By Michael Wilbon
Washington Post Columnist
Friday, February 23, 1996

Okay, it's done now. The name is Wizards. No amount of whining and crying will change it. No new polls will change it. No amount of calls to the radio talk show host who tries to whip the citizenry into a frenzy will change it. Washington Wizards. Not my favorite, but it's not bad.

I preferred Justice or Glory or River Dogs, but Wizards is okay. The people in the NBA office in New York who create logos and colors will come up with something clever. You can market "The Wiz Kids" and other clever takeoffs. There's a lot there to work with.

Let's cut right to the chase with this discussion of the new nickname by dealing with what is, for some, an emotional flash point: the Ku Klux Klan. We all know the head of the Klan is called "The Imperial Wizard," which apparently is reason enough for some people -- particularly blacks and Jews -- to oppose Wizards. As someone whose daddy and uncles had to worry about Klansmen, I understand the sentiment. (Abe Pollin, I might point out, is Jewish).

But I'm not about to give over a name or anything else to the Klan. I wouldn't want to legitimize the hateful jerks. Later for the Klan. They don't own anything, they don't have any domain that I know of. Do they have a trademark or something on the name "Wizards"? Apparently not. So enough with the jokes about "hooded" uniforms and the logo being a burning cross. Or perhaps, since I hear these jokes coming from friends who are black and Jewish, we're at the point where we can dismiss the Klan.

The bigger issue here is the reluctance to embrace change, especially the kind of change that hasn't been seen in sports in 30 years. That was the last time a big league club changed its name (Houston Colt .45s to Astros) without changing cities. If we use the sale of merchandise as an indicator, "Raptors" is one of the most popular nicknames in the NBA. We know the popularity of the Toronto franchise must be attributed to the nickname/colors/logo because the team doesn't win many games. But you know what the reaction in Toronto was when the name "Raptors" was announced? Booooooooooo! Pollin said his colleagues in the NBA warned him the reaction to changing the name would be at least partially negative.

And as Pollin said yesterday moments after he announced the name, "If you take any name and look at it hard enough, you can find something negative."

Personally, I think it took too hard a look at the name "Bullets" to find something negative. But I have nothing but applause for Pollin for following his convictions.

The cynic in all of us says this must have something to do with money, since any kind of half-smart marketing will mean millions in the sale of merchandise. But Pollin didn't have to change the name to make the same dollars. Retaining the name "Bullets" and changing the uniform, colors and logo would have also accomplished the same thing. "Wizards" isn't necessarily going to make more money than "Bullets."

I haven't hesitated to criticize Pollin on basketball- or hockey-related matters, but I'm not about to call him a liar when he says his motivation for changing the name is "the name Bullets is no longer appropriate."

"I'm prepared to give up this name that's been a part of my life for 32 years because maybe we can save some lives," he said. "I thought I could coalesce the community. Saving a life is more important than the nickname of a team. You may think it sounds so corny, but I wanted to put in my two cents. But the name change is just a small part of this anti-violence campaign. We're going to go into the schools and work with the kids. It's incumbent on me to make a major impact on the community. Kids killing kids with bullets is horrible."

Now, excuse me if I'm forgetting somebody out there, but I don't hear a lot of owners of professional sports teams saying anything like this. In 15 years of covering sports, I don't recall any other owners voluntarily stepping up and talking about violence in the community where his teams play. Usually, what we have, including right here in Washington, is the owner of a team with an obviously offensive name saying, "Offensive? the nickname (Redskins, Chiefs, Braves, etc.) doesn't bother me one bit."

So if "Bullets" bothers Abe Pollin, he ought to change the name of the team. He probably should have just renamed it and skipped this whole vote thing because he owns the team. That would have avoided what has appeared to be the most crooked "election" since anything held in Chicago.

For those of you still curious about names such as "Wonder" and "Monuments" and "Power" Pollin said yesterday they were among those nixed by the league in the early stages of consideration. Pollin and his wife, Irene, started with a list of 2,000 names and picked 18 they liked. "Most of those 18," Pollin said, "were discarded for trademark reasons by the NBA."

When asked whether "Wizards" truly won the vote, Pollin said, "Oh, yeah, and by over 1,000 votes." Asked to reveal the exact vote, Pollin said, "I do know it, but I'm not going to tell you. I don't want it compared with The Post poll or the New Hampshire primaries or any other vote. [Wizards] won by a very, very large number of votes."

The bigger problem now is what to do with a lame-duck name. Pollin said yesterday, "I could have done it next [season], but the NBA wouldn't let us do it." So we now have this half-season plus another full season of a lame-duck name. "In life," Pollin said, "there's transition. And this will be a transition."