What Is in a Team’s Nickname? Plenty of Confusion, for Starters

He should be shot. He should be tortured. We should boil him in oil. He should get 40 lashes with a wet noodle. He should be crashed into the rear of a Ford Pinto. He should be strapped to a chair in front of a TV and forced to watch “Three’s Company” for 24 hours. Yeah, that ought to do it.

Except, we do not know his name. He could be anybody, anywhere. All we suspect is that he once owned a team in the World Football League. Not the United States Football League. The World. Ancestor of the USFL. Sort of a black sheep of the family that fathered an even worse sheep.

Somebody who owned one of those crummy teams is responsible for the trend. At least we think he is. And we will get him for it. That is a promise.

Maybe he was the guy who owned the Shreveport Steamer. Maybe he owned the Chicago Fire, or the Chicago Wind. Or maybe we are totally wrong. It could have been a pro basketball team. Or a soccer team. Or team tennis.

It doesn’t matter now. All we know is that he or she is out there, somewhere, and ought to be put out of our misery.

Because of this person, we are still stuck with these insipid, stupid, singular team names, like the Utah Jazz, and the Chicago Sting, and the Baltimore Blast, and the Stanford Cardinal.

“Son, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Mommy, I want to be a Jazz.”

It is true that many nicknames do not make sense. Nobody really knows what a Laker is. Evidently it is a guy who really, really likes lakes. And when these franchises move, like New Orleans to Utah, or Minneapolis to Los Angeles, the least they could do is think up something new, something territorial, instead of keeping the old name just to save the cost of new uniforms and stationery. Utah’s got jazz the way Pittsburgh’s got penguins.

It also is true that children who follow American League baseball in Boston or Chicago do not say that they want to grow up to be a Sock. And Los Angeles people do not dodge streetcars as Brooklyn people once did. Los Angeles people dodge Saabs and agents.

It’s just that these singular nicknames have got to go. We do not want to root for the Cleveland Brown. We do not want to root for the Texas Ranger. We do not want to root for the Vancouver Canuck. There are people out there playing with that ball or puck. People, as in more than one. Plural, man.

The first things some of us are taught is that a plural is a they and a singular is an it. Television and radio announcers get tongue-tied trying to decide what to say. “It was its fifth win in a row” sounds so weird to them. It sounds unnatural. Headline writers at newspapers likewise go nuts. “Sting Win Fifth Straight.” “Gold Beat Express.”

It drive you crazy.

But there is nothing we can do about it, because the beats go on. In its wisdom--in their wisdom?--the National Basketball Assn. recently decided to admit four new franchises to the league, three of which tentatively have adopted singular nicknames. They are the Miami Heat, the Orlando Magic and the Charlotte, N.C., Spirit.

Only those sensible Midwestern folks in Minnesota were able to come up with an honest-to-goodness team name. Their NBA team will be called the Timberwolves, which will present a challenge to whomever sews the name on the uniforms, but otherwise will do nicely. You can just hear those Minnesota fans now, wearing their plastic wolves’ heads and baying at the opponents: “Ah-wooooo! Ah-wooooo!”

Now that’s a nickname. Timberwolves are real. They exist. Where, nobody knows, but they exist. At daylight they turn into Lon Chaney. But what the hell is a Heat? What are Miami fans supposed to use for a mascot--a guy disguised as a tube of Coppertone?

“Shirley, I just met the neatest guy. We’ve got a date Friday night.”

“What’s he do for a living?”

“He’s a Heat.”

Even back in the old WFL days, teams had better nicknames than that. If memory serves, Charlotte was the Hornets. Jacksonville was the Sharks. You could have all sorts of fun with a team called the Miami Sharks. Which, incidentally, sounds a heck of a lot tougher and meaner than Dolphins. Even Porpoises sounds better than Heat.

We know, we know--Lakers is dumb, too. (Are dumb, too?) But that’s in the past. There was tradition involved. The organization already had been Lakers for years in Minneapolis, just as Indianapolis tried to maintain football tradition by keeping the name Colts. We didn’t like it, but we understood it.

Miami, Orlando and Charlotte had a chance to do something new. They are going to use basketball players, not player. They are not going to play the Washington Bullet or the Chicago Bull.

“Oh, look,” people in airports will say. “There go the Magic.” Or: “Wow. Those Spirit are tall.”

They should have called them the Charlotte Brontes or the Charlotte Pimpernels or something like that.

And if one Florida expansion franchise has to be the Orlando Magic, couldn’t they at least call the other team the Miami Kareem? What do Boston and Philadelphia fans think of all this? Shouldn’t they demand the Minnesota Larry? Or the Orlando Julius?

Oh, well.

It’s like we were asking Earvin Johnson the other night.

“How long you been with the Laker?” we asked.

“Several season,” he said.