Sometimes, the decision to change the name of a sports team comes about through political expediency. At other times, international tragedy can be the catalyst.
On November 4, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin spoke at a Tel Aviv peace rally. As he walked off the stage to his motorcade, moving past throngs of supporters overjoyed by the first signs of Israeli-Palestinian peace in years, he was shot twice in the back and arm, and died in surgery hours later.
Abe Pollin, Rabin’s close friend and the then-owner of the Washington D.C. NBA team, heard the news soon after. Four days after Rabin’s funeral, Pollin announced that his team — the Washington Bullets — would be changing their name.
“My friend was shot in the back by bullets,” Pollin said, when the decision was announced. “The name ‘Bullets’ is no longer appropriate for a sports team.”
Pollin had already been thinking of changing the name of the team he’d owned since 1964, saying to the Washington Post’s Richard Justice in May, 1995 that “We haven’t made a final decision. In the old days, our motto was ‘Faster than a speeding Bullet.’ That’s how we were envisioned in Baltimore (the team moved from Baltimore to D.C. in 1973). Today the connotation is a little different. It’s connected with so many horrible things that people do with guns and bullets. I don’t know. We’re considering it. We’ll make a decision this summer.”
Rabin’s assassination forced his friend’s hand, but given the onslaught of gun violence in America, Pollin had already headed in that direction. The name change became official in 1997, and the Washington NBA team has been the Wizards ever since.
“If I save one life, make a change in one life,” Pollin concluded, “it’ll be worth it.”
Not that everyone saw the wisdom in it.
“Personally, I think the association between the name of the local basketball team and horrible things that people do with guns is a reach,” then-Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon wrote. “And if there’s ever a time to change it, now would be that time, what with Chris Webber and Juwan Howard aboard and new uniforms and a new downtown arena in the works.”
Those who support Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder’s decision to keep his team’s name may argue the same things — that there’s no real connection between the name and all the horrible things that have happened to Native Americans over the centuries. But it’s a flimsy argument, as is the argument that one shouldn’t tear a team’s tradition down, no matter how repugnant the name that upholds that tradition might be.
In truth, the Redskins don’t just have the attendant racism of the name. The team also has one of sports’ worst histories regarding integration. Former owner George Preston Marshall was the man behind the ban of all Black athletes from the NFL from 1934 through 1945, and it was only through the efforts of Stewart L. Udall, John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, that Marshall finally integrated his team… in 1961.
There is no positive benefit to retaining the Redskins name, especially in an America that is torn apart by police brutality, gun violence, and politically-charged divisiveness. As Pollin astutely ascertained, that kind of violent tragedy can (and must) be a catalyst for change.
It’s time for Daniel Snyder to follow Pollin’s lead.