When I was a boy, it seemed as though there were a great, great many black men called Willie or Leroy, but a careless, cursory examination of current NFL rosters shows not a single one, even while there are no fewer than 71 players with two-syllable names ending with -shawn — including Marshawn, Keyshawn, and, quite wonderfully, Seanshawn.
With the Super Bowl approaching, this might be an opportune time to discuss the glorious given names that abound in the National Football League. Newly retired linebacker D’Brickashaw Ferguson’s is the zaniest in the history not only of American professional sports, but since homo sapiens began addressing one another with anything other than grunts. I had always hoped that it was a portmanteau of Brick, a key character in Tennessee Williams’s Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, and rickshaw, a three-wheeled passenger cart pulled by a member of a very low caste. It does indeed have literary origins — it was inspired by Father Ralph de Bricassart, the handsome Irish priest with whom central character Meggie Cleary falls in love in The Thorn Birds, the best-selling novel in Australian history — but nothing whatever to do with rickshaws. I am unable to account for the missing n at the end. Marshawn, Keyshawn...D'Brickashawn, you see.
The D’ has long fascinated me, but even after I slipped her a £10 note (the icky new plastic kind, rather than the old-fashioned paper), Siri was unable to explicate its origin or meaning. My wife and other animal rights types are not delighted with the new tenner being made in part with tallow, as I am displeased with its depicting Jane Austen, of whose novels PBS has encouraged many hoity-toity adaptations. I, for one, would have much preferred Clement Freud, the funniest man in the history of the English language, or gay trailblazer Quentin Crisp, but of course was not consulted.
It’s possible to infer a great deal about a player from his given name. We would expect Carvaggio Hoskins, the Seattle Lites of Love special needs, I mean team, star to have had art-loving, probably upscale parents, and would in fact be correct — Vag (pronounced to rhyme with garage) is the son of a highbrow urologist father and attorney mother. On the other hand, we might reasonably expect LaDemetrius Hairston, the Jacksonville Fives’ weak safety, to be the son of a very young mother who was trying too hard, and probably not married, as few men would allow their sons to be given names beginning with La, the feminine definite article in many Romance languages.
The case of Kaligula Joyner, All-Pro offensive lineman for the Yucatan Maize, is an especially interesting one. It might lead one to expect that his parents were classicists, but we now learn that the name just sounded good to Lig’s 14-year-old mother, L’Taniqua’a, who hadn’t even heard of the Roman emperor notorious for his sexual perversity. T
Given the high likelihood of their ancestors having been kidnapped at the behest of, and then sold into bondage by, Arab slave traders, I don’t understand why Islamic names like Kareem, Rashid, and Jamal have been so popular among American black people the last few decades. Surely at least a few young men with strange, fanciful names become NFL and NBA players because they find it hard to find less concussion-prone work. A 2015 study overseen by a UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture study for Evolution and Human Behavior discovered that job applicants with ordinary, non-fanciful, non-Islamic names were 74% more likely to get a positive response from prospective employers than those with stereotypically black names. Far better Chuck, Brad, and Steve, that is, than Rashid, LaDemetrius, or D’Brickashaw(n).
Or maybe it’s that fancifully named young men grow up to play in the NFL because their names compelled them in their childhoods to get strong and tough. Can you imagine the hell of being named LaDemetrius and being interested in flower arranging or hairdressing?
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