By Chuck Klosterman
Grantland, July 12, 2011

Allow me to spare you the hyperbole: Usain Bolt is fast.

He is, as far as we can tell, the fastest human who’s ever lived — in 2009, at a race in Berlin, he ran the 100-meter dash is 9.58 seconds. This translates to an average speed of just over 23 mph (with a top speed closer to 30 mph). His ‘09 performance in Germany was .11 quicker than the 9.69 he ran at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the fattest chunk ever taken off a world record at that distance. Considering the unadulterated simplicity of his vocation and the historic magnitude of his dominance, it’s easy to argue that Bolt has been the world’s greatest athlete of the past five years. And yet there’s an even easier argument to make than that one: Within the next 10 years, Bolt’s achievements as a sprinter will be completely annihilated.

This is not guaranteed, of course, but it’s certainly more plausible than speculative — for the past 30 years, the men’s record in the 100-meter dash has been assaulted so continually that many of its former record holders don’t even qualify as difficult answers to trivia questions. This was not always the case: Jim Hines broke the 10.0 barrier with a 9.95 at the (high-altitude) 1968 Olympics; that mark stood for 15 years before Calvin Smith ran a 9.93 (also at altitude) in Colorado Springs. But since 1983, the record has been shattered more than a dozen times. Ben Johnson’s steroid-fueled 9.83 in ‘87 was the first massive blow, but eight others have chipped away at the record with increasing regularity (Bolt just happened to use a sledge hammer).

The big-picture upshot to all this measured subtraction is simple: Over the past 40 years, man has improved his ability to run 100 meters by .37 of a second. That’s a rough average of .01 a year, but that kind of math is deceptively understated — though the year-to-year improvement isn’t exponential, it also isn’t gradual. The rate of change keeps accelerating. As of this June, 17 men had already run sub-10.0 100 meter dashes, the most ever in the span of a year (with six months still on the calendar). Were he to get in the same physical condition he was in 2009, most track experts concede that the 25-year-old Bolt has the potential to breach the 9.50 barrier at any moment. And this raises the central question fans of track and field have always wanted to know: Is there a ceiling to how fast a man can run? Will there be a day — maybe in 50 years, or maybe in 500 — when someone runs the 100-meter dash in 8.99 seconds?

“In order to answer this question, you have to think like a sprinter. And sprinters believe that — someday — somebody will run the 100 meters and the clock will read 0.00.” Ato Boldon tells me this over the telephone. Boldon is now known as a track analyst for NBC and CBS, but he’s also a four-time Olympic medalist and the fastest man the island of Trinidad has ever produced (in 1998, he ran the 100 in 9.86). “And when a sprinter thinks like that, he’s not trying to trick himself. It’s how you have to think. This idea of human limitation is exactly what we’re competing against. It’s thinking about running a 8.99 that gets you down to 9.58. That’s how it works.”

Obviously, it’s impossible to talk about sprinting records and human potentiality without mentioning steroids. It’s more than the rhino in the room; it’s possibly the reason the WR in the 100 didn’t move for 15 years and then started falling like an air conditioner shoved out an open window. But for the sake of this specific discussion, PEDs don’t really matter. It isn’t a moral (or even competitive) issue. The question is not what speed a man should run; the question is how fast a man could run, through any means necessary. Steroids tend to be a secondary issue for track fans, principally for two reasons:

• 1. Though nobody will ever talk about it on the record, PEDs have become an integral part of sprinting. It’s pretty much like cycling: There’s just an unspoken “everybody does it” concession. There are sanctioned rules, and athletes get penalized if they get caught breaking them. But nobody really worries about this, simply because …
• 2. People who love track want to see guys run fast. That’s the whole game. There is nothing else. The sport is not built on personal rivalries or constructed purity or nationalism or the import of tradition; the sport is solely driven by the excitement of people doing what no one has done before. In this one specific instance, the ends truly do justify the means. And unlike other sports, there’s no rhetoric or concern about steroids warping statistics, because the only stat that matters is who’s fastest right now. Once a record has been broken, it instantly becomes meaningless. Not even track historians use comparative times as a way to establish greatness. Easy example: Which of these men was the greatest sprinter — Jesse Owens (who won the 1936 Olympics with a time of 10.3), Carl Lewis (whose career best in the 100 was 9.86), or Leroy Burrell (who ran a 9.85)? Track and field is about running fast today. It’s a bottom-line endeavor.

This is not to say that steroids don’t make debates about human speed complex, because they do. Around the same time Ben Johnson ran his (then unthinkable) 9.83, Florence Griffith-Joyner destroyed the women’s 100-meter mark with a 10.49, and that record has not been seriously challenged in the 23 years since. Was something happening with PEDs in the late 1980s that has since been removed from the sport? Why do men keep getting faster, but women do not? These are questions that science cannot seem to answer (or even guess at).

