Name-a-Day Calendar, February 19: Green Bay Phoenix
Page 105 of 365
Chosen in: 1970
Chosen by: Student body vote…kind of
The University of Wisconsin–Green Bay was founded in 1965 with a focus on environmental sustainability. They began playing intercollegiate sports in 1969, their first mascot simply a local twist on that of their parent institution: the University of Wisconsin–Madison are the Badgers, so Green Bay dubbed themselves the Bay Badgers.
After a year, though, students wanted their own identity, so student newspaper The Fourth Estate ran a contest to pick a new mascot. The contest drew more than 40 entries. Many of them played off the school’s eco-friendly reputation, some obviously (Earthmen, Eco-nauts, E-Gulls, Environmentalists) and some less so (Beavers, Bison, Dolphins, Sharks). A couple others harkened back to the rich history of the area (Nicolets,1 Explorers, Loggers). Most of them didn’t really have anything to do with anything.2
All suggestions were sent to the student body for a vote, and the winner was…“Tomatoes”, by a slim, 10-vote margin over “Phoenix”. But the staff of the Fourth Estate was having none of it. According to a 1992 feature in Green Bay’s Inside magazine, editor Patrick Madden especially couldn’t stand being known as the “Tomatoes” and searched for a technicality to discard it. He found one in the contest stipulations: all entries needed to be submitted with a “reproducible drawing”. The person who submitted “Tomatoes” only included a crude scribble of a tomato in blue ink on notebook paper. That was enough for Madden and the committee to throw the “Tomatoes” in the compost bin. Another committee member, Donna Scheller Lipper, summed it up best: “Phoenix did not win. The real winner was just so ludicrous that we decided to toss it.”
The selection was done in secret, so nobody immediately knew anything was amiss when Fourth Estate announced “Phoenix” as the winner in May 1970. Everyone just assumed it’d won fair and square and the Omega Kappa fraternity, who submitted the name, took the attached $100 prize3 like nothing was wrong. And it’s probably good that they did, as “Phoenix” was a name unique to Division I from when they made the jump in 1981 until Elon made the switch in 2000.
The Phoenix has seen several mascots over the years.
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Jean Nicolet, Sieur de Belleborne, in 1634 became the first European to set foot in what is now Wisconsin.
A selection of rejects: Apollos, Aquarius, Buccaneers, Centaurs, Gladiators, Gremlins, Horsemen, Hydros, Spartans, Vulcanists, Zeppelins
$771.06 in 2023 dollars
#JusticeForTomatoes