The importance of being Ernie, not Ernest, or, How nicknames make legends

Everyone needs a good nickname – at least, any athlete who aspires to greatness.

Think back to that great baseball movie of my childhood (you, gentle reader, may not be the same age as I), The Sandlot. Hamilton Porter is doing his best impression of The Great Bambino, when the loveable Smalls intimates that he didn’t know who said Bambino was.

Squints: You’ve never heard of the sultan of swat?
Kenny: The titan of terror.
Timmy: The colossus of clout!
Tommy: The colossus of clout!
Benny Rodriguez: The king of crash, man.

What’s key to this whole scene is that the boys never once refer to the player by his “real” name, Babe Ruth. Which, of course, is in itself simply a lesser nickname. And of course the whole refusal to call the Babe by his name sets up a fabulous turn of events at the end of the movie

Squints: Where did your old man get that ball?
Smalls: I don’t know. Some lady gave it to him. She even signed her name on it… Ruth. Baby Ruth.

wherein the mysterious owner of the dog, The Beast, that has terrorized the boys, reveals himself to have been a friend of the legend, whom he calls….GEORGE!

Deep breath.

The whole issue of names as signifiers, and perhaps even as predictors of personhood is perhaps more academic territory than I am qualified or willing to cover. But let’s delve in anyway.

What if names, nicknames, signifiers (chair, table, couch) don’t simply attach a series of sounds to make it easier to communicate, but actually somehow denote and in turn FORM the essence of the thing they’re pointing to?

Not so radical, right? The word “couch” would always signify that lovely leather number parked alongside the fireplace, and would also somehow inherently refer to the object’s intrinsic “couch-ness.”

Now, what if nicknames worked the same way? What if, the day Dale Earnhardt became “The Intimidator,” he was both assigned a mission – named what he should become – and was somehow changed by that naming?

It’s cyclical. It’s the very cliché of the self-fulfilling prophesy.

Now think again of the legends (another wonderful trope of The Sandlot, by the way – when the Babe emerges from a closet to christen Benny a legend and tells him that heroes get remembered but legends never die.)

Now think of their names – their nicknames, infinitely more powerful and weighted with meaning than their given names.

The Great One. The Intimidator. The Great Bambino.

Now think of the names of the men who hope to be legends, or who played hard enough to perhaps, one day, be a footnote to legendary days:

The Perfect Storm. The Answer. Little Ball of Hate. King James. Prince Albert.

Now think of the great athletes of our time, and how devoid they are of excellent, aspirational names: Miggy. Manny. A-Rod. K-Rod. And so on and so forth.

None of these men will ever be great men (here I am reminded of the absurd song from Gang of Four) so long as their names offer no direction, nothing to become (an intimidator, a bearer of greatness) and begin no prophetic cycle of legend.

Their nicknames, even, lack the sound and the fury – and still signify nothing.

What, then, should we be calling these men?