Hatters and Paladins and Camels

It is, once again, almost NCAA basketball tournament time. My alma mater, once again, will not be participating. And so my thoughts turn, once again, to unique college sports team nicknames (when I'm not rooting for the Wolverines anyway). 

Spurred on by a (perhaps) good natured comment from a friend ("guess when Kevin last posted about something other than music?") here, at long last, is a third edition of some of my favorite nicknames and the stories behind them. You can read the previous posts here and here.

Stetson Hatters. Okay, so it could be taken as just a very early example of a school selling out to a deep pocket. But it did result in an unusual nickname. Formerly DeLand Academy, Stetson first changed the name of the institution to recognize its major benefactor John B. Stetson of cowboy hat fame. And when it started playing football at the turn of the last century, its team became known as the Hatters. The school's mascot is "John B." who apparently received a heavy dose of PEDs before his reimaging in 2021. I think I prefer the earlier version that was "a leprechaun-looking Mad Hatter which was rumored to scare children and stopped making appearances in the 1990's."

(image from X)

Furman Purple Paladins. Familiarity with schools and their unusual nicknames may not necessarily breed contempt (although in at least one case it certainly does for me) but may cause complacency when it comes to a unique name that is right under your nose. So it is with the Purple Paladins, my brother's alma mater, ignored up until now on these lists. Apparently different sports teams at FU had different nicknames - Paladins for basketball, Hornets for baseball, and Purple Hurricane (not making this up) for football until, in 1961, the student body voted to name all of the school's teams the Paladins. The basketball team's nickname came from, you guessed it, a sportswriter named J. Carter "Scoop" Latimer (thank goodness he came up with a more original moniker than he was saddled with). The Purple part is a vestige of the earlier football team nickname.

Campbell Fighting Camels. Formerly the Hornets, Campbell changed its nickname to the Camels in the early 1930's although the reasons are not entirely clear. There's an apocryphal story about a campus fire and Campbell President J.A. Campbell being told to "get a hump" to buckle down and start the recovery. But that seems to have been effectively debunked. While another source posits that Campbell suggested the change "after the nearby Cape Fear River, known for its abundance of wild camels," AI tells me that "there is no evidence that wild camels ever lived along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina." Which makes a whole lot more sense. Whatever the reason, choosing Camels over Hornets was clearly the right move.

Loyola Chicago Ramblers. Originally the "Maroon and Gold" in 1925 Loyola's football coach, in conjunction with the school newspaper, conducted a contest to give the team a proper nickname. Unfortunately, the winning entry was the Grandees "tying in to the Spanish origins of St. Ignatius of Loyola." Fortunately, that didn't stick either and the media dubbed the 1926 team the Ramblers because of their extensive travel across the U.S. that season. From 1982-90 the school's mascot was "Bo (short for Hobo) Rambler." The athletics press packet for that season depicted a homeless man rambling across the Loyola logo. A year too late for the little girl below (meeting Bo in 1989), the mascot was changed to "LU Wolf" in 1990.

(from the Loyola University Chicago
Digital Special Collections)

Youngstown State Penguins. I had discounted the Penguins the first two times through this exercise because I assumed that it was one of those Johnny-come-lately too cool by half nicknames chosen in the early aughts. Au contraire! The name originated from a basketball game that Youngstown State played at West Liberty College in 1933. The visiting players' locker room was unheated and upon seeing the YSU players flapping their arms and stamping their feet to keep warm the Liberty coach observed that they "looked like a bunch of penguins." Current YSU mascots are humans wearing costumes as Pete and Penny Penguin, but they were preceded by three live penguins, also named Pete, all of whom (not surprisingly) met fairly early demises.

Missouri-Kansas City Kangaroos. Apparently they are going by just the "Roos" these days. Which I will blithely ignore. Much like the Penguins, I mistakenly believed that the Kangaroos were a recently chosen nickname. Wrong again! The Kangaroos moniker was chosen in the 1930's for the then University of Kansas City's first competitive team - the debate team. The whole city was "abuzz" about imminent arrival of Jigger the (pregnant) kangaroo's progeny at the Kansas City zoo and so the name was adopted first for the debaters, then for the school's sports teams as they formed in the next few years. One of the first print versions of Kasey the Kangaroo was drawn by none other than Walt Disney, a Kansas City native.

