Your Atlanta Bravos: As Easy as E-to-O?

lethalweapon3 · January 7, 2012

(WARNING: just another rambling diatribe on my part... don't say you weren't warned! lol) Input and feedback welcomed, as always!

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“Let’s Go Blackhawks! Let’s Go Blackhawks! Let’s Go Blackhawks! Let’s Go Blackhawks!”

Were it not for a decision made for us already, in Wisconsin back in the 1950s, yes, you could be rooting heartily right now for YOUR Atlanta Blackhawks. Thankfully, Ben Kerner, who renamed the team ‘Blackhawks’ after relocating his Buffalo Bison to Moline, Illinois in midseason, understood the name lacked historical relevance (“Blackhawk War”) once he moved his franchise east to Milwaukee. Conveniently dropping the “Black” and changing the logo to a bird of prey was pretty much all it took.

Two years after the basketball team arrived, Milwaukee got a baseball team to relocate there as well. General contracting magnate Lou Perini had no designs on changing the name for the club he bought in 1941. Almost off the, umm, bat, his Milwaukee Braves drew league-record crowds while contending perennially. Kerner’s “Hawks,” just two seasons after moving out of Milwaukee, won an NBA title in 1957 and were the toast of St. Louis. That same year, the Braves they left behind won their first World Series and were the toast of Milwaukee. No one could predict that just over a decade later, the two franchises would meet again, in a completely different city.

As Kerner did for our Hawks, I’m wondering aloud whether it’s time to make a similarly subtle but momentous change in the way the club around the corner on Hank Aaron Drive refers to itself. Specifically, how wedded are people to the name “Braves”? I suspect, for a franchise that’s moved around several times over 125 years and has three meaningful championships for its trouble, the bond with the name is not as unbreakable as many would have us believe.

What’s wild is the name “Braves” was coined for the team 100 years ago, in 1912 when the team was in Boston, but the name and logos were fashioned by a new owner based in, of all places, New York City. Tammany Hall, the legendary political machine James Gaffney was tied to, was named after a Lenape tribal leader (Tamanend) influential in the 17^th century colonial era. Manhattan’s Tammany society members like Gaffney incorporated what they allegedly understood to be Native American customs into their bullying, corrupting, power-grabbing tactics. Gaffney changed the team name after years of name-changes by prior owners (Beaneaters in 1883, to Doves in 1907, and Rustlers in 1911) failed to coincide with any measurable success on the diamond or at the ticket gates. While the Braves’ image would be sold to the public for generations, rightly or wrongly, as homage to Native Americans like Tamanend, the originator of the name really established it to honor the likes of guys like “Boss” Tweed.

The “Miracle” worst-to-first championship season of 1914 quickly allowed fandom around the Braves’ name to take hold in Beantown. The field Gaffney built in Boston the next year, baseball’s largest at the time, was dubbed “Braves Field,” but despite selling the franchise just three years later, he left the Tammany-inspired name behind. New owners changed the name to “Boston Bees” in 1935, but could not change the team’s losing fortunes.

Former Red Sox owner Bob Quinn bought a portion of the team in 1936. In an attempt to renew popularity for a team vying with the Red Sox for local attention, he and co-owners changed the name back to “Braves” in 1940, five years before he sold the franchise to Perini.

Incidentally, in 1932, the city’s new football team (different owners, but thinking along the lines of the New York Football Giants) took the same “Boston Braves” name, eventually changing it to “Boston Redskins” before relocating to Washington, D.C. five years later. Reasonably, one can assume the Redskins name might never have taken hold, had the owners started out copying any other name than the “Braves.”

The “Braves” name was revived in Boston during the early 1970s (http://en.wikipedia....n_Braves_(AHL)) when the Bruins’ owners conducted a short-lived trial to add minor league hockey to the Garden. Ironically, when that franchise’s rights were sold to Winnipeg in the 1980s, their team name was changed… to the “Hawks.” How many degrees of separation was that?