“Bolt’s 9.58 is so low that perhaps no one gets close to it for a very long time, just like Flo-Jo’s record,” says Boldon. “But scientists are always wrong about this stuff. Scientists once believed that if a man ran a four-minute mile, his lungs would explode.”

The scientific understanding of sprinting is pretty immature,” concedes Peter Weyand, and — since Weyand has become the de facto American expert on the science of sprinting — that tells you just how mysterious this phenomenon is. A physiologist and biomechanist at Southern Methodist University, Weyand specializes in terrestrial locomotion; while at Harvard in the ’90s, he directed experiments at Concord Field Station, a facility where researchers regularly placed animals such as cheetahs,¹ wolverines, and kangaroos on treadmills to understand the mechanics of movement. Now 50, Weyand was also a fairly swift runner in his younger days, having run the 100-yard dash in 10.8 as a high school student. “The one thing about sprinting we all understand is that speed comes from how hard the runner’s foot hits the ground. Someone like Bolt is hitting the ground with 1,000 pounds of force, and we just don’t how he does that. For example, we have a very accurate understanding of how much weight someone can lift — we can take a person’s frame and his muscle mass and accurately estimate how much weight he’ll be able to bench press. But world-class sprinters deliver twice as much force as our estimates indicate, and we don’t know why.”

With Bolt, there’s also a second component: Height. While most world-class sprinters are short, Bolt is 6-foot-5 and his stride is an insane 2.44 meters long. When Bolt ran 9.58 in Berlin, he needed only 41 strides to traverse those 100 meters; the man who placed second, 5-foot-11-inch Tyson Gay (who still managed an incredible 9.71), needed 44½ strides. This has led to a popular pet theory about the future of sprinting: Bolt has the proportions and mechanics of a conventional sprinter, but he comes with an inordinately long skeleton. So what would happen if an even taller man were able to move with this kind of fluidity? What if someone with Kevin Garnett’s 7-foot frame moved as naturally as Bolt does at 6-foot-5? Would this hypothetical supersprinter be able to travel 100 meters in only 33 strides? Might sprinting become dominated by sleek, long-stepping giants?

Perhaps. But probably not.

“Being tall is really a disadvantage,” says Weyand. “Bolt is just a freak. Generally, the smaller you are, the stronger you are in relation to your weight. Bolt defies the laws of biology in terms of his start. He’s good out of the blocks, and he shouldn’t be. It’s so strange because Tyson Gay is basically as fast as Bolt once they hit full speed.”

The idea that Bolt’s height is his not-so-secret weapon makes sense geometrically, but not in practicality — he seems to be the only person who somehow benefits from this “disadvantage.” Francis Obikwelu (the 2004 Olympic silver medalist for Portugal) is almost 6-5 himself, and he once ran an impressive 9.86 — but he simply can’t turn his legs over² as quickly as Bolt. His length gets in the way. For whatever the reason, Bolt is flat-out superior at every aspect of high-speed locomotion — stride length, stride power, and the amount of time it takes to reach his top speed. It’s almost like he was designed to do this by a track-obsessed God.

Joe Strummer argued that the future is unwritten, and he’ll be correct about that forever. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Is there an irrefutable dead end to the 100-meter dash? Is there a speed at which a human body would just break down and disintegrate, no different than a machine pushed beyond the capacity of its individual components? Some have been arguing “yes” for years. Reza Noubary, a professor of mathematics, computer science, and statistics at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, has estimated “with 95 percent confidence” that the ultimate time for the 100-meter dash is 9.44. That number seems as good a guess as anything else. But if Noubary is correct, it would force us to accept a depressing, unreliable notion — it would essentially mean we’re about 25 years away from the pinnacle of human performance. It would mean that most of us will see the fastest man that could ever exist within our own lifetimes. And something about that just seems unlikely. Beyond the (pretty clear) evidence that people are getting bigger, faster, and stronger at the same time, there’s also been a massive uptick in cultural motivation: There has never been a time when being the fastest man in the world was worth so much money (particularly in the 100 meters, where the difference in notoriety between who’s no. 1 and no. 2 is especially vast).

“I wouldn’t take 9.0 off the table,” says Weyand. “Scientists don’t like making these kinds of predictions, and for good reason. A world record is the most extreme fringe of performance, and weird things happens at those fringes. I need to take off my scientist hat to make that statement and just speak as the Average Joe. But my gut feeling is that it will probably happen in our lifetime, and that feeling is driven by the incentives of modern sports.”