Purdue Fort Wayne Mastodons. Another odd nickname inspired by a local event, this time the discovery of a mastodon skeleton by a farmer near Angola, Indiana. The PFW geology department led the excavation of the skeleton, which is now on display in the student union on campus. Take a gander at some 13,000 year old bones on your way to root on the Mastodons!

Minnesota Golden Gophers. The Big Ten is actually chockfull of seldom seen nicknames, from Wolverines to Badgers to Hoosiers to Boilermakers to a certain large brown poisonous seed. But Golden Gophers? Do kids grow up wanting to be a Gopher someday? If you're from Minnesota, maybe you do. The nickname was somewhat of a natural one, since Minnesota has been known as the Gopher State dating back to the 1850's. A radio announcer added the Golden in the 1930's based on the football team's all gold uniforms.

Evansville Purple Aces. After the then Evansville Pioneers basketball team beat up on Louisville in the 1930's, Louisville's coach remarked to his Evansville counterpart that "You didn't have four aces up your sleeve, you had five!" The Evansville coach relayed the quote to a local sportswriter and both agreed that they preferred Aces to Pioneers (the journalist motivated, at least in part, by the ease with which Aces could fit into a headline). Evansville's colors then and now are purple and orange, and so the Purple Aces were born. Their mascot? Ace Purple, a "riverboat gambler" who bears an uncanny resemblance to Burt Reynolds.

(photo from gopurpleaces.com)

Wichita State Shockers. When then Fairmount College (now Wichita State) was preparing for a 1904 football game against a nearby school its manager came up with the name "Wheat Shockers" for the team because many of the players earned money for tuition and board by harvesting wheat. The name was later shortened to Shockers and officially adopted in 1926. The school's mascot is WuShock which google's AI describes as "a large, muscular creature designed to represent a 'bundle of wheat.'" Yes, it seems to completely defy logic to describe a shock of wheat as muscular.

That's it for this edition of unusual nicknames. Tune in again in 11 years or so for another.

Collective Action Instead of Litigation

You may recall my posts from last Spring and Fall about the NCAA and the efforts by former and current players to organize and to be compensated for their names, images, and likenesses ("NIL") while they competed at the college level.¹  

Things didn't turn out exactly as planned for either the Northwestern football players and their attempt to organize or for Ed O'Bannon and his fellow plaintiffs. But there may have been the dawning of a different means over the past week through which college athletes in revenue sports may well begin to realize the true value of the service that they provide.

The NLRB dismissed the Northwestern players' petition to organize not by finding that they didn't have a right to, but rather because action on the petition would not have promoted stability in labor relations. As a New York Times article on the NLRB decision notes:

Chief among the board’s reasons for declining to consider the case were the complexities of an N.C.A.A. in which one team might be unionized while others were not, and whether a union would negotiate terms that conflicted with the association’s rules. The N.L.R.B., which has jurisdiction only over the private sector, was also reluctant to wade into territory that could have raised implications for public universities. A vast majority of top-level college football programs are at public colleges, and Northwestern is the only private institution in the 14-member Big Ten Conference. ²

While the decision apparently left open for another day the issue of whether college athletes, particularly in football, are employees, "student-athletes," or both, it's difficult to imagine a scenario in the near future where either a more worker-friendly or less NCAA-beholding NLRB will find it appropriate to consider the issue.

Meanwhile, O'Bannon essentially won the battle and lost the war when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken that NCAA rules prohibiting "student-athletes" from profiting from the use of their NIL violates anti-trust law, it also found that the part of her decision that granted the former players an injunction requiring schools to compensate their athletes up to $5000 a year for the use of those images was for reasons that are not entirely clear, unsupported.

Nick Saban, Alabama's football coach, reportedly
makes $7 million a year. But the Ninth Circuit found
no justification for his players to make $5000 per year
for the use of their NIL. (photo from commons.wikimedia.org)

The O'Bannon plaintiffs petitioned last month for a rehearing of the case en banc, but regardless of the ultimate decision issued by the Ninth Circuit, the case is likely to be appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which will perhaps take a dimmer view of the finding that antitrust laws apply to college athletics.

This past week, however, "student-athletes" may have realized the power that they hold over the schools for which they play, albeit in an entirely different context. You've no doubt heard by now about the resignations of the President of the University of Missouri system (Timothy Wolfe) and the Chancellor of the Columbia campus (R. Bowen Loftin) in the wake of campus protests regarding the response, or more appropriately the lack of response, to racial incidents on the campus.

