‘The Fighting Okra’ is a ‘sock-o’ college mascot

Sports opponents of Delta State University fear getting smacked by “The Fighting Okra” mascot that lives on the Delta State campus in Cleveland, Miss.

The Fighting Orka is lean, mean and green…and wears boxing gloves. Whap. Ka-Pow. Bam. Bop. Bonk.

 

Delta State, which has an enrollment of about 4,000 students, competes in the Gulf South Conference, NCAA Division II. 

In 1985, students decided their stodgy Delta State “Statesman” mascot may talk (or orate) a good game, but he did little to get the athletic teams and fans jacked up to punch out the competition.

 

Hannah Kistemaker of Mooresville, N.C., who was co-editor in chief of the Delta State student newspaper in 2017, said a member of the varsity baseball team came up with the okra idea, because the vegetable was “fuzzy and tough.”

“At the next basketball game in 1985, the baseball players climbed into the bleachers and began chanting: ‘Okra! Okra! Okra!’”

Kistemaker quoted student Raven Allison, who said: “Everyone loves The Okra, from little children to adults. The party does not start until The Okra shows up.”

“The Fighting Okra” is ranked fourth among the all-time list of “weird college mascots,” according to FirstPoint USA, a sports scholarship and university admissions agency.

With a bit of a 2024 makeover, “The Fighting Okra” could leap to the top of the heap, replacing “Sammy the Slug” of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sammy is depicted as a cute, bright yellow, slimy, shell-less mollusk.

 

The “second weirdest” on FirstPoint USA’s mascot list is the “Redwood Tree,” representing Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. The costume depicts a tree whose limbs and branches barely survived a weekend of heavy-duty campus partying.

 

In third place is Saint Louis (Mo.) University. Its mascot is a “Billiken,” a blue-and-white “mythical good-luck figure” – charming and devilish at the same time.

 

Ranked just below Delta State at Number 5 is Wichita (Kan.) State University with its mascot “WuShock,” who’s describe as “a big, bad, muscle-bound bundle of wheat.”

 

At No. 6 is the “Boll Weevil” of the University of Arkansas at Monticello (UAM). The boll weevil is “a pesky little insect – a beetle with a long snout – known for destroying cotton crops. (Ironically, UAM’s women’s teams carry the nickname “Cotton Blossoms.”)

 

Ranking seventh is The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., which has a geoduck named “Speedy” as its mascot.

 

Pronounced “gooey-duck,” the mollusk is native to the Pacific Northwest; it’s the world’s largest burrowing clam, weighing more than two pounds on average. It’s so large, it can’t fit into its own shell.

At the community college level, it’s hard to top the happy-go-lucky mascot known as “Artie the Artichoke,” who represents Scottsdale (Ariz.) Community College.

 

The pride of North Carolina, of course, is “The Fighting Pickle,” who is the mascot of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.

 

Some of the students who were admitted in the early 1970s were of “northern persuasion.” One was Larry Glickman of Albany, N.Y., an oboist. He fussed about the horrors of not finding “anyplace in Winston-Salem to get a decent pickle,” so he imported them from Manhattan. He became a campus hero and was memorialized with the selection of the school’s mascot.

Drop down to the high school level, and root for the Ridgefield (Wash.) High School “Spudders.” 

The school with an angry potato head mascot cheers: “Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew….”

It’s an adaptation from “The Lord of the Rings,” a fantasy novel released in 1954 by British author J. R. R. Tolkien.