The Stinking Onions? What are they thinking?

Perhaps this sports franchise is destined to fall into the same category of Chicago history as the Chicago Hustle, the Cougars, the Power or the original team known as the Chicago Fire.

But the franchise that is expected to represent the Second City when Women’s Professional Soccer kicks off its first season of existence next spring may wind up with one of the most unique monikers in the city’s athletic history.

THE AS-OF-yet-named Chicago team said this week it will allow its potential fans to choose a public identity for the first serious attempt at a women’s professional soccer team in this city.

For what it’s worth, fans can go to an Internet site and pick from among 10 nicknames, all of which are meant to feed off some offbeat aspect of Chicago’s history or character.

Hence, we could wind up with a ball club that carries the English translation of what the name Chicago originally meant, back in the days a couple of centuries ago when the Second City was just a strong-smelling swamp with onion plants growing wild on the banks of what is now known to be the spot where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.

The “Stinking Onions.” It’s almost suitable, since any Chicago ball club is going to have to carry on the tradition of periods of time when they are god-awful at their respective sport. What other nickname would suit a Chicago team better?

THE “STINKING ONIONS” – we literally smell.

I could almost go for the nickname, since most of the other suggestions are just so god-awful dull, generic or sound so cutesy like they were proposed by some marketing geek who is already dreaming of a tacky mascot and maize-colored jerseys for sale at $100 a pop.

Hence, nicknames such as the “Blues,” “Progress,” “Towers,” “Massacres,” “Red Stars” and “Wind” are ridiculous, just as bad as the old Chicago Enforcers of the XFL, the attempt by pro wrestling marketers to put together an “in your face” football league.

Just imagine this future statement – “Hi, I play for the Chicago Wind.” Ugh!

IF THAT NICKNAME is chosen, we Chicago sports fans would have to stand for a lot of abuse because we would literally have a team with a more lame nickname than the current holder of that title – the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association.

Now perhaps taking this contest and the team nickname seriously is a bit ridiculous.

After all, just about every attempt at a professional sports league gets around to having a Chicago franchise. Chicago sports are not just limited to the tales of the White Sox, the Bears or the Blackhawks.

I personally recall the existence and demise of all the sports teams I named at the top of this commentary. The Women’s Basketball League, the World Hockey Association, the American Indoor Soccer Association and the World Football League all came and went.

THE WORLD FOOTBALL League of the early 1970s was so forgettable that their Chicago team, the Fire, was literally able to have its nickname appropriated by Chicago’s pro soccer team in the U.S.-based Major League Soccer.

The “Stinking Onions,” if that nickname is adopted, could come and go so quick that most of us would never notice they were here.

Going through the list makes me realize how much the mentality of sports marketing has changed throughout the years.

Take the nickname “White Sox.”

IT HAS BECOME a part of Chicago culture (particularly to those of us to whom anywhere north of Roosevelt Road is “foreign” turf) and is known in baseball circles throughout the world to be representative of our beloved city.

Yet it is so early 20th Century in mentality. No self-respecting sports team would even dream of adopting that name today.

The 19th Century mentality (which is when baseball led the way in sports becoming professional enterprises with franchises becoming significant parts of their home cities’ culture) would have had teams known as “Stockings,” with the color in the team nickname set by the color of socks worn with the uniforms.

Cincinnati, which is usually credited with having the first professional baseball team in 1869, was known as the “Red Stockings,” while St. Louis once had a team known as the “Brown Stockings.” In a similar vein, the Detroit Tigers got that nickname because someone thought their orange and black striped socks resembled a tiger in appearance.

CHANGING “STOCKINGS” TO “Sox” was a 20th Century innovation, done in part because Charles Comiskey wanted to separate the identity of his American League version of white hosed athletes from the National League version that existed a couple of decades earlier (the team now known as the Chicago Cubs).

“Sox” with the “x” was short. It was punchy. It fit better into a headline.

Now, sports marketers would say the misspelling looks illiterate – something along the lines of people who spell the word “barbecue” as “bar-b-q.”

A new team would probably call itself White Sock. Singular, no “the.” Actually, they’d probably think the color white was too drab, and would prefer something more along the line of “Mauve Sock” – which would ensure that the franchise would go broke within a year.

NO SELF-RESPECTING Chicagoan is going to root for anything colored mauve.

It is someone working under that mentality who is probably rooting for the nickname, “the Towers” to win the competition.

After all, one could then include some artsy vision of the Sears Tower in the team logo. Perhaps they could even hit up the building’s owners to cough up some cash in exchange for advertising rights?

For those who want to bash soccer (real football, I call it), I don’t want to hear it. I enjoy the sport, even when women play it competitively at its highest levels. Watching the U.S. national women’s team compete in international events is entertaining, particularly since the women’s team is held in higher regard in its soccer class than the U.S. men’s team.

BESIDES, I STILL have fond memories of the old Chicago Sting, who brought two North American Soccer League championships to Chicago (1981 and 1984) and actually continued to live for a few more years as an indoor league team after their outdoor league went out of business. To me, the name “Karl Heinz Granitza” will always mean more than any of the modern-day athletes who play for the Chicago Fire.

Personally, I’m rooting for this new franchise to succeed on some level – and largely because this attempt at creating a professional soccer league in the United States had the sense to come to Chicago to begin with.

The previous league, the Women’s United Soccer Association, existed for a couple of seasons and never got around to having a Chicago team, instead preferring to have teams in places like “Carolina” and “Atlanta” to traditional sports markets like Chicago, St. Louis or Detroit.

Sports marketers ought to realize it is the traditional sports towns that are most likely to want to have and support a team in every league in existence.

A CHICAGO “STINKING Onions” is probably more important than a team in a place like Phoenix or Denver. Smaller, newer cities will sound just so minor league and give the new league a less-than-important image.

Nonetheless, when I cast my vote in this poll, I’m not going with “Stinking Onions,” even though a part of me thinks it has some unique appeal (it would put us up there with the Nippon Ham Fighters of Japan professional baseball as the most unusual sounding team nickname in pro sports).

I picked “Chicago 1871,” which means technically the team wouldn’t have a nickname Or is it that its nickname would match its official name? At the very least, it would be a counterpart team of sorts to the Chicago Fire men’s team.

That date, to those of us who have taken the tour of the Chicago Historical Society at some time during our lives and seen the charred dolls and other burnt remains, was when the Great Chicago Fire occurred – the seminal event that could have wiped this town off the face of the earth, but instead motivated it to rebuild itself into one of the pre-eminent cities of the world.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Cast (http://www.womensprosoccer.com/form_ektekfrm1940.aspx) your vote here for Chicago’s newest pro sports franchise.

Women will finally get their chance to add a few stories to the long story of professional soccer (http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/chicago.html) in the Second City.

The Great Chicago Fire (http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/) could become the inspiration of professional soccer in Chicago for both men and women.

This artist's depiction of the Great Fire could wind up being the symbolism used by both of Chicago's professional soccer teams. Illustration provided by Library of Congress collection.