Illini fans can't let go of their school mascot despite the cultural mockery the display entails.
Published in the Daily Southtown, Feb. 25, 2007
By Dennis Robaugh
They came to see the college boy dance.And he danced as never before. Dashing into the arena, the eyes of 17,000 upon him and many more watching from afar, Dan Maloney dashed in and strutted across the court.
"I just threw everything I possibly could, every bit of energy into it," said the young man, who may well be the last Chief Illiniwek to dance on command for University of Illinois sports fans.
They cheered and chanted. He kicked and flailed.
"Save the Chief! Save the Chief!"
He bowed to them.
They cried.
And he left them in their Illini orange and their black T-shirts of mourning.
Young and old, fans of the now-vanquished Chief Illiniwek wept a trail of misspent tears Wednesday night.
Maren Schuit, of Chicago, a 2004 U of I grad, cried as Maloney performed. Rick Legue, who donned the Chief headdress in 1966-67 and danced for the clapping students, admitted to tearing up as he told reporters "this is one of the saddest days of my life."
They claim to prize tradition. They even have convinced themselves Chief Illiniwek honors the powerful tribes of 10,000 Indian people who were found living here in the 1600s by the French.
But the campus custom carries no honor.
In the days before the college boy clad in his Chief Illiniwek costume fancy-danced for the last time as the symbol of the University of Illinois, fans made a run on Chief merchandise at the local stores in Champaign. They always will have these trinkets and bits of cloth to spark their memories, fond recollections of a farce born in the 1920s.
The U of I came into existence in 1867 -- as Illinois Industrial University - with dreams of being the "West Point for the working world," according to the school.
At the time, the last Illinois Indians, numbering fewer than 300 in a single village, were 35 years removed from relinquishing their lands and heading west. In fact, as the school was founded, this once large and dominant tribal people were again uprooted, leaving Kansas in 1867 to live on a reservation in what is now Oklahoma.
Their centuries-old traditions destroyed and their culture wiped away, the tribe merged into the remains of other displaced Indian people.
In 1885, the school changed its name to the University of Illinois to avoid being confused with schools serving delinquents of the day.
By the 1920s, the U of I boasted one of the strongest fraternity systems in the nation. The school president at the time, David Kinley, called the U of I "an oasis of intellectuality in a desert of fertility."
In this oasis, Chief Illiniwek was conceived.
Assistant director of bands Ray Dvorak was inspired by the football coach, Bob Zuppke, said to be smitten with the Illinois Indians' strength, smarts and spirit. Dvorak, in turn, enlisted Lester Leutwiler to create the Indian chief character. Leutwiler drew largely on his Boy Scout experience studying Native American customs.
He put on the costume and appeared at half-time during a 1926 football game. And so a cartoonish symbol was born to rally school spirit at the playing of games.
Eighty-one years later, scores of scribes descended on Champaign to chronicle the demise of a college-kid "tradition." They listened to 20-year-olds earnestly spout off about grief, injustice and lawsuits. The news cameras beamed pictures of their weepy faces, protests and vigils to our televisions.
Young Americans, like these college students and the recently graduated, face real problems these days.
The U of I generation weeping over the loss of a fancy-dancing mascot will enter an economy racked by a massive shift in its underpinnings.
They will have a harder time getting their financial footing, buying a house, starting a family, according to Demos, a non-partisan public policy center.
The college education they desperately need as a gateway to a good job is getting more expensive - adjusted for inflation, a semester's tuition cost has tripled in the past 25 years - and loans and grant money don't cover what they once did.
Wages aren't growing, either. They are shrinking.
And the war in Iraq has claimed thousands of American lives, many of them young men in their 20s who never had the benefit of a college education.
As a misbegotten symbol and an insult, Chief Illiniwek deserved to die.
Don't save the Chief.
Save your energy for the daunting prospects ahead of you.
Save your outrage for issues that really matter.
Save your tears for people who deserve your sorrow.