Gene's Blog: A Prince, a Queen and The King ride our Purple bandwagon

Purple evokes a strong emotion at St. Thomas, whether in our current student-athletes, our alumni, our student body, or other friends and fans.

Tommie Football is building a tradition of winning while wearing home purple. The Toms are 35-1 in their last 36 games in O'Shaughnessy Stadium.

Our basketball, soccer, baseball and hockey teams experience unity when they wear purple uniforms at road games.

Our golfers and softball and tennis players dress for success in purple for all competitions, home and away.

According to the revered global scholars at Wikipedia, the color purple has long been associated with royalty, authority and piety. One explanation dates to ancient times, when Tyrian purple dye was expensive to produce. It became a rare commodity, and only the wealthy could afford garments made with the purple dyes.

High-profile world figures -- as far back as the Roman Empire and later Catholic bishops, and even Queen Elizabeth -- have dressed in purple for special ceremonies.

In the Holy Bible, the Book of Mark has a purple reference. In the days before he was nailed to the cross, it was written that Jesus was dressed in purple by his Roman captors, who mocked him as "King of the Jews."

Elvis Presley owned a purple Cadillac convertible. On a visit to the White House to meet Richard Nixon, "The King" wore a purple velvet suit.

Purple is one of two colors to make the lyrics of America the Beautiful. It's also included in the title of songs performed by artists as diverse as Jimi Hendrix (Purple Haze)... Prince (Purple Rain)... The Who (A Man in a Purple Dress)... and Donny Osmond (Deep Purple).

"Across the globe, countries use the color purple to indicate honor, courage, royalty and leadership, faith and sacredness," wrote Jo Sabin in the Design Crowd blog. "Purple is a slightly quirky take on traditional navy blue -- the corporate world's favorite color. (It's been) a creative choice that has given the brands a strategic edge."

Sabin pointed to the popularity of purple in corporate logos including Hallmark, Yahoo!, Cadbury, Taco Bell, FedEx, Monster, Apogee Digital, Wonka Candy and Asprey's of London.

In professional sports, the Los Angeles Lakers, Minnesota Vikings, Baltimore Ravens, Sacramento Kings and the Phoenix Suns use purple as a distinctive brand identifier.

Purple Past

St. Thomas' first sports teams in the 1890s were intramural baseball squads labeled "Blues" and "Greys." It's believed that the Tommies' school colors of purple and gray evolved from those early baseball days.

The first reference to purple as a St. Thomas school color can be found in an archived roster from 1899. One of our university's first publications was the Purple and Gray Magazine, which debuted in 1912.

Purple remains an important part of our university branding and identity, another way that St. Thomas stands out. But the on-campus appeal of purple isn't limited to artists and designers. The color intrigued a former U.S. Marine after he was hired 50 years ago as our head football coach.

DuWayne Deitz wanted to "shake up" the sub-.500 football program he inherited. In his third season, 1972, Deitz launched his own experiment in branding as he introduced the nickname "Purple Tide" for his St. Thomas gridders. For part of that 1970s-1980s era, a large "T" was added to St. Thomas helmets, too.

The new nickname caught on and was regularly used in weekly stories by the Aquin student newspaper.

Our first Purple Tiders built momentum with a 6-4 finish. That 1972 roster included a rare feat for a small-college team. Four future NFL Draft picks played for Deitz that season: Senior defensive end Bill Palmer, junior halfback John Goebel, and sophomore offensive linemen Mike Julius and Mark Dienhart.

Deitz' 1973 squad tied a school record with nine victories; shared the conference championship with Minnesota-Duluth to end the program's 16-season MIAC title drought; and ended a five-game losing streak to archrival St. John's.

Purple Tide stuck with St. Thomas football into the 1980s, when Dienhart replaced Deitz as St. Thomas' head coach. But the nickname eventually drifted into the archives. Dienhart left his Tommie coaching roles in 1986, and left campus in 1990 to work in athletics at the University of Minnesota.

Not even the lobbying power of the campus student newspaper could keep Purple Tide afloat. In a December 1986 Christmas wish-list column, the Aquin sports staff asked the all-powerful Santa Claus to change our college nickname from Tommies to either the "Purple Tide," the "Tigers," or the "Greymen."

(In hindsight, the Aquin buried its own lead: It should have lobbied Santa to ditch his red suit... for a purple one.)

Purple Reigns

Our Tommiesports.com story last week on the best NCAA football records of the last decade had an interesting underlying theme: Purple ruled the 2010s.

Six of the 11 most successful NCAA football programs from 2010-2019 -- including Glenn Caruso's Tommie program -- all use Purple as a primary or lead accent color. The list was based on the best winning percentage by an NCAA football program over the last 10 seasons:

NCAA Football Best Win %: 2010-2019

(schools with Purple as a primary/accent school color listed in bold)

.945, Mount Union, D-III (138-8)

.934, Mary Hardin-Baylor, D-III (128-9)

.913, North Dakota State, FCS (137-13)

.911, Wis.-Whitewater, D-III (123-12)

.892, Alabama, FBS (124-15)

.871, St. Thomas, D-III (108-16)

.869, Northwest Missouri State, D-II (119-18)

.862, Colorado State-Pueblo, D-II (106-17)

.858, Linfield, D-III (97-16)

.855, Johns Hopkins, D-III (100-17)

.854, Minnesota State, D-II (111-19)

The Purple phenomena has been well documented in Division III, where each of the last 20 Stagg Bowl championship games have included one or two Purple powers. That includes 14 seasons -- 12 in a row from 2004-2015 -- where both Stagg teams wore purple in their uniforms or helmets.

A top-35 NCAA list of best 2010s football records would also include the Purple and White from LSU, and the Orange and Purple from Clemson -- the winners of three of the last four FBS national titles.

In all, the 2010s decade produced 40 NCAA football national champs and 40 national runners-up. Of those 80 teams, 29 wore purple as a primary or accent hue.

That's quite a run for a color that's represented in just 11% percent of NCAA Division III football teams, and worn by less than seven percent of Division I programs.

And don't forget Division III men's basketball: From 2010-2016, seven consecutive national champions and three of the seven runners-up wore purple, including the Tommie title teams in March 2011 and March 2016.

Two Purple schools also rank 1-2 in another important category: Best Real Animal Mascots in College Football.

The Total Pro Sports website listed its top 25, and LSU's mascot, a Bengal tiger named Mike, repped purple with the No. 2 rank. At No. 1 were Leo III and Una, lion and lioness mascots from the Purple and Gold teams at North Alabama. Leo and Una live on campus next to the president's residence in a $1.3 million, 12,000-foot, climate-controlled habitat.

This is usually the place in the blog, when most people have stopped reading, where I make up something for a big finish. But sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Purple is so hot these days that a quarterback who wore it, LSU's Joe Burrow, was chosen first in the 2020 NFL Draft. Yet it's not Joe but rather his school's mascot, Mike The Tiger, who has his own personal website.

It's one more reason why -- with apologies to fans of the Gopher Volleyball coach McCutcheon, that British actor with a last name of Grant, and Minnesota's Happy Warrior Humphrey -- our favorite hue will always be Purple.

Gene's Blog is a sports column penned by UST sports information director Gene McGivern. Gene is in his 26th season at St. Thomas and 32nd overall in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. He blogs periodically on various topics regarding the Tommies, the MIAC and Division III sports.

If you have comments or questions, e-mail Gene at ejmcgivern@stthomas.edu

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Gene's Blog: A Prince, a Queen and The King ride our Purple bandwagon

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