Salt Lake City Is No Place for All That Jazz

Countless professional sports teams have relocated when their financial situations became untenable in their hometown. It is a reality nearly as old as professional sports itself. Yet relatively few peregrine franchises choose to bring their nickname with them. And why should they? Sure, the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Baltimore Colts, and Minneapolis Lakers possessed franchise monikers that were too deeply ingrained in the fabric of their sport—and too valuable in their marketability—to be rechristened, but owners are often eager to rename their incoming team something with indigenous appeal that will bring locals into the arena.

After all, why would the NHL’s Colorado franchise retain “Rockies” when moving to swampland whose most mountainous feature is the New Jersey Turnpike rising over the Hackensack River? Just as Denver would have proved très stupide to keep the Nordiques nickname in its new mile-high home.

And the Dallas Texans would have been dang suicidal not to have switched to the “Chiefs” upon arrival deep in the heart of Kansas City.

So it is perplexing that the NBA’s Utah franchise retained its Big Easy–born Jazz nickname.

Utah, and specifically Salt Lake City, is both the temporal and spiritual home of Mormonism. Mormonism, like most religions, is—at least in principle—a strictly codified belief system. In Mormonism’s case, guided by its 13 Articles of Faith. Its Book of Mormon contains a “history” far older than Christianity and is supplemented by lengthy scriptures such as the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. All in all, the Book of Mormon seems—from its own sources as well as interviews with “average” members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints—to be a highly regimented template of conducting one’s life righteously and steering clear of sin (even though Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith, and his polygamous congregation lived lives that made them—even by standards of their day—outcasts of mainstream Christianity).

So, it goes without saying that straight-laced Salt Lake City—home of the Utah Jazz—bears no cultural resemblance whatsoever to vivacious, hedonistic New Orleans. More to the point, jazz is the spiritual antithesis of religion—this most improvisational of art forms thrives on its lack of boundaries and its emphasis on personal expression. Whereas religion arose to curb the chaos of an uncivilized populace, jazz embodies, musically, that very chaos. Frankly, jazz never could have evolved in a button-down town such as Salt Lake City or a state as conventional as Utah—only the melting-pot, loose-moraled, devil-may-care streets of a city such as N’awlins could have birthed this deeply emotive and unpredictable art form. 

One need only look upon one of the great practitioners of personal expression on the basketball court, Pistol Pete Maravich—perhaps the John Coltrane of the hardwood—whose freewheeling style of play personified New Orleans and its Jazz franchise. Considering both that Pistol Pete was hardly the poster boy for Salt Lake City’s reverential atmosphere when he and his Jazz arrived in 1979 (Maravich was quoted in a biography of the same name as having no interest in Christianity during his playing days) and that, by 1979, Maravich’s days as a basketball virtuoso were behind him, it’s beyond baffling that Jazz owner Sam Battistone, Jr., didn’t rename the franchise.

So, why weren’t the Utah Jazz redubbed something closer to the city’s—and by extension, the state of Utah’s—heart?

Such as for what Salt Lake City is truly known—even more than its homegrown religion and choir:

Salt, of course.

Long in the vanguard of team names utilizing a collective noun, Battistone could have continued that fashion by rechristening his NBA franchise the Utah Salt. After all, the Great Salt Lake—sitting just west of the city founded by Mormon bigwig Brigham Young—is larger than Rhode Island and, on occasion, Delaware, providing both Utah’s capital and the state, itself, with its foremost secular identity.

And the marketing opportunities didn’t end there. The Utah Salt would be ripe for a third jersey: the “NaCl.” Similar to “NOLA” of New Orleans renown, “NaCl” would represent both the chemical formula of table salt and, when either read or spoken as a quasi-nickname for the team, a hip phonetic reference to Salt Lake City’s famous Mormon TaberNACLE Choir.

Such a marketing plan even could have included the rallying cry “Get the NaCl” to capitalize on the Get the Knack album and its single, “My Sharona,” that debuted just four months before the Utah Jazz played its first game and were each massive No. 1 hits by then. A lawsuit likely would have ensued, but a quick settlement would have provided invaluable buzz for the fledgling team and been well worth the legal wrangling.

Who could have predicted that young jazzmen going west would culminate in such a lost opportunity?