Sigh. Hi. I apologize for the wet blanket I'm about to douse this thread with.
However, this thread has gone to two pages, and I find it disturbing that no one -- pro or con -- has brought up the Number One Example of (successful) Nickname Recycling in Sports (with an asterisk for bballer Michael Jordan and singer Michael Jackson's shared 'MJ'):
Sugar Ray Robinson.......... Sugar Ray Leonard.
Is it because no one remembered, or because the comparison is odious for whatever reason?
If the football motif must be kept, there is also
'O. J.' Simpson .............. 'O. J.' McDuffie
If he had started his playing career the year after the trial over the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, would Otis James still be glossed as OJ, since those are his initials, or would sportswriters have found another way to gloss him? I admit that perhaps not, since OJ (the original) was treated with some measure of respect by his peers years after caucasian so-called 'sports fans' went to unusual lengths to pretend OJ never existed. Negr.oes reasons for disrespecting OJ preceded the deaths of Brown-Simpson and Goldman.
For the record, I am also of the opinion that LT is Lawrence Taylor, not Ladanian Tomlison. But I'm an old person, and I don't have the sports trivia at my back to say that even Lawrence Taylor 'stole' his initialed nickname from someone else, he just made the biggest impression under it.
The 80s were an Ice Age ago, y'all. Things change, whether we change with them or not. There's an entire generation which could give a fuck about Lawrence Taylor. To them, Ladanian Tomlison
is their 'LT' -- until someone else with the same initials comes along and sweeps the floor with Ladanian's stats to the point of being comparable to -- or greater than -- the original LT.
Ladanian is LT. For now.
Dinsdale wrote:yep, really a stretch there Dins..can't figure how or why Ladanian Tomlinson would get tagged with a nic like L.T
Oh, goodness -- here we go. Chargertard just never gets enough of a good beating, do they?
Igor Olshansky is like 6'6" -- hard to imagine why people don't call him Too Tall Igor.
Shaun Alexander sure has some sweet moves -- can't imagine why no one has glossed him Sweetness.
Man, Baltimore has a good D-Line -- they should be called the Iron Curtain.
Actually, Chargermike, I guess you've made your point. For many, many years, the term "retarded" was used to describe people of various learning disabilities and mental defects, but in today's lexicon, many, if not
most people also use "retarded" as a nickname for Chargerfans, regardless of the exact volume of drool that eminates from their slack-jaws. So I guess there is precedent for your claim.