Whenever you get the universities from Brigham Young and Washington State playing each other, you can always count on somebody saying that one thing's for certain, the Cougars will win.
This is a play on names, of course, since both BYU and WSU have cougars as their mascot. It has nothing to do with actual cougars winning, which they would, no question, if they could make it into a lineup. If Bob Davis thinks he's such a tough Cougar, let him take on the kind that can run the 40 in about a second and eat venison with the skin still on.But of course, genuine cougars will never qualify for major college eligibility, not until they can pass the language requirement, for openers. The crack NCAA enforcement staff would rule against them in a matter of weeks.
It remains for only a handful of major schools, BYU and Washington State being two, to dedicate their athletic programs to admirable cougaresque tendencies, which is to say grace, agility, poise, tenacity, courage, aggressiveness, and a certain all-around Rambo-like nature. (Other cougaresque traits, those that aren't so romantic, such as a tendency to plunder livestock, beat up on animals smaller and slower than you are, and eat too much red meat, are, as a rule, either downplayed or not mentioned at all).
Tonight, when the football teams from WSU and BYU meet in Cougar Stadium and on ESPN, it will be a rare Cougar vs. Cougar showdown.
This particular football pairing, BYU vs. WSU, has only occurred once before in history, that being in the 1981 Holiday Bowl, where the Brigham Young Cougars won, 38-36.
In an attempt at a little Cougar one-upsmanship, the sports information department at BYU announced this week that its Cougar pedigree is the oldest of the two schools. The SID office's research showed that BYU became the Cougars in 1923, when an alum named David Rust donated two live native Utah Cougars that he had found, along with their mother, somewhere along the banks of the Colorado River, where he was a guide. BYU named them Cleo and Tarbo, for reasons unknown.
Cleo and Tarbo came on the scene in Provo a full four years before The Honorable Roland Hartley, then the governor of the state of Washington, donated, in 1927, a live cougar to the Washington State students, who named him Butch.
But all that means is that BYU had the first cougar that made a campus visit.
It is a point of historical fact - fully documented in the book "What's In A Nickname?" by Ray Franks of Amarillo, Texas - that Washington State had been known as "Cougars" ever since 1919, well before BYU.
Prior to 1919, the WSU students were referred to as Farmers - this because their original charter, granted in 1890, was for an agricultural college.
But they knew Farmers wasn't macho, not even in Pullman, not even in 1919, so they were always on the lookout for a different, more aggressive nickname.
Then, in October of 1919, the WSU football team went to Berkeley to play the California Golden Bears. (Now there was a nickname).
The Farmers beat the Golden Bears 14-0, whereupon a cartoonist in an Oakland newspaper portrayed Washington State as a mighty cougar, driving away a wimpering bear.
Washington State took the cue, and formally adopted the nickname on Oct. 28, 1919. For their next game, they played their arch-rival Idaho in nearby Moscow and won 37-0. They've been Cougars ever since.
In 1927, Butch became their first live, kept-in-a-cage Cougar. He was followed by Butch II, Butch III, Butch IV, Butch V, and Butch VI. All the Butches were given to the school by governors, who got them from the zoo. When Butch VI died in 1978 the practice ceased. No one knows exactly why, although it was not for lack of a name.
BYU stopped keeping live Cougars sometime in the '50s. They almost stopped way back in 1929, when Cleo and Tarbo escaped from their cage on 8th North in Provo and terrorized the campus. They were recaptured, however, and while Cleo died a year later, Tarbo hung on for a good many years, replaced later by a cougar named Sparrow.
Perhaps because of a lack of inventive names, the live-Cougar practice stopped at BYU. Perhaps, also, because the president of the school in the late '50s, a man named Ernest Wilkinson, thought BYU should change its nickname to "Pioneers." Denver University, which used that nickname, had dropped football and Pres. Wilkinson saw his chance.
A lot of people thought "Pioneers" was more descriptive of BYU football than Cougars, anyway. But they weren't BYU students - although a lot were students at the U. of U. - and the BYU student body basically told Wilkinson, in a polite, no-caffeine way, to do his pioneering elsewhere.
And so it remains. BYU is the Cougars. So is WSU. Tonight they meet. Live - but only in a manner of speaking. The Cougars will win. You did not hear that here first.