Name-a-Day Calendar, December 29: Coastal Carolina Chanticleers
Page 53 of 365
Chosen in: 1963
Chosen by: Basketball coach Cal F. Maddox through player vote
You ever read The Canterbury Tales? If not, I feel like 620 years is well past time for me to feel bad about spoiling it. If you’re somehow not familiar, it’s a collection of 24 short stories by Geoffrey Chaucer. The one we’re interested in is “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”.
In it, a rooster named Chanticleer dreams that a beast will threaten to kill him and tells his wife the dream scared him, only for her to brush him off. One day, a fox approaches Chanticleer in his yard and begins showering him with compliments on his singing. Against his better judgement, Chanticleer closes his eyes and begins singing at the top of his lungs to impress the fox, who grabs him by the throat, puts him in his mouth, and runs off. As Chanticleer’s wife and friends give chase, he tricks the fox into turning around and bragging about his catch, which the fox has to open his mouth to do, allowing Chanticleer to fly away to safety.1
Ignoring the first half of the story where he almost got himself killed, it’s that late display of shrewdness that leads people to view Chanticleer as a witty, heroic figure. One of these people was Cal F. Maddox, an English professor at Coastal Carolina who was thrust into coaching the first basketball team the school formed in 1963, when they were still a junior college branch of the University of South Carolina and had no athletics department of their own. They’d occasionally fielded some sports teams, which they called the Trojans, but nothing was very organized.
His team facing a material disadvantage, Maddox figured they’d have to beat their opponents through intellectual acuity. Being an English professor, the comparison to a classic text came naturally, and it helped that Chanticleer was essentially identical to the mascot at Coastal’s parent university. Maddox suggested the team be called the Chanticleers but left it to his players to make an official decision. He recalls that some players suggested “Seahawks” and “Sharks” but his “Chanticleers” won out.
The popularity of the name has been questioned on several occasions since. It was challenged when Coastal Carolina became independent from the University of South Carolina in 1993, making the continued use of a rooster-esque mascot less necessary. It was challenged again when the school started a football program in 2003; Maddox liked the name “Chanticleers” for a scrappy underdog basketball team but he’s gone on the record to say that it doesn’t quite work as well to symbolize a football team that relies on strength to win. In the end, every time the name has been put to a student body vote, it’s won easily.
A costumed mascot would come, named Chauncey because nobody knew the correct pronunciation of Chanticleer and the assonance helped make it more obvious. They’d also get a live mascot, named Maddox after the coach who gave the school its athletic identity.
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I’m aware this is a very pared-down synopsis but pretty much everything else in that story is outside the scope of this one.