Los Angeles, land of the misnamed sporting activities teams

Possibly it’s because we’re neighbors with Hollywood’s mirage equipment that we can cohabit so quickly with irony.

How else to describe how we’ve invested a lot more than 60 many years cheering for a workforce which is named immediately after luscious bodies of drinking water that exist only in Los Angeles’ yearnings?

The Los Angeles Lakers were named for their outdated hometown, Minneapolis, and for Minnesota’s slogan, “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Now the staff is right here, in the “Land-of-Very good-Luck-Discovering-a-Lake.” (If I had my druthers, the team would be “the Arroyo Secos.”)

Journalist Paul Lukas, the creator of the UniWatch sports website, wrote, “When I was a child in the 1970s, I had no idea that the Lakers had moved to L.A. from Minneapolis, so I mistakenly thought that the crew name was centered on the town name —“L-A-kers,” get it? It performs!”

Numerous of our teams are, like us, immigrants and newcomers, but like us, they flourish, even when they retain a hand on their aged handles.

Describing L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a sophisticated spot. In this weekly attribute, Patt Morrison is conveying how it is effective, its record and its society.

Most celebrated, of program, are the Dodgers. To the Brooklynites who bear us a very long grudge, we not only stole their crew, we stole their staff name, the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, but callously snipped away the front finish like some vestigial appendix. (The trolley part was for the acrobatics of crossing Brooklyn’s welter of streetcar tracks.)

But their recollections could fog conveniently in this: Significant League Baseball’s web site notes that “trolley dodgers” was an off-and-on moniker. The fickle staff also used other names: the Bridegrooms (for the yr when so many gamers acquired married), the names of diverse team supervisors, and a vaudeville act. Not right up until 1933 did the Brooklyn group set “Dodgers” on its uniforms, and in 1958, that crew and that snipped title had been in Los Angeles.

Here’s a good little bit of trivia symmetry for you. One particular yr and one particular working day just after Los Angeles’ trolley, the Pink Automobile, manufactured its final journey, the sans-trolley Dodgers played their initial sport at Dodger Stadium. April 9, 1961, and April 10 1962.

Like fragile bouquets, some workforce names don’t survive transplantation. You’d have imagined that “Lakers” would be one particular of all those, but prosper it did in this arid soil.

The San Diego Padres, named for the 18^th century Franciscan founders of the Spanish mission there, would make no feeling anywhere else, nor would their mascot, the Swinging Friar — the “swinging” little bit for his at-bats, not his social daily life.

Pro football’s Houston Oilers upped sticks and moved to Tennessee, but just after a pair of seasons, it grew to become very clear that no just one was hanging oil in Nashville, so they re-branded on their own the Titans. Now, “Titan” appears like a Marvel character, but it arrives from extended back. Nineteenth century Nashville christened alone “the Athens of the South,” a citadel of understanding, like the Athens of historic Greek. Hence the Titans, gods of Greek myth. The team should really give a cost-free ticket to random followers-on-the-road who know this.

The Tall Ships

Now, as for the Clippers, the NBA group participating in in the penumbra of the Lakers’ gold-and-purple aura: If you’d never ever read of the team in advance of, you might feel that the crew identify and mascot was a barber. (Perfectly, I did.) For modern Californians, the origin may possibly be just as obscure.

In the 19^th century, the clipper ship was the swift and wonderful workhorse of the world’s mercantile fleets, a ship whose remnant memory we uncover in the phrase “at a quick clip.” These ships swarmed San Diego’s great normal harbor, which the seafaring Harvard person Richard Henry Dana explained in 1835 as “the very best harbor on the coastline.”

The San Diego workforce grew to become the Clippers in 1978, and six a long time later carried that title up the coastline to Los Angeles, a place that had no comparably deep normal harbor.

I questioned my mate Alonzo Bodden, the comic and most forbearing of Clippers followers, what he believed of a team named for a practically 200-12 months-old sailing vessel, and its existing plush-fur feathered mascot, Chuck the Condor.

“Have to say I’m not a supporter of Chuck the Condor. I get it — the California condor is approximately extinct. But is not it that form of a lousy omen? The Clippers are named soon after clipper ships. Couldn’t we have a pirate or a sailor? Why an indefinable chicken? Do not we have ample issues?”

I choose Alonzo’s side in this article if you are going to simply call your group the Clippers, then a genuine clipper ship captain mascot would slice a great figure courtside.

