Name that team!

Peter V. Conroy Jr

Chicago Literary Club, 18 October 2004

 

 

What  is in a name? An eternal question and a puzzling one. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” says the poet. But then it would no longer be a rose, and the name no longer appropriate or accurate. Naming is an enormously powerful symbolic process. To name someone is in a sense to confer an identity on that person. In certain social circles in Victorian England it was considered impolite to introduce strangers to each other by name because telling another’s  name infringed on that person’s privacy and might even menace his identity by revealing it indiscriminately. In Native American culture, young braves would experience an exhausting cleansing ritual that marked their transition from adolescent to adult. They completed their vision quest when they had discovered their true identity and their totem animal. At the end of that ritual they gave themselves a new name, which henceforth was considered their real name. In the garden of Eden, God granted Adam dominion over all the plants and animals. To demonstrate that dominion, God lined up all living creatures and “brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19; King James version).

Tonight, the names that interest me are much less lofty than those of my several examples. I want to speak about sports teams like our own Bulls, Cubs,  Bears, and Sox. While we might be tempted to dismiss such names as minor afterthoughts lacking any real significance, they in fact demonstrate a complex  labyrinth of allusion and  reference that I propose to explore with you this evening.

 

Let me start with an illustrative anecdote. In 1920 Charles Adams purchased a hockey team that eventually became known as the Bruins. Adams proposed a contest to his Boston fans, asking them to name his team. His criteria for the entries was that all the names proposed  refer to “an untamed animal whose name was synonymous with size, strength, agility, ferocity, and cunning.” [Mike Momson and John Gettings, [www.factmonster.com/spot/nameorigins1.html] Although these are  not  universal criteria for all American sports franchises, Adams’s contest proves that  names are chosen to showcase their team’s sporting skills, if only on the linguistic plane, and that the choice of a team name is a significant enterprise.

 

That is obvious you say. Not true I reply; the self-evidence of my statement is in fact only apparent. Sports teams in other countries do not have names in the sense that all American and some British teams do. For example, in France teams take their names from their native city or region. Les Auxerrois play in the city of  Auxerre; les Parisiens in Paris, les Nanciens in Nancy.  Les Girondins are the team from Bordeaux, which is located in the department of the Gironde. They are also called les Bordelais. Since French easily accommodates adjectival and substantive forms derived from cities and regions, teams can easily be identified by  such  geographical markers. English, on the other hand, is not really comfortable with this kind of linguistic formation even though there are some exceptions: New Yorkers, Bostonians, Floridians, Pennsylvanians, and Wisconsinites are examples that come easily to mind. Witness, however, the awkwardness of derrivations like Illinoisans (an alternative form is as hostile as it is awkward: Ill-anoyers,),  Denverites,  Tampa Bayers,  Phoenixites, Arkansawians, Maniacs  (I have also head Mainers).  British English is only slightly better on this point, with such bizarre sounding but grammatically correct forms like Liverpudlians and Glaswegians.  In contrast,  French has no problem with adjectives and  nouns derived from cities, for example les Stéphanenois, les Messins, les Tourangois, les Monégasques, terms that  indicate the teams that play respectively in Saint-Etienne, Metz, Tours, and Monaco. To reinforce my point here, I  have purposely selected forms that are not easy or transparent derivatives from their respective city names. Nonetheless, these adjectives and nouns are common usage in French, being both grammatically correct and easily found in dictionaries. Thus, French team names are not creative, special choices. Rather they obey clear linguistic rules that are determined by factors outside the club’s purview. French teams do not choose names that represent or depict their own self image. Their names are given according to the region or the city they play in, according to grammatical rules that are independent of the teams.  As an alternative to names derived from  geographical markers, French journalists and commentators can also designate teams by their club colors: sang et or (literally blood and gold) are the colors of Lens; les Verts (the Greens) play in Saint-Etienne.

The French case holds true for most teams in Europe and South America, and usually for the same linguistic reasons: nouns and thus names can easily be derived from geographic features like rivers, mountains, cities. Barcas is an abbreviation for Barcelona, los Madrilenos means “those [players, indeed anyone] from Madrid.”  Mexico and Canada present the two major exceptions. Canadians play baseball, football, and hockey with the Americans, and thus have adopted our system. Mexico has been influenced by its close proximity to the US, both physically and in terms of tv and radio broadcasting, not to mention the large number of its nationals who live in the US and who follow both American and Mexican teams. When American football is played in Europe (the World Football League), those teams use the American naming system. In the same city, however, soccer teams follow the European custom.

