Name-a-Day Calendar, June 3: Northwestern Wildcats
Page 209 of 365
Chosen in: 1924
Chosen by: Chicago Sunday Tribune sportswriter Wallace Abbey
Northwestern University was established in 1851 and began playing football in 1882. The university’s early sports teams were known as the Purple on account of the school’s main color, but this wouldn’t last forever. By the early 1920s, students wanted two things: a fiercer nickname and a mascot. They figured one would beget the other.
In 1921, the year-old Decatur Staleys franchise of the National Football League moved to Chicago, and in 1922, they renamed themselves the Bears. Students of Northwestern, located in the nearby suburb of Evanston, took inspiration from their new neighbors and sought a live bear mascot for their own football team. In 1923, they acquired a bear cub named Furpaw from the Lincoln Park Zoo and paraded it around the sidelines during games. The team was still called the Purple during this season. The team was also awful, going 2-6 and losing all six of their Big Ten contests, so the students deemed Furpaw bad luck and abandoned the bear mascot just as soon as they’d introduced it.
The next year, Northwestern was not as obviously bad. They still only won one Big Ten game, but they stayed competitive in most of the ones they lost. It was that competitive spirit in defeat that earned the team its “Wildcats” nickname.
On November 15, 1924, the 4-2 Purple made the short trip south to face the heavily favored Chicago Maroons. They lost the game 3-0, but the game story from Wallace Abbey in the next day’s Chicago Sunday Tribune1 is the stuff of legends:
“Something more than ordinary wildcats are required to subdue wildcats gone completely vicious, entirely aroused, by the temptation of a great price, a big, juicy piece of ‘meat’. Let us call that ‘meat’ the Big Ten football championship and consider the following situation at Stagg Field yesterday afternoon, to which 32,000 hoarse fans will attest today:
“It was the fourth quarter of the annual Chicago-Northwestern grid battle. Football players had not come down from Evanston: wildcats would be a name better suited to [head coach Glenn] Thistlethwaite’s boys. [Star halfback Ralph] Baker was there, and he was the chief wildcat giving his supreme effort.
“[Chicago head coach Amos Alonzo] Stagg’s boys, his pride, the eleven that had tied Illinois a week ago, were unable to score. Once they had been on the 9 yard line and had been stopped stone dead by a Purple wall of wildcats.”
So, uh, yeah. That was that. The team would be called the Wildcats, effective immediately.
Northwestern’s costumed wildcat mascot, Willie the Wildcat, would debut in 1947.
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At the time, this was the title under which the Sunday edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune was published. This paper is now the Chicago Tribune.