To conclude my time away, I’m sharing another newsletter from the Basketball Feelings archives. Because of its subjects of family, place, the vulnerability of naming people and things, this one was special to me before it was selected by Hanif Abdurraqib to be included in The Year’s Best Sportswriting 2025. That hasn’t changed, and I feel proud of the recognition, but I mostly feel proud for the recognition and relatability of its inward, small (in the scheme of pro sports), hopeful and quiet themes — by Hanif, and by its readers since last December.
I’ve also buried the lede a little: a big change is coming to Basketball Feelings in just a few days. Part of these archival revisits have been to give myself the runway to get ready for that change, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.
For a week, the baby didn’t have a name. Not uncommon — in Japanese culture there’s significance to waiting a week to announce the name to your family, the world — but the duration stretched, warped to double the days with the difference in our family’s time zones.
Wanting to be light, and to uncover and assuage my brother’s worry about Ryoko and the baby, both who he had to be apart from for a week after the birth, I reverted to calling him Bobo — the nickname they’d given him in utero.
How is Bobo, Send photos of Bobo, What are the doctors saying about Bobo
When the name did come, Carl explained how long they’d lingered over the kanji for it. The name, intentionally simple to say in both Japanese and English, could be translated to over a dozen kanji for the same sound. In writing, he could go from passionate and honest to a sickle, the tool. He could be unselfish, creative, the act of alchemy or a small ripple on water from wind. He could be the concept of continuity, courageous, the highest point on a roof, a garden, or love.
When my brother sent over the first photos of my nephew in the hospital, ruddy and hefty then even in his incubator, I thought about all the different meanings for him being parsed by his parents. He had his whole life to be anything he wanted but their careful consideration would be his start. What I liked best is that what they landed on, in two dense, elegant kanji, still had seven descriptors between them. He had options.
It was the same thing my mom had said about naming me, and why she scrapped the other names she’d tentatively chosen before I was born. You looked like a baby that needed options, she told me.
There’s plenty of naming in basketball. Beginning with the Draft, where the leagues’ commissioners stand on stage and call out names of soon-to-be rookies with dramatic flourish, and ending with the Hall of Fame, where retirees have their names called by former teammates and peers, themselves recently inducted by the same. Hallowed names hallowing names as others who hope to be hallowed, watch.
Naming in the NBA is so important that the league’s most prestigious seasonal awards were renamed from simply citing the thing they were awarding (MVP, Defensive Player of the Year) to being named after athletes that embodied the award’s ideal qualities. The MVP award changed to the Michael Jordan Trophy, Rookie of the Year to the Wilt Chamberlain Trophy, the mouthful of Most Improved Player of the Year to the George Mikan Trophy.
What I like about some of the changes, especially in the more specific awards, is that they impress their action onto the name of the athlete the trophy’s now named after. Tilted this way, Wilt Chamberlain has found the Fountain of Youth and remains a perpetual rookie, and Mikan becomes a Sisyphean figure, destined to always be improving.
There’s something rife to naming. Or, a process made rife in how loaded the naming becomes. Who gets to have a name at all. Who needs one. Where something sacred, whether a construct of identity, a methodology, the canonical or clerical lineage of family history, is considered lost if a name isn’t given or if a name given once, changes.
And I understand, given the comfort naming confers. Naming is how we organize the world. In all the titles we give, their consequence — implied or ingrained — bound tight to the word.
Variants of intimacy, comfort and trust instantly gleaned from the way we organize people within our lives, and packed within the neat walls of the name goes everything unwieldy that we can’t so easily summarize. Hopes, fears, history and identity, going back past where any living person can remember, all of it knocking around inside a name. The resulting weight, sometimes held proudly, sometimes unbearably, gives way to strain, psychic and bodily. So I also understand why a person might want out from under that and look to shed all the titles they’ve ever carried in order to feel, at least temporarily, free.
Legacy is a word that gets brought up often in basketball. What someone’s name is going to conjure long after they’ve left the game behind.
In earlier eras of the NBA it was considered almost gauche, if not jinxing, to talk about your own legacy. It was a word and a conversation left to fans, left for them to dream up and eventually determine when the rote everyday gave way to legacy — when the future suddenly eclipsed the present based upon the merits of someone’s past. The catalyst mainly triggered by a career ending, but the reasoning democratic.
Now even rookies, days into their first NBA seasons, talk about legacy. College athletes mention it when, in the scheme of a life, that time is glancingly short, shorter still if they’re fast-tracking to the pros. In conversations about legacy, players cite it as something that drives them or can be cleaved from them, squandered or robbed. They mention it, name it, both freely and because they are being asked about it, and they’re being asked because while competitive sport and athletes have always used records and breaking them as fundamental metrics, our notion of what’s permanent has been so deeply, casually, and perhaps fundamentally warped by digitization and its side-effect of cultural sameness, historic homogeneity.
There is a sense now that naming, each repetition set like a layer, will lend weight to legacy. Make it less likely, or at least more difficult, to flatten and erase.
Naming, the finality of it.
I stared at the name in the dark. I’d been up for an hour working and went back into the bedroom to get my phone. Whatever the reason I had for getting it vanished as the screen responded to touch. I instinctively tapped open Instagram, thumb moving in the worst kind of muscle memory. At the top of my feed, posted moments before, a frosty periwinkle logo over a blurred photo — something moving, maybe legs — in a darker gradient of the same, ghostly blue and black.
At first I thought Dylan had shared it. The graphic was in the style his running series uses in their posters but the name wasn’t anything I recognized. Toronto Tempo, I simultaneously read and said into the dark, tapping the name to open the profile.