 

The conclusion is clear: we Americans are unusual in that we give “nicknames” to our sports teams while other cultures do not.  Furthermore, our team names are distinctive enough to be used alone, without ambiguity,  in lieu of the city to designate a  team. In sports,  team name and  city are synonymous and interchangeable. For marketing purposes –clothes marked with the club logo which is most often connected to the name– these “nicknames” are vitally important because they command dollars, as I will discuss later.

While the variety and imagination displayed in such names are quite impressive, this topic might seem a bit frivolous in the precincts of the Chicago Literary Club. While I do hope to be entertaining, I also want to leave you with some matter for reflection.  If I succeed in providing a dollop of instruction,  I will have satisfied that most serious classical injunction to combine, in Horace’s words, the utile and the dulce, that is to say, joining useful information and instruction with fun and enjoyment.

Before launching into my discussion of team names and the various ways that we can categorize them, I have to introduce the grammatical tool and the rhetorical strategy that powers this naming process.

 

Metaphor is one of the most fundamental devices of classical rhetoric as well as a basic operation of the human mind.  According to Roman Jakobson, the eminent structural linguist, there are two rhetorical techniques that underlie almost all human communication. The first and most familiar, and the one I will employ this evening, is metaphor or the comparison of unlike things; the other is metonymy, or the substitution of part for whole or vice versa. Metaphor is usually regarded as poetic and thus at first blush appears out of place in the prosaic world of sports and sports discourse. By juxtaposing unlike things, metaphor implies a hidden resemblance, or a likeness in the unlikeness of the items so linked. While  metaphors may be implied or merely suggested, they can also be explicit. In the latter case, the metaphor is technically a simile, usually recognizable by the markers “like” or “as.”  “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” or, “She is as  pretty as a rose” are common examples of simile or metaphor. While “yellow grain” is a mere description, “golden grain” is metaphoric: the grain is assimilated to the yellow color of gold, even without specifically saying so.

Metaphor is a subtle device because it activates a set of  imaginative links between the dissimilar objects. In my example, “golden” evokes not only the color yellow, but also additional ideas of prosperity and value. The gold in “golden years” suggests a most valuable period of life and perhaps too the yellow glow of sunset associated with the end of life.

Metaphors comprise an active and ever changing element in our spoken language even though we pay little conscious attention to them. Sometimes, after years of service, a metaphor may lose its evocative power and disappear, thus becoming “as dead as a doornail.” Other metaphors drop out of circulation because, after their initial vogue, we forget the logic or the validity of the comparison. Sadly a metaphor may vanish even if it once was “as happy as a clam.”  We use metaphors and similes so easily, so frequently, so unthinkingly that we forget they rely on a complex mental operation. While escaping immediate observation, metaphors do nonetheless effect conscious reactions even if we cannot always explain why.

 

My talk this evening means then to explore the symbolic territory that lies between naming as identification (the garden of Eden example) and the rhetorical trope of metaphor. Names given to sports teams are metaphoric because by the simple fact of naming they attempt to confer on the team the values or skills that are possessed by whatever is named. This is most clearly illustrated by  the example of Charles Adams and the Bruins. Traditional team names highlight some animal skill or prowess, which, by a secret osmosis or exchange, that is to say, by metaphorical assimilation, endows the team with the qualitites of that animal.

There are, however, at least two other factors at work when a team name is chosen. First, in an effort to promote bonding between the local fans and their team, a name might contain some pertinent local reference, be it historical, geographical, or economic, to the city or region that the team calls home.  Second, marketing or publicity imperatives require a clever name, one that captures the fans’ imagination and that rolls easily off the tongue of commentators and journalists. Given the enormous number of teams that exist and that have names (think not only of professional and semi-professional teams, but also of school teams at both at the high school and college levels), the most usual names have been taken. To avoid redundancy and to maintain each team’s unique personality, new types of names are needed. Thus, to catch the public’s eye and ear, a conscious effort is often made to select a name that is unusual, punchy, or savvy, thereby distinguishing one team from its sporting and economic rivals. We should not forget that in this naming game, every team is a brand, a valuable financial entity whose name participates in selling a “product,” which increasingly means not just tickets to the game but increasingly, and dare I say more importantly,  clothes, those caps, jackets, sweat suits, and “casual wear” that are emblazoned with the club logo and name. While touching on our metaphoric concern, these last two points have a few other implications. I will return to them at the end of my talk.

