Name-a-Day Calendar, April 12: Marquette Golden Eagles

Page 157 to 365

Chosen in: 1994 (and again in 2005)

Chosen by: Student/staff/alumni vote (and then student body vote)

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Marquette University’s nickname history is rather messy, including multiple identity crises and a prolonged battle between students/alumni and university administration regarding the deprecation of a Native American moniker.

We’ll start at the beginning: the football team began play in 1892, almost universally referred to by the school colors, “Blue and Gold”. After a couple decades, students wanted a true nickname. The school’s first campus was situated atop a hill, so around the mid-1910s, students started calling their teams the Hilltoppers…even though the campus had by this point already moved to its current location, which is on a mostly flat plot of land just west of downtown Milwaukee. In any case, “Hilltoppers” caught on so well that the school made it their first official nickname in 1917.

By this time, Marquette had begun playing other sports than just football, so while those teams were called the Hilltoppers, the football team took on a separate new nickname on an unofficial basis. Sportswriters often described Marquette’s squad as a “Golden Avalanche” charging at their opponents, and it sounded cool enough to catch on among the broader fanbase. However, Marquette cut football in 1960, and with it went the Golden Avalanche nickname.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; a much larger change happened six years earlier. By 1954, I guess Marquette’s student body collectively realized, “hey, we are no longer located atop a hill”, and so they sought to change their schoolwide athletic identity. On May 13 of that year, the Student Senate announced that their new nickname would be “Warriors”, ushering in a long era of Native American imagery for Marquette. In making this decision, the Student Senate cited that the university seal had a Native American on it¹ because university namesake Rev. Jacques Marquette often hired Native Americans to assist him in his travels, and that a Native American sporting identity was already prevalent in Milwaukee at large with professional teams named the Braves (baseball), Chiefs (hockey), and Hawks (basketball).²

Marquette’s first Native American mascot came in 1961 in the form of Willie Wampum, an offensive stereotype that drew several complaints before athletic director Samuel Sauceda banned it from university sporting events in 1971. Their second Native American mascot, The First Warrior, debuted in 1980 and was significantly more respectful, as the school afforded local tribes heavy influence in designing the costume and only allowed Native American students to wear it. Unfortunately, not many Native American students attended Marquette, and the ones who did mostly didn’t want to be a mascot, so The First Warrior’s appearances were fairly scarce by the mid-’80s and it was retired in 1987.

For a short time in the late ‘80s, Marquette’s mascot was randomly a giant blue monster named Bleuteaux, which didn’t really have anything to do with anything and was retired in 1991 due to lack of interest.

At this time, Father Albert DiUlio had just become the president of the university, and it was under his rule — and mostly through his doing — that Marquette would finally retire the Warriors branding in its entirety. As with Willie Wampum two decades earlier, this decision would come despite many (and possibly the majority of) students and alumni disagreeing with it. In 1993 and 1994, Father DiUlio and other university administrators took numerous suggestions from Marquette community members on the school’s new identity. By spring 1994, these were narrowed down to just two: “Golden Eagles” and “Lightning”. The school held a vote of students, staff, faculty, and a random sample of 1000 alumni, and the winner, announced on May 2 with 54% of the vote, was “Golden Eagles”.

As you might imagine, this caused even more protests and uneasiness from fans and alumni who were upset at the retirement of the identity that had served the school for the past 40 years. This uneasiness continued for some time, peaking in spring 2004 when alumnus Wayne Sanders gave the university commencement speech and used his platform to offer the school $2 million to change their nickname back to “Warriors”. The university declined, but this did lead them to conduct a survey on the Golden Eagles identity, and this survey of over 9000 students, staff, faculty, and alumni determined that 57% of respondents thought “Golden Eagles” was a boring name and 55% thought it was a weak one.

Unilaterally acting on the results of this survey, the Marquette Board of Trustees announced on May 4, 2005, that the university’s sports teams would henceforth be known simply as the “Gold”. This angered just about everyone on both sides of the Warriors debate, so the Board hit the panic button and quickly held a schoolwide nickname contest, disallowing “Warriors” and other Native American nicknames from being submitted. Several nicknames made it to the first round of student body voting, some old (Blue and Gold, Golden Avalanche) and some new (Explorers, Golden Knights, Saints, Spirit, Voyagers, Wolves), but only two made it to the final round: the school’s first official athletic nickname (Hilltoppers) and its most recent (Golden Eagles).

On May 10, “Golden Eagles” won yet again, killing the “Gold” era of Marquette sports less than a week after it started. This time, the nickname has persisted, and now it’s here to stay.

As for the mascot, Marquette currently has a costumed golden eagle named Iggy. It received a makeover in 2018.

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1. Marquette’s seal has since been updated to remove the Native American; the new seal became official in 2022.

2. I’m not sure what a regular ol’ hawk has to do with Native Americans but hey, I wouldn’t be born for 43 more years. Maybe it was different back then.