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Chief Wahoo, the mascot of the Cleveland Indians, expired on Monday after his eponymous baseball team was eliminated from the American League Division Series, swept in three games by defending World Series champion Houston Astros.
Officially, Wahoo was 71, although accounts vary with her exact age. According to some baseball historians, the chief could have been between 66 and 11 years old. His disappearance was inevitable since January, when Indian owner Paul Dolan and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred had decided that the team would not use the Chief Chief Wahoo Chief's logo afterwards. the 2018 season. The team turned to "Block C", which was the "main brand" of the Indians since 2016.
The Wahoo logo "is no longer suitable for use in the field," said Manfred in January.
Jim Thome, the newest inductee at the Cleveland Baseball Hall of Fame, has asked that his plaque in Cooperstown, New York, not include the leader.
Wahoo has been both loved and revered in all of his life, either as the familiar and affable face of a mediocre baseball team, or as a racist caricature of an already marginalized Amerindian population.
Some critics, including the newspaper that helped him create, had called on the team to purge it years ago. The Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board in 2014 called for a "clean break" of Wahoo.
For years, an Indian supporter donned a complex face painting and fake Native American feather headdress to encourage Cleveland under the pseudonym "Chief Chief Wahoo". Until recent years, players wore the controversial face of Wahoo on their caps and their batting helmets. This season, the team wore Wahoo only on his shirt sleeves.
He was also the frequent object of protests outside the field of origin of the Indians. In 1998, a group of protesters was arrested for burning a three-meter-tall Wahoo effigy on the outside of the stadium before the Cleveland home opener. The demonstrations continued each year on the day of opening; these will probably end with his disappearance.
In 2017, an Indian supporter laughed at the protesters in front of the stadium, saying, "They need a hobby, like putting on beads."
According to most accounts, Chief Wahoo was born nameless on May 3, 1942. An image of a young Indian man carrying a dagger and ax appeared on one of the Plain Dealer's after the baseball club had swept the Washington Senators in a two-game series.
After the following games, the drawing – nicknamed "The Little Indian" by the designer Fred George Reinert – continued to be broadcast, gaining popularity, making it easy to follow the results of the team. The comic book lasted 30 years, according to Belt magazine.
The official origin of Wahoo however came in 1947 when Indian owner Bill Veeck hired the designer, Walter Goldbach, then just 17, to draw a new logo for his team. Goldbach produced an amazingly similar Indian cartoon to the one Reinert published in Plain Dealer and the one who lived for several generations. He had orange-yellow skin, a grinning smile, a hanging nose and big eyes with a single feather protruding from a headband.
The former Plain Dealer columnist, George Condon, described Reinert's drawing and Goldbach's logo as "blood brothers", according to Belt.
"Chief Wahoo" was already a common nickname for American Indians after the popular cartoon "Big Chief Wahoo". This name was first published on October 6, 1950 in relation to the baseball team, praising the performance of right-handed pitch thrower Allie Reynolds, a member of the Creek Nation, which Cleveland traded to the Yankees in 1946.
The merchant said that Reynolds was "harder than Sitting Bull".
A year later, the team remodeled the logo so that Wahoo's face had a red skin that matched the team's color scheme.
Other experts date from the creation of Wahoo in 1899, the last year of the career of Private Louis Sockalexis, a "full-fledged Indian American" who played for the Cleveland Spiders. Sockalexis' newspaper renderings had wide eyes and an oversized nose. A drawing included feathers coming out of her hair.
The team's representatives over the past few years have defended Wahoo as part of Cleveland's baseball legacy, but have refrained from using it as the club's bid to host the match. stars 2019.
"Although we recognize that many of our fans had a long-standing attachment to Chief Wahoo, I finally agree with Commissioner Manfred's wish to remove the logo of our uniforms in 2019," said Dolan, the owner of the franchise, announcing the decision in January.
The team will continue to sell Wahoo products in order to retain brand ownership, according to the Associated Press.
"They should be congratulated for taking this step, [but] they took a small step forward, "Philip J. Yenyo, executive director of the American Indian Movement of Ohio, told The Post Philip J. Yenyo in January," They still do not go far enough. m get rid of it. [And] the nickname must disappear too. If they do not get rid of the name "Indians", our culture and spirituality will continue to be ridiculed by fans. They will always be dressed with a red face and feathers. "
First Published by the Washington Post
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