COLUMN ONE : The Name Game Can Get Ugly : Don’t like the sound of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks? It could be worse. How do you like Artichokes, Banana Slugs or Polecats?

Those who still can’t believe they are being asked to support a hockey team called the Mighty Ducks can be thankful for one thing.

They could be living in Albany, Ga.

Last year, a Class-A baseball team came to that town without a name. After holding a contest in which fans submitted exciting monikers like Pine Trees, Pecans and Peaches, a club employee scoured the dictionary for another “P” word.

He stopped at polecat .

The definition: an ill-smelling, long-haired member of the weasel family.

The reality: a skunk.

The owners liked the way it sounded, and the Albany Polecats were born.

“Now we have a giant skunk mascot that the kids love; he doesn’t spray or anything,” said Scott Skadan, general manager. “But at first, the name created quite a stink.”

A duck is not a skunk, but many local hockey fans pinched their noses when the Walt Disney Co. was awarded a National Hockey League franchise in Anaheim and immediately called the team the Mighty Ducks, named after a successful film that it released last year.

Ira Miller of Irvine wrote: “Can’t you hear ESPN showing hockey highlights and saying, ‘Let’s roll the Duck tape.’ ”

But do not despair, all of you who will not be able to watch a hockey game in Anaheim without thinking of Emilio Estevez and a bunch of snot-nosed kids. You do not have the worst name in sports.

You are not the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs.

Or the Bryn Mawr (Pa.) Mawrters.

Or the Scottsdale (Ariz.) Community College Artichokes.

Or the Presbyterian (S.C.) College Blue Hose.

And chances are you will never feel compelled to lie about your nickname as Tom Rowland, former football star for the Illinois College Blueboys once did.

Rowland was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 1968. When he stood on his chair in the training room one night and prepared to make the traditional rookie speech, he panicked.

“I stood up and shouted, ‘I am Tom Rowland of the Illinois College Tigers ,” Rowland recalled. “(Hall of Fame player) Ray Nitschke was sitting there looking at me with no teeth. There was no way I was saying Blueboys .”

Rowland, the track and wrestling coach at the college, has since tried to change the name to Fighting Blue. But since it came from the days when students fought in the Civil War and were known as Blue Boys, the traditionalists at this oldest school in Illinois (established in 1829) will not bend.

The folks at Concordia College are also not in a hurry to change their name, the Cobbers, even though it originated as an insult from a cross-town rival in Moorhead, Minn.

In the 1940s, the football team played in a corn field, so they were known as the Corn Cobs. The name was eventually shortened, and accepted.

“It’s pretty tough to find a logo,” admitted Armin Pipho, athletic director.

In the name business, sometimes the most insignificant bit of history can stick with, and haunt, a school forever.

In 1919, the Arkansas Tech football team upset heavily favored state rival Jonesboro, 14-0, with two 70-yard runs by a 17-year-old quarterback named John Tucker.

A local sportswriter referred to the team as the Wonder Boys, and despite annual protests, the name has remained unchanged.

“The new guys come in here and always want to change the name to some bird or animal,” said Sandra Cole, the longtime athletic department secretary. “But then they graduate and decide they want to be Wonder Boys forever.”

As those with the Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens will agree, history plays an important role in the acceptance of odd names.

A sports psychologist there, noting that the Blue Hens was originally the name of a local militia during the Revolutionary War, says it is this perspective that the Mighty Ducks lack.

“Blue Hens means something to the people here,” said Eric Denson, a consultant to the Delaware athletic department. “The problem I see with Mighty Ducks is not so much the name, but how they arrived at the name.

“I mean, to name a team after a Disney movie is a joke.”

Jay Coakley, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, said the naming of the Ducks is part of a recent trend that ignores history.

“Initially, nicknames were descriptive terms referring to a social characteristic of that team, something other than just the team’s geographic location, a way of identifying that team,” Coakley said. “But more recently, marketing considerations have become much more important in nicknames. And I’m not so sure that was their original intent.”

The origin of the Mighty Ducks name, indeed, appears to be a bigger problem than the name itself.

“Ducks, by themselves, are not bad names,” said Mike Cunningham, associate curator of birds at the Los Angeles Zoo.

“Ducks fiercely defend their territory,” Cunningham explained. “Ducks stick together. And when two ducks fight, well. . . .

“One duck will grab the other duck with his beak and hold him, then pummel him with his wings,” Cunningham said. “That fits the hockey image, I suppose.”

