Is a Name Worth All the Fuss?

The Walt Disney Company has never been afraid to take risks. Disney has been known to make entire motion pictures about a boy in serious need of cosmetic surgery (“Pinocchio”), about a woman in a very bizarre sort of coma (“Sleeping Beauty”), about starving animals forced to share food in a dark alley (“Lady and the Tramp”) and about a verbally abused girl who falls for a guy with an unusual shoe fetish (“Cinderella”).

So, it should astound us not in the least that those cheerful Mouskateers over in Burbank have put their Mickey-capped frontal lobes together and decided to venture forth bravely into men’s professional hockey, an animated cartoon world if ever there was one, by naming their new Anaheim-based NHL team after a kiddie movie, “The Mighty Ducks.”

Oh, the outcry. Oh, the woe.

For days and days now, there has come a howling the likes of which one is not likely to hear from out of the woods, a plaintive cry that Disney somehow is desecrating the sanctity of the National Hockey League by bestowing such a foolish nickname upon a dignified pack of puck-slappers. This, from supporters of a sport in which one club proudly calls itself the Canucks.

OK, so the Mighty Ducks is going to take some getting used to; my advice is, get used to it. Lighten up. After a while, not only do I expect that you will build up an immunity to the absurdity of it all, but you actually might begin to find it fairly charming. Besides, life is short. Laugh hard.

Already, in calls and letters from conservatively labeled Orange County, where this team will be playing on frozen pond, I have begun to hear wails about what a quacky-wacky, ducky-wucky little nickname this is, how embarrassing and all that. Naturally, it has not yet been mentioned in any of these complaints that in this very same county there is an NCAA Division I university where the athletic teams have long been known and loved as the Anteaters.

What we all need do during l’affaire Duck L’Orange is take one step back from the situation, take a deep breath and repeat like a mantra, “What’s in a name?” For what the heck is a Dodger, anyway, and how many of us who reside near Los Angeles spend any of our time side-stepping trolleys? What the heck is a Laker, and how long must we watch this organization defraud the public by refusing to rename itself the Los Angeles Oceans?

OK, so they are going to be the Mighty Ducks. What is the worst possible thing that can happen? Something that already has happened. The worst thing is an absolute onslaught of lame “duck jokes,” a poultry attempt at humor that so far has included (by actual count) 1,993 one-liners about what the team is “quacked up to be” and hundreds more truly ha-ha funny cracks about webbed skates, Duck wings and putting it on their bills.

Look, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t the slightest idea what a Crimson Tide is, or what it would be like to go around being a Horned Frog, or why we haven’t the slightest trouble identifying someone as a Hoya or as a Boilermaker or how politically improper it would be today to name a team after an oppressed minority or endangered species. And every modern fight song on behalf of a Blue Devil or Blue Demon suddenly would qualify as a Satanic verse.

And I continue to wonder what it must be like for a child tugging at his or her mommy’s arm inside a Florida airport to suddenly spy a 7-foot man approaching, prompting the child to say: “Look, it’s a Heat!” Or, perhaps: “Mister, Mister! Are you a Magic?” So don’t go telling me how ridiculous it would be to be a Mighty Duck.

In the state where I was raised, there were high school teams that bore the names Orphans, Pretzels, Appleknockers and Corn Jerkers. There was a team in a town called Polo that called its teams the Marcos. Nearly everybody there grew accustomed to it and before long nearly everybody came to adore it.

You might not think it easy for cheerleaders to chant, “We’re the Corn Jerkers, couldn’t be prouder, and if you can’t hear us, we’ll yell a little louder.” But in Hoopeston, Ill., home to the world’s greatest sweet corn, the student body doesn’t find this any odder than college students would in Lincoln, Neb.

Scholastic teams in Indiana have been known as the Artesians, the Jimmies and the Alices, as well as the ever popular Frankfort Hotdogs.

In Cairo, Ga., the teams are the Syrupmakers.

In Brush, Colo., they’re the Beet Diggers.

In Winslow, Ariz., they’re the Squirrels.

Given time, we will grow comfortable, trust me, with a hockey squad that bears a name that at the moment seems so terribly preposterous. In any case, it occurs to me that the same company that owns this hockey team also financed a successful film known as “Pretty Woman,” so be thankful for the moment that Disney is restricting itself to men’s sports.