When is a dog not a dog? At Pacific University
Though the Pacific University school mascot is the Boxer, it does not refer – at least directly – to the popular breed of family dog, nor does it refer to the sport of boxing.
Yesterday Dog O’Day published a complete rundown of all NCAA schools with canine mascots, which included at the tail end the Pacific University Boxers.
As Pacific University Media Relations Director Joe Lang pointed out, while the school’s sports teams do use a stylized dog’s head logo, there is a little more backstory necessary.
As the school website explains, the backstory begins with a statue donated to the school in the late 1800s by the Rev. J.E. Walker and his mother, who were missionaries in China. The statue depicts a “qilin,” (pronounced chee-lin or ki-rin) a kind of spirit common in Asian cultures, which occasionally manifests as a dragon-dog hybrid, as with this statue.
It became a campus tradition for students to swipe the statue, then display their possession in an ostentatious manner. For the most part, this was done by male students in the campus fraternities.
As they would “fight” over the statue, campus newspaper The Index dubbed the statue “Boxer,” and the statue – and the practice of stealing and displaying it – continued for several generations.
Boxer went missing in 1969, never to return. A replacement statue was installed in the early 1980s, but eventually this replacement was also permanently misplaced.
Since Boxer was such an entrenched part of campus lore, the previous mascot of “Badgers” was changed in 1968 to the Boxers.
As newspaper The Oregonanian stated in November 1950, “He is a strange tradition and the spirit of Pacific. He’s their mascot, their emblem, the love of their life.”
A 12-foot-tall replica of Boxer was established on campus in 2006 – and has stayed there, as it is much too large and heavy to be moved.
Pacific University, founded in 1849, is located in Forest Grove, Ore., and their sports teams compete in the NCAA Division III Northwest Conference.
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