But now onto the main event, as they say in boxing: team names chosen for the qualities and the talents they represent.

 

Team names fall into approximately three large and capacious categories that somewhat flippantly  I  call  pets, people, and phenomena.

Animals obviously constitute the largest and the most traditional source of team names. Pets is a singularly bland word; in this context, a much better and more accurate one would be something flashy and alliterative like animals that display fangs, fur, feathers, or fins. These are the ferocious predators whose strength, cunning, and ferocity  teams want to emulate as Charles Adams so presciently  understood . Here we find some of our oldest team names, those famous “lions, and tigers and bears, oh my” as Dorothy said in Oz, all of whom are worthy representatives of fangs and fur. The winner in Adams’s contest, the Bruins, is a tad more sophisticated than Bears while Cubs sounds a more friendly and cuddly note; Bengals provides only an adjective while we supply the missing noun (tigers), which is an interesting linguistic case of active, readerly participation in the formation of meaning, as the literary critics say. Nonetheless, team names do have a predilection for  beasts of prey because of the metaphoric power and prowess those animals possess: Jaguars, Panthers, Bobcats, Wildcats, Timberwolves, (any kind of wolf in fact) and Grizzlies are all used as team names. Locally, we have the Kane County Cougars, a minor league team that joins alliteration and base hits. College teams in neighboring states are called Wolverines, Badgers, and Hawkeyes.

 

Not all team animals are predators, however. There are other mammals (fur) that also invoke ideas of speed, strength, or courage. At the top of this list are horses that signal the American romance with the wild west: hence we have Broncos, Colts, and Mustangs. Literally, Mavericks are  unbranded calves who, lacking the brand that confers identification and legitimate standing in the herd, exist outside the pale of legality and social norms. Figuratively the term evokes the undisciplined and rough cowpunchers on the frontier and on horseback. Also belonging to this equestrian set, Pacers connect us with the race track, harness racing, and pari mutual betting. Chargers are the war horses that carried those medieval  knights in shining armor into battle.  Although they are not equines, Bucks are highly prized hunting trophies. In the vernacular the term means money, never a secondary consideration in sports. We also appreciate other furry mammals like Rams or Bulls, known for their strength and butting powers. Must less frequently, we find a beast that seems unworthy of being a team name. Such names are not widespread, so it is the exception that draws our attention  An unglamourous pig would without doubt be an unsuitable candidate. Call it a Razorback, however, and that name gives an aggressive, and thus desirable, cutting edge (that formidable razor) to the Arkansas football team.

 

Ornithological names (our category is feathers) are also associated with strength and  swiftness, claws having replaced fangs here. Flying high on the pinions of this scale of team values are (Toronoto) Raptors like the Eagles, Falcons, Seahawks, Blackhawks, Jayhawks, indeed any kind of hawk.  A milder avian nature characterizes Red Wings, Blue Jays (we’ll move on to colors later) and Orioles (not the cookies), as well as the Ravens, a recent team whose naming logic combines feathers and local history. Baltimore is the home town of Edgar Allen Poe whose Raven is perhaps the best known nineteenth-century American poem, even among unliterary sports fans and the commentators who work in the broadcasting booth. A non bellicose water fowl gave its name to the hockey team in Anaheim, which is the home of Disney Land. The Mighty Ducks were the stars and the title of a  Disney movie. Temple University calls its basketball team the Owls, a raptor noted more for intellectual virtues than its hunting prowess (it is the bird of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom), although the owl is in fact an effective hunter.  While such a mythological allusion is pertinent for a university, it does not suggest physical domination and fury. It goes without saying that Temple is not a conference powerhouse. The Cardinals present a  curious case. Two teams with that same name originated in Saint Louis. Those birds still play baseball there while the football team has moved to the capital of Arizona. Hence, a double allusion that combines ornithology and mythology: the legendary phoenix rising from its ashes joins its name to a feathered friend seeking the resurrection and renewal of its sports franchise in a new city.

