Team color names [WAS: Card sharp versus card shark]

[Mike Salovesh]

Laurence Horn wrote:

<<much of original message snipped, up to . . . >>

>
> A later version of this involves the renaming of teams whose original
> nickname later came to be felt to be offensive.  So the Stanford
> athletic teams, formerly the Indians, were renamed the Cardinal
> (singular) after the color of their uniforms.  And St. John's teams,
> formerly the Redmen, are now the Red Storm.    A more complex example
> is the St. Louis Blues hockey franchise, named not for the color but
> for the music form (a version of the one that provided our Word of
> the Century), which in turn is presumably based on the metaphorical
> extension of the color term to the psycho-emotional state associated
> with it.  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".
>
> larry

Please don't forget the "Monsters of the Midway", the University of Chicago
Maroons.  Their days of glory came when they led the original Big Ten,
under the leadership of the Grand Old Man, Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg. Their
last notable season in bigtime  football was way back in the 1930s, the
heyday of Jay Berwanger. I don't know whether it's truth or urban legend,
but at the U of Chicago they still claim that the figure atop the Heissman
Trophy was modeled on Jay Berwanger.

Maroon football died when U of C President Robert Maynard Hutchins decreed
an end to athletic scholarships as such. When asked if he really meant it,
Hutchins said "of course a football player can get a scholarship at
Chicago. He has an equal chance to compete for one on the same academic
terms as any other student."

Maroon football has made a recent comeback -- not Big Ten, but at least
it's organized college football.

--  mike salovesh     <m-salovesh-9 at alumni.uchicago.edu>     PEACE !!!