When the Fond du Lack Dock Spiders, a collegiate summer league team that plays at the southern tip of Wisconsin’s Lake Winnebago, debuted in 2017, there was a lot of chatter about their arachnid-based logo. As a Richmond Spider myself, I was of course charmed. But before they debuted, when the team was working on a name and logo with the prolific design firm Brandiose, partner Jason Klein proposed a name that made some people even more squeamish than spiders do.
“The name that we really liked, and everyone was on the fence, was the Udder Tuggers,” Klein said back then about what might have been. “Everybody who heard it thought, I love that name. It sounds like there’s something wrong with it, but no one could really land on what was offensive about it, because everything you think is offensive about it is not.”
Two years later, the world is ready for the Udder Tuggers, but it will be the Midwest League’s Wisconsin Timber Rattlers who bring them to us rather than the Dock Spiders. The Timber Rattlers will change their name for one game on Salute to Cows Night in Appleton, Wisconsin, later this season, celebrating their state’s rich dairy farming heritage.
The team will wear caps featuring a grimacing, running cow with rather pronounced udders. The team’s jerseys will emulate the cow pattern featured on the cap logo.
The Udder Tuggers will take the field June 20.