While the protests had been going on for weeks, they truly only gained momentum after the school's African-American football players announced that they would boycott all of their remaining games until the demands of one of the protesters, who was on a hunger strike, were met. One of his demands was that Wolfe resign, which was ignored until the players got involved and threatened not to play, beginning with Saturday's game against BYU, a contest that would have required Mizzou to pay BYU a $1 million penalty if it was cancelled.

Suddenly, more than two months after the first racial incident that drew attention, but less than two days after the announcement by the players, Wolfe held a press conference at which he said that out of his "love" for his alma mater he was stepping down. The same day Loftin announced his resignation.  And, as was pointed out in another New York Times article, the timing can hardly be coincidental.

Arguably, the Missouri players' action was undertaken for more admirable reasons than collective action regarding compensation for their work for their schools. But if it hasn't already dawned on them, it certainly has on others (including several in the most recent Times article), that this same kind of action could be easily undertaken to support payment for college players.

What's to stop the squads of the two football National Championship game finalists from talking it over at one of the free outings that the NCAA so generously provides them and deciding, "hey, what if we just decided not to play next Monday unless we start getting a share of this gigantic pie?" Would the NCAA's reaction be any different than Wolfe's was, facing a potential boycott and the loss of millions of dollars from ESPN?

Perhaps that is the only way that the NCAA will be forced to abandon its mantra of "student-athletes" while it and its members continue to rake in the cash and pay the coaches of those athletes more than any other employee. The courts and quasi-judicial bodies seem unwilling to upset the status quo.

But perhaps the status quo is about to change.

---

1 The link to the article no longer works, but can be found here: http://web.uslaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2014_Fall_Winter_USLAW-Magazine1.pdf at pages 12-13.

2 A link to the full text of the NLRB's decision is here: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/13-RC-121359^↩

Lions and Tigers and Blue Hose

I am a connoisseur of sports nicknames. And while "March Madness" is mostly about basketball, for me it's at least a little about being exposed to one or two nicknames that I had never heard before.

There are 347 colleges playing NCAA Division I men's basketball this season.  Most have boring nicknames like Tigers, Lions, and Bulldogs.  And that's fine -- I like bulldogs. But the ones that pique my interest are the unusual ones. There's something special about a unique nickname and what it says about the school.

Nicknames originate from a variety of sources: school administrators, students, an actual vote, long-standing tradition. Many college nicknames were not chosen by the school or its students, but were first appended to teams by sportswriters. Back when scribes actually reported on athletes (or, this time of year, "cagers" which my brother assures me is a term that's still used), they had to come up with different ways to name the team, to depart from the monotony of repeating the school's name over and again, if nothing else. Still others were chosen by a particular coach. 

So, while I bear no animosity toward any nickname (with the possible exception, as my friend Mary used to say, of a certain "worthless hairy nut") I much prefer the unique names, especially those with a history behind them (not the made-up, Johnny-come lately Banana Slugs or Cardinal). In no particular order, here are some of my favorite collegiate nicknames, along with a little background of the origin of the name.

Idaho Vandals. Okay, I lied. There is some order -- the Vandals are my all-time favorite nickname. There are lots of Spartans, Trojans, and Vikings, but for your hard-core pillagers and anarchists, I'll take a Vandal every time. Did the Vikings or the Spartans or the Trojans take down Gaul and Rome? I don't think so. An Idaho basketball coach from the 1910's first referred to his team's defense as so fierce that they "vandalized" their opponents; a writer for the school newspaper first referred to the team as the "Vandals."

Canisius Golden Griffins. The griffins of Greek mythology have the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. But this nickname comes from a ship (believe it or not) that was built in Buffalo, NY and was the first vessel to sail the Upper Great Lakes: "Le Griffon."

Manhattan Jaspers. What is a Jasper you might ask? The correct question would actually be "Who was Jasper?" Brother Jasper was a Christian Brothers (F.S.C.) priest who was a BPOC in the late 19th century and introduced baseball to the school.

St. Louis Billikens. The Billiken is a goofy looking Buddha-like figure that was a charm doll created in the early 20th Century by a St. Louis illustrator and art teacher. It's not entirely clear how or why SLU adopted the Billiken nickname other than a supposed resemblance between the charm and a former football coach, John Bender, and its proximity to its creator.

