Dennis McCann: Without sports, who would cheer for the Flivvers?

Originally published Sept. 25, 2008

I passed through Colby, in the heart of Wisconsin dairy country, this week and lamented once again that the town’s leaders have somehow failed to change the name of the high school athletic teams to the Colby Curds. Maybe some would find that cheesy, but I am a big fan of naming athletic teams to honor past achievements or other bits of local history, and how the city that invented Colby cheese chose the Hornets – Hornets? – over Curds is beyond me.

That’s one of the nice things about living in the far north, where a number of schools’ athletic teams wear names that tell something about the community’s past. Where I live in Bayfield, for example, the school teams are named the Trollers, reflecting the city’s rich commercial fishing heritage. Down the road in Washburn, the teams are called the Castle Guards, a name that arose because the city’s original high school was said to resemble a turreted castle. And a bit further to the south, the Ashland Oredockers took their name from the four giant ore docks that extended from the mainland into Lake Superior in order to load ore carriers. Only one of those remains now, and it is slated for removal, but the local teams will help recall the glory of those days for years to come.

They aren’t the only schools with cool names, though. Mellen has the Granite Diggers, and Hurley has its famous Midgets. Unfortunately, that means the girls’ teams have to be the Hurley Midgettes, which makes a new word out of whole cloth simply to spin off of the boys’ teams name. That seems unfair to the girls. Given Hurley’s sordid past I could have offered something more fitting but then I’m not sure the town parents would have approved of the Madams. As it happens, Butternut also has the Mighty Midgets, though those teams are named not for diminutive athletes but for onetime hometown hero Charles “Midget” Fischer, a professional wrassler of some renown a few decades back.

Our friends across the Wisconsin border in the Upper Peninsula have more great team names. Bessemer has the Speed Boys (and, unfortunately, Speed Girls), while the Watersmeet Nimrods were thought to have such a wonderful name it was used in a national campaign by ESPN a few years ago. (Remember “Without sports, who would cheer for the Nimrods?”)

Of course, using bits of local history to choose team names doesn’t always mean they will roll off the tongue. Gwinn, Mich., which once was a model town for an iron ore mining company, still calls its teams the Model Towners, which seems to defy easy rhyming in cheers but you never know. ("Go Towners, Don't be Downers?") But my new favorite school team name comes from Kingsford, Mich., just across the Wisconsin border, where the Kingsford Flivvers uphold local pride every time they take the field.

Flivvers? Yup, because Kingsford once was a Ford Motor Company town and the nickname for the Model T reflects that fact. I only learned that while playing golf with the father of two Flivvers this week, and he seemed delighted with the name. (In an unrelated but still interesting note, Kingsford Charcoal began when the Ford plant there, which made wood sides and other components for Ford cars, was looking for a way to use every scrap of waste wood. They turned the scraps into Ford Charcoal Briquettes, which later became the familiar Kingsford brand we still use today.)

Anyway, the Fighting Flivvers make for great headlines, and the other team names work as well. “Trollers Net First Place,” for example, or “Speed Boys Race Past Hurley,” or even “Nimrods Top the Saints.”

I’d love to see a headline that reads “Curds Squeak By Tigers.” It’s just a pity it will never happen.