team names

[Beverly Flanigan]

Hey, we're the Bobcats!  Ohio at least still has some.  And we have
snarling (statuary) bobcats all over campus--in addition to the usual
fuzzy, cuddly cheerleader ones, of course.

At 03:36 PM 2/24/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Laurence Horns writes: No teams named "the Whites" or "the Blacks" as far as I
> > know.  Or "the Pink(s)" or "the Yellow(s)"--although my undergraduate
> > college's teams were the Yellowjackets and the school color Dandelion
> > Yellow.  Dartmouth is "Big Green", Cornell "Big Red", Syracuse "the
> > Orangemen" and of course Harvard "the Crimson".
>
>The NYU sports teams were long known as "The Violets", after flowers that
>grew at its Bronx campus.  This, I think, was considered unsatisfactory,
>but it was not until the Bobst Library named its on-line catalog "BobCat"
>-- "Bobst" and "Catalog" -- get it? that the men's teams started calling
>themselves the "Bobcats", with a fuzzy, cuddly bobcat leading cheers from
>the sidelines.  The women's teams, I believe, still answer the the name
>"Violets", no doubt thinking that it is more ignominious for an sports
>team to be named after a library catalog than after a spring flower.
>
>GAT
>
>George A. Thompson
>Author of A Documentary History of "The African
>Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.