Origin of the name Bevo
"Bo" made his first public appearance at the halftime of the 1916 Thanksgiving Day football game between Texas and archrival the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (later Texas A&M University), a game in which Texas defeated the Aggies 22 - 7.[8] Following the game, Ben Dyer, editor of the UT campus magazine The Alcalde, referred to the mascot as BEVO.[9] It is not known why he chose this name, though various theories have been put forth, including that Texas A&M had a hand in naming the mascot.[9]
The legend, accepted by both schools for decades, claims that the name came about due to an prank led by students of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas.[9][10][11] It is true that in 1916, four Texas A&M Aggies kidnapped the longhorn and branded him with "13 - 0", the score of A&M's 1915 win over Texas.[9][12][11] Texas students are rumored to have retaliated by changing the steer's brand to Bevo. Bevo was fattened up and served at a football banquet in 1920, due to the fact the university did not have the money to take care of him and he was not tamed to roam the campus.[9][12] The Aggies were fed the side they had branded and presented with the hide, which still read Bevo. Some Longhorn fans and even the official athletic site have recently come up with alternate explanations, including that the mascot was named for a near beer, Bevo. Another potential source of the BEVO name was the one reported in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of UT: "Through the 1900s and 1910s, newspapers ran a series of comic strips drawn by Gus Mager. The strips usually featured monkeys as the main characters, all named for their personality traits. Braggo the Monk constantly made empty boasts, Sherlocko the Monk was a bumbling detective, and so on. The comic strips were popular enough to create a nationwide fad for persons to nickname their friends the same way, with an 'o' added to the end. The Marx Brothers were so named by their colleagues in Vaudeville: Groucho was moody, Harpo played the harp, and Chico raised chicks when he was a boy. Mager's strips ran every Sunday in newspapers throughout Texas, including Austin. In addition, the term 'beeve' is the plural of beef, but is more commonly used as a slang term for a cow (or steer) that's destined to become food. The term is still used, though it was more common among the general public in the 1910s when Texas was more rural. The jump from 'beeve' to 'Bevo' isn't far, and makes more sense given the slang and national fads of the time."[9]