We arrive now at an animal category that does not automatically elicit the same positive responses as the preceding ones.  Fins are not as sympathetic as either fur or feathers, nor as fearsome as fangs. Best in this class are powerful denizens of the deep like  Marlins, a much prized game fish known for its stamina and fight, and those aquatic mammals,  Dolphins, much beloved for their intelligence and the clever tricks they are trained to perform. While not at all an endearing fin, the Sharks of San Jose do offer an appropriately ferocious image. Even less sympathetic than fish are reptiles like the Diamondbacks. The full designation “rattlesnakes” is absent, replaced  by the positive connotations of that glittering diamond. In the college ranks we have the University of Florida Gaters.  Again, the more off putting word  “alligator” is shortened to the more ambiguous but comforting “gaters,” thus mitigating that disagreeable reptilian element. On the comic side, the University of Maryland seems to disdain the speed and quickness that sports value so highly: its namesake animal is the terrapin, a land turtle found along that state’s shoreline. In our economy of team names reptiles and amphibians are not the animals of choice. Similarly, insects are avoided because they are not sufficiently anthropomorphic and thus lack positive, humanizing connotations.  Hornets are a rare exception probably because they do possess a powerful sting and can therefore demonstrate sportive strength and danger.

 

From the world of animals, whether friendly mammals or lowly reptiles, we pass now to our second category: people. Organizing such a large category into suitable sub-units is a challenge. We find first of all superhuman beings like Giants and Titans. Following them are the characters we love to hate, rogues and rascals, legally challenged men like Pirates, Buccaneers, and Raiders who, despite their criminal status, are welcome in the world of sports. Living up to that negative reputation,  the Raiders are consistently one of the most penalized teams in football, and its owner Al Davis enjoys a reputation as outlaw because he regularly  flaunts the rules and the authority of the football commissioner. Vikings combine a reference to national origins with a nod at this same marauding spirit. Luckily, we do have some representatives of law and order: Rangers patrol different sports in New York and Texas.

Other names recall the industries or workers that are most closely identified with their home towns, thus rehearsing the economic history of the  region where the team plays: Packers, Steelers, Brewers, Cowboys, Connecticut Whalers, Seattle Mariners, and the Purdue Boilermakers. Pistons are machines, essential parts of a car engine.  Metonymy displaces our attention from motors to the workers who manufactured those automobile engines and who created the industry that made Detroit famous as the Motor City. A rhetorical trope like metaphor, metonymy substitutes the part (a piston) for the whole (a motor, a car engine, the car itself) or the cause (the workers) for the effect (the pistons they manufacture). Locating such team names on a map would chart an economic history of our country, especially in the midwestern rust belt whose economic fortunes grew up with those teams.

 

Historical allusions are frequent in team names, and at times they are ingenious. The Buffalo Bills are the champions  in this aspect of the name game. With only two words, they score three references: first, to the city where they play; second, to fur since they have a prize animal for their mascot, the American bison; and third, to the incredible impressario Buffalo Bill Cody, that cowboy who traveled around the world with his rodeo-cum-circus and thus functioned as one of the first ambassadors of the American Wild West experience. Trailblazers made their long and heroic trek across the great planes, following the Oregon trail to Portland on the west coast. Astros is short for astronauts who are based at NASA headquarters in Houston. We have the New England Patriots in Foxboro, a short drive on the interstate south of Boston, our nation’s political cradle; 49ers outfitted in San Francisco before heading off to the Californian gold fields; the 76ers evoke our Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. That city is a curious name giver. Its long ago Athletics (an indifferent designation, but quite obviously in the category of humans)  metamorphosed into the puzzling, amorphous A’s who later moved to Oakland. The A usually has an apostrophe, which I suppose is meant to indicate – albeit incorrectly – a plural.  The city’s current baseball team, the Phillies, is also an abbreviation, but of what, we ask. Answer: the unimaginative, repetitive, redundant, stuttering Philadelphia Philadelphians. Montreal Canadiens ( -en not -an, and therefore the French spelling and pronunciation) is an equally uninspired designation, but it is at least bilingual even though never pronounced correctly, at least in the USA.  Despite the mispronunciation, it is surely preferable to the audible slap shot of the ethnically derogative Vancouver Cannuks.

 

Continuing our historical connection, we notice that names sometimes suggest the ethnic origins of the franchise’s original fan base. We have already seen the Vikings who hail from Minnesota which was heavily settled by Scandinavians and still retails that northern European  flavor. The Celtics –never pronounced Kel-tics in the sports world–  recall the Irish immigrants of Boston. New York’s first citizens, when the city was called New Amsterdam, were Dutch. Subsequent New Yorkers derisively identified them metonymically by the cut of their pants. These panterloons or knickerbockers were eventually shortened to Knicks, a tailored cut that has no apparent relationship at all with either the Dutch or their trousers.           

