February 4th marks the anniversary of when you came up with the Cosmos name, in 1971. How did you
came up with the name?
I wanted a name which was different. I wanted a name which was big, and went through the list of names
in my own mind of
the New York sports franchises, and didn’t think too much of any of
them, but looked to see where I could follow on and be bigger. The most
recent (in terms of history) club to come into existence was the Mets,
and the Mets was short for Metropolitan.
And I thought, “how can I come up
with something which is bigger than that?”, and came up with
Cosmopolitan. Some other people came up … the Erteguns wanted to call it
the New York Blues and somebody else wanted to have
the team wear pink uniforms and call it the New York Lovers.
Really? Oh my God!
Oh yes. So
I thought Cosmopolitan, no good; Cosmopolites, that’s no good. But
Cosmos, that is great. It’s a derivation of Cosmopolitan and what is New
York other than cosmopolitan? And what is bigger
than the cosmos? Nothing, so that’s what we’ll be. And then I had the problem of convincing the ownership that that was the name.
So I got a competition going and at that time I had
certain relationships with people at Swissair and got them to come up
with two free tickets from New York to Switzerland, for the winners of
the competition for the name of New York’s newest professional soccer club. Then [we] had the competition and, you
can imagine, we didn’t get that many entries, cause we didn’t get that much publicity - this was January of 1971. So I wrote a lot of letters myself, to myself, with different names
and addresses, proposing the name
the Cosmos. And then, thank God, I remember opening a piece of mail. I
was at a board meeting of the [United States Soccer] Federation in New
York and I picked up the mail and went into the meeting. It was the
opening of
the meeting, and there, I remember Gene Edwards [then Vice President and
later President of the USSF] looking at me and saying to me, “any
chance of you paying attention to the meeting now?” Opened
the mail, and there were two high school teachers in Queens who came up with the name, the Cosmos. So
now I had two real people to whom I could give the trip to Switzerland,
and another
twenty-thirty people – whose handwriting looked suspiciously like my own
– proposing the Cosmos, and could therefore could go to the ownership
and say, "look, this is it, the Cosmos." So that is how the name the Cosmos came about.
And voilà, the greatest name in the history of sport was born.
That’s right, and that is the honest truth.
[Originally published on 4 February 2013 on nycosmos.com]