Presbyterian Blue Hose. If they were called the "Blue Socks" it wouldn't seem all that unusual. But while at one time sportswriters apparently referred to them as either the Blue Stockings or the Blue Hose, the later won out, and an unusual name was born.

Wake Forest Demon Deacons. Another nickname coined by a sportswriter, trying to capture the spirit of a revived athletic program in the 1920's. Thank goodness we're still not "The Baptists." The Demon Deacon mascot is the perfect combination of a top-hatted Deacon with an impish attitude that represents the oxymoronic name.

A photo that appears to be from the 2007
Orange Bowl. Unfortunately, appearances at
such venues are few and far between for the Deacon.

Akron Zips. They were actually once the Zippers, named after a popular rubber shoe manufactured by BF Goodrich in Akron. With the advent of metal zippers that replaced buttons in pants, Akron thought it wise to shorten the nickname to the Zips. Their mascot is Zippy the Kangaroo. Honest.

Southern Illinois Salukis. The only school chosen here that got its nickname via a campus-wide vote. SIU was known as "The Maroons" before they decided a better moniker was in order. While Salukis are cool dogs, the nickname makes even more sense when one understands that the Southern part of Illinois has long been referred to as "Egypt."

Richmond Spiders. Another nickname inspired by a person (in this case a baseball pitcher) and bestowed by a sportswriter. The only arachnid-named school to my knowledge, although I always thought that one of the all-girls' schools was missing out by not naming itself the "Black Widows."

Coastal Carolina Chanticleers. "Gamecocks" is just fine, but Chanticleers? Very cool. Chanticleer was a rooster who ruled the roost in one of Canterbury's Tales. When the school went looking for a nickname to replace "Trojans" it wanted to identify with South Carolina's Gamecocks (it was a two-year branch of USC at the time) but keep a separate identity. And so they settled on Chanticleer.

So those are some of my favorite unusual names. I'm hoping to find one or two more in this year's tournament. But in the meantime, is there one out there that you're particularly fond of that didn't make my list? If so, post a comment and let us know.

A Shot at Redemption

"A man walks down the street, he says 'why am I soft in the middle now?

Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?

I need a photo opportunity; I want a shot at redemption.

Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.'"

I used to dislike Rick Pitino. Not a little. A lot. 

But they say that everyone deserves a second chance. And Pitino has earned one with me.

Sure, he and his Providence team were darlings 25 years ago, the little engine that could, the collection of gym rats and castoffs that made it to the Final Four.  After that, though, Pitino had shown his true colors by jumping ship to the New York Knicks, then Kentucky, then the Celtics, then Louisville. And with his fancy suits and fancier loafers he always seemed a little too slick, a lot too confident, to inspire much of anything other than dislike in the casual fan and especially the fan of any team other than the one he was coaching at the time.

The former Slick Rick?

I have to admit to a certain smug satisfaction several years ago when Pitino was excoriated after news of a dalliance with Karen Sypher (apparently straight out of casting for Fatal Attraction) led to sordid speculation in the press and forced Pitino to announce that he had been the target of an attempted extortion. 

Whether due to that sobering incident or simply maturation, Pitino seems a changed man and a changed coach. The press has been full of stories in this week leading up to the Final Four of how Pitino has mellowed, transforming himself from an unapproachable dictator to a likable mentor. Even seniors on his current team remark on how he has changed just in their time at Louisville, that he talks to and jokes with the freshmen players in a manner that they couldn't have imagined three years ago.

Perhaps most impressively, Pitino neither portrays himself as a victim in the scandal brought on by Sypher's allegations, nor does he point to it as playing a role in his change. Instead, he points with pride to the fact that he learned during that time to simply turn the other cheek, something he certainly hadn't been known for in the past.

Pitino's maturation has been amplified this week as Louisville has prepared to play Kentucky, his former team and in-state rival.  The noise gets even louder, or the suits a little whiter, when he is compared to Kentucky's coach, John Calipari, who seems to have many of the same traits as the old Rick.

It may be unusual, or even uncomfortable, for Pitino to find himself in the role of both underdog and sympathetic character. But his actions over the past three years, and those of his team in the Big East and NCAA tournaments to this point, have earned him the right to both.

Pitino was dangerously close, as Paul Simon said, to becoming "a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard." I, for one, am glad he didn't. Regardless of how Saturday's game turns out, this NCAA tournament has been Pitino's shot at redemption. And, as many of his teams have been famous for, he drained the three.