In early 1985, the L.A. Clippers did briefly have a sea captain mascot who created no impact in anyway, and was quickly changed by Sam Dunk, who looked like very little much more than a geezer kitted out for a weekend pickup game, and whose most unforgettable instant might have been when he tried out to pull a quite blond fan onto the court to be a part of him in a delighted-clappy routine. She resisted. It turns out to have been Shelly Sterling, the group owner’s spouse, and in their temporary tugging, Sam Dunk managed to tug off the boss’ wife’s bracelet.

Divine provenance

The Los Angeles Rams have also been the Cleveland Rams, the Los Angeles-Rams-of-Anaheim-Stadium, and the St. Louis Rams. Fordham University, the Jesuit institution in New York, statements to have blessed the staff with its name, many thanks to some priggish divines at the school.

As Fordham tells it, the faculty athletics cheer in the 1890s went like this: “One-Dam, Two-Dam, A few-Dam, For-dham!” The moment the Jesuit fathers obtained wind of this, they insisted that “dam” was out, and as a result “ram” was in.

Many years later on and hundreds of miles to the west, when it came time to name Cleveland’s new AFL staff in the 1930s, a confab of buyers and columnists acquired together to kick it about. As the Fordham Observer describes it, the newsmen argued for a shorter title that would fit into headlines. Another person — most likely a Fordham grad — put forward “Rams.” The title stayed with the crew even when it moved to California suitable following the war and remaining Cleveland’s pro soccer subject to that new staff, the Browns. (I constantly appreciated the placing visual of the Rams’ helmets and the motion picture-marquee names of L.A. gamers: Norm Van Brocklin, Roman Gabriel, Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, Aeneas Williams.)

Now, on to the Chargers. That’s a rather portable name, and fairly farsighted, as it turns out, thinking of that it predated by a couple a long time our cellphone chargers and electrical auto chargers. The group has had to commit way much too a great deal strength on whack-a-mole denials that the founding operator, Barron Hilton, dreamed up the name to encourage his credit score card company Carte Blanche (they identified as it a “charge plate” then).

No no, he informed The Times’ Bill Dwyre a lot more than a dozen years ago. “It was soon after the trumpet connect with, followed by the roar of ‘Charge,’” Hilton explained. “It under no circumstances experienced a issue to do with the credit card.” Me, I’d root quixotically for an antiquated indicating of “charger,” a valiant warhorse, like Lochinvar’s steed, surely a additional participating character than a bolt of electrical energy.

Most very good crew names — applicable or not — do the job best as two syllables, with the accent on the 1st 1, in unique for the timeless workforce chant, “Let’s go BLANK blank.” DOD-gers, CHAR-gers, AN-gels.” Sorry, Rams.

A staff of their own

Oh, the bad Angels. Their name has been just one extended struggle about —what else? Place, place, location. They have played for a long time in Anaheim, in Orange County, still they’re historically and lawfully yoked to L.A. in a freeway-friction cousinship to which L.A. is rather a great deal indifferent but one particular that grieves Orange County. Seriously, you could nearly make of Orange County’s unlucky geography some variation of lengthy-ago Mexican President Porfirio Diaz’s lament for his individual region: “So significantly from God, so close to the United States.”

Anyway. Los Angeles experienced a baseball team named the Angels as significantly back as 1892, when The Instances wrote it up as these types of, back when the California League held sway. Ownership and affiliation bought bought and swapped all around around the yrs, and in 1966 it turned an American League group playing in Anaheim as the California Angels.

Just after a new operator purchased the staff in 2003, he place “Los Angeles” back again on the team name, and so lawfully, for a time, the team experienced to be the cluttered, baffling “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.” Anaheim besought the court’s help but lost, and the crew became just the Los Angeles Angels the moment additional.

But Anaheim will constantly have the Ducks — nicely, at the very least for now. Disney’s chairman, Michael Eisner, decreed in 1993 that the new Nationwide Hockey League group really should bear the very same identify as a Disney hockey motion picture, “The Mighty Ducks.” The team, maybe improbably, executed even better than the movie (audiences beloved it, critics meh). In 2006, the workforce altered palms and the new owners dropped the “Mighty” bit. Earn or get rid of, “Ducks” is continue to a improved name than the nondescript, aspirational “Los Angeles Kings,” a title that operator Jack Kent Cooke supposedly believed gave an air of regality to his team. It’s a excellent identify when you’re winning, but not so much when the season turns up a joker.

