Can a Move Filch a Team’s Good Name?

Considering the kind of season they’re having, I suggested the other day that it might not be inappropriate to change the name of the Los Angeles Raiders, a National Football League team, to the Los Angeles Turtledoves.

I took the name from a Mrs. Laura Turtledove of Canoga Park, who had written to observe that the St. Louis Cardinals should not have kept the name Cardinals when they moved to Phoenix, Ariz., because there are no cardinals in Arizona.

It sounded like a good point, but I looked up cardinals in my field guide and found that there indeed are cardinals in Arizona. However, I saw no reason to let a name like Turtledove go to waste.

When teams move from one location to another, however, the names they bring with them are often inappropriate in the new surroundings. For example, the Minneapolis Lakers, the Los Angeles Angels, and the Cleveland Rams.

Jere Stuart French of Claremont complains that I left out “the most inappropriate nickname ever devised by the minds of men--the Kings.” French refers to our local hockey team, the Los Angeles Kings.

“What do kings have to do with hockey?” he asks. “What do kings have to do with Los Angeles, or California, or even America? Didn’t we fight to get rid of them?”

French also objects to my observation that professional teams, like high school teams, seek names that sound ferocious and inspire fear. “Not all high school nicknames are ferocious,” he says. “We were the Statesmen.”

As for the Phoenix Cardinals, J. R. Smith of Long Beach, an amateur sports historian, says we should be grateful that the team was not renamed the Arizona Phoenix, a name that was considered.

For a team that had not been too successful in St. Louis, as the Cardinals, I think that the Phoenix, a mythical bird that rises to new life from its ashes, might have served very well.

Smith recalls that the defunct World Football League gave life to such abstract names as the Portland Storm, the Chicago Fire and the Southern California Sun--all now in ashes. The trouble with those is that they do not convert to adjectives. We can not refer to a particular linebacker as a Fire, or a Storm, or a Sun.

John Degatina applauds Turtledoves as a new name for the Raiders, but he wonders why we give teams animals’ names to conjure up ferocity. “If one wants ‘aggressive and fearless,’ how about the Agents? If they need ‘fear-inspiring,’ how about the Lawyers? I would love to see a team that plays covert, dirty pool call the City Council.”

Lloyd Peyton notes that abstract team names preceded the World Football League by decades. He recalls the Crimson Tide of Alabama and the Green Wave of Tulane. Also, he says, the USC Trojans were known as the Methodists until early in this century.

He also points out an animal name that is neither fear-inspiring (except to an ant) nor geographically appropriate. “How about the Anteaters of the University of California at Irvine? I doubt strongly that there are any beasties of that nature in Orange County.”

When Irvine announced its choice of a name for its teams, I sensed that it was an academically oriented institution. No university that had serious hopes of fielding a national champion would ever call its team Anteaters.

Joseph G. Leggett wrote that when the Angels moved from Los Angeles to Anaheim they would have done well to take a name from Genesis 6:4:

“The Nephilim proved to be in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of the (true) God continued to have relations with the daughters of men and they bore sons to them, they were the mighty ones who were of old, the men of fame.”

He suggests that the Nephilim would be more descriptive of an athletic team than Angels. “However,” he concedes, “one could reasonably argue that it sounds more like a detergent.”

Jeff Williamson agrees that few team names travel well, and he raises a question that has always puzzled me. “About our own ballclub, very few, even among their most avid fans, seem to know how the Dodgers got their name.”

Williamson thinks he knows the answer: “Weren’t they originally called the Brooklyn Trolley-Dodgers?”

Help, Peter O’Malley.