Marquette’s TBT Team Fixed Their Very Not Good Name Change

So, on Monday, the Marquette alumni team that plays in The Basketball Tournament every summer announced a rebranding. While I appreciate the idea as to where they were going with it, the fact of the matter is that intentionally heaping praise on Jim Hellwig aka The Ultimate Warrior is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

On Wednesday afternoon, more than two days after the idea was met with nearly universal negative reactions because Jim Hellwig made it very clear that he was a homophobic racist during the course of his life, the alumni team announced that they were chucking their rebranding in the nearest garbage bin.

The statement in the tweet reads as follows:

After further review, we have decided to go back to GOLDEN EAGLES. We were not aware of and do not stand for any negative views associated with the rebrand. WE. ARE. (Still) the GOLDEN EAGLES.

I kind of don’t buy the “were not aware of” part of the statement if we’re being quite honest. You would think that Item #1 on the “should we use the famous wrestler man’s name and logo for our name and logo” to-do list is “Google search ‘Ultimate Warrior controversy’” and see what happens. That’s how you find the Vice article that I linked to on Monday with the title “WWE is Whitewashing The Ultimate Warrior’s Bigoted Past” and a Deadspin article from 2014 titled “The Ultimate Warrior Was An Insane Dick.”

As I alluded to in Monday’s article: This stuff is not hard to find if you’re trying to make sure your kewl name idea is actually kewl. It’s easy enough to find even if you’re not a wrestling fan that’s been staying up to date on the various not-so-great activities of your favorite wrestlers.

Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now. The team will stick with the Golden Eagles moniker that they’ve been running with for each of their first five trips into TBT. Speaking of TBT, that’s set to get started in mid-July with the Wichita and West Virginia regionals on July 16-20 and 17-21 respectively. The Columbus and Illinois regionals will follow the next weekend, specifically on July 23-27 and 24-28 respectively. We have to be getting close to the announcement of a bracket for the event since we’re coming up on six weeks away, so we’ll keep our eyes and ears open for what’s up with all of that as Golden Eagles looks to defend their 2020 TBT title.