blocked us on that very good website for reasons beyond us — in 2013 once told us that, and here we quote, “I [sic] going to enjoy sending you a reminder of the score after we beat ole shitty tom [sic?]!” (State won in overtime, 17-10, whatever). That’s the tweet.

Now, to detonate an antagonist’s grammar on Twitter is pretty low hanging, but “I going” is pretty fresh and on the nose. The initial omission of the helping verb already pushes you into stupid land, and the finalizing “tom” — which might stand in for “tomorrow” but we’re in no mood to grant benefit of the doubt here — to coin the wonderful “Ole Shitty Tom” is too enticing. Gonna beat Ole Shitty Tom.

Ole Shitty Tom owns his own mythology.

Keep Ole Shitty Tom’s name out your mouth, Michael Hurden. Ole Shitty Tom was born in Sparta, Miss. and died of consumption at an Ole Miss football game in 1907. You don’t know shit about Ole Shitty Tom. You know who does? These people:

When you’re lost on the internet:

If you see Ole Shitty Tom wondering about campus this week, please send us pictures. Thank you.