I brought up all that historical background because it is easy for some people to imagine that the name was inspired by a desire to show a measure of respect to the perceived fighting spirit of Native Americans. As it turns out, a good bit of the traditions built up over the years lack an Atlanta basis, or even a Georgia basis, but are modified remnants of concepts initiated in Boston and Milwaukee (and, if you will, Tallahassee), all under a name created by a guy from New York that owned the team in Boston for no more than four years. Once the inspired linkage to a corrupt political regime is laid bare, it becomes much simpler as a basis for the argument that follows.

Someone else can be on the activist path to change nicknames of the thousands of teams referring to indigenous-peoples and ethnicities in America – indeed, many are doing just that to various effect, especially at the sub-professional level. I just find that, among the professional teams that have built-up allegiances in their towns (Blackhawks of Chicago, Redskins of Washington, Indians of Cleveland, Chiefs of Kansas City, etc.), the argument for maintaining the "Braves" name in perpetuity on grounds of "tradition" and "honor" is among the more tenuous.

In the state and region widely accepted as the historical “home base” for what would become known as the “Trail of Tears,” there was no rational need, beyond short-term financing, to sustain the “Braves” moniker for a club with a spotty, quite often dreadful, baseball legacy. There are no Milwaukee Pilots (from Seattle), no Minnesota Senators (via D.C.), no Texas Senators (also via D.C.), no Baltimore Browns (by way of St. Louis), no New York Orioles (via Baltimore), and no Washington Expos (formerly Montreal). Yet the Atlanta Braves’ new owners elected to follow the “Athletics” and “Dodgers” approaches not to modify the packaging for its newest customers.

The Braves’ current tenure in Atlanta has included decades of grappling with and moderating the ethics of fan-based and team-based customs. These range from the “screaming warrior” logo (a legacy from Milwaukee), to Chief Noc-A-Homa and Princess Win-A-Lotta, to the teepee in the bleachers, to the re-introduction of the Tomahawk with the script logo on the jersey (a legacy from Boston), and of course the “Tomahawk Chop” rally and war chant that accompanied Florida State star Deion Sanders’ arrival to the club.

Yet as of the moment, there is really not a lot of hullabaloo over the appropriateness of the name, imagery, and customs that remain. Maybe, though, that’s the best time to make a change.

What it doesn’t have to be is a huge change… as for the name, not terribly much more than a vowel. Over the years, many diehard fans have lovingly referred to the club as the “Bravos”. I suggest here that the secondary name become the primary one.

What, pray tell, is a Bravo, one might rightfully ask? Same thing a Yankee, a Dodger, a Phillie, a Met, a National, a Red, an Athletic, and an Astro is. It’s nothing, and potentially everything, at the same time. The city that hosts the Bravos, and the team’s fortunes, make the name what it is. Like Brave, the inanimate terminology bears no clear local connection. But unlike “Brave,” being a “Bravo” doesn’t require an explanation of, or any reflection upon, the history of Native American nicknames defined by others. Sure, one can be small-b “brave” without necessarily bearing a certain ancestry, and “brave” is the quality we ascribe to the players on our hometown field when cheering them on. But the heaping of supposedly Native American customs atop the capital-B “Brave” effectively obscures that fact.

While some will snicker with myopic jokes connecting the team name to queer eyes, actor’s studios, and “real” housewives, the long-term use of the word “bravo” has connotation in multiple languages for courageousness and boldness, while also serving as the exclamation for audiences appreciating an excellent performance (usually, by males; In Italian, “brava” is the interjection for females). For those desirous of a more combative spirit, “bravo” has an etymology in English and French languages as well, a reference to swordsmen and hired assassins. In Spanish and Portuguese, the “bravo” name also applies to furious and angry-tempered persons – probably as controversial as such a name could get, but it’s not much of a stretch from team names like “Fury” and “Rage” commonplace in the States. Taken together, “bravo” can still mean “brave” for the die-hards, and “Bravo” has more international appeal than “Brave” in an Olympic city still trying to market itself as a cosmopolitan locale.

