Lary Bloom
Writer, Editor, Teacher
The Bloom Blog
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Monday, January 30, 2006
Go, Penn Pigs!
Chowan College, a small liberal arts institution in North Carolina, revealed that it would comply with new NCAA guideliness and renounce its long-standing nickname for its sports teams. So say goodbye to the fighting and occasionally victorious Chowan College Braves. The school is now entertaining ideas for a new way to refer to its athletes.I have an idea of course. But first a little historical perspective. In the early 1950s, in a poem in Sports Illustrated, Ogden Nash showed he was well ahead of the NCAA policy committee. But for different reasons. His argument against Braves, Indians, and other nicknames was not that they are insensitive, only that they failed to distinguish one school from another. There are so many Tigers and Lions and Wildcats, for example, it can make a sports fan's head spin. He concluded his poem in this manner:
When I read that the Cohawks are playing the Zips
My disposition becomes sweeter than saccharine.
Because then I know the game afoot pits
Cohawk College and the University of Akron.
Nash's poem got me to thinking. I took it upon myself to rename several college teams (though none have ever seen fit to adopt my suggestions).
You will have to agree that the Harvard Crimson could do with an update every few hundred years. How about the Harvard Beats? And while we're in the Ivy League, Harvard's arch rival could certainly use something more sophisicated than Bulldogs. So clap your hands for the Yale Locks. Also, among the Ivies,consider the Brown Outs. Or the Columbia Gems of the Ocean. Certainly you could easily root for a team called the Penn Pigs. Out west there could be the California Here I Comes and the Colorado Rocky Mountain Highs (everybody'd want to play them.) Then there's the team that nobody would want to play, Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. I have no idea why the athletic department there refuses to consider my sensisible idea: The Capital Punishments.
But back to Chowan College, which I read on its official website is a Baptist institution with "Judeo-Christian" values. Well, then, the Chowan Chosens. No?
Posted by:Lary Bloom at 4:27 AM
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