NAMES ARE DESTINY. If you had a son in the late ’60s or early ’70s and named him Maximilian or Zacharia or Noah, you knew for a certainty that in 15 years he’d be in his room with his comic book collection, not making time upstairs with a girl named Brandy. If you named your daughter Brandy, at 15 she would be off God knows where with some boy with a car, and that boy would probably be named Brad. And it wouldn’t be her fault. It would be yours. Brandys go out. If you had named her Millicent, you could have slept the peaceful slumber of parents who know their daughters aren’t riding in cars with boys. Names count for a lot. Sure, there are placebo names that don’t influence people’s lives, like Joe, Mary, and John. Bobs never feel the force of their name pushing them through life. But sometimes–especially in sports–a name is fate. For an athlete, the right name can even guarantee glory. The local minor league baseball team I follow, the Potomac Cannons, has had a string of players over the last few years with what can only be described as “baseball names.” Covelli Crisp, Esix Sneed, Dustin Brisson, Damon Ponce de Leon. These boys had no choice: They were destined for sports as soon as the ink dried on their birth certificates–and not just any sport, either. Baseball has always been home of the name too quirky to be true. Long before Covelli and Esix were slugging for the Cannons, the majors were full of great, goofy names: Napoleon Reyes, Kermit Wahl, Delbert Rice, Cadwallader Coles, Gordon Goldsberry. Some players tried to hide their names: Wilbur Wakamatsu, for instance, went by “Don.” Others understood that a good name was integral to success. As “John Peter,” Honus Wagner would never have had his 3,418 hits and .327 lifetime batting average. Of course, adopting a baseball name doesn’t cinch things. Honus’s older brother, Butts Wagner, played only 74 games in the bigs. He couldn’t escape the stuffiness of his given name, “Albert.” The players who don’t have quirky names have ur-American names, the kind that make you want to stand up and salute, like Sammy Sosa, Derek Jeter, Bo Hart, and Billy Deck. (What’s doubly strange is that some of these American names are given to guys who weren’t born here. Go figure.) Say what you want about free will–there was no way Mrs. Deck’s little boy was going to grow up to work for Greenpeace. There are basketball names, too, which also fall into two categories. The first are the creative spellings, like Anfernee Hardaway, Dajuan Wagner, Antawn Jamison, Jumaine Jones, Jeryl Sasser, DeShawn Stevenson, DerMarr Johnson, Damone Brown, and Ervin Johnson. Dontae, Jones tells the story that after he was born, his mother sat in the hospital and, while filling out his birth certificate, decided to put an accent mark at the end of his name because she liked the way it looked. Which is fitting: Basketball, the sport of imagination and improvisation, has the most whimsical names. At the same time, other basketball players have names that are positively regal: Sixer greats Maurice Cheeks and Julius Erving could have been Victorian novelists. Chauncey Billups sounds like a playwright, and Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje will surely be elected secretary general of the United Nations someday–remember, he speaks three languages and got his degree from Georgetown. Lawrence Funderburke and Nick (originally Nicholas?) Van Exel should have castles in Europe. And then there’s the most sublime name in basketball history: God Shamgod. Alas, the Providence guard never found much success in the NBA because, clearly, his eponym intended him for baseball. The fellows in golf don’t sound like athletes so much as society-page caricatures, but their names are just as loaded. Payne Stewart. Hale Irwin. Dudley Hart. Other golfers, like Heath Slocum and Davis Love III, sound like refugees from lost F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. A hundred years ago, they might have had a choice of careers. They could have been dissipated Manhattan bachelors or plantation owners. In modern America, if you’re born Loren Roberts, you better get a 9-iron for your first birthday, because it’s off to the links for you. And what about the hearty men who play hockey? They have names like fancy European sports cars–rough and ready hockey names. Jaromir Jagr, Igor Kravchuk, Darius Kasparaitis, Miroslav Satan, Jeff Beukeboom, Brad Bombardir (I bet he gets the girls). No figure skating or curling or particle physics for these lads. It was hockey or death. I’ve led a sinful life, so I’m sure one day God will give me a son as a little pre-purgatory warm-up. I think I’ll name him Flashman. Flash Last. But I’m not quite sure what sport it is. –Jonathan V. Last
