Name-a-Day Calendar, November 17: Arizona Wildcats

Day 11 of 365

Chosen in: 1914

Chosen by: Los Angeles Times sportswriter William M. Henry

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On November 7, 1914, the University of Arizona played a football game against Los Angeles’ Occidental College, which was a football powerhouse at the time. Arizona was a heavy underdog, and…well, they still lost. Got shut out, even: 14-0. But evidently it was the roughest, toughest shutout the Los Angeles Times’ William M. Henry had ever seen, as he wrote in his game story that “the Arizona men showed the fight of wild cats”.

Henry referred to Arizona’s team as the “Prohibitionists” a few times, which appears to have been an unofficial nickname, but the university jumped all over the Wildcats identity immediately. Just the next year, they got their first live mascot: a bobcat.

Learn more about the history of Arizona’s wildcat mascots here.

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