Man Mulligan is a ragtag collective of sports fans from across the country united by our common love for whatever game is in season. As a team, we’re more patchwork than polished, more underdog than favorite, more walk-on than blue chip, but like all self-anointed armchair quarterbacks and barstool GMS nationwide, what we lack in All-American talent, we make up for with an abundance of Hall-of-Fame opinion.
At game time, you won’t find us in corporate suites with their carpeting and catering; look up to the nosebleeds instead, squint a little, and we’ll be there, just below the rafters, with seeds, suds, and the local broadcast in our ear. According to our tax returns, we’re about a billion short of the billionaire class calling the shots for our birthright teams (no hate here, for the record, just cold, hard, cash-strapped facts), so ultimately, when we get into re-calling those same billion-dollar shots, we’re nobodies—and probably a lot like you.
We at Man Mulligan think it’s due time to take a carving knife to the most sacred of sacred American cows—the nicknames of our professional sports teams—and separate the prime rib from the chuck, the tenderloin from the shank, and essentially everything else edible from hot dog filling. And to all you homers out there who think you teams are more Wagyu than Rocky Mountain Oyster, we’ve got five words for you: Not so fast, my friends. There’s enough nickname filler in each league to stuff the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile ten times over, and odds are your city’s mixed in with the mystery meat.
If that dose of subjective truth puts you and your sensibilities off, you can rest easy, fellow fans, because we’re not merely the slice-and-dice kind, at least not without making nice in the process. So, instead of simply leaving a trail of destruction in our wake, albeit—we hope—an entertaining one, we’ll make good on our name’s promise—Man as in for all mankind, and Mulligan as in taking another swing—and reimagine a team identity for each city we visit, touching on everything from the superficial (name, logo, uniform) to the spiritual (gameday experience) in the process.
Will we succeed? Like any season of at bats, we’ll swing and miss a lot (get ready for the breeze, folks), but every once in a while, luck will be on our side, bat will be put on ball, and we’ll hit one in the gap or, even better, out of the park, and we’ll turn out an identity worth remembering, worth repeating, worth sporting—and maybe you yourself will be a fan of. Hell, even the greatest ballplayers fail seven out of every 10 times at bat. To the Man Mulligan team, producing something decent every 30% of the time (and falling flat on our face the other 70%) are our kind of odds.
Now—and for as long as we can get away with it.
Earlier this year, we went live—let’s call it a soft opening—at the de facto winter shift change for American sports, and it proved to be an all-time doozy: the NFL wrapped up its annual ratings domination with a super dud in Santa Clara, MLB pitchers and catchers reported for spring training and promptly started breaking hand-bones left and right, the NHL paused mid-season for the Milan Cortina games and the Americans took home the Olympic gold in both men’s and women’s ice hockey, MLS began its 31st season (and last in its traditional Feb.–Dec. format), and the NBA shuffled the deck at its trade deadline for a home stretch that was, without a doubt, not chock-full of tanking.
After such a spring-loaded start, we took the summer off to play footy with visiting World Cup teams, and now that it’s fall we’re back for the long haul, ready to tune in and dish out with the best of them. Our aim is to deliver our subscribers (hint, hint) a thousand-plus, worth-the-time words each week, whether as part of our monthly market spotlights (City Series), weekly spotlights on timely team names (Nickname of the Week), radar readouts on select industry developments (Scope Dope), or stand-alone posts on whatever topic strikes our fancy (Copy That)—all at no cost. Now, if that sounds like a deal you and your entire contact list can get behind, subscribe to Man Mulligan today.
Practically speaking, we’ll be dispatching from wherever we’re at when the time comes, be it in the office, on the couch, at the tailgate, next to the pool, or under the bleachers. Most of the time, those desks—and sectionals and lawn chairs and lounge chairs and seat cushions—will be in Kansas City (Missouri side), but the Man Mulligan not-so-secret agency has operatives across the country, waiting for activation. Impractically speaking, each city in the country—major, minor, and college alike—is on our team’s radar, and we plan to bring this thinking fan’s sideshow to every last one—eventually.
Each season (that’s what we call years) we’ll spotlight a dozen or so metros—our very own starting lineup plus a couple reserves—and run them through our patented three-part gauntlet. First up will be the Teardown, where we take an area’s sports temperature by piling up and then piling on its past, present, and sometimes future teams through their nicknames, dishing out our unique flavor of scores along the way. Next will be the Rebuild, where we dig through an area’s non-sports past to find a fresh way forward, and then hand-deliver that path in the form of a uniquely Man Mulligan team identity (plus selected merch) for the city and its people. The third and final step of each season stop will be Opening Day, where we showcase the gameday experience for our newly minted team and provide a glimpse of just how great that game could—and should—be to our readers.
We’ll do this, like we said, a dozen-ish times each year, with fun sidetracks in between every stop, and then run it back a short offseason later with an entirely new lineup of cities but the same old fun. Sounds like a good time and all, but how in the world do we decide where to visit next, you ask? That, we’re afraid, belongs to state secrets, so our lips are sealed with government-issued adhesive, but odds are we’ve already got your city (or one close to it) circled on our map.
In the wide world of sports, like so many of its concession stands, the name game’s grown a big stale, and the seasoned tastebuds here at Man Mulligan crave fresh and authentic flavors more than ever before, so instead of sticking with the status quo, which means swallowing bite after bite of pre-heated nicknames and waiting—no, praying—for someone to spice up the menu, we’re flipping our tables in protest and jumping in the kitchen ourselves. “Hold my beer,” as they say.
Team names matter, more than most of us care to admit, but they’re largely treated as if they were carried down to us fans from the mountaintop as perfectly formed—and untouchable—reflections of the team and its players, let alone the home city and its people. That’s hardly the case, as we know. While there’s a select few that certainly seem that way, there are far more that leave us scratching our heads and asking why.
Some nicknames that were pitch-perfect in the 1880s, or 1920s, or 1950s, or 1990s—you know who you are—now miss the mark entirely. We’re talking the territory of career-ending airballs, shanks, yips, what have you. Is this understandable? Sure. Everything changes eventually, including our sports. But is this acceptable—stomaching these past-due nicknames ad infinitum? We at Man Mulligan think not. Team names, like the teams they’re connected to, are living, breathing creations, constantly evolving with each season, each logo tweak, each time they roll off fans’ lips, but we often see them instead treated, more often than not, like yesteryear’s leftovers thrown in the microwave for a quick zap and passed off as meals of the day.
We’re out to change that perception—and spice it all up in the process. While many of the team nicknames in American sports are culturally, if not capitalistically, sacred and—let’s be honest here—will never change due to their statuses as cornerstones of both priceless fandoms and ten-figure enterprises, the enterprising crew at Man Mulligan believes there’s more to discover within each fanbase than what’s currently adorning our teams. The people’s nickname, if you will. We’re not out to erase the identities of your city’s storied franchises (though, as you’ll see, there are plenty we’d like to replace); we want to add to them instead.
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