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When I was thirteen, my parents enrolled me in a basketball class after school in a bid to make me more active and to generally create a sense of sportsmanship in me. I was terrible at it. My extraordinarily patient teacher told me to wake up early in the morning, and watch American Basketball on TV to motivate myself and learn how to move better in the basketball court, and so I did. My game didn’t improve, which wasn’t surprising considering that I have the hand-eye co-ordination of a blind panda bear. What was surprising, though, was how enamoured I became with the way the Americans named their teams. The team’s name was never just the place where it was from; these names had flair, and I enjoyed the way the words rolled out of my tongue, like condensed rhymes. The Chicago Bulls! The Cleveland Cavaliers! The Los Angeles Lakers! The Washington Wizards! How fun it would be to cheer these teams on!
I began to read more about American sports purely for team names, and about a week or so later of furious typing on AskJeeves (this was 2003), followed by the pregnant blank screen that accompanied dial-up connections, I discovered more team names which ranged from fantastic to downright absurd. You may have heard of the Dallas Cowboys, but have you heard of the Insurance Management Bears? They’re a champion American football team from the Bahamas. Now imagine a scene where they’re coming back to their home ground with a trophy — how would the crowd cheer? “Go Insurance!” or “We did it, Insurance Bears!” both sound strange. An “In-sur-ance” chant, perhaps? Not like that’s any more fun to do. It was at this moment when I realised how important a team’s name is. When you’re watching sports in a filled stadium, or even just in a small crowd, it is the name of the team which you support that connects you with the other strangers who’re watching the game with you, and unifies you into a team of your own — the fans.
When it was first announced that the Indian Premier League team which was to represent Chennai was named the ‘Chennai Super Kingsʼ, I was sorely disappointed for two reasons. The first being, ‘Super Kingsʼ sounded like something one would name a beedi so potent that it could only be procured by asking the shopkeeper through surreptitious whispers. The second, and more significant reason why the name angered me was because it threw out the window our city’s heritage of memorable sports-team names. It did not possess the alliteration of The Egmore Excelsiors, nor did it have the personality of The Book Sellerʼs XI, and most notably, the bloodthirsty beasts of The Mambalam Mosquitoes. I was convinced that the Chennai team had the worst name in the IPL.
Two minutes later, they announced that the Mumbai team would be called the ‘Mumbai Indiansʼ, and my conviction changed. Chennai had the second-worst name in the IPL. It’s been close to eight years since the first-ever IPL, and I’ve to admit that I had fully invested myself in the Chennai franchise. I bought the absurdly bright yellow merchandise, I took the trouble of spending hot, sticky evenings in Chepauk to watch games, I roared when the announcer asked the stadium to cheer its “lions”, and at times wondered out loud why M.S. Dhoni was still a part of the Jharkhand Ranji team when he so clearly belonged in Tamil Nadu’s. I even told people that I associated myself more with the Chennai team and its motley crew of South African, Australian, West Indian and Indian players than I did with the national team.
Everything changed in July 2015.
The Supreme Court of India suspended the Chennai Super Kings and the better-named Rajasthan Royals for two years in view of the betting activities carried out by the principal members, and following this judgment, the teams were disbanded. It was cruel for the fans; everything we’d known about the Super Kings, from the wonderful, talented team that we’d cheered on, to all those impressive statistics that we’d memorised to fling at anyone who criticised the team, and the players we’d grown to accept as our own — everything — it seemed, was just a lavish parlour trick.
Despite the feeling of betrayal, many Chennai fans rallied for the team to continue playing in the franchise, which, unsurprisingly, met with no success. Then, we hoped for a new Chennai franchise, which was also unsuccessful. The player auctions happened, and ever since, the cynosure of all Chennaiites’ eyes has been the newly formed Pune team, because they managed to snap up former CSK stars Dhoni, R. Ashwin & Faf Du Plessis.
The franchise recently released the name of its team: Rising Pune Super Giants. And the Rising Pune Super Giants have instantly qualified themselves, nay, become a frontrunner in the competition for the prestigious mantle of Worst IPL Team Name. In case you’re wondering about the rationale behind the team’s name, it is thus — Rising Pune Super Giants (RPSG) has been “inspired” by the organisation that owns them, the RP Sanjiv Goenka (RPSG) group. It’s hard to imagine the megalomania that may have gone into this naming process (and I hail from Tamil Nadu!). Imagine the scene at the meeting in which the name was decided: the country’s top branding officials flown down to headquarters and given a passionate speech about how the team’s name must reflect the soul, the ethics, the values, and most importantly, the initials of the group. These (obviously frustrated) top creative minds must have then executed the perfect revenge by coming up with a name that one would ideally associate with a brand of detergent, or, worse still, yeast.
I suppose it takes a special kind of naivety to expect these giant conglomerates to participate in the league because they love the game and want to create a unique fan-following and bring them together (as opposed to the copious amounts of money involved in the sport). However, not every city in India has its own IPL team, so surely it is also basic business sense to attempt to create the broadest fan-following possible. We are, after all, talking about companies whose revenues are as large as a small country’s. Can’t they sculpt a team with a name — and consequently, an identity — that a majority of fans can resonate with and claim as their own? Of course they can!
But they won’t.
