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A TAXONOMY OF SECURITY IMAGERY IN AMERICAN PRO SPORTS
By Erich Fox Tree
The most popular North American sports are team competitions where the aim is for one team to secure victory.(1) Professional sports reflect security concerns ranging from the profound to the inane. Loss by a team is often regarded as if it were a threat or insult to the region, nationality, or even the political ideologies supposedly represented by a given team. Because of sports merchandise, tourism, tickets, broadcasting fees, and concessions, team success is also linked to material monetary gains for franchise owners and secondary industries. In order to make money, team owners seek to stimulate loyalty to teams within the general populace, not unlike the way a manufacturer of detergent or carbonated soda seeks to encourage brand-loyalty. Owners often do so by exaggerating the importance of athletic competitions and associating teams with such external phenomena, such as regions, nations, patriotic sentiments, and ideologies. They also do all within their power to enhance and secure the probability of their team's victory. This includes investments of materiel, money, and energy. This also includes investment in the imagery associated with a team, which is selected or designed to promote the idea that a team is secure, healthy, and powerful; that it represents the positive character of the community of supporters; and that it should be victorious in competition. This report offers basic taxonomy of the imagery of security in sports by examining the names of professional teams.
I postulate that team names have been selected to promote images of security as a means of deceptively promoting a team's potential for victory, and ultimately, inspiring greater fan allegiance. Such imagery makes the populace feel more comfortable buying season tickets or merchandise, and thereby "supporting" a "winning team."
In answer to the question of whether the imagery is successful, it is difficult to measure such impact directly. Nonetheless, the influence of the imagery evoked by team names is demonstrated by how news media often talk about certain sports teams. Just consider the verbal cliches associated with certain teams. For example, numerous teams bearing the names of birds regularly "fly" to victory.
Given my postulate, I have examined the names of 124 professional teams in the four major team sports played in the USA and Canada. These names include the names of 31 hockey teams, 33 football teams, 30 baseball teams, and 30 basketball teams. I have categorized these names, in order to see what are the most common images of team security. These are the same images that are meant to psychologically instill insecurity through fear in competitors and the fans of the competitors. Indeed, while a good team name cannot by itself win an athletic competition, it can materially assist franchise profits, and indirectly lead to team victory, which translates into even greater earnings for those invested.
My less-than-scientific sorting exercise has led me to the following conclusions:
Violence is by far the most popular element in the popular imagery of athletic security associated with professional team names. Security through violence is evoked by some 40 percent of all team names. This imagery combines SCARY ANIMALS, as well as several VIOLENT NATURAL FORCES (which, surprisingly, are restricted to hockey teams -- Hurricanes, Avalanche, Flames, Wild, and Lighting), and SCARY PEOPLE, (A) with violent occupations, not to mention racist images of scary "other" races. The single most popular image invoked is that of what I term SCARY ANIMALS: night animals and animals that kill, sting, bite, or buck. Twenty-eight of 124 teams, or 23 percent of teams in all three sports, are based on SCARY ANIMALS. However, that statistic is severely biased by football. Fully one third of football teams have names based on scary animals. Ferocious predatory mammals are the most popular animals used for team names.
But violence is also connoted through both SCARY OBJECTS, consisting of physical instruments of pain and capture (i.e., Spurs, Rockets, Nets, Sabres), and through SCARY PEOPLE, representing violent, masculine human occupations (Pirates, Buccaneers, Raiders, Rangers, Warriors, Thrashers, Blue Jackets). Team names referring to perpetrators of war, violence, stealth, or thievery constitute fully 13 percent of the total.
Team names that are meant to inspire fear also include a second group of subjectively SCARY PEOPLE (B), whose fearsome quality derives from ethnicity, based on racist opinions apparently held by white U.S. citizens. Several racist names are meant to inspire fear through the mention of "savage" or "bloodthirsty" non-Anglo types, such as Braves, Blackhawks, Indians, Redskins, Vikings, or Celts (10%). These names seek to take advantage of the supposedly fearsome warrior quality of certain ethnic groups, particularly Native Americans. Although the violent imagery associated with most of these terms is indirect, I include them in my count of names that promote security through violence. Indeed, in many cases, these names themselves are acts of symbolic violence against the groups that are stereotyped, commodified, and marginalized by them. The prevalence of names associated with Native Americans reveals the special effort some athletic franchises have made to exclude Native Americans from their inclusive images of security.
The case of the Houston Texans is one odd case of supposedly SCARY PEOPLE (3), under the assumption that the Texans denoted by the name are, for the most part, imagined to be white Anglos. Perhaps this team ought to be grouped with Celtics and Vikings as a category of fierce white savages.
Only six teams invoke SUPERNATURAL ALLIANCES. Though a popular military slogan for nations and armies around the world, "Gott mit uns" is not a popular claim in American sports. Apparently, people are not afraid of being defeated through divine intervention. With the exception of nationalistic flag-worship and the occasional curse or expletive, Americans presumably imagine their sports to be very secular confrontations. Americans apparently put more faith in money than religion. Names referring to WEALTH are more than three times more popular than names referring to supernatural forces.
Teams evoking security or power through wealth can be divided into three subcategories. The first, WEALTH (A), includes teams referring to industry, modernity, and urbanity. Symbols of wealth in this group range from financial commodities such as gold nuggets (and the affiliated 1849 miners), to world expositions (i.e. the Expos) and the modern metropolis (i.e., the Mets). The second subcategory, WEALTH (B), includes non-animate natural forces and resources. The third, WEALTH (C), includes non-violent human imagery of industrial proletarians and varied regional workforces. For some strange reason, however, none of these teams denoted by the third sub-category of wealth play basketball.
Sources of wealth are related to items included under the category of names that evoke security through SIZE, NUMBER, or mechanical strength. The general percentage of names connoting power and wealth is even greater if one adds the Kings, Royals, and other figures associated with statecraft.
Fifteen percent of names promote the idea that security can be imagined in terms of speed without danger. Baseball has the most names based on fast-but-not-scary things, but it also has the wimpiest names. These wimpy names, generally based on colors, plants, music, and songbirds, demonstrate that security imagery is not universal. Rather than arguing that these images are used to promote power through beauty, I believe these team names demonstrate that not all teams make use of imagery of violence, strength, speed, or industrial, natural, and supernatural force in order to promote imagery of victory and security for the team.
ATTACHED CHART
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(1) Other groups around the world sometimes engage in sports events that have different primary objectives, such as the display of community solidarity, nobility, or physical prowess. For example, as Anthropologists have documented how some Native Amazonian groups engage "races" in which there is no winner; rather, the "competitors" struggle to finish the race at the same time.
Erich Fox Tree is a PhD. candidate and teaching affiliate in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. Erich is interested in Pan-Indianism across the Americas, particularly the increasing use of the "sciences" of historical linguistics and anthropology to justify pan-Mayan cultural and ethnic unity in Guatemala. His research examines rural Mayas' changing customary beliefs about the nature of language and identity in relation to the scientific ideas promoted by native activists in the emerging Maya Movement. Erich draws theoretical inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Gary Larson.
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