Name-a-Day Calendar, April 20: Miami (FL) Hurricanes
Page 165 of 365
Chosen in: 1926 or 1927
Chosen by: Defensive end Porter Norris or the football team as a whole
In mid-September 1926, an intense, costly hurricane struck Florida and either devastated or outright destroyed most of Miami. The University of Miami, which had just been established the previous year and was set to open its doors that fall, went through with opening just after the hurricane passed but, as with the rest of the region, struggled financially for several years after the fact.
That storm, commonly known as the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, is the namesake of the Miami Hurricanes, though how exactly we got from A to B is the subject of some debate. The university fielded a football team as early as its first year of operation; the hurricane actually postponed what was supposed to be their inaugural game. One story claims that Miami News sportswriter Jack Bell asked defensive end Porter Norris about the team’s nickname and relayed that the school wanted the team to be nicknamed for a local animal or plant. Norris said that that wouldn’t do and told Bell to call them the Hurricanes.
A second story has the nickname becoming official in 1927 during a meeting of the entire football team, who likened their destructive prowess to the storm that ravaged their city the previous year.
In either case, Miami’s sports teams have been known as the Hurricanes for essentially their entire history. Their mascot, often incorrectly called a duck, is Sebastian the Ibis; the ibis is often the last animal to take shelter before a hurricane and the first to arise after it. In 1989, it also became the first animal to try to extinguish the flaming spear of rival Florida State’s Osceola before a football game.
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