What again is so, so wrong with the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo logo, the one that the World Series-bound team wears on their caps, uniforms, socks, pullover sweatshirts and whatever else it can sell out?
Oh, right. It’s the logo.
This red-faced character, which continues to be used with Little League teams across our country without much of a second thought, at least isn’t as cartoon-racist as that one from the late 1940s: Yellow-brownish face, exaggerated nose, wide grin and delightful rounded eyes. It’s also one of the hot T-shirt sellers of the so-called “Cooperstown Collection” in many online stores.
We actually picked one up during a trip to actual Cooperstown. Because, you know, it’s classic. Part of the game’s fabric. Appalling and appealing at the same time.
To mark the team’s American League championship, and celebrate a franchise trying to win its first title in 67 years, the National Baseball Hall of Fame online store has many things for sale this week as well.
One is a T-shirt that has the old Chief Wahoo character swinging a bat. Another says “Respect Cleveland” with the orange letter “C” in the middle.
So which is it supposed to be?
• The franchise could have earned respect if it had done more than just quietly de-emphasized the Chief Wahoo logo, in whatever historic depiction, long before a Toronto judge was asked by Native American activists earlier this week to disallow these Clevelanders from wearing that symbol when the Tribe (as it is also known) crossed into Canada to play the Blue Jays (their real name) in the AL Championship Series.
The protest was based on the interpretation that the logo violated the providence’s civil rights’ code and continues to be demeaning to aboriginal people of North America.
If you can’t fix the problem in U.S. courts, take it to another country that might be a little less backward thinking.
Yet, when the MLB and its 27 lawyers showed up for this hearing, the judge was persuaded to dismiss the motion and would explain why at a later time.
Our chief concern in all this: Why, in the name of Louis Sockalexis, is this still an issue?
• We could trip back to 1948, when the Cleveland Indians’ last championship was granted by a defeat of the Boston Braves. Cleveland team owner Bill Veeck approved that previously discussed Wahoo logo at this time because he believed it conveyed a “spirit of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm.”
But then there was 1995, when the Atlanta Braves won the title over the Cleveland Indians, filled with foam Tomahawk Chops and sporadic protests that included a Chief Wahoo burned in effigy .
During this recent re-re-examination of the Indians name, former Cleveland franchise president and current Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro said the Wahoo logo “personally bothered” him but the people of Cleveland seemed OK with it.
Pretty cavalier attitude, don’t you think?
So, in 2016, when the pathos of politics struggles with how names can be hurtful, why good manners are appreciated and not everything is rigged just because, why not try to evolve in a sports world where the NFL insists on hailing Redskins and the NHL is puckish about its Blackhawks and perhaps be a little more progressive enough to believe that political correctness really isn’t what’s at stake here?
• Quick review: Louis Sockalexis, nicknamed the “Deerfoot of the Diamond,” was a Native American from the Penobscot tribe who played for the NL’s Cleveland Spiders of the late 1890s.
The AL Cleveland franchise came to a point in 1915 when it needed find a new nickname, since they had been called the Naps (after star player Napoleon Lajoie, who was leaving), and the local scribes pushed for Indians (to honor Sockalexis, who had long since disappeared). This was also at a time when famed Native American athlete/Olympian Jim Thorpe was playing for the NL champion New York Giants (ironically ending his MLB career with the Boston Braves in 1919).
So, sure, there’s context and history. But this franchise plays in Ohio, not Indiana (translation: Land of Indians), and the origin of the nickname is completely nontransgenic from any attempt to recognize a nation of prideful people.
Cleveland has enough mistakes by its lake. Can you just add this to your bucket list?
• It seemed the only groundswell of support for anything lately in C-town was coaxing Charlie Sheen (aka Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn of “Major League” movie fame) to throw out something just a bit outside for the first pitch of the World Series that starts Tuesday at whatever they’re calling Jacobs Field these days.
(It’s Progressive Field? How ironic).
The Indians said Friday that Sheen didn’t make the cut, and they’ve already got “former franchise greats” they want to honor instead.
Any of them Sockalexis’ descendants?
