Sports names

Someone reminded us that the Baltimore Ravens played their final home game at good old Memorial Stadium in midtown Baltimore on December 14, 1997 before moving to their undomed palace downtown. Their opponent that day? The Tennessee Oilers, formerly the Houston Oilers, who had decamped from Space City just that season. They were supposed to be based in Nashville, but only two college stadiums were available in Opryville. One was too big and one was too small. But the one that was just right was in Memphis, over 200 miles away. They made that their home for two seasons.

In a bizarre twist, the Edmonton Oilers hockey team almost moved to Houston in 1998 before the city of Edmonton came up with the money to keep them home, which spared Houston the pain that people feel when they see their ex marry someone else with their name!

If you think that didn't make sense, how about them keeping the name "Oilers, " in a state whose one refinery accounts for a whopping 1% of US oil production? Later on, when a stadium was built in Nashville, they changed their name to the Titans, a nod to the titans of country music who add so much to our culture.

This was not the only example of a sports team relocating and keeping a wholly inappropriate nickname. The New Orleans Jazz basketball team moved to Utah and should have left the Jazz behind. The Minneapolis Lakers moved away from the Land Of 10,000 Lakes (actually, there are 11, 842, but who's counting?) to Los Angeles, California, a city of 22 lakes and one tar pit.

The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, named for the nimble way Brooklyn residents had to duck and dive to avoid being hit by trolley cars, moved in 1958 to Los Angeles, which for years had electric streetcars. These had replaced horse-drawn trolleys, and those horses really gave pedestrians something to dodge!