Name-a-Day Calendar, June 15: Oregon Ducks
Page 221 of 365
Chosen in: 1978, officially
Chosen by: It had been used unofficially for decades prior as a shortening of “Webfoots”
The University of Oregon was established in 18761 and began playing football in 1894. The university’s nickname history, from the beginning, is simultaneously very simple and incredibly convoluted.
The simple part: students began referring to themselves as “Web-footed Ducks”, or “Webfoots” for short, around the turn of the 20th century. Webfoot became the title of the school yearbook and The Oregonian sports editor L.H. Gregory began using the term to refer to the school’s sports teams as well. It wasn’t universally popular at first, with some feeling the nickname lacked firepower, but it eventually gained acceptance and the school made it official in 1926.
The convoluted part: how exactly we got to “Ducks”. It started not long after “Webfoots” became official. Sportswriters gradually shortened “Webfoots” to “Ducks” because the latter was more convenient and easier to fit in headlines. At the time, Oregon enjoyed the presence of a live duck mascot named Puddles. Then, athletic director Leo Harris thought his school could do better.
Harris was a good friend of an up-and-coming cartoonist by the name of Walter Elias Disney, and one of Disney’s most popular characters happened to be a duck named Donald. In 1947, Disney licensed the use of this “Donald Duck” character to Harris via a friendly handshake agreement, and he and his associates drew up some special edition Donald cartoons specifically for Oregon. Just like that, Donald freakin’ Duck was Oregon’s mascot.
Disney died of lung cancer in 1966 and Oregon continued to deploy Donald Duck as their mascot after the fact. A few years later, the Disney corporation realized there was no contract legally allowing the university the rights to Donald Duck. Leo Harris was no longer the athletic director at Oregon, but he was still alive and well, and he knew that Walt would have wanted the agreement to continue. After he showed Disney representatives a photo of Walt wearing a jacket with a special edition Donald Duck emblazoned directly above the word “Oregon”, the company realized this as well. The two sides came to a formal, written agreement in 1973.
Then came the question of whether the university community actually wanted to keep Donald around. Men’s basketball coach Dick Harter didn’t. In fact, he didn’t want his teams to be called the Ducks, the Webfoots, or anything of the sort, insisting the media call them the “Kamikaze Kids”. Of course, he wouldn’t coach Oregon forever; when he left for Penn State in 1978, new coach Jim Haney returned to the “Ducks” identity.
That same year, Steve Sandstrom, a cartoonist for the Daily Emerald student newspaper, created a duck he thought would rival Donald in popularity. Named Mallard Drake, Sandstrom’s cartoon looked somewhat similar to Daffy Duck and sported a fiercer look than Donald. The Daily Emerald then held a student body vote on whether Mallard should replace Donald as the official mascot, and the answer was a resounding no, as two-thirds of voters backed Donald. This was the first time Oregon students had actually chosen in some official capacity to accept Donald Duck as their mascot, and it led to the university finally officially changing their athletic nickname from “Webfoots” to “Ducks”, about half a century after everyone else had already done so.
That wasn’t the last time Donald Duck’s mascot status has been called into question. To avoid going overlong, I’ll ignore most of the rest and give a passing mention to the Mandrake.
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The school was actually established with the name “Oregon State University”, which it only kept for one year before becoming the University of Oregon. The school we currently know as Oregon State University was at the time known as Corvallis State Agricultural College.