1980s-2000s: The Boxer II Years

After more than a decade of calls for the missing original Boxer statue to be returned to campus, students had begun to give up hope that it would ever be seen again. They used stand-ins, like a wooden statue that looked a bit like the original Boxer, as temporary placeholders to keep the traditions alive. 

Around 1982, a small group of students -- Janet Leasher, Linda Parker and Kim Smith -- decided to raise funds for a replacement. The three women had to locate a sculptor willing to make a bronze replica on the very limited budget of $1,000. They could offer only one or two black-and-white photographs as reference images. They found a willing sculptor in Pat Costello, an art student at the University of Oregon. He did his best to recreate the original's size and shape, casting a replica that turned out to be bigger and heavier than the original, with somewhat different features. However, it was still recognizably Boxer, and the students of Pacific adopted it as a new symbol of school spirit. 

This statue would become known as "Boxer II."

But the world had changed since the original Boxer had last been seen in 1969.

While violent brawls for possession of Boxer had once been expected on campus -- or even celebrated -- by the '80s, liability and lawsuits were on everyone's mind. Pacific University did not want to see students being injured or property destroyed during a Boxer Toss. The students who had raised money to make Boxer II also did not want to see it get damaged, or for it to go missing like the original. In an attempt to stave off these problems, the three fundraisers wrote a "Boxer Code of Ethics," which outlined responsibilities and boundaries for the new statue.