As democratic as sports are reputed to be, they have their own aristocratic pretensions. Cavaliers play in Virginia at the college level and professionally in Cleveland. Kings are found in California twice, in Los Angeles (hockey) and Sacramento (basketball). That city’s women’s basketball team is called the Monarchs. What an example of “California dreamin” despite the state’s reputation as a bastion of the Democratic party! Senators used to play baseball in Washington, but their abject failure caused them to move. I do not know what kind of comment my sporting perspective calls for here. Are the Kansas City Royals a reference to monarchy or a painterly nod at the Saint Louis Blues who play hockey  across the Mississippi?

Some names are just plain confusing. The Oilers used to be in Houston, the Lakers in Minnesota, and both names respect a geographical logic. But what kind of persons or professions might they be? Sonics must have something to do with speed and jets, even though Boeing  has transferred its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. Twins can be just folks, but here the name refers to the Twin Cities, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, neither one of which is mentioned in the team’s geographical marker Minnesota. The oddest of the lot: what were the (football) Browns and what did they do in Cleveland,  besides leave it? The current Browns are not the original team. Their baseball homophone, the Saint Louis Browns, also moved from their native city and changed their name.

 

Yankees incarnate the adventurous, mercantile spirit of the seafaring northeast with their magnificent sailing ships, the famous Yankee clippers. They left their name to the whole nation (you Yanks as the Brits call all Americans) and to its enterprising acumen (that yankee ingenuity) as well as to the New York baseball team. Its great centerfielder, Joe Dimaggio, was called the Yankee Clipper, probably for his grace in the field, which was extraordinary at that time for a man his size.  Early in the twentieth century, street urchins in congested Brooklyn would dodge recklessly in and out of traffic and jump on moving trollycars to avoid paying the fare. That penurious connection probably led to the team’s cartoon image as the “Bums.” That is a faded image, I might add, since the present LA Dodgers are a much more up-scale, white wine-and-brie type of club. On a more exalted plane, we might claim Dodgers as a literary allusion to the juvenile character in Dickens’s Oliver Twist who is a street-wise survivor and so very artful.

 

If the Astros aspire to the stars (the Latin astra means star), a less scientific heaven inspires the Saints and the Angels. The latter’s home is Anaheim, a suburb of Los Angeles, angels in Spanish. Equally celestial is another linguistic borrowing, the Padres. In English the word is more specific than its Spanish cognate, and refers to those Catholic priests who staffed the Spanish missions in southern California.  Devil Rays play in Florida (fins thus being consigned to the appropriate nether regions), plain old Devils in New Jersey. These latter devils are less spiritual than it might appear, since the name refers (supposedly) to a small animal that inhabits the state’s piney barrens. The Wizards might belong here, although neither occult powers nor the enormous magical talent of Michael Jordan have been able to raise them to any sporting heights. Spiritual allusions are more pronounced at the college level. Both ends of the spectrum are covered, but with some confusion, by Wake Forest whose team is called the Deamon Deacons. Much more logical in that infernal arena are Duke’s Blue Devils, DePaul’s Blue Demons, and Arizona’s Sun Devils (Tempe).

Politics might seem far from sports, but sporting metaphors are the lifeblood of politicians on the stump. Closer to our topic is the politically correct controversy surrounding names. Today many object to the supposedly racist content of names that were chosen in less contentious times. That criticism is surely anachronistic, however, and wide of the mark as far as original intentions are concerned. Nonetheless, I would be remiss not to mention the hue and cry about the Indians, Chiefs, Braves, Warriors, and Redskins. Bowing to pressure, Saint John’s University in New York changed its name from  Redmen to  Red Storm. Impervious to the pressure, Florida State has kept its name Seminoles. Currently resisting the pressure, Chief Illiniwek remains –at least the last I heard– the mascot down in Champaign-Urbana, but his status and continued existence are topics regularly debated, and at times heatedly, at the Board of Trustees’ meetings. The controversy has even moved on to the state legislature, and has garnered at least one lengthy report on National Public Radio..

Most of the names I have mentioned up to now refer to living things: pets and people. There is however a final group, my third category, “phenomena.”  Here I include all manner of inanimate objects and things, including atmospheric conditions and disasters.  Sabres rattle on the hockey ice in Buffalo. Jets once flew high in the New York sky when Broadway Joe Naemeth was at the controls. We will consider more closely Nuggets, Spurs, and Rockets later, in another context. Many of these names allude to several fields of semantic play. Capitols are a basketball team as well as an integral part of the architectural cityscape of our nation’s capital. A previous team in DC was called the Bullets, which unfortunately reminded too many of  that city’s unenviable crime record.

