Death to flying things

This is my all time favorite for two reasons. First, to get the cadence right you have to put the nickname in front of his whole name. Most nicknames either replace the first name entirely (‘Cy’ Young) or go between the first and last name (Kobe ‘Black Mamba’ Bryant).

Second, Mark Whiten wasn’t hard hittin’. Don’t let the four home runs in one game fool you. He had a really nice decade long career but only hit 105 home runs with a .259 lifetime batting average.

Still, at the end of they day, He had to be ‘Hard Hittin’ Mark Whiten!

This is a perfectly fine nickname but it’s here because of a sentimental attachment.

I once won a trivia contest at college when I was the only one at the Rathskeller that knew Ted Williams was known as The Splendid Splinter. It was a packed room and it took me awhile to weave my way to the front so by the time I got there the quiz master was begging for anyone to answer it.

Same bar that, while playing quarters, my friend John swallowed the quarter. But that might be a story for another day.

Yankee Stadium

Babe Ruth joined the Yankees in 1920 and their attendance rose to a point where they decided, in 1923, they needed their own stadium. They had been sharing the Polo Grounds with the New York Giants but that was an agreement unsatisfactory to both parties. Babe Ruth, fittingly, hit the first home run in Yankee Stadium in the1923 season / stadium opener. And 100 years later the nickname still holds.

Much as I hate the Yankees I give them kudos for not selling the stadium naming rights to the highest bidder. This is a trend that has rendered baseball stadiums anonymous when there was a time when they were famous in their own right (“U.S. Cellular Field”? “Petco Park”?)

Special mention to Dodger’s Stadium (although it should be Chavez Ravine) and Fenway Park for also surviving without selling the naming rights.

Charles Barkley

Very likely the best basketball nickname of all time and it comes with an uncertain provenance.

Charles Barkley remembers that Auburn was trying out various nicknames to give him more visibility (and, subsequently, Auburn as well)

“We were trying to drum up support at Auburn because we’re a football school,” he said. “They were going to do a story on me for Sports Illustrated.”

But the actual Sports Illustrated article implies it was already his go-to nickname:

The preferred epithet in Baton Rouge is Fat Boy. But you could construct a thesaurus entry of the nicknames Barkley has inspired in his travels: Bread Truck, the Love Boat, Food World, the Crisco Kid, the Wide Load from Leeds, Ton of Fun, the Leaning Tower of Pizza, the Goodtime Blimp and the prevailing Round Mound of Rebound are just a few. “He’s my favorite player in college basketball,” says Oklahoma’s Wayman Tisdale, who played with Barkley at the Sports Festival. “I call him the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

Somewhere you have to believe there is a sixty year old Alabamian that tells the story to his family every Thanksgiving of coming up with the Charles Barkley’s nickname while working at the Auburn Plainsman as a college freshman.

Larry Bird

This nickname loses points since it was inspired by (almost to the point of plagiarism) Jerry West’s first nickname (Zeke from Cabin Creek). But eventually this passes muster since Larry Bird is a hick and is, indeed, from French Lick.

George Nelson

Wait, this isn’t a sports nickname! No, but one thing the Coen Brothers’ movie “Oh Brother where are thou” proved was that, if there wasn’t a gangster nicknamed Baby Face, they would have had to invent him.

Baby Face Nelson was born in 1909 and died in an FBI shootout in 1934. Earlier in 1934 he, along with John Dillinger, shot up Little Bohemia, a lodge in northern Wisconsin. Years later my cousins worked there.