MINNEAPOLIS — Roger Staubach’s Hail Mary pass to Drew Pearson in the 1975 divisional game at Met Stadium could have happened in a game between the Twins and Rangers.
Hold on! Twins and Rangers?
As the Sports Time Machine looked back at the first season of the Minnesota Twins — for clarity, today’s Major League Baseball team — there was a time when the expansion football team in
Minnesota considered the Twins
as its nickname.
All sorted out, the Twins became the Twins, the Vikings became the Vikings and that Dallas football club, after first being introduced as the Rangers, changed their name to Cowboys, all in 1960.
The Vikings and the Cowboys were awarded NFL franchises in their respective cities on Jan. 26, 1960, with Dallas immediately fielding a team for the upcoming season. The Vikings, meanwhile, had to wait until 1961, the same year the Twins took the field after the franchise relocated from Washington.
Part of the reasoning was that Met Stadium in Bloomington needed to be expanded to 40,000 seats as the Minnesota club had an NFL obligation to sell 25,000 season tickets.
By August 1960, the Minnesota NFL club did not have a nickname. Reidar Lund of the Duluth News Tribune reported in his Aug. 7 column that Eskimos were in the mix, a sentimental choice because of the former Duluth Eskimos team that played in the NFL in the 1920s.
The former owner of the Eskimos, Ole Haugsrud, was now chairman of the board for the NFL club in Minnesota. Other mentions of a possible nickname were Vikings, Miners, Lakers, Twins and Wolves.
The Lakers name became available that spring when the NBA team moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. The Wolves nickname, at least in its shortened version, would later be picked by the expansion NBA franchise in Minnesota in 1989.
Erwin J. (Whitey) Jones of St. Paul wrote letters to newspapers around the state supporting his idea for a team name, the Minnesota Medics, honoring the state’s fine medical facilities in the Twin Cites and Rochester, the Post-Bulletin reported.
While it certainly had a ring to it, Medics isn’t a name that would appear on the positive side of a ledger when it comes to football. And that’s exactly why the team went with a fiercer moniker.
On Sept. 27, 1960, the Minnesota NFL club officially announced the team would be called the Minnesota Vikings by team president William Boyer as a tribute to the region’s Norwegian heritage and a fighting spirit.
“Ideally, a nickname for an athletic team serves a dual purpose,” said team president William Boyer when the Vikings were announced. “First, it should represent an aggressive person or animal imbued with the will to win. Secondly, if possible, it is desirable to have a name connotate the region that particular team represents. The name Vikings seems to us to score well on both points.”
The team considered being called the Minneapolis-St. Paul Vikings at first.
Vikings general manager Bert Rose cleared that up when he met with the Rochester Rotarians on Nov. 17, 1960.
“We felt that the name, Minneapolis-St. Paul Vikings, was too long and we were afraid St. Paul might get dropped — that possibility was fraught with disaster. So we chose Minnesota — we hope and believe the Vikings will have the backing of the whole state,” the Rochester Post-Bulletin reported Rose saying.
And how ‘bout them Cowboys? The Dallas club was originally named the Rangers, but on March 20, 1960, the team adopted the Cowboys because Dallas-Fort Worth already had a Rangers baseball team in the American Baseball Association.
Baseball wins with nickname
On Nov. 27, 1960 — two months after the Vikings were named — newspapers around the country carried the news that the relocated Washington Senators club will be known as the Minnesota Twins, following the Vikings’ lead to incorporate the state into the name.
With the announcement, the team unveiled its Minnie and Paul logo, uniting Minneapolis and St. Paul. That logo remains a fixture above center field at Target Field.
The Senators name remained in Washington as the city was awarded another franchise that began play in 1961.
Forum file photo
