By Phil Blackwell
Sports Editor
So the primary logo of my favorite Major League Baseball team is on the way out. And it’s about time.
No, wait a minute. Amend that statement. It’s long, long past time to do so.
Effective in 2019, the Cleveland Indians will wear uniforms, caps and jackets free of the smiling, red-faced Chief Wahoo that has, for decades, has come to symbolize the franchise in all the wrong ways.
In many ways, that’s a shame, since Cleveland was the first American League team in the 20th century to have an African-American player (Larry Doby) and manager (Frank Robinson), among other milestones.
Yet no matter how progressive the team was on that front, the nickname, and Wahoo, rendered all commendable progress moot, and stood in stark contrast to the retreat most other sports teams, college or professional, made from blatant Native American stereotypes.
Colleges started this trend. Dartmouth, Stanford, St. John’s and Marquette changed their nicknames. So did Eastern Michigan and North Dakota. Syracuse once had a Saltine Warrior, but that’s long gone.
Central Michigan is still the Chippewas and Florida State is still the Seminoles, but those schools work with tribes to honor them, and while Illinois is still the Illini, there sure isn’t a fake chief in headdress dancing at midcourt during timeouts at basketball games.
It’s far more problematic in the for-profit ranks. It’s one thing to use an honorable nickname like Blackhawks (Chicago) or Chiefs (Kansas City), quite another to do tomahawk chops like they do in Atlanta, even though “Braves” is far from derogatory.
Then there’s that NFL team in Washington that still insists on using a racial epithet. True, it held up in the courts, but it’s funny how, unlike MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s pressure on Cleveland, Roger Goodell has not done the same to Daniel Snyder.
Spare me the tripe about history, tradition and heritage. Get a new nickname (heck, you could use Warriors), restore that arrow helmet Washington used in the 1960s, keep the burgundy and gold and you’ll still make piles of money, but do so with a dash of honor.
This brings us back to baseball, and to the Tribe. Look, for a long time I just liked to use that common moniker because it was far less egregious than “Indians.” Plus, whenever I wore a hat, it was of a C, whether the current one or that crazy crooked C of the 1970s. Things were different then.
But part of the reason why I wasn’t more vocal about by Tribe fandom was not because doing so was a distinctly minority opinion in a region where the pressure to pledge allegiance to Yankee pinstripes is stifling.
It was that nickname, that mascot, Displaying it wasn’t something you boasted or bragged about. You lived with it, perhaps tolerated it, but the sooner it went away, the healthier.
Of course, the club isn’t doing this right away. They’ll still display Wahoo in 2018 and sell tons of merchandise, especially to those traditionalists who griped the loudest week when word got out of the eventual change. So it only felt like a half-measure, done as a guilt trip.
What makes it worse is that our focus should be on what Cleveland is doing on the field – namely, get within a run of winning it all in 2016, follow up with 102 wins last year, and have a real good chance this time around, too.
Thanks to the recent drought-breaking title runs by the Red Sox, White Sox and Cubs, Cleveland has the high honor and distinct privilege of carrying baseball longest title drought — 70 years and counting.
Yet if, as most people assume, the Tribe tear through the AL Central and make it back to the October post-season, you just know that every inning and every pre-game and post-game yak fest will feature talk about that nickname, that logo, in all its offensive glory.
Then it might feel a bit hollow if, by some chance, Cleveland does finally win it all. Why feel universally good when your very image and presence nauseates a large segment of the public?
Thus, the courageous move, if I were put in the shoes of team owner Larry Dolan (heaven help if that ever took place), would be to say, right now, no more nickname, no more mascot, hire the best people to come up with something new to take a proud franchise into the future.
Maybe it is Tribe. Maybe it’s something intriguing that old-time fans will despite but the younger generation can embrace. But try something different.
Great purpose can arise out of great pain. Decades of red-faced embarrassment are difficult to erase, but Cleveland needs to make that correction, for only by accepting the mistakes of the past can anyone truly move forward.
