Your favorite sports team or alma mater’s mascot is probably some sort of big cat or bird of prey, and that’s fine. Your tattoo is right; the Tigers totally rule. However, there are quite a few more esoteric mascot choices out there, like a color of a certain disposition or a set of punctuation marks, all of which can still cause fans to well up with pride. Here are the origins of some of our favorites from this arcane set:
1. University of North Carolina Tar Heels’ Rameses the Ram
A quick trip to Chapel Hill will reveal lots of great bars and live music venues but surprisingly few wild rams walking Franklin Street. So why is the school’s mascot a ram? In 1924 cheerleader Vic Huggins decided the school needed a symbol. The stellar football team of 1922 had been led by the punishing running play of Jack “The Battering Ram” Merritt, so Huggins decided that a live ram would be the perfect mascot. Huggins had Rameses shipped in from Texas for $25, and when the Tar Heels beat heavily favored VMI in Rameses’ first appearance, the ram became something of an institution. Perhaps the least believable part of this entire story is that it involves Carolina winning a major football game, but records show it’s entirely true.
2. Philadelphia Phillies’ Phillie Phanatic
In the late 1970s, the Phillies’ mascots were two 18th-century siblings named Philadelphia Phil and Philadelphia Phyllis, but the duo did little to attract families wary of Veterans’ Stadium rough-and-tumble image. In an effort to find a more family-friendly mascot, team officials commissioned design firm Harrison/Erickson, who also designed Muppets and the Montreal Expos’ beloved Youppi!, to craft a gentler symbol for the team. Thus, in 1978, six feet of green fur, curled tongue, and gyrating belly were born to signify the rabid passion of Philly’s fans without drawing attention to the more beer-soaked aspects of the Vet.
The Phanatic has since become one of baseball’s most popular mascots, but since this is a Philly sports story, it can’t have a totally happy ending. Former team vice president and current part owner Bill Giles wrote in his autobiography that he made a key blunder when commissioning the design. Given the option of buying the Phanatic costume alone for $3900 or the costume and its copyright for $5200, Giles didn’t shell out the extra $1300. This decision turned out to be an expensive mistake: five years later Giles and a group of investors bought the team and eventually purchased the copyright from Harrison/Erickson for $250,000.
3. Oakland A’s Stomper the Elephant
Benjamin Shibe, who is credited with inventing the machinery to mass-produce standardized baseballs, owned the then-Philadelphia Athletics from their inception in 1901. In the early days of the franchise, New York Giants manager John “Muggsy” McGraw derisively said that Shibe had a white elephant on his hands since the Athletics couldn’t compete with the existing Phillies of the National League.
Instead of shying away from the taunt, legendary Athletics manager Connie Mack embraced the white elephant nickname, even going so far as to give his old friend McGraw a stuffed elephant when the Athletics met McGraw’s Giants in the 1905 World Series. Although eccentric owner Charlie Finley replaced the elephant with a live Missouri mule named after himself in 1963, the elephant mascot was restored in 1988, and Stomper debuted in 1997. With his high OBP and the great defensive range factor he gets from his trunk, Stomper is surely a favorite of current A’s general manager Billy Beane.
4. University of North Texas’s Mean Green
It takes a special player to get his number retired by his alma mater, but only a real legend’s nickname becomes his school’s mascot. The vicious play of football star “Mean” Joe Greene, perhaps best known to many casual fans for winning Super Bowls and bumming a Coke off a kid in a commercial, may have given rise to the school’s current moniker after years of playing with a less-than-inspired green Eagles mascot. According to one story touted by the university, Sidney Sue Graham, the wife of sports information director Fred Graham, called Greene “mean” following a brutal tackle during his late-1960s career at the school. She then began calling the entire smothering defensive unit the “Mean Green,” and although Graham initially dismissed his wife’s newly coined phrase, he eventually used it in a press release that caught on with reporters.
5. New College of Florida [ ]
That’s not a typo. The New College of Florida’s unofficial student mascot is actually the null set. After hearing rumors of this unique mascot but not being able to find any hard evidence on it, I placed a call to the school’s Office of Public Affairs, where the very friendly staffer informed me that while the 746-undergraduate college founded in 1960 doesn’t officially have a mascot, it’s fair to say that students adopted the null set early in the school’s history as a sly wink to its lack of athletic teams. Although the school now fields competitive teams in sailing, ultimate Frisbee, and soccer, the [ ] still seems almost as clever; one can’t afford to be all that picky when searching for a mascot based on set theory.
