Sports and Names Thought Exercise

I was thinking the other day about names of athletes that truly convey their sport and their region, or are so perfect that it defies the best writers or creative types to come up with it themselves. I don't know why this kind of thing gets my old noggin fired up.

It started with a quarterback, a kid from Texas who was the QB for the University of Texas Longhorns, the Austin-based institution. His name: Colt McCoy.

"Colt McCoy" isn't made up, and is the absolute perfect name for a Texas quarterback. The kid isn't quite making it in the NFL, and may have lost his starting job in Cleveland, but the name is classic.

The next such athlete is an Olympic legend, a sprinter from the hotbed of track and field sprinting. They day that this country's Olympic qualifiers are usually better than the Olympics themselves, and given how many gold medals this country won the previous go around in sprinting (seven), that claim makes sense. The country: Jamaica. The person: Usain Bolt.

Isn't "Usain Bolt" just the best damn name for a sprinter from Jamaica? If you don't believe me, go find a Jamaican and strike up a conversation with them, then, once you become kinda friendly, ask them to go ahead and speak like they would with their next door neighbor, and marvel at the thought that technically this person is still speaking English. Real Jamaicans are barely understandable as it is, and Usain sounds like either a condition or a threat when they say it, but, in either case, it sounds super cool.

My whole theory, if I could say I had one, is that these names may be available in other sports, but I'm having a hard time necessarily coming up with them.

There is a kid playing today that seems to strike me having one of these kinds of names, and he's a young slugger, and to me that makes sense with his name. He plays for the Angels out here. His name: Mark Trumbo.

I don't know why, but there's something about "Trumbo" that to me says "baseball thumper". Maybe it's because of the "um" in the middle there, and it's easy to like names that use an "r" to affect the vowel form. I think that's been proven, but don't quote me on that.

Not that anyone cares, but I'll be revisiting this asinine topic as I find other names, or after asking other people and collecting suggestions.