 

Colors constitute one branch of this inanimate category. Colors can stand alone or be combined with pets, people, or phenomena. Thus, the Redwings or the Blue Jays, the Red and White Sox (of which, more later). Do the Saint Louis Blues stand for a color or is that a musical reference? I have already mentioned those ambiguous Browns. Cincinnati’s baseball team was originally the Red Stockings, later shortened to Reds, so as not to be confused with the Red Sox in Boston. Red is a color that had political implications, especially when standing alone, long before 1900 when baseball became our national sport. None of that political inference rubbed off, however, on the team that was known in its glory days as the “red  machine.” Keeping to that same shade, Alabama’s Crimson Tide combines color with an irresistible oceanic phenomenon.

 

That last aquatic reference brings us to the most unusual part of my inanimate category. Natural, physical  phenomena constitute an inspiration that is more modern and edgy than either people or pets. These names denote what is inert yet active, neuter and lifeless yet full of movement and energy.  Such ingenious designations speak to a new mentality, to a break in the cultural continuity that heretofore presided over the selection of sports names. Indeed, by their mere existence they attest to the potency of the identification process that naming informs. Most commonly, new teams and newly popular sports pick names from this category. Once all the traditional names are taken, the logical alternative is to seek out unusual ones and to take advantage of their grammatical and metaphorical shock. In the music world, rock groups went through a similar transformation of the naming ethos when groups with inanimate designations like the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Led Zeppelin,  Mannheim Steamroller, Guns ‘n Roses, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Cream, the Clearwater Revival, Air Supply, and Pearl Jam among many others began to appear. In rap music we have names like Ice Cube and Fifty Cent. Equally curious from the grammatical standpoint is the use of the singular for the more usual and traditional plural.

Two local teams combine natural phenomena with historical allusion. In any city other than Chicago, the Fire would be less pertinent and thus have less impact. In the college ranks, the same can be said of the UIC Flames. Calgary’s hockey team is also called the Flames. Originally from Atlanta, its fiery name recalled that city’s burning by Sherman during the civil war. The University of Miami’s football team is called the Canes, an abbreviation for hurricanes, which is used in full by the pro hockey team from North Carolina. The Phoenix Suns, in the plural, play basketball in the southwest sun belt naturally.

 Many of the teams in the newly expanded World Hockey League have adopted unusual names from this category. Thus, the historically logical Revolution in New England,  Earthquake in San Jose, Rapids in Colorado, Lightening in Tampa Bay (winners of the Stanley Cup for the 2003-4 season), and  Metrostars in the New York/New Jersey area. The Galaxy in LA is, I presume, a longing reference to the stars from neighboring Hollywood. Actors are famously big fans, especially of the basketball Lakers.  Hockey would love to attract spectators willing to pay handsomely for  those court side, front row seats, where the TV cameras can always find them, especially when the game turns dull.

 

Like people, things often have a relationship to the city a team plays in. The type of historical allusion we discovered in the people category functions just as well with objects. Orlando has the Magic, reminding us that the Magic Kingdom of Disney World is close by. Notice that singular noun. Houston, the home of NASA, has its Rockets, San Antonio, out in horse country, the Spurs. Are Indiana’s Hoosiers people or a piece of furniture? (and if people, what does that term mean beside designating people from Indiana?)  Colorado has its Rockies, as well as the Avalanche, but why Nuggets in Denver?  The state did once have a booming mining industry, but the lode was silver. Nuggets are more a term from the gold fields. The Nets logically play basketball, but what does the Jazz play in Utah? The team began in New Orleans before moving to Salt Lake City. Are Clippers boats or the sailors who manned them? In either case they plied the southern Californian coast between San Diego and Los Angeles. The world exposition of 1967 gave Montreal’s baseball team its name, although it was both shortened and then made plural (expos). Sartorial tastes are satisfied by socks, which are red in Boston but white in Chicago, although the latter turned black during the famous world series scandal of 1919 with Shoeless Joe Jackson, who presumably did at least wear socks. Curiously,  the name is spelled s-o-x, which is a correct but eccentric and archaic plural. Once again, sports get off on the wrong foot with the most common language usages.

