ClayNation: Tracing the origins of the 'jort' insult

Accusing another fan base of wearing jorts is the atomic bomb of SEC insults. As penetrating and debilitating insults go, it makes accusing LSU fans of smelling like corndogs seem like a "Knock, knock" joke.

Believe me when I tell you there is no insult that makes SEC fans more incensed. No insult that is so rapidly attacked as lacking in any basis of truth.

This really isn't a common sight in Gainesville, Fla. (Provided to SportsLine)

If you talk about somebody's momma it tends to get sloughed off; if you talk about somebody wearing jorts, you better be ready to fight. If you talk about somebody's momma wearing jorts? I can't even go there. It's SEC nuking time.

For the unaware, according to my good friend Wikipedia, jorts are "short for "jean-shorts" ... a garment worn by women or men that covers the pelvic area, the buttocks, and the upper part of the legs (typically the part above the knee.) Jorts are types of shorts that are made only from denim."

I'm not exaggerating when I say this, there is no single article of clothing that an SEC man could be accused of wearing that would make the accused wearer angrier or provoke more rage. Not one.

But how did this happen? As a kid, everyone in Nashville wore jorts -- black people, Asian people, straight men, gay men, illegal immigrants. Basically, if you could wear jorts you did. I'll admit it, I wore jorts. And so did you, or you're lying. They combined the comfort of jeans with the airiness of shorts. Plus, man, they let your knees breathe.

There was no culture of idiocy being espoused by their wearing. But then, amazingly, circa 1995, jorts came in for ridicule in Nashville. It happened suddenly and without warning. Like 9/11. One day a kid wore jorts to school and left Algebra II that same day on the verge of tears. I knew how he felt because the fashion tides had similarly turned on me a year earlier for wearing a pink shirt.

Here today, gone tomorrow. That's the fashion world. Suddenly Nashville, like Paris and Milan, became a jort-free zone. At least for white people.*

*Interestingly, black men have escaped universal derision for wearing jorts. After deep contemplation I have two hypotheses for why this is: 1. Black men's dark legs look better in denim shorts than white men's pale legs; 2. White people are afraid to make fun of black people.

In the ensuing decade jorts continued their fall from grace. Each year they become more detested. The only way George W. Bush could decrease his approval ratings? Be photographed on his summer vacation wearing jorts. They're the denim-clad kiss of death.

I truly had no idea how hated jorts were in the Southeast until I started the Dixieland Delight Tour last year. As I traveled through the Southeast, without fail, the jort bomb was tossed with anger and derision from one fan base to another. Recklessly, without fear for the innocents, usually wearing khaki, incinerated along the way.

And it's not just one fan base accusing another. Ole Miss says Mississippi State fans wear jorts. Alabama says Auburn fans do, Arkansas says Kentucky fans do. And vice versa. It's really uncanny.

No fan base comes in for jort accusations more frequently than the Florida Gators. The Gators are the crown prince of the jort monstrosity. So much so that when I visited Gainesville last year, my friend Neville, a Gator grad, kept saying over and over again, "No jorts here. See, no jorts here." And he was pretty much correct.

As much as I wanted to see an entire stadium wearing jorts (after all, fashion ridicule flows most strongly when you yourself used to violate the fashion rule), they really weren't that common at Gator games. At least not any more common than they would be at Wal-Mart or Waffle House or any other place in the South.

After the SEC season ended, I let these jort insults pass into the recesses of my memory and forgot about them. Until football season emerged anew, less than a month away, and I received an e-mail featuring Florida's Tim Tebow clad in, you guessed it, jorts and a football jersey. Once more the cycle of jort derision had been reborn. And that's when it hit me, Georgia fans are the ones who have turned jort-wearing into the modern day equivalent of sleeping with your first cousin.

Khaki shorts wearers are often caught in the middle of the jorts insult war. (Getty Images)

It all came flashing back to me as if I were former assassin Jason Bourne. A cavalcade of repressed jort memories.

I recalled passing a Georgia fan in an Athens street and hearing her say the following in the wake of UT's victory over Georgia, "All the UT fans are out right now celebrating in their f'ing jorts."

I remembered standing at an Athens tailgate watching Florida play LSU on television when a Dawg fan sidled up next to me and said, "I hope all the jorts in that stadium catch on fire at the same time."

Recollected that every person I've known since high school who has condemned jorts has, in some way or another, been associated with the University of Georgia. Now, suddenly, it all made perfect sense.

According to Dawg fans, every team that Georgia loses to features a fan base of jort-wearers. "J'accuse," said Emile Zola in the midst of the Dreyfuss Affair. "Jorts," said Georgia fans as the Cocktail Party losses mounted one after another.

Suddenly, like a flash of lightning that reveals the distant shore after a long night at sea, it all became clear: Steve Spurrier's arrival in the SEC coincided with the rise of jort trauma. So too did Georgia's losing streak to Florida.

Slowly, inexorably, jort derision then crept up the interstate from Atlanta and Athens to Nashville where, unbeknownst to some unaware jort wearer in Algebra II, the tide of jort derision was going to rise up and sweep over him while he sat at his desk trying to master quadratic equations. ("Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally," indeed.)

It was Spurrier with the shotgun in the Swamp with the jean shorts and the SEC championships. It was he who unleashed the jort hounds across the southland.

As this wave of knowledge swept over me, I felt a chill. Like Stephen Hawking when he suddenly saw into the heart of a black hole. Or Einstein when the map of the universe revealed itself to him via the theory of relativity.

It was Georgia fans, clearly the Georgia fans, who turned jorts into the greatest insult in SEC football history. They were the jort-derision forefathers who brought ominous denim tides into our hopes, dreams, and our football.

Somewhere, somehow, some way, Georgia loses a football game not to an opposing team but to men whose denim doesn't even have the decency to cover their own naked calves. For shame, jort-wearers, for shame.

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Clay Travis is the author of Dixieland Delight: A Season on the Road in the Southeastern Conference, available July 31, 2007, from HarperCollins. Called "as indispensable to college football fans as ibuprofen on Sunday morning" by Warren St. John, the New York Times' best selling author of Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, Dixieland Delight is Travis' hilarious, loving, irreverent and endlessly entertaining chronicle of a world that goes a little crazy on football Saturdays.