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All I want for Christmas
is the Rainbows back

This year when I asked my sister what she wanted for Christmas she told me that she wanted a University of Hawaii sweatshirt. The bookstore sells sweatshirts with two different logos, the university logo, and the University of Hawaii "H." I sent an e-mail back to her asking which logo she wanted on her sweatshirt. "I want the rainbow logo." That started me thinking.

Recently while attending a conference, I took a tour of Yale University. One of the stops was a bronze statue of Theodore Dwight Woolsey, the school's most beloved president. While the rest of the statue had the typical dull earth tones of a bronze statue, the right foot was brightly polished. There is a story behind the polished foot.

When Woolsey was president of Yale he would often attend the rowing competitions. After giving the team a pep talk he would place his foot on the bow of the boat and push it out into the water. The team was doing well, and a legend arose that his foot bestowed luck on the boat. Fans believed that whenever he pushed the boat from shore the team could not lose.

Students of Yale now believe that by rubbing the foot of Woolsey's statue they will receive luck. As students head to a difficult final exam, they walk by the statue and rub the foot for luck. As I rubbed the foot, I wondered why UH didn't have similar traditions.

When I returned to Hawaii, I did some research online. I found that UH did have such a legend. In 1923 the UH football team was one of the lowest-ranked teams in the nation. During a football game against No. 1-ranked Oregon State, a rainbow appeared over the stadium. UH went on to win 7-0. They went from the lowest-ranked team in the nation to the highest-ranked team. The legend formed that UH would never lose a football game when a rainbow appeared over the stadium.

In 2000 the University of Hawaii replaced the rainbow logo that represented its athletic teams with the new "H" logo. To me the "H" stood for "haole." The letter "H" does not come from any Hawaiian tradition, but was brought here by European explorers. To make it seem local, university officials dressed up the "H" to make it look Hawaiian. I guess to me it is still just the haole "H" in a headdress. The university claimed that it was a stronger logo, but that the rainbow would still be seen on all UH athletics documents. I was online looking at the UH athletics pages and didn't find a single rainbow logo. Perhaps Web pages don't count as "publications."

Shortly after the announcement, I received an e-mail from a friend working for NASA asking if we were now the homophobic warriors. At the time, the university was claiming that the decision had nothing to do with the stigmatic association with homosexuality. Later, university officials admitted that it was to avoid the association between homosexuality and the rainbow being transferred to the UH teams. Either way, I felt that I had lost a connection with the university. I had associated the UH rainbow with a sense of school pride, and the Journal of Pacific Business agreed with me, terming the move a "case in poor marketing."

The days of "GO BOWS" bumper stickers are gone. It is sad for UH to lose this tradition that spanned 77 years -- perhaps longer. The symbol of the goddess Manoa was the rainbow. Perhaps this is just the musings of a dumb haole that puts too much stock in his interpretations of Hawaiian legends, but I feel that by ridding the university system of the rainbow logo we have again turned our backs on Hawaiian tradition. I even heard someone suggest that the flooding that occurred on campus in October was really Manoa crying. She was trying to wash away the university that turned its back on her with her tears.

In the end, my sister isn't getting a sweatshirt. The bookstore was out of sweatshirts with the university logo -- they only had the haole "H" sweatshirts in stock. I refuse to buy any product with that logo.

My sister is visiting me in Hawaii to see me graduate. On commencement day Dec. 19, as I walked in the ceremony, I stopped for a moment and looked up. I had hoped to see my rainbows, but I didn't. I wondered if I should join Manoa in her tears.

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