I find another grammatical anomaly north of the border. As we all know, the maple leaf is the national symbol of Canada, but Toronto’s hockey team is called the Maple Leafs, with an S. So what are we talking about?  Many tree leaves or a single leaf that is pluralized because it represents many team members?

Etymologically, I am confused by  what Mets means. Its one syllable rhymes with their football  neighbors, the Jets, and the near-by New Jersey Nets. Is it an artsy and elitist allusion, an abbreviation for the New York  Metropolitan Opera or the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Both seem a bit too high brow for the baseball crowd, which gets to Shay Stadium by the underground subway which is elevated for that portion of the line. Is it then a reference to the Parisian mass transit system, the Metro? Or am I thinking too much, and it is just the bland old Metropolitans like the Philadelphians in Philly?

 

Because they joined the professional ranks so recently and thus missed out on the classic team names, women’s sports often exploit the richness of this realm of the inanimate, the collective, the neuter. Arena football, another recent invention, finds itself in the same linguistic bind, as do the soccer clubs that have become financially viable in the past few years.

In arena football, we have a few animals. But they are lowly reptiles (Cobras) or fantastic beasts like  Firebirds, Dragons, and Sabercats. The people names tend toward crime and violence (Destoyers, Desperados, Avengers), although there are a few professions (Gladiators, Wranglers) that of course emphasize muscle and meanness.  The richest and most provocative set of names however draws on the inanimate force and the tremendous power of  nature:  Fury and Force and Rampage and Storm. Events seem to be the impulse behind the Rush in Chicago and the Crush in Colorado. Most evocative, for me, is VooDoo. New Orleans is our doorway to the mysterious Caribbean, a region that arouses our rationalist suspicions about magic and the spirit world. Something similar appears to be at work in the Philadelphia Soul.  Perhaps there is a connection here with brotherly love.

 

Women’s basketball, at least with its current roster of teams (a previous league went bankrupt and dissolved a few years ago), does not have many people names: I find only the Cleveland Rockers, the aforementioned Sacramento Monarchs, and the celestial Washington Mystics. Joining impractical mysticism with the pork-rolling pragmatism of the politicians in our nation’s capital seems to be an egregious oxymoron if not some ironic political joke. There is a single animal, one that is shy and endangered, not unlike women’s basketball itself: the (Minnesota) Lynx. Other names evoke inanimate objects or natural phenomena: Sting, Sun, Shock, Fever, and Storm, all singular words without the definite article. Comets and Sparks are however plural. Silver Stars is logical in San Antonio, the land of the sheriff, but what is Mercury and what is the link with Phoenix? New York Liberty is either a political abstraction or else an allusion to that statuesque  woman (quite appropriate for women’s sports) holding a torch in the harbor.

Professional soccer finds itself in the same naming dilemma as women’s basketball and arena football. Not surprisingly, many of their names fall into our last category, phenomena and objects. Thus, we have the Clash, the Mutiny, the Burn. In the (but only slightly) humanized column, we place the Crew (Columbus OH), the Wiz, and the Metrostars, who of course play in the New York/New Jersey area.

And now, how to conclude my untidy collection of sports teams and their names? Up to this point I hope that my review has provided some diversion and that I  have fulfilled the first part of that Horatian injunction (the dulce or entertainment) with which I opened. The challenge for the rest of my essay is to find some suitable instruction, something utile  in my subject.

Since I have privileged linguistic considerations in many of my comments, I would now like to draw a few grammatical and rhetorical conclusions about this curious American sport of naming teams.

 

Effective team names tend to be short. Monosyllabic names especially present a tough, direct, and hard-nosed image or sound that is appropriate to sports: Bulls, Reds, Colts, Rams. There seems to be a decided preference for hard sounds that add punch. The consonant K, technically designated by linguists as an unvoiced velar stop or plosive,  is particularly effective because it is phonically shocking (plosive is related to explosive), especially in the final syllable: Knicks, Bucks (twice: the short form of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the male deer from Milwaukee), Mavericks, the Pack (short for Packers). In the initial position, it is strong and percussive: Crew, Crush, Clash, Kings. Cannucks has the K sound at both ends. Even in the middle of a word K sounds hard and punchy: Buccaneers, Hurricane, Falcons, Rockers, Earthquake. 

