I feel sure the speaker gets a tickle. Don't you feel it? There you are, an ordinary Texas guy, but hey, you know opera. And you aren't intimidated by it. No siree, you'll call an overweight woman a fat lady no matter where you see her.
Not that you can't slip up. Like some of the guys that followed Dan, but said "isn't over." Fell right into UT language. You've got to stay A&M.
But actually Dan Cook isn't first with the singing fat lady. Ralph Carpenter, over at Texas Tech, got in there two years ahead of him when his Aggies were in a close one. There it is in the Dallas Morning News, 10 March 1976: "The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings."
Well, the "opera" was dropped and by our century it was pretty much "it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings," with the origins accordingly broadened. Some said Kate Smith's regular singing of "God Bless America" before Philadelphia Flyers' hockey games in the fifties got it going, since she was very fat and very famous. Some made it one of the many things Yogi Berra said, or almost said, for New York sports writers. And some said it came out of the South, where hefty choir ladies brought forth, "Church ain't out 'til the fat lady sings."
I have no doubt about the tickle the expression gives, since I feel it myself. That voice from the lower ranks, speaking with confidence, that knowing sassiness — I've been in higher education too long not to be tickled. And then there's the image it gives: jocks grappling desperately in the mud, waiting for a circus lady to waddle to the mike. That's an image that won't fade. I'm ready to put Dan Cook in Red Barber's league: "He went for that pitch like a country hog goin' for city garbage."
But no, a schoolteacher just can't do that. Close inspection shows that Cook's image doesn't really fit the situation. He's got people waiting for the sign that all is over. But in the singing-lady image there's no such sign, certainly none that works the ballgame way. Brunnhilde in Wagner's Gotterdamerung, the only lady opera singer who, because she has a fifteen-minute final aria, comes close to signaling the end, has several other arias, one in the first act. A fan can say, "Ah, fat lady just sang; I'm going home." Take away the Wagnerian sopranos and Cook's out of ladies. If his listeners picture Kate Smith they've got a song before the game starts, as Phrase Finder has pointed out. If they picture a Southern church service they've got the preacher's prayer coming at the end, not a soloist's performance.
I know. That's another schoolteacher pooping a good redneck party. But jeez, these Aggies, with that image, presented with that flourish, have put themselves in a league with Red Barber and Francis Schmidt. They're contending for the pennant. Do they know who they're going up against? In 1934 Schmidt's Ohio State football team was looking at a Michigan team that had won national championships twice in the preceding four years. But he, picking up what Lon Warneke had said two years earlier about the Yankees, said, "they put their pants on one leg at a time just like everybody else." The ridiculousness of the image of the alternative, Michigan players jumping into their pants, made any fear of them as supermen ridiculous. Good fit, zero defects.
But not the great fit Barber had. Think of that situation. He's looking at an eager rookie phenom at the plate, a cagy old Yankee pitcher on the mound. Picture one of those veterans so good at throwing junk it didn't matter that he'd lost his fastball. The pitcher wastes a couple of his fastballs outside and then throws him a fat change-up down the middle. "He went for that pitch like a country hog goin' for city garbage."
Perfect. Free of defects. Zips right past the schoolteacher. That's how pennants are won up in the Big-time Sayings League.
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