Ottawa RedBlacks sounds just fine: MacKinnon

As training camps open, there is a singular, over-arching issue roiling the normally placid CFL waters and you can sum this controversy up in two words, and here they are: RedBlacks? You gotta be kidding me?

Confession: The name RedBlacks is growing on me, actually, but I reckon I’m in a minority, one dismissed as tone-deaf, at that.

Oh, this naming thing is serious business, all right.

You can certainly see why. For football writers who routinely (lazily?) refer to the team they cover not by its name, but by its colours (Green and Gold; Green and White, etc.), the apparent name RedBlacks resonates like fingernails across the blackboard. Go figure.

I say apparent name because the official announcement of the RedBlacks won’t come until June 8 in Ottawa. So we’ll have to wait and see.

But the name has been circulating for weeks now. And the Ottawa Citizen reported this week that both the RedBlacks name and its French equivalent — Rouge et Noir — have been filed by the Ottawa franchise with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office.

So has a logo featuring the beloved big letter ‘R’ that long adorned the side of the Rough Riders’ helmets.

This development has only intensified the hubbub over the name in a way that has not affected the Red Sox, White Sox, All Blacks, Reds, Blues, Rouge et Or (Laval’s Red and Gold), Syracuse Orange and Cleveland Browns, to name just a few, shall we say, colourful sports teams.

So far as anyone can tell, those names are all good.

So it’s not just a colour scheme issue, evidently. It has to do, perhaps, with the way the word RedBlacks rolls off the tongue. More important, it’s about how another name — Rough Riders — does not, cannot do the same. Not anymore.

For those of us of a certain age, part of the quirky charm of the CFL for decades and decades was the fact that two teams in the eight- or nineteam league had the same nickname: the Saskatchewan Roughriders; the Ottawa Rough Riders.

Indeed, the first Grey Cup game I attended was in 1969 at the Autostade in Montreal (ask your grandfather), pitting Ronnie Lancaster’s Roughriders against Russ Jackson’s Rough Riders. That landmark game was memorialized in the excellent Engraved on a Nation documentary series TSN produced last season.

And a good thing, too. Because a matchup of those storied names can never happen again. Which is a great, irreversible shame.

Since the Rough Riders folded in 1996, the CFL has owned that brand name, for one thing. And now that Ottawa is returning, nine years after a second CFL franchise, the Renegades, folded in the Nation’s Capital, Rider Nation is all snooty about the Roughrider name, not to mention protective of all that merchandise they sell, all over the country

In Regina, they’re protecting their quirky brand, in the parlance of our times, and the CFL isn’t about to fight with those watermelon-sporting true believers.

So, Jeff Hunt, president of the Ottawa Sport and Entertainment Group that owns that city’s newest CFL franchise, has had to invent a new identity for his team that nonetheless pays homage to the deep roots football has in the Ottawa Valley.

Identity is so crucial in sports; a team’s name so important, yet so delicate, so intensely local.

Can anyone imagine, for example a basketball team called the Minneapolis Lakers (Minnesota being the Land of 10,000 Lakes), moving to, say, Los Angeles. And succeeding?

Could the Flames, an expansion NHL franchise, whose nickname evokes the effective but horrific scorched-earth strategy executed by U.S. Civil War hero General William Tecumseh Sherman, decamp to, say Calgary, where, to this day, many remain strikingly unaware of Sherman’s March to the Sea? And make a go of it?

The New Orleans Jazz was a natural, back in the day. But Utah Jazz? But that name has found its niche in Mormon country, just as the Lakers settled in as the home team hard by the Pacific Ocean, far away from the lakes that inspired the name to begin with.

Of course, the Ottawa situation is not about moving a franchise or transplanting an identity. It’s about re-connecting with that city’s proud sporting traditions, and branding this CFL iteration with a name that will satisfy the older crowd and catch on with new generations of football fans.

Hunt, something of a junior hockey marketing legend, may well pull this off, it seems to me. For starters, the very name RedBlacks reinforces that the football team will fly the city’s sporting colours, dating back to the Senators’ NHL clubs of the 1920s and ’30s on through to the Hunt-owned 67’s of the OHL, whose traditional barberpole jersey was a self-conscious nod to the early NHL team.

In that way, the ‘look’ of the team will be woven onto the past in a meaningful way. As well, that big ‘R’ on the helmet will be a splendid visual link to the days of Jackson, Whit Tucker, Ronnie Stewart, Tony Gabriel and the rest.

And, no small thing this, RedBlacks certainly is a quirky name, in a league steeped in eccentricity and oddball charm.

Given time, the RedBlacks will be as Ottawa as the 67’s or the Senators. Or BeaverTails. Just wait.