Effective names can be enigmatic and intrigue our curiosity. Abbreviations confound us because they reverse or deny the expectation the longer name promises. Shortened forms fudge once clear outlines: Gaters and Canes. References, heretofore obvious, become murkier. Sometimes the human element disappears and a vague neuter takes it place:  Mets, Browns, A’s, Reds, Expos, Sox.  Even when the speaker needs only a short second or two to reestablish the original form, that pause pushes the name toward self-referentiality.  It becomes a term sui generis, a signifier without any external reference. It names nothing but itself, and perplexes us as to what in fact that might be.  Teams are natural plurals since they are composed of many members. A team name in the singular contrasts with this natural perception, and consequently captures our attention even if only momentarily: the Heat, Magic, Avalanche, Lightning.

There is, additionally, a curious intertextuality among team names. Intertextual is a term literary critics use to describe a interlocking network of cross-references or allusions, a sort of echo chamber for meanings. Whether intentionally or not, some names have almost natural affinities for each other: Cowboys and Redskins, Cavaliers vs Kings. Other names rhyme and thus proclaim a certain affinity even if nothing, geography, history, rivalry, links them: Nets/Jets/Mets;  Broncos/Expos; Astros/Metros. Rhyming on a strong vowel like “o” produces the same robust effect as the sound  “k.”

 

Metaphors make language powerful, and power is always a dangerous thing. The temptation to strong language is as difficult to resist as the temptation to strong drink. Both have deleterious effects on one’s behavior. Writing perhaps suffers the worst fate. Names and their semantic fields can drive some sports writers and commentators to indulge their verbal virtuosity as they seek alternatives to the over-used and worn out verbs “win/lose.” From this need for ever new ways of expressing the same outcomes spring picturesque phrases or purple prose that bear witness to how the implicit metaphors in these names can generate statements like: Bears maul  Packers; Colts trample  Titans;  Heat scorches ...; Sun shines ...; Avalanche buries ...; Lightening strikes ...; Kings rule ...; Eagles claw their way back ...; Hawks soar ...; Lions roar....

More importantly, I would suggest that in the names selected by sports franchises for themselves we have an alternative or at least a heretofore neglected  way to chronicle our nation’s history.  It is not at all arbitrary or indefensible to claim that in fact sports reflect the economic and technical history of the past century. I have already alluded above to how some team names memorialize the industries and professions that once thrived in the regions where they play: meat packing in Green Bay, steel foundries in Pittsburgh, automobiles in Detroit, beer in Milwaukee. Other names speak to present-day economic activity and successes: aerospace in Houston; airplane manufacturing in Seattle.

 

In the 1950s when the then New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers moved to the west coast, sports franchises reenacted the pioneer experience of the preceding century. In my view sports are an unrecognized element in the massive population displacement that moved the demographic center of the country further and further away from the eastern seaboard.  Not coincidently, this was the moment when the jet plane opened up the country west of the Mississippi. Rapid air transportation allowed teams to travel ever greater distances more quickly and comfortably than by train. Road trips became possible outside the narrow area of the east coast and the eastern fringe of the midwest.  Modern trailblazers, the Dodgers and Giants belonged in the first wave of teams that played in areas of the country previously neglected by major league professional sports. Increased  fan support in new markets and rising income from sport franchises in cities that had not hosted national teams before inspired and helped finance the technology that built larger indoor stadiums that were multi-purpose and could accommodate other activities like the United Center that replaced the old Bulls stadium here in Chicago. Modern refrigeration know-how brought hockey out of frozen Canada and New England and made it viable even in the heat of the south and the southwest. Architectural wonders like massive unsupported roofs made domed stadiums possible which in turn allowed football in the coldest winters, baseball in the rain. Just as it produced ice for the hockey rink, refrigeration technology produced air conditioning units that could cool such immense domed stadiums and keep them comfortable. Huge retractable roofs combined opposites: natural sunshine when opened, an artificial atmosphere when closed.  The link between technology and sports is a topic that warrants further investigation, but it is too far beyond my purview here tonight.

 

A colleague of mine once told me that you would know a great deal of French history if you could identify all the names and events commemorated in the street names of Paris. A similar claim for American sports teams would surely be an exaggeration. Nonetheless, the cultural, economic, and technological information heretofore concealed in the background of sport franchise names might constitute an intriguing prologue to the economic, demographic, and technological history of our country.  At the very least it would offer a popular and populist alternative way to recount our past. It would be wonderful to imagine that sports, so often considered lowbrow, might resemble Shakespeare’s toad, which is a lowly reptile and therefore not yet enshrined as a team name or logo and which   “... ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” (As You Like It, act II, sc. 1)