The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership. 

As everyone knows, the sports teams for Anson High School are called the Bearcats. But what exactly is a bearcat and how did the school adopt it as their mascot?

First of all, let’s establish there really is an animal called a bearcat. Also known as the binturong, it is a reclusive 50-pound mammal native to Southeast Asia that somewhat resembles a cross between a raccoon and a beaver. 

I think we can also establish that this animal is not what Anson Schools had in mind.

The most famous use of “bearcats” as a sports mascot is the University of Cincinnati. Known as the Bearcats since 1914, the name is said to originate with a cartoon in the local paper coinciding with the school’s football contest with the University of Kentucky, who were known as the Wildcats. After a 14-7 Cincinnati victory, the paper published a cartoon showing a bedraggled Kentucky Wildcat being chased by a creature labeled “Cincinnati Bear Cat.” The name stuck and the school achieved a level of sports prominence when they won NCAA basketball championships back to back in 1961 and 1962. 

But the bearcat name goes back further than that. A company called Stutz sold a car called the Bearcat beginning in 1912. The Stutz Bearcat was actually one of the more popular cars of its day, a sporty runabout that appealed to the wealthy and sold for the equivalent of $50,000 in today’s money. The Great Depression, however, effectively put an end to its production, as the market for luxury automobiles all but dried up. The nameplate earned a bit of notoriety with a new generation in the early 1970s (and that’s how I know of it) when CBS produced a television series called “Bearcats!” which featured the car in a modernized Western format that was probably intended to compete with the similar-ish Wild Wild West.

The stories, set in the pre-WWI West, center around the heroes’ private security work for prosperous clients. Rather than charging a traditional fee, they extracted from the client a blank check, with the amount charged to be determined by just how difficult or dangerous the job proved to be once it was completed. “If you can put a price on it, you don’t need us badly enough,” was their motto. Typical adventures included learning who was setting fire to oil wells, unraveling a plot where German Deutsches Heer soldiers dressed as American troops raided Mexican border towns hoping to force Mexico into a war with the United States, and stopping mercenaries from sabotaging medical supplies being sent overseas to the Allies of World War I. 

So, how does this all tie in to the naming of Anson High School sports teams? The consensus opinion among long-time Anson residents I spoke with is that the Bearcats name was chosen from a list of potential nicknames when the school system was integrated in the late 1960s, the feeling being that it was a relatively unique name which was not shared by any other teams in the area, and perhaps owing a bit to the popularity of the successful Cincinnati Bearcats basketball teams of the era. It is somewhat interesting that the local interpretation of the name tends more toward “tiger” than either “bear” or “wildcat.” I guess we can call that the Clemson Effect.

If anyone has any additional insight into the AHS Bearcats nickname, we’d love to hear it.