Greensboro Gargoyles

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At this point I'm sure most readers of this site know that I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes because some weird idea occurs to me and I spend way too much time looking into it. Indeed, I'm guessing that at this point most of my readers probably enjoy these rabbit holes, if only because anyone who doesn't got fed up with this site years ago. So follow me, dear reader, down another one of my rabbit holes. The title of this rabbit hole is:

Why do so few teams use purple as a team color?

Now, before we can spend too much time on this, it's worth asking if it's actually true. There's no shortage of things where people ask why something is the way it is and the answer is that it isn't the way they think. Well, it really is the case that not many teams use purple. Between the NHL, PWHL, AHL, ECHL, and SPHL there are over a hundred professional hockey teams in North America. You'll easily find dozens that use red as one of their team colors, dozens that use blue as one of their team colors, and dozens that use black as one of their team colors. You won't find quite as many with green, yellow, or orange but you'll still break a dozen. But the just-founded Greensboro Gargoyles are one of only four professional hockey teams that use purple. (I won't mention the others here in case some of my readers want to try to guess, but the answer is at the other side of this asterisk*.) The situation isn't much different in other sports. Look at baseball and again, there's four. It's a similar story in soccer and lacrosse. The one exception is basketball.

So why is it like this? There's no way to know for certain — it's not like I can find every single person who picked a team's colors and ask them why they chose what they chose and didn't choose what they didn't choose — but of course that isn't going to stop me from wondering, or from trying to come up with possible explanations.

My first thought was that it had something to do with heraldry. After all, coats of arms are arguably the original team logos. Maybe the fact that purple isn't used in coats of arms is having some subconscious effect. There's just one problem, which is that purple is used in coats of arms, although not often. And orange, which as I noted above is more common in sports colors than purple is, isn't used in heraldry at all. So that doesn't explain it.

Maybe it's something to do with what colors get used on flags? No, because many (perhaps most) flags are based on heraldry, so saying it has something to do with flags is just another way of saying it has something to do with heraldry, and I've already rejected that notion.

Warm colors versus cool colors? Unlikely, because there's no real bias toward warm or cool colors: As noted above, the most common colors are red (warm), blue (cool), and black (neutral).

Okay, so let's get crazy. Linguists have noted that there's actually a pattern to color names. It may seem surprising to those of us who speak a language with words for colors like sepia and vermillion, a language which can make a distinction between turquoise, aquamarine, and cyan, but there are languages that only have names for three or four colors. And as it turns out, there are definite patterns to the order in which colors get their own word:

• Every language has a word for black/dark and white/light.
• If a language has words for three colors, the third color will be red.
• If a language has words for five colors, the fourth and fifth will be green and yellow. If it has words for four colors, the fourth will be one of these two, although it could be either one.
• If a language has words for six colors, the sixth color will be blue.
• If a language has words for seven colors, the seventh color will be brown.
• The next four colors to get their own words are, in alphabetical order, grey, orange, pink, and purple. If a language has words for eleven colors it will have all four of these; if it has words for eight, nine, or ten colors it could be any combination of these.

So at this point I've written over six hundred words on the topic and I haven't come up with any good answers. I suppose I could go with the simplest, which is that the most common colors for sports teams are the colors that people call their favorite, but no, it turns out that purple is more popular than red (as is green). In short, I really have no idea, and I should probably be ashamed of myself for droning on about this for as long as I have without having anything even remotely resembling an answer. But you know what? I don't have an answer and I don't feel ashamed about it and you're just going to have to accept that. You've put up with my crap for long enough. You should know by now what you've signed up for.

Wait! Don't close the—

Damn, I think I just lost a healthy chunk of my readers right there.

Anyway, for those who are still here, how about I actually talk about the Greensboro Gargoyles?

Obviously the reason I went down this rabbit hole in the first place is because, as I mentioned before, the newly-formed Greensboro Gargoyles are one of only four professional hockey teams that have purple as a team color. Their other colors are grey, dark yellow, and black, which makes for a color scheme that is quite striking. It's a little on the goth side, sure, but what do you expect when the team is called the Gargoyles? The team tries to be clever in a way that truly isn't necessary by referring to the colors as "Gargoyle grape", "Greensboro gold", and "Midnight" (I'm assuming grey isn't officially a color, which is odd since the logo has more grey in it than purple or dark yellow). Guys: this sort of goofy alliteration is not necessary. And there's really no way to make this shade of purple, which looks so ominous in the logo, sound less ominous than to brand it "grape". It's fucking purple. Call it fucking purple. You can even do that literally: say the official colors are "fucking purple", "yellow from the depths of Hell", "dark as shit black" and "the grey of the damned". It's a lot less kid friendly, but a lot more appropriate to the logo.

You may be wondering if gargoyles have anything to do with Greensboro, if there are any prominent buildings with gargoyles there. I don't think so. I won't swear that there's not a single building in the city with them, but in the countless times I've visited the place I've never noticed any, and yeah, it's the sort of thing I notice (be glad I'm not about to head down a gargoyle rabbit hole now). Certainly no one hears someone mention Greensboro and thinks, "Oh, yeah, that's the city with all the gargoyles!" As best as I can tell, the team chose the name because it's cool and it alliterates. Both of which, to be fair, are true. Honestly, I think that's about all you need sometimes. It's certainly the coolest name a hockey team in Greensboro has ever had (the only other names are Generals and Monarchs), and possibly the coolest name any sports team in Greensboro has ever had (although the baseball team called the Greensboro Bats definitely gives it a run for its money and just may edge it out). So let's not worry about how appropriate-to-the-city the name is. It's a cool name, and it lends itself to a cool logo. That's good enough for me.

Oh, and the logo has purple in it, too. Seriously, I still don't get why more teams don't put purple in their logos. More teams should.

*	The others are the Reading Royals of the ECHL, the Knoxville IceBears of the SPHL, and the Minnesota Frost of the Professional Women's Hockey League.

Final Score: 0 points.
Penalties: Alliteration, 2 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: Cool-Logo, -5 pts; Cool-Name, -4 pts.