“Lions, Tigers, and Bears! Oh my!”

We are quickly approaching the vacuum of no real sports in America.  This is a temporary void when football ends and baseball has yet to begin.  Hockey doesn’t count but, they are on strike, in case you didn’t notice.

 

College football is over, college basketball is in full swing, and someone actually mentioned that women play basketball, too.

 

So, during this respite, let’s take this time to examine some of the names of the teams that grace our arenas and ballparks.

 

In the NFL, we can find the Browns, Giants, Eagles, Packers, Bengals, Ravens, Saints, Texans, Titans, Cowboys, Chargers, Redskins, and Bills, among others.

 

The Green Bay Packers got their name from the meat packing facilities in the Green Bay, Wisconsin area, and the Ravens copped their name from Edgar Alan Poe’s story, “The Raven.  Dallas Cowboys seems an apt moniker as Texas is known for cowboys and oil – hence, the Houston Oilers who, perhaps because of irreplaceable fossil fuels, became the Houston Texans.

 

But, we venture into other realms and question the Cleveland Browns’ name.  Are there many Giants in New York?  Could the Chargers be so-named because they are squanderers with their credit cards?  Maybe those Buffalo Bills are laden with overspending IOUs.

 

I’ve been to Tennessee and didn’t see one titan.  Perhaps Cincinnati is lousy with large cats in the form of Bengal tigers.  Likewise, my one visit to Philadelphia failed to evidence a single eagle, which was not surprising because of the lack of tall nesting trees.  And, the New Orleans Saints have no connection with canonization or the Vatican.

 

Having lived in the Washington, D.C. area for over three decades I heard countless sports stories about The Redskins.  That is an area in which normally overly-sensitive people who cower at the use of many, many frowned-upon descriptors feel it is okay to use a vulgar slang term for American Indians.  Quite odd, indeed.

 

Baseball team names are equally goofy.  The Chicago Cubs may or may not be named for bears - which happens to be the name of Chicago’s NFL team, The Bears.  Not as unique or catchy as you previously thought.

 

The Houston Astros are clearly named for something; I’m not quite sure what, though.  A Los Angeles Dodger could have been the subject of a Selective Service notice, but I doubt that.  And, although consisting largely of foreign players, we must not forget that northern-implied team The New York Yankees.

 

College teams – both football and basketball – maintain similarly stupid names.  I’ll wager there isn’t an epidemic of Blue Devils cavorting about the Duke campus, anymore than the Georgetown campus is overwhelmed with hoyas, a waxy creeping vine.

It seems to me that teams should be named for something tangible to their geographic area just as Miami Dolphins, Boston Red Sox, and St. Louis Cardinals are.  Unlike the Pittsburgh Pirates.

 

In order to help some teams contrive better names, www.easternshorefishandgame.com offers these:  the Losers, Three-Runs-and-a-Punt, Should’ve Stayed Homes, We Got No Pitchers, and We Pay Our Star Player How Much?

 

Those are merely suggestions for teams fielding players with $10,000,000/year salaries and spending copious monies on retro uniforms.

 

So, we await NASCAR’s return in February just about the time we overcome our withdrawal symptoms.