We Navel Gazers have had our issues with Arte Moreno's decision in 2005 to rename his Major League Baseball team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim–with the understanding that we would immediately embrace Whatever the Hell the Team's Called once it reclaimed the World Series glory of 2002.
However, with the city of Anaheim officially dropping its legal challenges to LAAofA, it is important for us to move forward. As Los Angeles Mayor of Anaheim Curt Pringle so succinctly put it, “it's in everybody's best interest to take no further action.”
Amen, homey.
In the spirit of this maturity, we would therefore like to spread word of a new curse that we have just made up. Basically, unless Moreno comes to his senses and voluntarily changes the name back to the Anaheim Angels – which is what they were called when they won the Series, after all – the Spirit of the Cowboy — late, great, luckless owner Gene Autry — will prevent the Halos from winning another world title.
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Now, the fact that Autry named his new franchise the Los Angeles Angels
when he bought the team in 1960 is not important right now.
Nor is the
fact that the Angels had Anaheim in front of their name for only nine of
their going on 49 seasons.
Nor is the irrefutable evidence of there
already having been a Curse of the Cowboy, which was manifested in the
club's long stretch without winning a pennant, punctuated by the
post-season disasters of 1982 and 1986, the 1995 end-of-season
collapse, Lyman Bostock's murder, Donnie Moore's suicide, the Angels in the Outfield remake and all those former Angels who got inducted into Cooperstown in other teams' uniforms.
Nor our fears that a new Curse of the Cowboy would be canceled out by the unconfirmed tales of the Big A having been built upon sacred Indian
burial grounds.
Nor our fears that there may be a secret clause that kicks in, reverting ownership of any team named the Anaheim Angels back to Disney,
which did give us that team name and a World Series
championship but also gave us “The Big Ed,” the Rally
Monkey and Rex Hudler.
No, none of that matters because our sweatshops are cranking out Curse of the
Cowboy t-shirts as you read this. Fans will love 'em.
They're periwinkle with pinstripes.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.