Remembering the Charlotte Hornets 25 years later: The Name Game

This upcoming Monday will mark the 25th anniversary of the Charlotte Hornets first game back on November 4, 1988, and we are looking back at some of the important and interesting milestones from the franchise's birth.  In the first chapter, we talked about how George Shinn went from being a janitor at a business school, to making millions as owner of Rutledge Education Systems, and to assembling a group of investors in a quest to bring an NBA team to Charlotte, and in part 2, we talked about how his speech to the NBA Board of Governors led up to the phone call from commissioner David Stern back in 1987.

Today, we'll discuss about how one name didn't warm up to those of us that were growing up here during that time, and how Shinn wanted to give the fans what the wanted to look for in a name for an NBA franchise.


What's in a Name?

"Lakers", "Yankees", "Cowboys", "Celtics", "Red Sox". Those are some of the legendary nicknames that we have come to known as sports fans, but during our quest to bring the NBA to Charlotte, it was a tale of 2 nicknames, one that was somewhat a bad decision, while the other would be all about a connection to our city's history.  Shortly after the NBA awarded Charlotte an expansion franchise, George Shinn and his group already selected a name for the new expansion team, called the Charlotte "Spirit"?  When that was first announced, some of the fans said "What kind of nickname was that?" 

Well, according to legend, Shinn wanted to choose the name "Spirit" as a reflection of the city and it's people, and many said that the choice for the name wasn't pretty, given the fact that some of the fans would associate the name with "The PTL Club", which was a christian television program that was based in Charlotte and was hosted by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and it was a subject of an investigative report by The Charlotte Observer, the city's newspaper back in 1987 uncovering the organization's fundraising activities that would lead to the eventual downfall of the Bakkers and the PTL ministries as a whole, and The Charlotte Observer would go on to win the coveted Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the PTL investigations in 1988, but it was part of a marketing campaign the Charlotte group had in 1986 titled "Bring the NBA to Basketball Country", and that drew a lot of outrage from the fans saying that it was a bad choice for a team nickname in the NBA, so it was back to the drawing board for George Shinn to come up with a way to give the fans what they want.

And he did, as Shinn realized that the "Spirit" name wasn't taking off with the hometown fans in Charlotte, he would give the fans what they want the team to be called in something he would call "Spirited Voting".  So in April of 1987, he enlisted the help of The Charlotte Observer for a "Name-the-Team" contest, which drew over 9,000 Charlotte Observer readers, and fans, to send in their suggestions for what the team should be called, and it was pretty obvious that both, Observer readers and fans wanted a team name that can reflect the city's history and heritage, and in the end, 2,916 of those fans that took part in the Name-the-Team contest overwhelmingly chose "Hornets" as the winning nickname for the team, over the "Knights", "Cougars", "Spirit", "Crowns", and "Stars".

The meaning of the Hornets nickname

When Shinn officially announced that the Charlotte Hornets would become the team's name on June 5, 1987, team officials would have do a lot of research to dig up some history behind the team's name, as well as the historic significance and connection to Charlotte itself.  According to legend, the origins of the "Hornets" namesake trace to the Revolutionary War, and one of those battles that occurred was the Battle of the Bees, which occurred on October 3, 1780. In that battle, an estimated 450 British troops were attempting to load up on some supplies from McIntyre's Farm in the Northeast end of Mecklenburg County, but they were met by a group of 14 American patriots after the British Redcoats turned over several hornets nests, causing the British soldiers to elude from them, and along the way, the hidden American patriots saw their chance to strike and open fire, causing the British to retreat in the hopes that they were under attack from a significantly larger force.  After British general Charles Cornwallis left Charlotte on October 12, 1780, he would go on to say that Charlotte was "A veritable hornet's nest of rebellion."

The "Hornets" nickname was used by our city's minor-league baseball teams from 1901-73, and it was also the nickname of our city's short-lived World Football League franchise during the 1970's.  There was a lot of reasons why the "Hornets" nickname would be a good fit for the team, and they wanted to choose it to reflect the city's history, and I did a post about the history of the Hornets name back in July, when the city's current NBA team, the Charlotte Bobcats, was on the verge of reclaiming the Hornets name again, and you can read more about it here.

In our next installment of our series leading up to the 25th Anniversary of the Hornets first game, we'll talk about how Alexander Julian wanted to design the uniforms for some good-old fashioned North Carolina barbecue, and how the daughter of famed "Muppets" creator Jim Henson got into the act of designing and building a loveable mascot we would all fall in love with.

NOTE: One of the nicknames that was considered in the "Name the Team" contest, was the "Knights", and it would eventually become the nickname of Charlotte's minor-league baseball team when Shinn bought the Charlotte O's from the Crockett family in 1987.