The USC Trojans Have the Dumbest Mascot Origin Story in the Big Ten

I get curious about really dumb things, often only tangentially related to football. Why are they called "bowl games"? When was the original Purdue Harbor? What's the story behind the USS Illinois bell in Memorial Stadium? It's a compulsion. For the half-dozen of you that actually read the articles, I appreciate it! But my damn brain would be fixated by these silly questions whether I had an audience or not. You lot are just along for the ride.

Over at Off Tackle Empire a few years back, BoilerUp89 and I argued that the Michigan State Spartans were the worst team nickname in the Big Ten. It was a fun shitpiece; I loved writing it and deeply enjoyed some of the angry comments raging about the valor and/or the kill/death ratio of Leonidas and the 300. But with the Bigger Ten and the introduction of the four Pac-12 teams, I thought that there was a new candidate for stupidest mascot: the USC Trojans.

The conceit, obviously, is that the Trojans famously fought off the Greeks for 10 years, only to let a wooden horse full of troops into their city walls. The Greeks snuck out of the horse, killed the guards, sacked the city, ended their civilization. It's not exactly a great ending for the Trojans, although it is a classic of high school literature, as well as a warning about those bearing gifts.

But that got me to wondering. When did USC start using the Trojan as a team name, and even more importantly, why?

The when is easy: February 24, 1912 in the Los Angeles Times, Saturday morning edition. Prior to then, the USC sports teams had been referred to as Weslyans, Methodists, Cardinal, and Cards. No one from USC enjoyed the status quo, so the athletic director allegedly reached out to Owen R. Bird, a newly-minted local collegiate sports writer at the LA Times. Bird was asked to pick a new nickname for USC, or at least test out some new ones. This isn't all that strange; nearly every school mascot from that day and age ultimately derives from some sports writer's column.

This is a good moment to address some changes in etymology. Today, thanks to its context in computer hacking, the idea of a Trojan summons the story of enemies in the horse. But that wasn't always the primarily detail from the Iliad!

In the 1910s, the connotation of a Trojan was someone of endurance, of a plucky underdog, of holding out for longer and working harder than others, someone with impregnable walls and fortitude. (This is also why the condom brand, created around 1910, featured the Trojan helmet, not the damn horse. I don't need to explain any further. Make your jokes in the comments.) "Working like a Trojan" was a commonly-used positive affirmation for someone that had been toiling endlessly, cheerfully, and diligently, although that usage is nearly lost now. And the idea of Troy as a real, historical place was in the ether, as the archeological site had been discovered just a few decades earlier in 1870, although the actual historicity of something approximating the Trojan War remains debatable at best.

In later interviews, Bird would explain that he chose the Trojan as a mascot for USC because they were "under terrific handicaps... They were facing teams that were bigger and better-equipped, yet they had splendid fighting spirit. The name 'Trojans' fitted them." It's somewhat hard to imagine, but USC were the scrappy underdogs of the day in California behind teams like Stanford, Occidental, and Pomona. But after that original reference in 1912, the name stuck. The school formally adopted it a few years later, the school newspaper became the Daily Trojan, and Tommy Trojan and Traveler the horse have been appearing in various forms for nearly a century.

So there you have it. The University of Southern California's nickname was initially bestowed upon the USC track team by a young sports journalist based on a now-outdated connotation of a semi-historical city involved in a mostly ahistorical war in which they fumbled the bag so hard and fucked up so royally that their civilization collapsed into dust and are solely remembered for being idiots or for a brand of condom.

Fight on for ol' SC.