You Name It, It’s a Problem

For a number of reasons, it had been my sincere intention to steer clear of this running dispute over American Indian team names.

Because if you try to address this subject with humor, you will be chastised for insensitivity.

And if you try to “stimulate serious discussion,” you will be accused of “stirring up controversy just to sell newspapers.”

Frankly, I have never understood this latter imputation, since I have yet to spot a news vendor on a street corner shouting: “Extra! Extra! Sportswriter stirs up controversy! Read all about it!”

In light of recent developments, however, I feel the need to take one more crack at this. So please, bear with me, because in my heart I believe this is an important subject that won’t--and shouldn’t--go away.

I see where even the Tank McNamara comic strip has been having some fun with this theme, possibly with a subliminal message meant to embarrass a principal or two.

Hundreds of people--mostly from the American Southeast--accused me of instigating this nationwide controversy in the first place, by hammering the Atlanta Braves and their fans before last season’s baseball playoffs for doing “tomahawk chops” and wearing Indian vestments.

At least a dozen letter writers and one Atlanta columnist retaliated by asking some variation of: “What’s a Dodger supposed to be?”

Yeah, those Los Angeles bigots really do have their nerve, offending turn-of-the-century streetcar dodgers this way.

I must repeat my syllogism that the No. 1 reason more Americans remain unsympathetic to the plight of the American Indian is that most of them do not personally know an American Indian. As if this should matter.

Those opposed to the renaming of teams named Braves, Redskins, Indians, etc., ask several questions, among them:

--Why are we just getting around to this now?

Answer: Because (a) by winning, the Atlanta Braves gained a national spotlight, and (b) by doing those “tomahawk chops” and wearing those costumes, they called additional attention to themselves to (c) a more socially conscious society that considered this play-acting a mockery of American Indians, no less insulting than “ugh, me want wampum” Western movies or Al Jolson-era blackface minstrel shows of years gone by.

--What about tradition?

Answer: Hey, the Braves weren’t always the Braves, any more than they were always in Atlanta. Many of the teams in professional and amateur sports have undergone name changes without permanent fallout. Stanford University doesn’t seem to have lost any alumni support over its athletes no longer calling themselves Indians.

Although the major league Braves have yet to take action--I have faith in Ted Turner and Jane Fonda not to let this slide--one minor league baseball team called the Braves already has made a change. Protesters have been imploring the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and Washington Redskins to do some soul-searching as well.

The Cleveland Indians, too, have been lectured about using a corporate logo of a grinning warrior wearing a head feather.

And now we have the noble experiment of the Portland Oregonian newspaper, which recently decreed that it no longer will identify any organization by a name that refers to an entire race of people or singular tribe.

Washington D.C.’s football team is to be called simply Washington, never the Redskins. Chicago’s hockey team is never to be identified as the Blackhawks.

Nice idea, but not very practical.

For all I know, there might be Oregon residents who resent having a newspaper named after them.

One of the Oregonian’s sports columnists asked an editor why it was OK to call their local basketball team the “Trail Blazers,” since this could be construed to represent the same pioneers who ran roughshod over the American Indians and oppressed them in their own country in the first place.

“That’s got nothing to do with this!” the editor reportedly replied.

Doesn’t it? Where I grew up, high school basketball was extraordinarily popular, and one of the top teams, year after year, was from a community called Pekin, the hometown of the late Sen. Everett Dirksen.

Those teams were called the Pekin Chinks.

For decades, hardly anybody objected. There probably weren’t 5,000 Asian-Americans within 500 miles, and very few who were willing to argue publicly that just because Pekin felt a sister-city affinity with Peking was no reason to adopt a nickname that, once upon a time, might not have been considered offensive.

The students put it to a vote. Chinks won. The PTA requested another vote. Chinks won again.

The state legislature made a plea. And, with great reluctance, the Pekin teams accepted a new nickname, the Dragons.

Look, I know it would be peculiar to begin calling our Super Bowl champions the Washington Wildcats. Same as it would anticipating the big game involving the Notre Dame Fighting Catfish.

And I know there aren’t many lakes in the city of the Lakers, or jazz musicians in Utah. And I know that you could come up with some pretty funny scenarios in which identical twins express resentment at being ridiculed in Minnesota, or in which Latino clergymen oppose the nickname of the San Diego baseball club.

But what can we do?

The columnist in Oregon has decided to refrain from writing any team’s name, including the home-state Trail Blazers, Ducks and Beavers, because he does not wish to ask for a new ruling every time he watches somebody play.

I am not prepared to go that far. But let me warn you, if Atlanta plays Cleveland in the 1992 World Series, you have not heard the last of this.