Name Dropping

By DAVID WHARTON

Aug. 8, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The early days of Chick Hearn at the microphone were also the days of Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain and Jerry West, otherwise known as “Mr. Clutch.”

Hearn’s career as the Laker announcer’s career progressed through Magic and Silk. It was no surprise when, after watching forward James Worthy produce one clutch performance after another, Hearn coined the name “Big Game James.”

Hearn, who died earlier this week, hailed from a more colorful time in our sporting past. It was a time when players had nicknames such as Pee Wee and Crazy Legs, Broadway Joe and the Bronx Bull. Ted Williams was “The Splendid Splinter,” Teddy Ballgame and The Kid.

That era could be long gone.

“Sports nicknames are becoming much fewer and not nearly as interesting,” said Edward Callary, former president of the American Name Society. “Instead of the Splendid Splinter, we have Mark McGwire as Big Mac. I mean, how clever is that?”

It might seem trivial, this matter of the vanishing moniker, but people who study language suggest it illuminates a shift in how fans watch games, if not a sea change in the culture at large. They believe it says something about who Americans have become.

“That was an earlier, heroic, more innocent age,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguistics professor and San Francisco Giants’ fan. “We aren’t like that anymore.”

Nicknames have always been an intimate lingo, terms of endearment circulated among a close-knit group. Family. A squadron of fighter pilots. The Mafia.

In the world of sports, however, they were often coined and publicized by sportscasters such as Hearn, said Terry Pruyne, who collected 20,000 of them for his book, “Sports Nicknames.”

The best sobriquets reflected a player’s persona. Joe DiMaggio was as majestic as a “Yankee Clipper” and Pete Rose intense enough to be “Charlie Hustle.” Jack “The Assassin” Tatum tackled like one on the football field. Hockey goon Dave “Tiger” Williams skated ferociously.

Such insights were not always flattering. After a baserunning error in a 1908 game, the otherwise competent Fred Merkle would forever be known as “Bonehead.” Chuck Wepner was called the “Bayonne Bleeder,” an accurate but unfortunate tag for a boxer.

Even worse, Pruyne found that many nicknames were unimaginative--scores of “Leftys” and “Reds”--while others were bigoted, derived from skin color or religion.

For good or bad, this language was more closely associated with sports when fans felt chummier about their teams, said Callary, an English professor at Northern Illinois University who busies himself with onomastics, the study of names and naming practices.

Years ago, in his native Baltimore, it was common to see legendary quarterback Johnny Unitas--”Johnny U”--on the street. Other Colt players attended prayer meetings at Callary’s neighborhood church. “These were guys who lived in our town,” he said.

Now the best players become free agents and franchises move across country for the promise of a new stadium. Fans are no longer relegated to the local ballpark or radio station--they can choose from half a dozen games on cable each night.

Add rising ticket prices and labor disputes to the equation and, as Callary said, “I don’t think we feel the same way toward our players. We’ve just put so much distance between ourselves and them.”

If anyone has tried to keep nicknames alive, it has been sportscaster Chris Berman, who grew up reading about the likes of Frank “Home Run” Baker, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown--a pitcher maimed in a childhood accident--and Walter “Big Train” Johnson.

As a counselor at summer camp, Berman renamed all the kids in his cabin. In college, he and his pals “hung names” on players they read about in box scores. This quirk became a professional trademark when, as an announcer for the then-fledgling ESPN, he uttered the words: “Frank ‘Tanana’ Daiquiri.”

“It wasn’t planned but I guess it worked,” he said. “We did a few more and everyone seemed to enjoy it.”

Fred “Crime Dog” McGriff. Eric “Sleeping with” Bienemy. Andre “Bad Moon” Rison. Edgar “Trailer for sale or” Renteria.

Berman is quick to acknowledge that his word plays and pop culture puns, delivered tongue in cheek, are not like nicknames of old. He figures the traditional style served a purpose--in its time.

“Way back when, most of the people in America never went to a game, so they were doing it off visualization,” he said. “The Splendid Splinter was descriptive of how Ted Williams looked. And we had Sliding Billy Hamilton with 912 stolen bases.”

That might still work for fighter pilots and recent gangsters such as John “The Dapper Don” Gotti and Vincent “The Chin” Gigante because they are not on television daily. But in sports, cameras peer into every dugout and inside every facemask, leaving little to the imagination. “There’s less language because we see all of them,” Berman said.

Perhaps fans see too much.

Many old nicknames had a sense of grandeur, said Nunberg, the linguistics professor who wrote “The Way We Talk Now.” He is thinking of the Galloping Ghost and the Sultan of Swat when he explains: “It’s about heroes ... these Homeric heroes and the way we portrayed them.”

Such adoration might be impossible when every barroom brawl, divorce proceeding and arrest for drug possession makes the nightly news. Athletes are exposed in much the same way politicians are. Imagine if fans had known that Mickey Mantle got in a brawl at the Copacabana or stepped to the plate with a hangover, as he later acknowledged.

“The players all had feet of clay but it wasn’t covered,” Nunberg said. “Now that we know, these people cannot be given a reverential status.”

Instead, Pruyne has noticed a new trend: the commercialized nickname.

In the 1970s, entrepreneur Charlie O. Finley was looking for ways to market his baseball team, the Oakland A’s. He not only dubbed his star pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter, he concocted a story about Hunter running away from home as a child to go fishing.

More recently, “Air Jordan” was a shoe marketing campaign before it was shorthand for basketball star Michael Jordan. Athletes have followed the lead of rap singers who deliberately craft their personas.

“In Los Angeles, Shaquille O’Neal has a thing about giving himself names like ‘The Big Aristotle,’ ” Pruyne said. “Players see the value of nicknames.”

That notion got dragged into the courts last December when a man claimed he helped Philadelphia 76er star Allen Iverson come up with “The Answer.” The plaintiff was seeking 25% of the profits Iverson has earned from lines of clothing and shoes connected to the nickname.

“All the marketing and image consciousness ... these names sound like they come from a public relations department,” said Ron Shelton, the former minor league baseball player who became a film director and created characters such as Crash Davis and Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh in “Bull Durham.”

Not that spontaneous and descriptive names are extinct. The likes of Jevon “The Freak” Kearse and Frank “The Big Hurt” Thomas still populate sports pages. But Shelton joins a chorus of skeptics who believe modern names--from the Bus to the Big Unit--are no match for Shoeless Joe and the Georgia Peach. “We’ve lost that real character identity,” he said.

Or, as Simon and Garfunkel sang: “Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”

Maybe that is why Berman senses an appetite for the names he invents. Players eagerly adopt them--McGriff is widely referred to as “Crime Dog” and Rison had “Bad Moon” tattooed on his biceps. Viewers write letters pining for something to fill the void after Lou “The Toe” Groza and Smokin’ Joe Frazier.

“Look, that language was colorful,” Berman said. “Now there’s less mystery. There’s not as much poetic license.”

Major Nicknames

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Ted “The Splendid Splinter” Williams

Babe “The Sultan of Swat” Ruth

“Hammerin’ ” Hank Aaron

Ty “The Georgia Peach” Cobb

Joe “The Yankee Clipper” DiMaggio

Willie “Hit ‘em where they aint” Keeler

Willie “The Say-Hey Kid” Mays