If your name is Robert Lee these days — whatever your middle initial — you stand to be the brunt of somebody’s joke. “Hey, Bobby,” some wag will exclaim across the workplace, “after lunch we’re going to the parking lot and tear down your statue.”
Since I bear the name Roy Clark — shared with a famous country singer — I have a dog in this fight. (More about that later.)
The inspiration for this reflection is the news, much ridiculed since Tuesday, that ESPN was moving one of its young announcers — Robert Lee — from coverage of the University of Virginia’s football game in Charlottesville on Sept. 2. Long associated with higher education and Jeffersonian democracy, Charlottesville now bears the burden of a deadly confrontation with White supremacy.
Robert Lee, not to be confused with ESPN veteran Bob Ley, happens to be Asian-American. According to Wikipedia, Lee (also spelled Li) “is the second most common surname in China, behind only Wang. It is one of the most common surnames in the world, shared by 92.76 million people and more than 100 million worldwide.” We can extrapolate from this data that our chances of running into a Lee — maybe even a Bob Lee — in our daily travels are pretty damn good.
There are no previous reports of complaints about the young announcer’s name — or external suggestions that it would become a significant issue related to the culture wars of the day. According to statements from ESPN, a switch to another game that day was a kind of courtesy, an attempt to save Robert Lee from the barrage of jokes — thoughtful and thoughtless — that might come his way. In other words, let the focus be on the game and not the name.
The name Robert Lee has suddenly become inconvenient.
Names, such as Bob Lee or Roy Clark seem quite personal — discretely ours — until, of course, we Google it. I want to meet the person in America who has not ego-surfed the Internet by way of Google. It turns out that we share our sacred name with hundreds — if not thousands — across the country, and around the world.
This is personal. One morning, I arrived at my doctor’s office and noticed that someone had already signed me in. “Roy Clark.” That’s a nice courtesy, I thought. Then I double-checked. Turned out there were three Roy Clarks in their system. Two of us happened to converge that morning, like asteroids in deep space. I was lucky enough to meet my namesake as he emerged from his appointment. I showed him my ID, and we shook hands and hugged in solidarity. I mention, in passing, that we looked quite different: he was young, tall, handsome, well-coiffed and African-American; I was…ah, forget it.
I was named after my two grandfathers: Roy and Peter. I did not know another Roy Clark until a country singer by that name had a hit in 1969 with “Yesterday When I Was Young.” I started getting teased about it, especially after he became co-host, with Buck Owens, of the country musical comedy show “Hee-Haw.”an It got more annoying when I moved from New York in 1974 to teach at a college in Montgomery, Alabama. At least half the time upon introduction I was asked “Are you THE Roy Clark?”
About 1975 I wrote a few columns about coming to understand Southern culture. One of them was titled “Unbuckling the Bible Belt,” about how raunchy lyrics were creeping into country music. An editor at The New York Times, which published the piece, asked me about my name, and worried that I would be confused with the country singer. Since my name was short, I decided to add my middle initial. In time, Roy P. Clark grew into Roy Peter Clark, my professional identity forevermore.
When all was said and done, I realized that I was lucky to share a name with the singer. What if I had been born Dick Nixon? Or much, much worse: Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini? Whatever happened to those names? I would love to chat with our former president about what it meant to lug around the politically inconvenient middle name “Hussein” — a coincidence exploited by his enemies.
What do you do with an inconvenient name? Sometimes you change it.
A young lawyer in Kentucky joined the bar during the Watergate era. His name was John Dean. Through no fault of his own, he achieved that professional status in 1973, two years before the White House lawyer of the same name, suddenly a convicted felon, was disbarred. The Kentucky John Dean had no animus against the Watergate John Dean, he now says. In fact, he admired the other Dean for the testimony that sent Nixon aides to prison and the president himself into decline. (The two Deans would meet each other years later at a friendly book signing.) But early in his career, the name proved a disadvantage: “I was confused with him,” he said in a phone interview. “There were jokes about why I wasn’t in prison. It was an inconvenient name.”
The Kentucky John Dean took matters into his own hands and changed his name. There are lots of Deans in the world, and this one could have changed his name to, say, Jonathan Dean or Jerome Dean, to achieve the desired effect. Instead, he became Natty Bumppo.
For those readers deficient in Early American Literature, Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo was the young hero of The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper. Maybe Natty Bumppo didn’t like his name very much, because by the time he charges off with Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans, he is better known as Hawkeye.
There was nothing much literary in the Kentucky lawyer’s choice, just an attraction to a name he had run into in an earlier career as a newspaper copy editor. Need some legal help in Kentucky? Forget about calling Saul (the TV lawyer who also changed his name). He wants you to call Natty Bumppo.
In my time, I have known a John Wayne, Joan Collins, Tom Jones and Glenn Miller. My neighbor, a firefighter, is Michael Jackson. My favorite encounter was in Alabama when I handed a gas station clerk my credit card. I remember him as a young man with blond hair. He looked at my name and said, “So you’re Roy Clark, huh?” I nodded, anticipating the inevitable. “Well, I’m glad to meet you,” he said, flashing his name badge, “I’m Glen Campbell.” When I first learned of the passing of the great singer of that name — who performed with Roy Clark, by the way — I did not immediately think of “Wichita Lineman” or “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Instead, I thought of a young man working at a Shell station in Montgomery, Alabama.
I once, as a visitor, taught a writing class at Robert E. Lee High School in Montgomery. Wednesday in my hometown newspaper there was a prominent story about efforts to change the name of Robert E. Lee Elementary in Tampa Heights. In that school of 300 students, 57 percent are African-American. There is nothing funny about that story. Names matter more than statues because there are many more of them. People are making light of ESPN’s decision to move Robert Lee, but I have heard no accusations of their making that decision lightly.
There is a long history of conversions — going back to Saul falling off his horse and becoming Paul — in which an individual changes his name to express a new condition of enlightenment. Growing up, I thought Cassius Marcellus Clay was a cool name for a stylish fighter, until Muhammad Ali taught me it was the name of a slave owner turned abolitionist. “Cassius Clay is a slave name,” he once said. “I didn’t choose it and I don’t want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name — it means beloved of God, and I insist people use it when people speak to me.”
Back to ESPN’s decision to move Robert Lee. At best it may be said that they did the wrong thing for the right reason. An unintended consequence of their choice — as happens so often — is that they have called more attention to the young man’s inconvenient name than if they had just left it alone.
Correction: The Watergate John Dean was disbarred in October 1974; the Kentucky John Dean changed his name to Natty Bumppo in December, 1974. He became a lawyer in 1973, not 1975.
