These Beasts May Become Real Beauties

If you can call a hockey team the Penguins, you can call a hockey team the Ducks.

What else would you call a Walt Disney hockey team? The Devils? The Flames?

No, you need a cute, cuddly name, like Penguins, or Bruins.

The California Ducks.

Works for me.

And I think Unca Walt would have liked it, too.

Until today, I thought “Disney on Ice” meant having humans on skates dress up like large mice, little mermaids and big, bad wolves.

This was before Disney chairman Michael D. Eisner broke the news that the NHL would be--barring any glitches--bringing professional hockey to Orange County, where the company has been doing business since 1955.

The first thing Disney has to do is bar those glitches.

The company is making sure that this development is OK with the L.A. Kings, who are owned by an individual rather than an empire. They are paying Bruce McNall $25 million to be--well, to put it in terms even Dopey would understand--happy, not grumpy.

Next, the new team must find some place to play.

No prob. Anaheim is constructing a 19,200-seat arena, which I doubt was designed strictly for tractor pulls. It sounds perfect to me. A hockey team should prove to be so popular, they might even consider enlarging it to a 19,300-seat arena.

Next, the new team must pick out a color scheme.

Why, orange, of course.

I like the image of a team on ice dressed in orange. The players are going to look like Dreamsicles.

Next, the new team must find itself a name.

Again, not wanting any conflict with McNall, I sincerely doubt that Disney would decide to call its team the Queens.

Michael Eisner is the one who happened to make mention of “The Mighty Ducks,” the studio’s recent hit movie starring Emilio Estevez as the coach of a bunch of sassy kids. They were, more or less, the Bad News Bears on Ice.

Well, as long as they leave the “mighty” out of it, Ducks would be just fine.

Any NHL team that calls itself the Mighty Ducks is just begging for its players to be beaten up regularly.

This has been an eventful decade for the Disney Co., which opened a new theme park in France to go along with the ones in California, Florida and Japan. (You haven’t lived until you have ridden on a paddle boat with a Davy Crockett who speaks French.)

It also has been an eventful time for Eisner, who probably could call his team the Ice-ners if he wants. The chairman recently cashed in so much of his Disney stock that I understand he intends to purchase China and open another park over there.

Hockey will “help strengthen Anaheim’s position as a major tourist destination,” Eisner said, as well as “help promote hockey as a major international sport.”

It also suddenly gives the state of California three big league hockey teams, which should come as a shock for all those Canadians who picture us skating on frozen Evian.

Oh, and can the World League of American hockey be far behind?

By the year 2000, be looking for a big game between the Vancouver Canucks and the fast-skating Barcelona Spaniards.

In Hollywood, the game they will most look forward to every year will be the one between our own California Ducks, owned by the nice folks over at Disney, and the New York Rangers, who happen to be owned by the people from Paramount.

These teams won’t play series. They’ll play sequels.

Orange County is every bit as deserving of a hockey team as the Big Apple. Orange County’s fans have been true blue, giving their hearts, souls, lungs and dollars to a baseball team, the Angels, and a football team, the Rams, that very rarely give anything back.

What do you bet Orange County wins a championship in professional hockey before it does in baseball or football?

Advance ticket sales will be another of those evil glitches that Disney must first encounter.

I take it on faith that fans will come forward in droves to buy season tickets to see the Ducks, even before they know the name of a single Duck. It must be proved conclusively to the NHL that there is a second market for hockey here, and I am confident that fans of the Kings and minor league Gulls in San Diego will be doing their part as well.

At least from now on, the Kings won’t have to board an airplane every time they play a road game.

Now they have another team, practically in the neighborhood. It really is a small, small, small, small world.