Gastonia Honey Hunters

58

According to the Gastonia Honey Hunters website, the team is named after two things. One: the honey badger. I'm sure you saw the video several years ago, so you don't need me to explain that one. Two: Ransom Hunter. There you could probably use some explanation. Ransom Hunter was an entrepreneur in Gaston County, widely believed to be the first freed slave in the county to own land. He was apparently pretty damn shrewd. Having been trained during his enslavement as a farrier, he opened a horse stable upon being freed, and used the money he made there to buy some land. The land he bought was basically considered useless because it was so full of rocks that you couldn't farm it, but Hunter had a plan. He hired people to dig up the rocks and then sold those rocks for use in road construction. And once enough of the rocks had been cleared out, the land could be farmed on, so he sold the land to other freed slaves who could then use it for farming. From all this and other businesses, he made enough money to donate land for two different churches, a cemetery, and a school for black children. The school was also his brainchild, incidentally.

Despite all this, there's absolutely nothing in the iconography about Ransom Hunter. It's all honey badger stuff. The logo, as you can see, is the head of a honey badger with the team's name under it. The honey badger's head appears to be surrounded by something that's either honey or fire. Maybe it's supposed to be flaming honey? That seems like massive cruelty to animals to me. It's got to hurt like hell, and given how sticky it is, there's no way you're getting it off quickly. I'm not sure how the honey badger could survive such a thing. I'm guessing this time it actually would give a shit, at least until it was no longer capable of giving a shit about anything because it was dead.

Um, sorry. That got grim pretty quickly, didn't it?

Anyway, the omission of Ransom Hunter in the logo seems reasonable, if only because I have no idea how you'd put him in there (the fact that there don't appear to be any existing photographs or paintings of him doesn't help). It makes a lot more sense to just have a honey badger and be done with it. But when it comes time to update the logo, maybe do something about the animal torture bit? Please? I'm sure we'd all appreciate it.

Final Score: 58 points.
Penalties: Compound, 34 pts; Alliteration, 5 pts; Name, 10 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: Local (half-bonus for Ransom Hunter but not for Honey Badger), -3 pts.