Naming rights (and wrongs)

Ongoing mascot controversy hits home for Tulsa Union High School

Two-a-day camps will soon mark time at Tulsa Union High School, part of a district that encompasses 2.8 million square feet of facilities that dot the flat, retail-rich landscape along the I-69 corridor of southeast Tulsa. There’s an ever-present “U” in blood red attached to each building in the school’s 28-square-mile footprint.

Union, with nearly 16,000 students, is a 6A school, the highest competitive level of high-school sports in the state. The football team there is a tradition-rich program, the winner of seven state championships since 2002. On the practice fields, young men will run drills and sprints in the Oklahoma heat, the sound of their shoulder pads colliding punctuated by coaches’ whistles. While rituals such as hazing have largely been outlawed, penalties have been devised to protect the most vulnerable players, and though advances in sports medicine have made football what some would call a more civilized affair, these young men will compete as they have for decades for the opportunity to wear the colors of the school, just a short drive from the capitals of several Indian nations.

On Friday nights, the players who prove their mettle compete under the name “Redskins.”

Recent reports say 70 different high schools in the United States that use the name “Redskins” as a mascot—6 of them are in Oklahoma, and Tulsa Union High School is one of the largest. For those not in “Native America,” the most recognizable “Redskins” are the Washington, D.C. affiliate of the National Football League—or at least, it used to be. After a legal battle lasting more than two decades, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled earlier this summer that the “Redskins” name would no longer be protected for use by the NFL franchise, acting under a section of the Trademark Act of 1946 which states trademarks cannot disparage others or bring them into contempt or disrepute. 

A joint statement issued by Oneida Indian Nation representative Ray Halbritter, and National Congress of American Indians executive director Jackie Pata, explained: “The U.S. Patent Office has now restated the obvious truth that Native Americans, civil rights leaders, athletes, religious groups, state legislative bodies, Members of Congress and the president have all echoed: taxpayer resources cannot be used to help private companies profit off the promotion of dictionary defined racial slurs.”

This doesn’t mean that the team, or other teams using “Redskins,” can’t continue to use the name. It means that the trademark associated with its use is no longer protected. Now, anyone can print products with the “Redskins” logo, without fear of litigation from the NFL for not being an “officially licensed” vendor.

Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins who refused to change the name, penned this statement in an open letter to the media and fans: “So when I consider the Washington Redskins name, I think of what it stands for. I think of the Washington Redskins traditions and pride I want to share with my three children, just as my father shared with me — and just as you have shared with your family and friends.”

In Grantland columnist Charles P. Pierce wrote, “A slur remains a slur, no matter how much you loved your grandfather, who took you to see ol’ Sonny Jurgensen slinging the ball around. It is 2014 and we don’t call people ‘Redskins’ anymore. The NFL would like the whole controversy to go away. This is a simple fix made complicated by one man’s wallet and the empowered insensitivity of much of his fan base.”

The ruling could potentially cost the NFL millions. Profit from merchandise sales is shared between the league and its team owners. The ruling is being appealed, and the legal limbo could last years.

A post on the team’s website notes that many high schools around the country have decided they will keep their “Redskins” mascots, regardless of what detractors say. When it comes to the Washington Redskins PR machine, small town high-school principals are powerful allies.

As booster clubs scurry to bolster their merchandise inventory for the start of the season and cheerleader squads put finishing touches on routines, the administrative wing of Tulsa Union schools stiff-arms what has become an almost annual attack on their school’s mascot, now a well-rehearsed playbook that offers access to stem the initial rush of calls from journalists and reporters, but eventually tires, taking their ball and heading home.

“When you really think about this word in terms of our mascot, in a lot of ways as a district, we feel like it defines us as a very diverse and close-knit community that exhibits pride and spirit in terms of history, what we stand for and obviously our accomplishments,” Union Schools Superintendent Kirt Hartzler said in a recent interview with Tulsa World.

Dr. Hartzler, who has taught and coached in the Union school system since 1986, explained that the “district doesn’t hear complaints about the name from within the community or the people it represents.” In the Tulsa metro area, 92 percent of residents do not identify as “American Indian,” according to the most recent U.S. Census.

Tulsa Union’s athletics programs are branded primarily as “Union.” The “Redskins” nickname is often displayed secondarily. Unlike the mascot’s NFL counterpart, there is rarely an accompanying visual, the name represented instead in type. For the “Split U” logo on the side of the player’s helmets, Tulsa Union pays an annual fee to to the University of Miami, which owns the rights.

A growing number of newspapers and reporters have decided to refuse to refer to any team as the “Redskins.”

Local sports reporter Al Jerkens refuses to use the word on his daily radio or television broadcasts. USA Today—Tulsa Union is often prominently listed there, in the national football poll—refers to the school as “Tulsa Union High School,” preceded to the left by the “Split U” logo. If Union decided to drop its offensive mascot, it’d likely be awhile before anyone outside Green Country noticed. 

When Northeastern State University, just up the road from Union Tulsa Schools, in Tahlequah, changed its team moniker from the “Redmen” to the “River Hawks” in 2006, the estimated cost hovered somewhere around $2 million, but they didn’t have much of a choice. The NCAA, in a rare moment of clarity, deemed in 2005 that nicknames or mascots deemed “hostile or abusive” would not be allowed on team uniforms or other clothing beginning with any NCAA tournament, or for football’s sake, post-season play. Bowing to the potential for lost revenue associated with this ruling, most teams changed their names, a notable exception being the Florida State Seminoles, who have been granted exclusion due to the nature of its relationship with the Seminole Tribe.

“The biggest cost is not developing a new name and mark,” said Allen Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates, a New York-based branding firm, whose past clients include the NFL. In a piece for Marketplace, Adamson said, “The biggest cost by far is applying it to all the points of touch that a brand like the [Washington] Redskins exists on: merchandise, signage, training facilities and the stadium. That would be several million dollars, probably under $5 million. They can do it aggressively in six months, sometimes even less. Sometimes it can take a couple years to do the transition.” Adamson said those costs would be largely offset by all the fans who rush out to the old gear, now a collector’s item, and by fans buying new merchandise.

Baxter Holmes, the Oklahoma-born  sportswriter for The Boston Globe and a Native American, recently wrote a piece explaining, “There was a time when terms like ‘Chinaman’ or ‘Negro’ or ‘Wetback’ were accepted, but we’ve gotten better as a society. And I would say that the same is true here. If it’s a term that’s greatly offensive to an entire race of people, I can’t see the justification in keeping it.” Dana Lone Hill, a Native American writing for The Guardian, wrote, “I know I would not let someone call me a ‘redskin’ to my face, nor would I allow anyone to address my children in that manner.”

For now, our local Redskins are aligning themselves with their professional counterparts in Washington, D.C. Without a governing body such as the NCAA or Trademark and Patent Office to levy financial penalties that outweigh the cost of a potential name change, it’s likely to stay that way.