The football teams that insist on calling themselves the New York Giants and the New York Jets have agreed to continue playing in New Jersey for good, or at least for the next 99 years, which qualifies as for good unless you expect to be around in 2104.
Now that they are committed to the West Bank (of the Hudson), may a New Yorker be permitted a tiny question, humbly asked:
Can our city have its name back? Please? Hasn't it been abused long enough?
"Yeah, you can have it back," Acting Governor Richard Codey of New Jersey said by phone from Trenton.
He would love to have the teams fly under the banner of New Jersey, where the Giants and Jets have played for about 50 years combined. Their clinging to NY logos instead of giving NJ a try "rankles a lot of us," the governor acknowledged.
He has his priorities, though. For him, keeping the teams in his state is a much bigger deal than names. "I know and understand that marketing people told them they're better off with the NY for marketing purposes," Codey said.
"But you know what?" he added. "I wouldn't put it past myself late at night to go onto the field and do away with the Y and paint a J. I'm capable of that."
Does anyone want to read the governor his Miranda rights?
Not that redoing the field would help him any. The New York label is here to stay, the teams say. No one has thought about changing it, said the Jets' chief spokesman, Ron Colangelo. Pat Hanlon, his counterpart with the Giants, said in an e-mail message: "We are the New York Giants. Always have been. Probably always will be."
"We are not trying to make a political statement with our name," Hanlon wrote. "It is who we are. We proudly represent the New York metropolitan region, which encompasses New Jersey, New York and Connecticut."
Hmm. Maybe two of New Jersey's leading newspapers, the Record and the Star-Ledger, could get into the act by rechristening themselves the New York Record and the New York Star-Ledger. Why not? There is certainly nothing to stand in their way (except local pride, of course).
New York officials may trademark logos like NYPD and FDNY or slogans like "I Love New York." But "that doesn't give them rights to every incarnation of the words `New York,'" said Jane Ginsburg, a professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia University.
That is so, said Daniel Doctoroff, the city's deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. The name New York "is in the public domain," beyond trademark protections pursued by a city agency under his supervision, the Marketing Development Corporation.
You will recall that Doctoroff was the mayor's point man in the failed attempt to build a West Side stadium for the Jets. Despite that setback, he is fine with the team's holding on to the New York name for dear life. "I'd probably be a little more upset if I lived in New Jersey and they weren't called the New Jersey Jets," he said.
But even without a legal issue, doesn't truth in packaging matter at all?
This is a question raised in other cities as well. The baseball Angels, who play in Anaheim, California, have changed their name over the years almost as often as has Sean (Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, Diddy) Combs. They now go by the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, even though they have about as much to do with Los Angeles as free-flowing traffic.
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