Colleges use mascots and other anthropomorphic namesakes for many reasons: To identify alumni, to sell merchandise, to sound tough. And oftentimes, this works (Nothing is tougher than the wildcat or its regional variations!) But sometimes, digging a little too deep or thinking a little too critically about a college sports team’s name can be skin to staring into the abyss. Don’t stare too long, lest one of these namesakes stare back into you.
Coastal Carolina Chanticleers
To save you some time Googling, it’s not pronounced Chant-I-Clear (like LL Cool J saying “Can I bus?”). It’s pronounced SHON-ti-cleer, rhyming with chandelier, if you said it like a pretentious Frenchman. As an aside, a chandelier would be a tougher mascot than the Chanticleer, because at least a chandelier might fall due to shoddy craftsmanship and maim someone. Although at that point you may as well just name the team “the Disreputable Contractors.”
Anyway, in the 1960s, Coastal Carolina University teams were known as the Trojans. Ostensibly, the university wanted to maintain some ties to the University of South Carolina, their parent institution at the time, whose mascot is the mighty Gamecock. But considering this origin story begins with an English Professor agitating for a mascot name change from the Trojans to “something else”, we can safely speculate there was some MFA level snobbishness involved. “Ahem,” some neckbeard might have said around their pipe, “the Trojans LOST the Trojan war. Let’s pick a mascot with some winning pizzaz and also some literary credibility, shall we, lest the ruffians over at Yale continue to blow raspberries in our direction.”
This gave birth to the Chanticleers, named for a fancy rooster from the Nun Priest’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This bird is described as “dominating the barnyard” with it’s mighty cockadoodling and majestic plume. Which is to say it’s a chicken that can rule a narrowly defined ecosystem as long as there is a farmer nearby to keep wolves away. Go ahead and read the story, try to find something redeeming about a depressed bird that gets kidnapped by a fox. We’ll wait.
Just for giggles, while it might be hard to find a more intimidating flightless bird in literature, there are more intimidating literary objects that could have been used if an English professor insisted on getting involved in naming the sports teams. Perhaps the Casks of Amontillado? Halftime shows could involve the opposing team’s mascot being bricked up in a tomb on the sideline. Or how about anything by South Carolina Native (and “Two-fisted poet”) James Dickey? Sure, Deliverance came out over a decade after CCU adopted the Chanticleer name, but a team named for someone who makes you squeal like a pig would intimidate the hell out of opposing teams. Or even just calling a team “the Two-Fisted Poets” would suffice, as it blends confusion and vague threat like any good piece of literature or team name.
Boilermakers of Purdue
Let’s imagine two rival colleges, Gnads Tech and Gnads State. Gnads Tech is always defeating the hapless and overmatched players of Gnads State in sporting events. To try and save just a little bit of face, the more literate Gnads State tries to throw some shade in the form of high falootin’ insults at the burly jerks from Gnads Tech. Because Tech’s most prestigious major is the chemical engineering of sanitary products, State declares them “The Flaming Douchebags.” That’ll learn ‘em to be better than us at something!
But instead of crippling the self-esteem of Gnads Tech and leading to a century of dominance by Gnads State, Gnads Tech drops their current nickname (The Fighting Scrotums, because everything is better when you add “Fighting”) and adopts the mantle of Flaming Douchebags. The newly christened team goes on to whomp on Gnads State repeatedly for the next hundred years, the college sports equivalent of “Stop hitting yourself.”
This is more or less the story of the Purdue Boilermakers and the Wabash College (ahem) Little Giants. In the game that started this whole mess, Purdue defeated Wabash by the then obscene score of 44-0. Indignant, the hometown paper for Wabash dubbed the game “the slaughter of the innocents” and decried Purdue’s players to be strongmen of the worst sort, undereducated maulers who had unnecessarily roughed up their opponents. Imagine the harsh language that would have come out if Wabash had to play Georgia Tech!
To be fair, it was the local Purdue papers who dubbed their players the Boilermakers, a reference to the working class nature of the families of their students. But they were only embracing the image of the team that Wabash accused them of having. And really, when your team is named the Little Giants (or “the slightly larger-than-normal-sized-persons” perhaps?), you really shouldn’t start a name-calling competition.
Unlike some other team names covered in this article, the Boilermaker name doesn’t inspire any existential feelings for Purdue. However, any graduate of Wabash should be kept awake at night thinking about how it came to this and why they didn’t just go to trade school like their cousin Kevin, who now owns a successful plumbing business in Indianapolis. That bastard can just take off in the middle of the day to catch a matinee whenever he feels like it!
Jumbo and Tufts
It could have been worse. One of Tuft’s benefactors in the school’s early years was showman P.T. Barnum. He donated money to the school to create a museum, to which he also donated many “specimens.” So, again, it could have been worse. Tufts’ namesake could have been the bearded woman or a horrifying clown. A giant elephant doesn’t sound so bad compared to that, does it?
Well, slow down sparky. Jumbo was the star attraction of Barnum and Bailey’s circus, the largest elephant in captivity. He was a beloved money-making attraction, carrying children on his back and eating gingerbread, which is obviously a much better life than living free in the wild. After years of entertaining children and making old white men rich, Jumbo was unceremoniously hit and killed by an unexpected freight train. Barnum, like any compassionate human, gave the elephant a grand funeral, wishing Jumbo the peace in death he was denied in life. The end.
Wait, no, sorry. What Barnum actually did was have Jumbo stuffed, purportedly the largest taxidermy project ever conducted at the time. In an attempt to recoup some of his investment in Jumbo, Barnum then had the stuffed elephant paraded around the country, possibly while making sarcastic trumpet noises with his mouth. It took a few years for Barnum to tire of this, at which point he donated Jumbo’s carcass to Tufts because why not.
Jumbo was an immediate hit on campus. Students would put pennies in his trunk and tug on his tail for luck on exams. His name was evoked by Tufts’ coaches trying to inspire their teams, which makes some sense considering that even dead and stuffed, Jumbo could probably fall over and crush a lesser mascot like a Yellow Jacket or a Fighting Irish. But still, “C’mon men, go out there and get killed by a freight train!” leaves a little to be desired as far as pep talks go.
The indignities went on for an astonishing 86 years before a fire consumed Barnum Hall, including Jumbo. There has yet to be any evidence that Barnum Hall was built on an Indian burial ground or that the ghost of P.T. Barnum would come to the hall every night at midnight and slap Jumbo in the face, but it can’t be ruled out at this point. In any event, a quick thinking and cruel administrative assistant ran in with an empty peanut butter jar and swept a bunch of ashes into it with the intention of saving Jumbo. She probably also got the carpet, some chairs and several other stuffed creatures but at least the sports teams didn’t lose their goddamn dead elephant. The jar now rests in the AD’s office, where it is still rubbed for good luck.
Think long and hard about that. A majestic beast, twice killed in terrible ways, confined to a Jiffy jar for all eternity and rubbed by student athletes with the same groddy hands they use to slap each other’s asses. Then go watch Blackfish and tell us how it is.