Cunningham said, however, that he has never encountered a mighty duck.

“Knowing where that came from, I think that conjures up a whole different image,” he said.

Those who named the Mighty Ducks would have done well to follow the example of their fellow quackers in Eugene, Ore. Few make fun of the Oregon Ducks, even though their mascot is actually Donald Duck in disguise.

“We just don’t call him Donald,” said Jamie Klund, assistant sports information director. “But that’s Donald.”

Oregon’s Ducks evolved from the “Webfoots,” a name given to fishermen from Massachusetts in the 1700s. When the fishermen later migrated to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the name came with them.

In the 1950s, it was changed to Ducks to make it easier for fans and headline writers. Leo Harris, then-athletic director, used his friendship with Walt Disney to gain exclusive use of the Donald Duck caricature.

Until last week, Oregon was the only professional or college organization with a Ducks name.

They were also the only organization with a woman’s booster club called the Daisy Ducks.

“I tell you what, though,” Klund said. “I could think of worse things to be called.”

Like the Colby College (Me.) White Mules.

Or the Akron (Ohio) Zips.

Or the New York University Violets.

Or The Evergreen State College (Wash.) Geoducks.

A geoduck (pronounced gooey-duck ) clam is sometimes found on the campus of The Evergreen State College. It is also commemorated in a giant clam costume sometimes worn by the school president.

The Anaheim hockey team could also have been called the Mud Hens, a name that is so bad that people often don’t believe that the Triple-A baseball team in Toledo is for real.

“Because Jamie Farr wore our hats on the MASH show, quite a few people think we’re something just on television,” said Joe Napoli, assistant general manager. “These people will drive through town during the summer and are surprised that we really exist.”

And yes, there really is such a thing as a mud hen.

It is the name for a bird that waddled through the marshlands where the original Toledo professional baseball team played in the late 1800s.

Club officials would have adopted the bird’s real name, but they didn’t want to be known as the Toledo Coots.

The Mighty Ducks at least have the good sense of timing to start up during a sports year in which the world baseball champions were Blue Jays and the national collegiate basketball champions were Blue Devils.

Some in Toronto still believe that the organization wasn’t really named after a Blue Jay--”I’ve never seen one downtown,” said Jim Proudfoot, veteran columnist for the Toronto Star--but in deference to the owners’ beer operation.

Labatt’s, which owned 45% of the club then and owns twice as much now, has a popular beer known as “Blue.” Observers say brewery officials would have done anything to make that word prominent. In any case, a public contest was held and Blue Jays was declared the winner.

“No matter what, we can’t cast any stones at other nicknames,” Proudfoot said. “After all, we have a hockey team that is a grammatical error.”

He is speaking, of course, of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Not to be confused with the Goshen (Ind.) College Maple Leaves.

As the Maple Leafs prove, the Mighty Ducks won’t even have the oddest name in the National Hockey League.

After all, what is a Red Wing?

The team in Detroit is actually lucky it is not called the Winged Wheelers, the name of the Montreal-based hockey team for which industrialist James Norris once played.

When Norris founded a team in Detroit, he brought the name with him, then shortened it and added the color of the team’s jerseys. A winged wheel is still the team’s logo.

OK, you ask, then what about the New York Rangers? How much sense does that make?

It made plenty of sense to friends of promoter Tex Rickard, who helped bring hockey to Madison Square Garden in 1926. His buddies called the team Tex’s Rangers, and it stuck.

Which, of course, does not explain the league’s other funky name, belonging to Pittsburgh.

Nobody makes fun of the Penguins’ name anymore because, well, after consecutive Stanley Cup championships, people in town would welcome the bird as a pet.

But the truth remains that experts say the penguin can be just as inappropriate for mascot material as a duck.

“In fact,” said Cunningham of the Los Angeles zoo, “penguins don’t necessarily move better on ice than ducks. They can both be pretty clumsy.”

So why Penguins? Tom Singer, an Orange County free-lance writer, has been thinking about that for the better part of his life.

In the spring of 1967, as a high school senior in Pittsburgh, Singer entered a contest to choose the name of the new hockey franchise.

On a whim, he submitted Penguins .

Shortly thereafter, while he was debating whether to attend University of Pittsburgh or UCLA on academic scholarship, Penguins was announced as the winner.

His decision was made for him. He flew to California.

“I wanted to get out of town before anybody found out that I had anything to do with that name.”