Name-a-Day Calendar, September 7: Tulsa Golden Hurricane
Page 305 of 365
Chosen in: 1922
Chosen by: Head football coach Howard Acher, voted on by the football team
Oklahoma is notorious for being oft stricken by a certain natural disaster. That natural disaster is not a hurricane, and in fact, Oklahoma is landlocked. So why are Tulsa’s teams called the Golden Hurricane? Well…
In 1882, the Presbyterian Church founded a women’s boarding school in what was then the Indian Territory. Before long, this school expanded to become a coeducational college, and it was renamed Henry Kendall College in 1894 for the Reverend Henry Kendall.
Kendall began playing football in 1895. Their team was most often called the Kendallites, but other common nicknames included “Presbyterians”, “Tulsans”, and two monikers based on their color scheme: “Tigers” and the basic “Orange and Black”.
Henry Kendall College became the University of Tulsa in 1920. Two years later, Howard Acher arrived at the university to coach football and men’s basketball. Beginning that season, the football team also began wearing gold and black rather than orange and black; it’s unclear if the former event led to the latter.
That year, 1922, people began calling Tulsa’s football team the Yellow Jackets, but Acher wanted something fiercer. Playing off both the new uniform colors and Oklahoma’s proclivity for getting hit by EF-5’s, he’d heavily considered calling his team the Golden Tornadoes, but then someone informed him that John Heisman had already claimed that nickname for Georgia Tech five years earlier. So, he thought, what meteorological event is even bigger than a tornado? A hurricane!
Acher brought the idea of the “Golden Hurricane” to his team during the first weekend of October 1922. He had them vote on whether it should be the team nickname, and they voted in favor. The Tulsa Golden Hurricane were born.1
Conveniently enough for this article, Tulsa just redesigned and renamed their mascot. After decades of several designs named Captain Cane, their new mascot is a costumed…hurricane?...named Gus T.
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Tulsa’s first game as the Golden Hurricane was their third of the 1922 season, a 13-10 victory over Texas A&M in Dallas. They actually went undefeated (8-0) in 1922, not suffering a defeat as the Golden Hurricane until the 1923 season opener against Arkansas Tech.