Name-a-Day Calendar, August 12: St. John’s Red Storm
Page 279 of 365
Chosen in: 1994
Chosen by: A committee formed by the university
The school originally known as St. John’s College was founded in 18701 and began playing football in 1884. This football team originally had no official nickname but was often called the Johnnies.
As fun a nickname that is, it wouldn’t last.2 The football team often wore all-red uniforms, draping themselves in the color from helmet to shoe. At some point in the early 1920s, a local sportswriter played off this and began calling the team the Redmen, which stuck and eventually expanded to all St. John’s sports teams.
This nickname originally had nothing to do with Native Americans, but—like most nicknames that play on the color red—fans, media, and the school itself eventually shifted to use it in that context. A Native American mascot debuted in 1928, when two students stole a costume from a cigar store and brought it to the football game against Catholic University at Ebbets Field, which the Redmen won 22-0.3 Chief Blackjack, as this mascot was named, was followed by Native American logos and iconography in the decades to come.
St. John’s eliminated the mascot in the 1970s, but the logos stayed until at least 1988, and the nickname even longer. Its day came in the early ‘90s, when nationwide calls for sports teams to remove Native American nicknames, imagery, and mascots became too loud to ignore. On November 20, 1993, St. John’s announced that they had dropped the “Redmen” nickname and had formed a committee to consider replacements.
The nicknames this committee considered all had to do with severe weather (Thunder, Rolling Thunder) or the color red (Red Raiders), or both (Red Thunder, Red Storm). Unsurprisingly, they went with one of those last ones; on June 9, 1994, St. John’s became the Red Storm.
The new mascot stuck to the weather theme; Johnny the Thunderbird debuted in 2009 after a 12-day-long vote that saw more than 11,000 votes cast between six potential mascots.
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Became St. John’s University, Brooklyn, in 1933, then simply St. John’s University in 1954, around the time it moved from Brooklyn to Queens
Well, it would. Just not for St. John’s (NY). Saint John’s University in Minnesota still calls their teams the Johnnies.
The students would later pay for the mascot, marking perhaps the first time in U.S. history that white people owned their mistake after stealing something Native American.