Football in L.A.? Let’s Name Our Team

Like a lot of guys, I believe in happy endings.

I believe injured pitching sensation Kerry Wood will be back. I believe Roberto Benigni will eventually overcome his shyness. And I believe L.A. will get an expansion football team, a team we can raise and nurture and call our very own.

“We might get a team,” I say, scanning the morning headlines.

“Great, Dad,” my oldest daughter says. “Really great.”

“What’d he say?” my wife asks.

“Nothing,” my daughter says.

And that sums up the excitement sweeping Los Angeles over its potential new football franchise. But the excitement will grow. In a short time, maybe eight people will care. I will be one of them.

Because L.A. needs the Raiders back like it needs another street gang. It needs the Cardinals like it needs another rash. But an expansion team? Our own team? It’s worth a look.

“I’d love a new team,” I mumble.

“What’d he say?” my wife asks.

“He said, ‘Pass the cream,’ ” my older daughter says.

Don’t spread this around, but I miss having a pro team. I miss the home team trying to stomp the 49ers on Sunday afternoons. I miss quarterback controversies and late-summer contract holdouts. There’s no explanation for it, these things I miss. It’s an illness really.

In fact, most of the time, I find a lot wrong with the NFL.

The league needs to go back to basics, demolish the domes, to take the game back outdoors where it belongs, onto the icy fields of Minnesota and Michigan.

Because back when the game was rich and healthy, you could collapse on your couch and watch the Vikings play on some cold and rainy November afternoon, great games with muddy men playing their hearts out.

Then, if you were lucky, in the fourth quarter it would start to snow. It was how you knew God was watching. From the snow. Outdoors, in the only dome that matters.

And now it should be played in the New L.A. Coliseum, on cool autumn evenings, with an expansion team running out onto the field in its funny expansion-team uniforms, the fat coaches jiggling as they struggle to keep up.

What would the fans yell? We don’t know what they’d yell. The team doesn’t have a name. Not that people haven’t started talking about it.

“I’ve got a good name,” my friend Steve says.

“What?”

“Road Rage,” he says, showing a deep understanding of what makes L.A. tick.

“Go, Rage,” I say, practicing a cheer.

“Exactly,” he says.

It’s a good name. It reflects much of what Southern California is about. Roads. Rage. But there may be even more to this great city than that.

“How about . . . the Doom,” my son says, showing a deep understanding of doom.

“That’s nice,” I say. “Go, Doom.”

“Or the Terminators,” the boy says. “Yeah, the Terminators.”

Me, I prefer something a little more traditional. Maybe something that reflects the area’s great natural beauty.

“The Carmen Electras?” my wife says, sneering at the suggestion.

“Go, Electras,” I say.

“I like it,” says the boy.

“You need a new dad,” his mother says.

“Go, Electras,” the boy says.

But there is more to L.A. than starlets. There’s the surf. And the mountains. And the abundant wildlife.

We could call the team the Tide. Or the Rip Tide. “Roll, Tide”--a football chant that has sometimes worked in the past.

Or we could be the Bobcats. Or the Hawks. Or the Condors. We had several condors on our cul-de-sac just last week. They’re a mighty bird. We fed them miniature marshmallows.

The name could reflect the adventure and uncertainty of living in Southern California.

The Quakes. The Wildfire. The Random Acts of Violence.

Maybe there’s a movie tie-in. The Psychos. The Armageddon. The Producers. The Titanic. James Cameron would play quarterback. That way, he’d get to call all the plays.

Better something offbeat, something to salute the past? How about the Monica Nagurskis, a tribute to Monica Lewinsky, Bronko Nagurski, white Broncos and the Santa Monica Freeway, all in one elegant name.

It’s not something to screw up, this naming of a team. A new sports team is something we’d live with for a long time--four or five years at least--till some millionaire in a white suit comes waving money, much of it Confederate, trying to take our team to some two-bit Southern city with one freeway and maybe an airport. Till then, we might have our own football team.

So what would you like to call it? Something that reflects the region. Something that captures its spirit, its mystique, its essence. Yes, essence.

Send me your suggestions. In two weeks, we’ll publish the winners, determined by a panel of one: me, a guy with a white suit and lots of money, much of it Confederate.

In the meantime: Go, Nagurskis!

Name that team: E-mail suggestions, serious and otherwise, to chris.erskine@latimes.com.