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Ohio State University forced to abandon scarlet and gray
Joe Blundo, The Columbus Dispatch
Ohio State University is no longer allowed to refer to its school colors as scarlet and gray, thanks to a surprising legal settlement announced Thursday night.
Effective today, the colors are officially known as“ruby and porpoise,” university officials said.
“It’s mostly semantics,” OSU spokeswoman April Uno said. “The new colors are just slightly different from the old ones.”
The settlement ends a 13-year court battle between OSU and tiny Philo Olmsted College in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Fans aren’t prevented from identifying the OSU colors as scarlet and gray, but no OSU website, publication or even song is permitted to use the terms.
Late in the evening, the OSU website had already begun referring to the Scarlet and Gray golf courses asRubyand Porpoise.
“It is a slight break from tradition, but we’re looking at it as an opportunity to update the university’s brand,” Uno said. “For example, we can incorporate some cute fish logos.”
The ruby-and-porpoise description was chosen by OSU after it ensured, through a hasty review of university trademarks, that it wasn’t already being used.
“The beauty of ‘porpoise’ is that no other school has ever thought to use it to describe gray,” Uno said.
The new color combination differs just enough from scarlet and gray to satisfy Olmsted lawyers, who sued Ohio State on April 1, 2003, for trademark infringement.
The suit, largely laughed off when filed, had languished in the courts for years.
Recently, however, the situation turned more serious when Olmsted archivists unearthed a document proving that the Michigan school had registered scarlet and gray with the little-known U.S. Bureau of Athletic Paraphernalia, Regalia, Insignia and Labels on April 1, 1875 — several years before OSU adopted the same colors.
In a last-ditch effort, OSU offered to pay Olmsted millions of dollars for the rights to the colors. But the smaller school refused: Olmsted, which has 600 students and no football team, noted that its success in collegiate ice croquet is diminished by any Ohio State use of its colors.
“Our ice-croquet teams have won several championships,” said Gustave Ferbert IV, president of Olmsted.
“We felt there was a substantial risk of confusion between OSU teams and ours if the color-infringement issue were not resolved.”
Will Buckeyes fans accept the change? The university will find out April 16 during the spring intra-squad football game.
Traditionally, the game pits a Scarlet team against a Gray team.
This year, it will feature Ruby vs. Porpoise, head coach Urban Meyer confirmed.
“Some of the guys will probably say they don’t want to be on the fish team,” he said. “I’ll tell them: ‘Porpoises beat up sharks. They’re tough.’ ”
OSU also changed the lyrics of Buckeye Battle Cry, one of the two fight songs, to remove “scarlet and gray.”
The new lyrics:
Drive! Drive on down the field, men of the ruby and porpoise;
Juke out that cornerback and put some hurtin’ on his corpus.
The color change, which came with little warning, seems to have caught OSU fans off-guard.
Several who were approached Thursday night at the Varsity Club near campus expressed disbelief.
“Get out of here,” said Harwood Pool IV, 36, of Pataskala. “Ruby and porpoise?
“Are you sure this isn’t just an April Fools’ joke?”