It started innocently enough; I was browsing Twitter in the wake of Arkansas’ 55-53 Liberty Bowl win over Kansas when I stumbled upon the history of Arkansas and Kansas in football. It was only two games until week. The teams played a home-and-home series in 1905 and 1906, with the Jayhawks winning both.
Okay, interesting enough. The Athletic‘s Matt Brown was generous enough to post a tweet of newspaper clippings from that era:
Hold up. Are you seeing what I’m seeing there? Kansas beat Arkansas in Fayetteville on October 7th, 1905. The Kansas City Star‘s headline the next day (I’m fairly confident that it is real) has an interesting sub-head: “Jayhawkers defeated the ‘Razor-Backs’ after a hard tussle”.
The what? According to the University of Arkansas, the football teams were first referred to as Razorbacks in a speech by Coach Hugo Bezdek – “they played like a wild band of razorback hogs” – in 1909. That’s four years after this newspaper headline! The student body voted to change the nickname in 1910, but the Star apparently already knew to refer to Arkansas’ football team as the Razorbacks.
Until this point, I have never heard that the term “Razorbacks” was already in use by the time Bezdek made his famous speech in 1909. I thought that was truly the origin story.
Perhaps this newspaper isn’t reliable. After all, read the closing line of the article, which claims that a guy for Kansas named Pooler “missed an 85-yard field goal”. Also, an Arkansas team captain was apparently ejected for a “slugging penalty”, but the Hogs refused to keep playing without their captain, so Kansas let him stay in the game. The Jayhawks team went hiking in the Ozarks after the game and found a scorpion to take back to the university’s zoological department.
Nevertheless, we need answers!
Update
It appears we do have some answers! This 2016 article in the Traveler details it nicely: it does in fact appear that Bezdek was not the first to describe his team as the “Razorbacks”… that term dates to at least 1902. Bezdek’s “wild band of razorback hogs” speech in 1909 merely provided the impetus to make the name change official.
So while this isn’t an Earth-shaking discovery that Bezdek didn’t coin the term, it’s still very interesting to know that “Razorbacks” had made it outside of Fayetteville by 1905, as it somewhat contradicts this line in the article:
Bezdek wasn’t the first person to refer to the Arkansas team as razorbacks. Students and sports writers in the area had been using the term razorback to describe the team in local newspapers as early as 1902. Bezdek is credited with popularizing the term ‘razorback,’ which went on to be used in a more colloquial and unofficial sense, Alison said.
It does in fact appear that it was already being used in a “colloquial and unofficial” sense before Bezdek, as evidenced by its use in a newspaper outside of the state.
The original name Cardinals, chosen in 1890 when cardinal red was chosen as the school color, was apparently not very popular given that a new nickname arose for the football team a decade later. The other color finalist – heliotrope, a bright purple – provides some interesting alternate history.
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