Honolulu Lite
COMEDIAN Bobcat Goldthwait used to tell a story about doing a concert after a Texas college football game. During the game, the school mascot, a big white horse, galloped into a wall and was killed. PC terrorists put hit
on UH mascot"How bad does your team have to suck before your mascot commits suicide?" Goldthwait asked the students during his routine. In Texas, where they take their football and mascots extremely seriously, Goldthwait nearly ended up in the same condition as the horse.
So now in Hawaii, Goldthwait might ask, how bad does your team have to suck before the student body puts out a hit on the mascot?
The ironic thing is that the University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors don't suck. They've broken their 19-game losing streak and it looks like they are ready to play some football. (That's sports announcer talk. According to announcers, football players are always ready to "play some football," golfers hit great "golf shots" and baseball players "love to play the game of baseball." This is, I suppose, in contrast to those times when a golfer kicks a 40-yard field goal and a baseball player makes a great "golf shot" over the left field wall.)
Anyway, the Rainbow Warriors are doing all right, but suddenly some politically correct hitmen are calling in death threats to the "Warrior" mascot, who basically is about 50 pounds of foam-rubber muscles with a huge head and Hawaiian headdress. UH officials, having the backbone of, well, foam rubber, caved in to the gutless terrorists and have sidelined the cartoonish mascot.
Now, according to UH president Kenneth Mortimer, the whole mascot issue is under review, which means the Warrior mascot is history and will be replaced by a more politically correct alternative that won't offend anyone in the world.
Let's see if we can help out here. What we want is a mascot and team name that is appropriate to Hawaii but shows respect for everyone and everything; animal, vegetable or mineral.
How about the "University of Hawaii Quarrelsome Papayas."
Papayas are well-known in Hawaii. But here's the good part, they won't be "fighting" papayas or "warrior" papayas, because that hurts world peace. They are just "quarrelsome papayas," a little high strung, but anxious to contribute to the dialogue of football in the context of on-field expression.
If we want the team to have a harder edge, we can rename it "Acrimonious Pineapples," "Bickering Breadfruits" or the "Irritated Guavas," but that's probably abuse of produce.
In the PC world, you can't use animals as mascots. But considering the UH's recent scientific breakthroughs, maybe the sportso-terrorists would let us call our team the "Gregarious Green Mice." We wouldn't even have to change the team colors. As the team takes the field, the band can play "Send in the Clones."
If we want to go to the far end of political correctness, we might want to name the team the "Semi-Indigenous Misunderstood and Distraught Dispute Resolution Collective." The mascot could be a large gray blob named "Poo Poo the Compassionate," suggestive of absolutely nothing, inspirational to no one and, so, perfectly representative of these hypersensitive times we live in where no slight is too small, no offense too trivial and no game worth winning if it means victimizing and hurting the self-esteem of an opposing team.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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