COLUMN: Team nickname changes and Monticello history

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By: 
Pete Temple
Express Sports Editor

     The latest Iowa high school sports nickname/mascot change, reported in the Gazette March 18, is happening right within our River Valley Conference.

     After this school year, Camanche will no longer use the nickname “Indians.”

     Other schools and teams have done the same thing. Marion is searching for a new nickname after dropping “Indians.” An early attempt to adopt “Mavericks” is under fire as well at Marion, so the search goes on. Norwalk High School has remained the Warriors, but is in the process of eliminating its Native American imagery in favor of a new brand.

     My high school, Henry Sibley in Mendota Heights, Minn., took the same path as Norwalk, many years earlier. It kept “Warriors,” but dropped Native American imagery in favor of a knight’s suit of armor.

     My wife’s college, Simpson, changed from “Redmen” to “Storm” some years back. My favorite college hockey team, the North Dakota Fighting Sioux, now wears a new logo as the “Fighting Hawks.”

     Even in the pros, this is happening. The Washington Redskins are no more, going by “Washington Football Team” until the franchise finds a new nickname. Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians are reportedly about to drop their nickname as well.

     My take? I don’t care. I really don’t.

     Over the years I’ve gone back and forth on Native American nicknames. At one time I thought it was a travesty that the traditions and colors of so many sports teams – Chiefs, Braves, Blackhawks, etc. – might be in jeopardy.

     Eventually, though, I came around to a different view. Not one of these changes – even the one at my old high school – affected me in any way. If Native American tribes are offended by the nicknames, it hurts no one to change them. There is no doubt some expense involved, but most of that can be recouped over time with the sale of new fan gear with the new nickname and logo.

     And eventually, most of us get used to the new nicknames and wonder what the big deal was.

     Which brings me to a 1940 quote in the Monticello Express from an MHS student named Ray Behrends. But first, a little history.

     In February 1983, Mike Kent, the Express sports editor at the time, wrote a couple of columns tracing the history of team nicknames at MHS.

     Many know that at one time, Monticello’s sports teams were known as the Minotaurs. A minotaur is a figure from Greek mythology that has the body of a man and the head of a bull.

     Behrends is the one who came up with the nickname, Kent reported, and it was put into use for Monticello’s teams in time for the winter sports season of 1937-38.

     The MHS teams were called the Minotaurs for just three years. In 1940, according to Kent’s column, the name was voted out, partly because it was hard to find emblems for the teams’ gear, and partly because the nickname was eventually found to be “meaningless and without color.”

     It was voted upon to start calling Monticello teams the “Black Panthers.” I did some research to try to find when they became simply “Panthers,” and it apparently happened during the 1974-75 school year.

     Articles during that winter sports season occasionally used “Black Panthers” – Black Cats was sometimes used in headlines, no doubt because it was shorter. But starting with the spring sports of 1975, the Express only used “Panthers” or “Pantherettes.”

     I couldn’t find any articles on why the change was made. But I put the question out to Facebook, and several people who were students in that era said they believed it was changed because of the prevalence of the Black Panthers revolutionary party in the late 1960s and 1970s.

     “Pantherettes,” incidentally, ceased to be the nickname for Monticello girls’ teams at the end of the 1978 fall sports season. The girls’ basketball teams in the ’78-79 season were referred to as “Panthers” in Express articles. One Facebook comment attributed a quote to legendary basketball coach Bob Mullen, who said there was no such thing as a Pantherette; that all Monticello athletes were Panthers.

     In any case, Monticello’s teams have now been the Panthers for decades, and everybody seems to be fine with it (although “Black Panthers” is still part of the school song).

     While the Panther nickname never generated the controversy of Native American nicknames, the result of the changes has been the same: People got used to them.

     Even Ray Behrends, who saw his Minotaurs nickname get taken away, was quoted in 1940 as saying: “As a kid in high school, it made you feel bad for a day. But I got over it.”

 

 

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