Naming Rites: A Biographical History of North American Team Names

This ain’t no book of fast sports facts. In Naming Rites, Glenn Pierce works from the history on out, using team names as interactive characters that reveal the facts and debunk the creation myths behind nearly three-thousand major league, college, and semi-pro teams. Readers will travel a map of interlocking narratives to reveal one rich tale after another, each infused with more why-didn’t-I-know-that-ness than the last.

Of team-naming backstories, Bill Littlefield (NPR’s Only a Game) says, Naming Rites has “got a million of ’em ... or 460 pages of ’em, anyway.” Ex-NFL player and best-selling author Tim Green says, “If you like sports or history … you won’t be able to put it down.” This is a world of battle flags and goblins and word origins and mountain tops and Indians and gothic towers and revolutionaries and blues men and giants and pirates and people who speak languages that are just crazy (French and Spanish) and religious zealots and metallurgists and women in polo shirts … and a whole bunch of beasts with nasty, big, pointy teeth!

You’ll never again be the only dork in the bleachers who doesn’t know what a Tar Heel or a Hoya or a Lord Jeff is. And you’ll impress your friends with your knowledge of Paladins, Panhandles, and Dead Trees.

Glenn Pierce is a career technical and freelance writer who holds respective degrees in English and journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (Minutemen, Minutewomen) and Northern Essex Community College (Knights). He lives near Boston without a wife or children or dogs or cats or any of that (although he likes dogs very much). Glenn set out to write a book about team nicknames and mascots (Naming Rites: A Biographical History of North American Team Names) and accidentally ended up learning all kinds of crap about the Peloponnesian Wars and the Industrial Revolution. He blogs about team nicknames and mascots at www.goodreads.com/teamnicknames.