Chicago's newest athletes are "Red Stars"

A part of me is inclined to think that Chicago’s newest professional sports franchise is guilty of either altering the city’s flag, or of grossly overestimating its significance in the city’s history.

How else to view the nickname, “Red Stars?” That’s the new Chicago franchise that will play in the Women’s Professional Soccer league beginning in 2009.

TEAM MANAGEMENT ANNOUNCED the nickname last week following a two-month-long contest by which potential fans were asked to choose a team moniker. “Red Stars” beat out nicknames such as the “Massacre,” the “Riot,” the “1871” and my personal favorite, the “Stinking Onions.”

The nickname alludes to the Chicago city flag, that non-descript banner of blue and white stripes with four red stars. Each of those stars is meant to signify a significant event in the city’s history – the original settlement at Fort Dearborn, the fire of 1871 and the World’s Fairs held in Chicago in 1893 and 1933.

In the logo designed for the team, the flag has five stars, and team officials explain that the fifth star is meant to signify the creation of the Red Stars as a women’s professional sports team.

In a sense, they are saying this team is as significant as the Great Chicago Fire (the inspiration for the nickname of the men’s professional sports team) or the first European settlement at the site where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.

THAT MIGHT BE pompous and arrogant. I have to wonder if any pennant or banner designed for the team could be construed as desecration of the city’s flag (is that a crime?) It might come back to haunt the team if they or their league flounders financially.

But I will give it credit for at least reflecting something about the city’s history, instead of some generic, cutesy nickname that sounds more like it was meant to inspire a fuzzy purple mascot to roam the stands and amuse the kiddies.

Team officials even went so far as to designate special meanings for each of the six points on the flag logo’s fifth star – entertainment (top point), service, success, community, teamwork and leadership.

Those meanings are kind of self-serving and cheesy, but it goes in accordance with the real Chicago flag, where each of the points on the four stars has attached to it a special meaning that city founders would like to think reflect the unique character of Chicago – such as justice, civic pride and religion.

I’M NOT GOING to run through the list of all 24 meanings, but needless to say, they are the image that Chicagoans would like to say they are about, and that ought to be the goal of all Chicago residents in their lives. (For those who really care to know, read the Chicago Public Library’s explanation of the city flag at http://www.chipublib.org/cplbooksmovies/cplarchive/symbols/flag.php, or click on the Chicago flag image to the side of this weblog for a lengthy analysis written by the weblog Chicago History.)

To me, that implies that someone involved with the team took the trouble to understand the history of the city and to know that the stars on the flag are not just stars, but an attempt to tell Chicago’s story.

It is a more logical nickname than the trend of late among athletic teams of naming themselves after weather-related characteristics.

The Miami Heat. The Dallas Tornado. The San Jose Earthquakes. Heck, one of the nicknames considered by this Chicago team followed that trend.

WE COULD VERY easily have been stuck with a team nicknamed the Chicago Wind.

So now, let’s look forward. It would be interesting if this new team could somehow beat the trend of other women’s athletic teams that have tried to do business in Chicago.

They failed. Usually, their whole leagues failed. The Chicago Red Stars could easily become the latest version of the Chicago Hustle. How many people besides me remember the team that used DePaul University’s old Alumni Hall in the late 1970s for its games in the Women’s Basketball League?

The Chicago Sky of the Women’s National Basketball Association has struggled to gain much of any attention (although the fact that their teams have been terrible has not helped). When it comes to the city’s athletic culture, the Matadors (those blubbery, overweight guys used as a parody of cheerleaders by the Chicago Bulls) gain more respect than any women’s team in Chicago sports history.

ONE FACTOR GOING in their favor is that this is soccer. This is a sport where the women’s game is taken seriously, due in large part to the image set in the 1990s by athletes like Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy and Brandi Chastain (when she wasn’t stripped down to a sports bra).

Unlike the U.S. national teams for men that are not the world leaders in the sport, women’s national teams from the United States are regarded as being the world power. A U.S.-based women’s professional league would be able to feed off the teams that have won women’s World Cup tournaments and would be a goal for top female athletes from around the world.

There is a certain fan base in this country that will take this version of the sport seriously.

Of course, there also is the fact that this is soccer, and some nitwits are going to want to disparage the game no matter what happens. The last attempt at a women’s pro league, the Women’s United Soccer Association, didn’t last long enough to put a team in Chicago, let alone build up anything resembling history or tradition.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: The Chicago Red Stars hope to begin play next spring. They likely will (http://www.womensprosoccer.com/newsitem_ektid2984.aspx?team=chicago) share a stadium with the Chicago Fire men’s team out in suburban Bridgeview.

Potential fans of the new women’s soccer team picked the nickname “Red Stars.” Whether many of those people spend their hard-earned dollars to buy tickets to games (http://blogs.chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/soccer_redcard/2008/06/womens-team-to.html) will determine whether the team catches on in Chicago’s sports culture.

The Boston Breakers and the Washington Freedom, along with yet-to-be-named teams in (http://www.womensprosoccer.com/) Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, will comprise the Women’s Professional Soccer league in its inaugural season.

Do the names Rita Easterling and Janie Fincher ring a bell in your mental backlog of Chicago-related trivia? They do (http://www.wblmemories.com/index.htm) in mine.

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.

-30-

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.