Name-a-Day Calendar, January 9: Davidson Wildcats
Page 64 of 365
Chosen in: 1917
Chosen by: Most likely Dick Jemison of the Atlanta Constitution
The list of similarities between Davidson College and the University of Alabama is pretty small, all things considered, but two stand out: 1) like many schools in the Southeast, they’re both former members of the Southern Conference,1 and 2) both got their nicknames from local sportswriters after overperforming in a football game against Auburn.
Davidson’s game came on November 10, 1917, at Grant Field in Atlanta, the same field where their 2-4 “Red and Black” football team suffered a 32-10 loss to eventual national champion Georgia Tech four weeks prior. Of course, Auburn wasn’t the world-beater Georgia Tech was,2 and Grant Field was (and is) Georgia Tech’s home stadium, not Auburn’s. Despite all this, Auburn was expected to beat Davidson handily, especially given Davidson only sent 22 players to Atlanta for the game.
You can probably guess what happened next: Davidson won. By two scores, actually: 21-7. The details therein aren’t important, but in retelling those details for his game story in the Atlanta Constitution, sportswriter Dick Jemison referred to Davidson’s team — heretofore the “Red and Black” or (less commonly) the “Presbyterians” or the “Preachers” — as the “Wildcats”. Davidson’s student newspaper, The Davidsonian, caught wind of this and immediately began calling all of their teams the “Wildcats” on a regular basis.
This has actually led some sources, including Davidson’s archives, to claim that their own student, Albert Potts ‘19, first used the term; Potts himself even claimed this, stating that he “wrote sports stories for the Atlanta and Charlotte newspapers” at the time. Everyone seems to agree that the Atlanta Constitution story on the Auburn game was the first time the name was printed, and that story was written by Dick Jemison (who, I confirmed, was not Albert Potts).3 Perhaps Potts suggested the name to Jemison, and perhaps he can be credited with popularizing the name on a broader scale in the Davidson community, but there’s no hard proof of this and there is a story where the name debuted with Dick Jemison’s byline on it.
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Alabama from 1921-1932, Davidson from 1936-1988 and again from 1992-2014
In fact, Georgia Tech would beat Auburn 68-7 on November 29, that game also played at Grant Field.
This isn’t a joke. I thought it might have been a pen name or something, but no. Dick Jemison was an established 30-something sportswriter in 1917 and Albert Potts was a junior in college.