Redskins and Indians fall. Are Braves, Chiefs, and Blackhawks next?
by Tom Raabe
March 24, 2022, 10:57 PM
It’s been a month or two since the grand unveiling of the new name for the Washington Football Team, and reaction on the positive side to Washington Commanders has been, basically, meh.
Upbeat comments have come from the usual suspects: the team president, PR flacks, and the D.C. mayor. Beyond people who get paid to plump, however, the praise has been tepid. “I like it,” said one internet commenter. “Sounds auto-generated but everyone will get used to it,” said another. The comment of a digital content creator in Oklahoma, who called it “kind of badass,” is as badass as the encomiums get.
But is it better than the Guardians? Back in November, the woke warriors claimed another triumph, this one on the shores of Lake Erie, and a baseball team that for 107 years was known as the Cleveland Indians and adored as such by millions became the Cleveland Guardians.
The Cleveland baseball team hasn’t won a championship since Bob Feller was in his prime (1948) — the longest current non-championship stretch in Major League Baseball. And now not only is the beloved “Indians” stripped from the name but all the ancillary accoutrements — “the Tribe,” Chief Wahoo — keep it company in the dustbin. Rec rooms in northeastern Ohio will have to be entirely redone. The erstwhile Indians are the Guardians now, based on some art-deco sculptures on a roadway spanning the Cuyahoga River. They’re the Guardians of Traffic. The knees wobble.
But that’s baseball. Major league baseball teams are named after small birds, small bears, kids who dodge streetcars, chubby priests, beneficent supernal beings, mountain ranges, beer makers, letters of the alphabet, and hosiery. In that context, Guardians isn’t horrible.
more
https://spectator.org/woke-war-on-sports-nicknames-washington-commanders/
