Bring back the sting!

An online campaign to revert the Charlotte Bobcats name to the Hornets is gaining momentum. I can’t think of a better way to once again fill the seats of a dying professional NBA franchise than to bring the Hornets back to town.

The whole town of Charlotte was buzzing with Hornets fever in 1988, the year our beloved Charlotte Hornets began play as an expansion team. A rivalry was instantly born with the Miami Heat, the other expansion team playing its inaugural season that year. I had just moved to nearby Matthews from Greenville, SC, and was excited about the prospect of bringing the NBA to a state with a long basketball tradition, just not an NBA team. We marveled at the new Charlotte Coliseum, which would wind up hosting 364 consecutive NBA sell-outs from December 1988 to November 1997. At the time the coliseum was state-of-the-art, complete with luxury boxes and a large eight-sided video scoreboard. With almost 24,000 seats, it was not only the largest venue in the league, but the largest basketball-specific arena ever to serve as a full-time home for an NBA team. “The Hive” was so revered the Rev. Billy Graham dedicated the coliseum on opening night, August 11, 1988.

Then there were the players. A patchwork of NBA cast-offs, aging veterans and players taken from the expansion draft and NBA draft picks, we would become enamored with the names Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues, Kelly tripucka, Rex Chapman, Del Curry and Rickey Green. The team of misfits would play their first game on November 4th losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers 133-93 at the Charlotte Coliseum. The Hornets would earn their first win four days later when the beat the Los Angeles Clippers at home 117-105. That first roster of Hornets played more like drones. Wins would not come often for the Hornets, who finished last in the Atlantic Division with a 20-62 record.

The Hornets would make the playoffs in seven seasons, half of the team’s 14, but never made it past the second round. We would remember “Grandmama (Larry Johnson), the infamous trade of Alonzo Mourning, the untimely death of Bobby Phils in a speeding Porsche, and of course the fall of owner George Shinn, whose reputation was forever tarnished because of a rape allegation by a former Hornets cheerleader. The Bobcats came to town in 2004 as an expansion team, two seasons after the Hornets relocated to New Orleans. But fans never really bought into Bobcat fever as they once did with the Hornets. Even Michael Jordan couldn’t revive the enthusiasm, or the team’s success. Mediocre since their first season in 2004, the Bobcats have only one playoff appearance in their history, a 2010 seventh-seed berth in which they were easily dispatched by the clearly superior Orlando Magic in a four-game sweep. This season was memorable as being the worst in NBA history, with a 7-59 record, a winning percentage of only .106.

Meanwhile, the New Orleans Hornets are being bought by Tom Benson, owner of the NFL Saints, and the new management wants to change the name in favor of something more intrinsically related to the region. This would open the door for a new name change in Charlotte. I think bringing the Hornets back to town would revive old feelings and the aura of NBA basketball would once again return, this time in the new arena in downtown Charlotte. And yes, we could rename it The Hive.

Are you listening, Mr. Jordan?