Essay: What's in A Nickname?

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.