Rupert Cornwell: Out of America

Why a university football team has been forced to abandon its Indian mascot after 81 years

Published: 04 March 2007

At the University of Illinois these days it's not Hail to the Chief, but Farewell to the Chief. Only the Chief in question is, sadly, not George Bush but Chief Illiniwek, for 81 years the mascot of the basketball and gridiron football teams of that Midwestern seat of learning - until the week before last, when he became the latest victim of America's mania for political correctness.

I would have known nothing of the Chief's fate had it not been for my wife Susan, a U of I alumna. The news swept through her class of 1977 in a prairie fire of emails, by turns indignant, resigned and downright cynical at an event which, if truth be told, had been on the cards for years. But that doesn't make it any less irritating.

Even when the Illini Indians ruled that part of the world there never was a real Chief Illiniwek. But in 1926 someone had the bright idea of inventing him, to perform a dance during U of I football games.

I never saw the Chief in action, but apparently he would take the field at half time, his face greased with warpaint, and decked out in magnificent regalia acquired from a real Sioux chieftain, with a flowing head-dress in the team colours of orange and black. Then he (or she: there was once a Princess Illiniwek to do the honours) performed a three-minute war dance before leaving the field as the crowd chanted "Osk-ee-wow-wow". (Don't ask me what that means, just take my word for it.)

Anyway, all good harmless fun, you would think. But not so. The NCAA, the governing body of college, or university, sport in the US, condemned the Chief as a "hostile and abusive" mascot. Quite how strenuously actual native Americans object is a matter of debate. One poll suggests four out of five don't care about the use of Indian mascots and symbols for sports teams, but another has found exactly the opposite.

Unarguably, however, these emblems are not intended as insults, but to convey might, toughness and courage.

And, one might ask, why the Chief, and not other more demeaning Indian mascots, names and symbols scattered around professional sport here? Everyone knows about the Washington Redskins, the capital's beloved NFL team. For years the PC police have been complaining about the name (though despairing fans would surely embrace any new name if it guaranteed an improvement in their lousy on-field performance).

But what about the Kansas City Chiefs, also of the NFL? Or the Atlanta Braves of baseball, whose fans are wont to break into a grunting "tomahawk chop" if the team looks like scoring a run? The apogee of political non-correctness was the 1995 World Series, when the Braves took on the Cleveland Indians, known as the "Tribe" to their fans, and whose emblem is Chief Wahoo, a cartoon figure with a red-painted face, cheeky grin and a jaunty little feather in his hair?

So why pick on poor old Chief Illiniwek? The answer, as usual, is money. When I arrived in the US it took me a while to realise that college sports is a massive business, in the case of football and basketball as big, if not bigger, than their professional major league counterparts. NCAA basketball, for instance, is currently in the middle of an 11-year TV contract with CBS, said to be worth a cool $6bn (£3.1bn). This sort of money gives the NCAA enormous clout. When it threatened to bar U of I from hosting lucrative post-season playoff games unless it canned Chief Illiniwek, it not surprisingly buckled.

But the affair leaves a pretty sour taste. These politically cleansed, theoretically amateur college sports are riddled with backhanders and sundry dubious incentives to secure the best players. And why has the NCAA allowed Florida State University to keep the Seminoles nickname for its football team, not to mention its mascot Chief Osceola, who rides a horse on to the field and thrusts a flaming spear into the turf before home games? The answer is that FSU offers scholarships and other aid to the members of the Seminole tribe who still live in the state.

That option, alas, is not open to the U of I, since the Illini were wiped out in colonial times and their closest descendants, the Peoria Indians, now live in distant Oklahoma.