Once one makes the critical leap from “Brave” to “Bravo,” all traditions crucially tied to the former team name can be considered anew. The tomahawk on the jersey? Why not a red-clay-colored baseball bat? The Tomahawk Chop? Why not modify the gesture to an overhead clap, modifying what Gator fans instead of what Seminole fans do, one which forms a semblance of the letter “A” when the hands are clasped together? Accompany that with a Wurlitzer organ primer that maintains the Chop-style pace for the “clap” while sounding like anything other than a call for war chants, and fans can easily make the leap as well. It is here where fans can guide the transition to traditions that are truly local, and not just co-opted from Anywhere Else, U.S.A.

For Liberty Media, notorious for keeping daily operation decisions at arms’ length, an action such as this would be seen as positive to most, excepting the knee-jerk anti-PC forces, random sports columnists with axes to grind for the sake of personal publicity, and those with minor and resolvable proprietary squabbles. It also avoids a protracted and unnecessary debate with the public at-large to build broad consensus on a name with local connections that “everyone could be happy with” (see “Thrashers”).

There’s no real point in waiting for a new groundswell of protest, often provoked by conveniently deferred indignation (see the 1995 Series), drawing up pointless lines of scrimmage between pro-PC and anti-PC talking heads. There’s also no point in delaying until it’s “too late” (see “Redskins”). Fan apathy toward Atlanta’s baseball team is as low as it has been, arguably, since the late 1980s. A resurgence leading to, say, multiple World Series titles, something this franchise’s fans have never experienced even during the team’s high-watermarks, would likely engrain the “Braves” brand in people’s heads for a long time, and only add to any intransigence in even slightly changing the name going forward.

As Atlanta basketball fans, this could have been our issue, too, save for some practical foresight from Ben Kerner well before the Hawks got here. As “Atlanta Blackhawks” fans, who knows what kind of “traditions” we’d be tempted to cling to by now? An Indian head in a circle instead of a “Pac Man”? “Harry the Hawk” might well be “Barry the Blackhawk,” a mascot of a wholly different feather. “ATL” lettering placed within an arrowhead? Perhaps we’d be enlightened by now to change the imagery to a black bird-of-prey, or the mascot to some benign basketball-headed monstrosity similar to the Braves’ replacement for Noc-A-Homa and company; perhaps not. Maybe we’d be in stuck a state of periodic re-branding just to make sense of the name, like the Warriors in Oakland.

But all things considered, it’s a good thing not to have that issue in the backburners of our consciousness. Heck, without some forethought, we could’ve had the Blackhawks battling it out under the boards against the L.A. Braves (http://en.wikipedia..../Buffalo_Braves) for the NBA title.

~lw3

GABALLA · January 8, 2012

Can I write a term paper from this!

lethalweapon3 · January 8, 2012

Can I write a term paper from this!

I have no rights reserved! LOL

Sadly, Wiki was the basis for most of my stuff, but much of the links on the Wiki pages, and probably a trip to the library or two for some real sources, and you're set!

~lw3

lethalweapon3 · January 8, 2012

Stuff I left out about the "Atlanta Chiefs", both old (former NASL champions, also owned by the Braves' owners from its conception; sold to the Hawks and renamed "Apollos"; revived in 1979 by Braves' owner Ted Turner as the "Chiefs")...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Chiefs

to new (Semi-pro football team playing in Buckhead and Sandy Springs; that aforementioned "ATL arrowhead" concept is already taken)...

http://www.atlantachiefsfootball.com/

~lw3

lethalweapon3 · January 11, 2012

Also worth noting that http://atlantabravos.com/ is already taken by a fan as a website but it wouldn't take much to buy that out if needed.

~lw3

AHF · January 11, 2012

The name that I can't believe is out there is "Redskins." It is one thing to have a positive name associated with a minority group and another to have a name that is a slander. You have to figure it will change some day.