Name-a-Day Calendar, February 7: Furman Paladins
Page 93 of 365
Chosen in: Supposedly the 1930s but definitely by 1942; full use beginning in 1961
Chosen by: The Greenville News sports editor J. Carter “Scoop” Latimer
Furman University began playing intercollegiate sports when they first fielded a football team in 1889. The school color was purple, so by the 1920s, this football team had picked up the name “Purple Hurricane”. This name was quickly adopted by all of Furman’s sports teams, but that wouldn’t always be the case.
Sometime around World War II, The Greenville News sports editor J. Carter “Scoop” Latimer began referring to Furman’s men’s basketball team as the “Paladins of the Court”, or just the “Paladins” for short. Furman sources claim that this happened in the 1930s, but when I checked Furman’s Bonhomie yearbook archive to pin down when the name gained popular acceptance in the Furman community, I discovered something completely different.
In 1935, the Bonhomie began calling the varsity basketball team the “Purple Dervishes”. The word “dervish” refers to a mendicant Muslim man; it has nothing to do with sports. Given that Furman was a Baptist school at this time,1 it’s hard to imagine they chose this nickname for any other reason than that it sounded cool. They kept it until 1942, when “Paladins” took over officially.
The football team was still called the Purple Hurricane, so now Furman had two different athletic identities. Two would soon become four, as the baseball team would become known as the “Hornets” and the track and cross country teams as the “Harriers” in the years that followed. Eventually, the students got fed up with having so many different identities, so they tried to settle on just one. On September 15, 1961, a panel of student body president Tom Player, Pep Club president Alvin Brown, and head cheerleader Don Senteil ran a poll of the student body to determine which name they liked the most. “Paladins” won the poll and instantly became the nickname for all of Furman’s sports teams.
A paladin mascot would soon follow.
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Furman became a secular institution in 1992.