A mix of the early hour and purposefully obfuscated branding maybe, but at first I had no idea what I was looking at. My eyes went to the next anchoring point on that app, mutual follows, and I saw miniature renderings of Seerat, Jerome, Ashley. Basketball. Then immediately, it all clicked. The Toronto WNBA expansion, at 7 a.m. on a Thursday morning, had announced its name.
Japanese architect, Kazuyo Sejima, was given the ‘yo’ suffix of her name by her father.
"At that time, it was common for girls to have a name ending in ‘ko’, ‘yo’ is a little bit different,” Sejima’s said. The suffix is slight, but it made Sejima not immediately discernible on paper, in correspondence, or casual conversation — like when someone’s name is recommended — as a woman.
Sejima’s won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most distinguishing accolade, as well as been appointed director of the Venice Architecture Biennale — the first time ever for a practicing architect, and a woman. Her buildings, like the vaulting and otherworldly New Museum in New York City, push at the barriers of possibility, of everyday comprehension.
“My father gave me that name,” Sejima said, “because he wanted me to make my own way.”
Naming, the possibilities of it.
Plenty of people disliked the Tempo’s logo immediately. Complaints I read ranged from it resembling too closely the New Balance logo, was reminiscent of the Pacers, looked like a trucking logistics company. The name many also weren’t fans of, but dislike of a name is a harder thing to articulate.
We might categorize the name of a person to a be a bad one, a name we don’t prefer, because we associate it with someone else we’re not particularly fond of. Names can age poorly. Names can feel clunky, awkward, not quite right, even if we can’t exactly say why. Names can be funny, they can also be too funny. It comes entirely down to personal preference, but that’s the basis for the majority of things we name and why it’s impossible to find a name, to name something, without opposition. By that metric, naming a modern pro sports franchise feels Herculean.
When the NBA announced Toronto as an expansion franchise, The Toronto Star ran a write-in contest to name the team, then a voting contest to narrow down the names. Besides Raptors, the finalist included Beavers, Terriers, Towers, Hogs (a nod to the city’s pork processing past), Tarantulas and T-Rexes. Jurassic Park had just come out.
I was nine, I voted for Raptors — Jurassic Park had just come out.
When Toronto’s WNBA club (BT, Before Tempo) asked for names early this past summer, 10,000 people sent in their ideas. The unnamed franchise then spent months releasing names they weren’t going to use and giving their reasoning why in a series they called “The Cutting Room Floor”. Inventing an entirely new layer of naming by letting fans into the conceptual pre-life, the foreword, of the team.
There’s an analogy that brought me to tears while watching Women of Troy, the documentary about Cheryl Miller and her USC Trojan team. Miller compared herself to a lion with no teeth, having her competitive future taken so suddenly and brusquely from her because of a brutal ACL tear during a pick-up game.
The Trojan War is where Achilles went down, falling in the shadows of Troy’s walls. Whether the mythic figure was based on a mortal warrior or not he’s how we gained a catchy, colloquial saying for a crippling mortal deficiency. But the story of Achilles is also about hubris, how pride will destroy you from the inside out, as with the Trojan horse, and the lackadaisical way — stretched it out over 10 years — Achilles whittled down Troy’s defending forces with his god-given gifts.
Miller never squandered her talents. She was aware of them from a very young age and before people started comparing her to Michael Jordan. Her brother, Reggie Miller, has long called her the more talented out of the two of them.
In Antiquity, Greek and Roman, women did not get to have their own names. If given names at all they would be paternalistic extensions. For example, a man called Claudius would name his daughter Claudia. With more than one daughter, informal suffixes were added that translated to older, younger, a numeric order, or described prominent facial features and personality traits. If and when women married, their surnames were their husband’s. They were bound to men, start to finish.
Framed this way, when Troy fell no women went with it. By name, there were none there.
Still, I liked the the myth-making the documentary’s title attempted, because it was an incredible team: Cynthia Cooper, Lisa Leslie, Jacki Gemelos, Pamela McGee, Tina Thompson. These are names that still hold weight and call to mind individual performances, that press themselves into the bulk of basketball’s history and cut through its ever-accumulative density, like a hot knife into butter.
All names are of a moment. They all form out of their contemporary cultural backdrop, even the avenues the names are decided through. With the Tempo, I think how manifold the pressures of the decision: naming the WNBA’s first international franchise, naming it in this piqued moment of women’s basketball and women’s sports overall, and wanting a name without any existing associations (to teams, their legacies) in a venture sure to be charged as it is scrutinized. A tall task destined to fall partially flat, at least at the outset, given that all names — and certainly team names — have to be tested, ridiculed and screamed in unison; repeated until rendered unrecognizable and another meaning emerges, to be made real. They need life breathed into them.
I like Tempo. I like a conceptual name, I don’t mind the alliteration, pace is one of my favourite things in basketball, and I like it more knowing the brief irony made from the mistake that launched it. That when the WNBA accidentally revealed the name by adding it to its website team dropdown menu, the franchise responded, at speed.
Great post, Katie. It gave me much to think about, especially about the deeper meanings and symbolism of a name. I admit that I haven't always liked my name, especially given the meaning of "leader of men" and the famous Alexander the Great. I'm also more introverted and shy away from leadership positions. But I've come to appreciate my name over time.
The beginning of your article also really resonated with me as I have a Chinese name, I love its meaning, and I've learned a bit over the years about how Chinese parents name their kids :).
On a different (but still related to your article) note, I too like Tempo. Toronto Tempo is a cool name in my opinion :)
There is so much meaning and power that can come from a name, and your article is thought-provoking and spot on. Great write again :). I'm looking forward to hearing about the change to Basketball Feelings.
I'm going to see if my local bookstore has a copy of "The Year's Best Sports Writing 2025".
Take care.