What's in A Nickname?

By John Leo

Everyone knows that sports teams must have nicknames, but selecting an appropriate one is fraught with peril. Alabama, for instance, may be proud of the Crimson Tide, but it sounds like a bloodbath or a serious algae problem. Notre Dame's famous jocks are ossified as the Fighting Irish, though Hibernian-American athletes are about as rare in South Bend as they are on the Boston Celtics. Nothing exposed the nickname crisis more starkly than the 1982 NCAA basketball championship game played between the Georgetown Hoyas and the North Carolina Tar Heels. Even if you know what a hoya or a tarheel is, the only sensible strategy is to forget it. (For those overwhelmed by a need to know, hoya is short for Hoya saxa!, a garbled Greek and Latin cheer meaning "What rocks!," and tarheel originated during the Civil War as a disparaging term for folks from the Carolina pine forests.) Few knew what the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons were when a pro basketball team played under that name. (They were players owned by Fred Zollner, who also happened to own a piston factory in Fort Wayne.) The early vogue of naming a team for a person seems to have come to an end with Paul Brown, the original coach of the Cleveland Browns. Fans who found the cult of personality distasteful at least were grateful that he wasn't named Stumblebrenner.

The Zollner Pistons eventually became the Detroit Pistons, showing that some nicknames travel well. The Brooklyn Dodgers, named for the difficulty of evading trolley cars in the famous borough, are now the Los Angeles Dodgers, where evading mayhem on the freeways is equally hard. The name Los Angeles Lakers, however, makes no sense at all, though it did when the team was in Minnesota. Utah, with its Mormon tradition, could easily have accepted the New Orleans football team (the Saints, as in Latter-Day Saints and saints who go marching in). Instead it got the New Orleans basketball team, now known as the Utah Jazz, which makes about as much sense as the New Orleans Tabernacle Choir.

In general, nicknames are supposed to come from two categories: animals that specialize in messy predation (lions, sharks, falcons and so forth) or humans famous for rapine and pillage (pirates, buccaneers, Vikings, conquistadors, bandits, raiders, etc.). The image of mangled flesh must be evoked, but tastefully, one reason why there are no teams named the Massacres or the Serial Murderers. The aim, of course, is to borrow ferocity, but there are signs of change. Some years ago, students at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona voted to name their team the Artichokes and picked pink and white as the team colors. Authorities balked, but three years later students got half a loaf: the team is the Artichokes, but the colors are blue and white. Last year a similar nickname struggle took place. By 5 to 1, students at the University of California at Santa Cruz voted to call school teams the Banana Slugs in honor of a slimy yellow gastropod that swarms over the seaside campus on rainy days. Lest anyone miss the message, pro-Slug students said they meant to twit the "football mentality" of other California schools.

Not every team, of course, can be accused of seeking overly aggressive names. The New York University Violets or the Swarthmore Little Quakers do not induce terror. At Transylvania College, the team nickname is not the Neck Biters but the Pioneers. Women's teams are caught between the quaint feminine names of the old days (Colleens, Lassies) and the carnage-producing names of male teams. The defunct Women's Pro Basketball League had the Fillies and the Does, but leaned toward unisex names (Pioneers, Stars, Pride, Diamonds and Hustle). Most colleges, however, simply put the word lady in front the men's nickname: the Lady Dragons or the Lady Monarchs. The Midwest Christian Lady Conquerors are deeply awe-inspiring, perhaps a bit more so than the Hofstra Flying Dutchwomen or the Iowa Wesleyan Tigerettes.

In major league baseball, most of the aggressive nicknames, like Pirates and Tigers, are attached to older franchises. Now that the game is played by college-trained millionaires, the newer teams have been more sedately named after seagoers and spacegoers (Mariners, Astros), birds (Blue Jays), religious figures (Angels, Padres) or a dimly remembered world's fair (Expos).

While the nicknames of many older pro football teams enshrine civic boosterism (Packers, Steelers, Oilers), newer names include most of the violent ones. The United States Football League produced the Invaders, Maulers, Gamblers, Gunslingers and Outlaws. As one irritated analyst put it, this group "sounds like the roster from a Hell's Angels' convention."

The growth areas for team names are the military-industrial complex (Jets, Supersonics, Generals, Astros, Bombers, Rockets) and the more nostalgic violence of cowboys and Indians (Braves, Redskins, Chiefs, Indians, Outlaws, Cowboys, Wranglers and Rangers).

Copycat names (Oakland Raiders, Oakland Invaders) are also popular. After the New York Mets came the football Jets, basketball Nets, the team-tennis Sets and the Off-Track Betting Bets (known locally as the Debts). There was even some loose talk of a water-polo squad to be known, inevitably, as the Wets, and a women's basketball team, the Pets. This sort of secondhand glory is an old story in sports, dating back at least to football's Detroit Lions' and Chicago Bears' attempting to identify with the established baseball teams, the Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs. Another kind of identity problem forced the Cincinnati Reds, America's oldest professional sports team, to change their name to the Redlegs during the height of the cold war. One Cincinnati sportswriter objected on the ground that since the Moscow Reds were the newcomers, they should be asked to change their name.

Every now and then a franchise attempts a punning name. A hockey team in Georgia was known as the Macon Whoopees, and the Los Angeles Rams cheerleaders were once called the Embraceable Ewes. The name Buffalo Bills is a pun of sorts. So was the name of the late American Basketball Association team, the St. Louis Spirits. (Get it? The Spirit of St. Louis?) Perhaps one day we will have the Norman (Okla.) Conquests or the Greenwich Village Idiots.

One trend is to name teams for malevolent forces, such as the Blast, Sting, Blizzard and Blitz. Three team names celebrate disasters that destroyed much of their native locale: the Golden Bay Earthquakes, Chicago Fire and Atlanta (now Calgary) Flames. Such a breakthrough in reverse civic pride may yet induce other cities to celebrate their local disasters. Just think. The Boston Stranglers, the New York Muggers, the Washington Scams, the Los Angeles Smog . . .