There is of study course the Los Angeles Soccer Club soccer team, a generic staff title with about as substantially pizzazz as a grocery-retailer bag of flour labeled “flour.” The brand-new Angel City soccer club, a women’s team owned by a stellar array of woman actors and athletes, meant “Angel City” as a placeholder identify until finally it chose a permanent a person, but it appears like Angel Metropolis it will be, in spite of the simple fact that a roller derby league had initial assert on the Angel Town name. Wheels or toes, they both have wings.

Vanishing stars

You may perhaps be questioning, exactly where is Hollywood? Apart from Disney’s poultry-film staff, is no just one capitalizing on the proximity to filmland?

From the last entire 12 months of silent flicks, 1926, until eventually 1938, the Hollywood Stars performed in the Pacific Coast League on borrowed turf, the old Wrigley stadium in what is now South L.A., a location that’s a fantastic tale for one more time. The staff owner moved his club south to San Diego, where it would mature up to turn out to be the Padres. The Hollywood Stars experienced presently knocked all over for a few of many years right before coming to L.A. its preceding incarnations were being the Fresno Raisin Eaters and the Sacramento Solons. Solons is an historic Greek identify that became a synonym for “legislator,” a phrase beloved by headline writers but a mystery to practically anyone else.

The Stars ended up revived in 1939, the finest year in the history of American films. They played at Gilmore Industry, owned by the Gilmore family members, which created a fortune in oil and owned the assets the place Farmers Current market and the Grove now stand. From 1939 until finally 1957, when the Dodgers significant-footed L.A. baseball, the Gilmores fielded the Hollywood Stars. It was a see-and-be-witnessed put for movies’ celebrated faces, the stars who turned out for horse races at Santa Anita and auto races at Gilmore Stadium.

Maybe the Stars’ biggest Hollywood splash was its cheesecake instant in 1950. Columns by Moments sportswriter Braven Dyer about improved athletics machines and uniforms having better results influenced the staff supervisor to whip up a uniform of rayon shirts and pinstriped white flannel shorts. Some of the players beloved the neat, lightweight gear. The bare-knees glimpse lasted for just four seasons.

The Stars’ connection to movies lives on, more or significantly less, in the Galaxy soccer team, named for the formation of tens or even hundreds of billions of stars, so you cannot say the workforce is not thinking large. Its mascot Cozmo, so the staff tale goes, produced an emergency landing in Carson, unsuccessful to make the staff, but stayed on as a mascot. At minimum give that critter a jet pack, will not you, so there is something more-worldly about him?

Our two major school groups — the ones defecting to the Large 10, so allow us not converse their names — are known as Bruins and Trojans. The Bruins were being initially the Grizzlies, as the southern counterpart to UC Berkeley’s Golden Bears, but changed to Bruins in the 1920s when they signed on with the initial Pacific Coastline faculty meeting, which currently had a Grizzlies crew. As for the Trojans, much more than a hundred yrs ago, Situations sportswriter Owen R. Fowl in contrast the university’s stalwart keep track of crew to the Greek soldiers of the metropolis of Troy, so Trojans they became.

Individually, I prefer the modern names that reflect students’ spirit. UC Irvine sends the Anteaters onto the area and the court docket. UC Santa Cruz students chose a little little bit of nearby fauna, the Banana Slugs, to exchange a considerably greater 1, the Sea Lions.

Immediately after Stanford College sensibly gave up its “Indians” team name in 1972, pupils voted on a new faculty staff title. They overwhelmingly chose “Robber Barons,” a dig at Stanford founder Leland Stanford, one of California’s “Big Four” tycoons who named the photographs in California for decades. Unamused, the administration refused to honor the students’ wishes. Now Stanford fields teams named the Cardinal, singular, not plural, for the school coloration. Go Crayola, rah rah rah.

Group mascot figures are really worth delving into more deeply one more time, but I was delighted to study of the existence of the Nationwide Mascot Assn., motto “Fuzzier Together, Safer Collectively,” presenting deportment advice, coverage hints and guidelines these types of as “Have a handler or spotter at all situations when doing,” and “Never choose up or keep infants, toddlers, or small small children.”

I never know irrespective of whether this association usually means they’re unionized, but I would pay dollars money to see all people sports activities mascots going for walks a picket line.