Fansided

You can now order custom NFL Harambe jerseys again

By Dave Stevenson

CINCINNATI, OH - JUNE 2: Flowers lay around a bronze statue of a gorilla and her baby outside the Cincinnati Zoo's Gorilla World exhibit days after a 3-year-old boy fell into the moat and officials were forced to kill Harambe, a 17-year-old Western lowland silverback gorilla June 2, 2016 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The exhibit is still closed as Zoo official work to up grade safety features of the exhibit. (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images)
CINCINNATI, OH - JUNE 2: Flowers lay around a bronze statue of a gorilla and her baby outside the Cincinnati Zoo's Gorilla World exhibit days after a 3-year-old boy fell into the moat and officials were forced to kill Harambe, a 17-year-old Western lowland silverback gorilla June 2, 2016 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The exhibit is still closed as Zoo official work to up grade safety features of the exhibit. (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images) /
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In a glorious turn of events, you can once again order custom Harambe jerseys. 

On Sept. 14, there was a bit of outrage on Twitter when “Harambe” was added to a list of banned words to have on the back of a custom jersey. Most notably, the NFL and MLB temporarily disallowed jerseys with that name on the back. However, it turns out it was all just one big misunderstanding.

Starting today, you can order a custom jersey with the name of your favorite dead gorilla again.

ESPN’s Darren Rovell reports that Fanatics was behind the temporary ban of the name.

"It was subsequently added to the banned list for the other leagues, including the NFL, which received the majority of the blame on social media Wednesday even though league officials had nothing to do with the decision.As word began to circulate of the banning, Fanatics officials decided that it didn’t belong on the list, which includes thousands of words, made up mostly of profane and slang words. On Thursday morning, it was removed from the list."

Despite the temporary ban, the NHL still allowed for those custom jerseys. In fact, when ordering a custom jersey on NHL.com yesterday, the gorilla’s name was the default.

So what’s up with people wanting some gorilla’s name on the back of a jersey? Harambe was a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. After a baby fell into its habitat, the gorilla became possessive of the child, and was eventually shot and killed for the baby’s safety.

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This quickly became an internet meme. It went viral and eventually backlash from the decision to shoot the gorilla caused the Cincinnati Zoo to delete its Twitter account, with animal activists everywhere saying the gorilla was not a danger to the baby.

Wherever you stand on the issue — to say nothing of the larger moral quandary of locking wild animals up in cages for the amusement of humans — chalk this up as another victory for the First Amendment. Because if our Founding Fathers believed in anything, it was in the freedom to wear foreign-made sports jerseys with a martyr gorilla’s name on it.

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