Boldon is less confidant than Weyand; he says he’d bet against a man running 9.0 in the next 40 years, based on the premise that “a pen is harder to refine than a tractor.” The race is short and the moving parts are minimal — at some point, you simply run out of details to improve upon. For a more personal perspective, I e-mailed Tyson Gay (who was nice enough to return my e-mail on the same day he underwent surgery for a torn hip labrum). Gay is the fastest American of all time, having run a 9.69 in the 100 (he’s also the first man to break all three magic barriers within the sprints — he’s run under 10 seconds in the 100, under 20 seconds in the 200, and under 45 seconds in the 400). I posed him two simple questions: (1) If you ran a perfect race under perfect conditions, what time do you think you’d run, and (2) when you’re an old man, how low do you think the world record in the 100 meters will be? His response was rather curious:

I think with everything perfect I possibly could run 9.4, hahahaha. I know that sounds crazy but just being honest. I think the record will be in the 9.4 to 9.3 [range]. Maybe 9.2 range, and that’s only if people can grasp and believe that’s possible. All about the mind.

What’s so interesting about this answer is the dissonance between Gay’s self-perception and his perception of the world at large. He believes he could run almost .3 of a second faster than he ever has — yet he also assumes that specific time is almost the top of the mountain, even 50 years from now. When I read this e-mail to Boldon, he laughed with an immediate sense of recognition. “Typical sprinter narcissism,” said Boldon. “I could run a 9.4, but nobody could run a 9.2.” Even sprinters don’t understand what they do (or how they do it). In an era in which science is able to explain and predict almost everything, it’s amazing how little we know about the potential of rudimentary movement. Sprinting has represented half of the “fight or flight” instinct for the totality of human existence, yet we still have no idea of our true limitations … which explains why track and field will always matter, even if no one in America seems to care.

Some people can’t bear football. But is there anyone who doesn’t—to put it mildly—like tennis? Whereas football games are routinely tedious, tennis matches only occasionally disappoint (as when an unknown player carves a heroic path through a Grand Slam only to capitulate helplessly in the final). The standard of an averagely important tennis match—the kind you might see on an outside court in an early round at Queen’s—is superhuman.

This is striking because it is such a difficult game to play. Not to play well, but to play at all. (Squash is easy.) Tennis is like a piano—no fun until you can play it a bit. And as with keyboard so with court: coaching at a young age is hugely advantageous.

The first thing you have to do is serve—and it’s extremely difficult to serve, to get the ball over the net and into the service box. (I am 6ft 2in, have been playing tennis for years, and still, in a way that confounds several laws of biomechanics, regularly dump my serve into the bottom half of the net.) But wait—we have already skipped a stage. Before you can serve in the sense of hitting the ball, you have to do something else: you have to throw up the ball with your non-throwing hand, the hand that is typically useless for everything. The ball toss is all-important and very hard to get right; again, we have to go further back. It’s not just how you throw the ball, it’s how you hold the ball before throwing it. I used to always throw the ball too far back so that instead of hitting it when it was about two feet in front of me I hit it when it was directly over my head (thereby exerting chiropractically-expensive strain on my lower back). So I had to change the way I held the ball (angling the hand down, spreading the fingers wide as soon as the ball was released).

Don’t worry, this is not going to turn into a coaching manual (as if!). The point is that the lessons of serving are multiplied throughout every aspect of the game: a tiny adjustment in some distant, ostensibly irrelevant part of one’s body—a part that is not directly involved in striking the ball—has a disproportionate effect on where that ball ends up. Keeping your head down while attempting a top-spin one-handed backhand (as opposed to surging instinctively upward) is, in this regard, a major adjustment. So it’s not surprising that we watch, spellbound, as people who have mastered every aspect of this immensely difficult activity go about their immensely lucrative business on the clay of Paris or the lawns of Wimbledon.

But here’s the thing, here’s the lovely covenant of tennis: despite the huge gulf between them and us, everything that happens to the top players during a Grand Slam match is replicated by an average player in a park. You go through phases of hitting freely and fluently. Then, on an important point, you succumb to a fateful tightening of the shoulders. You are absolutely creaming someone—one set up, leading 4-0 in the second—and for no reason you miss a couple of sitters; the other person is back in the game and, before you can do anything about it, the match has turned into a precipice with you at the bottom. The progress of such a descent is described with agonising precision in Beach Boy by the novelist—and my sometime tennis rival—Ardashir Vakil, but we’ve all seen it happen at Wimbledon too. If a football team is 3-0 down with three minutes remaining, they will not win. With tennis, you may be a point away from defeat but, at the same time, you are only—only ever—a maximum of five points away from a new game, from the first of repeated opportunities to, as it were, start again from scratch. In no other sport does the scoring system have this inbuilt tendency to encourage comebacks. Or to snuff them out in an instant.

This makes tennis nerve-shreddingly exciting to watch, but does not mean it is easy to write about. On the contrary. Describing a match involves roughly the same difficulties as writing about sex. Typically there are just two people involved (doubles is frankly a minor attraction) and the vocabulary is similarly restricted (strokes, essentially) so that you end up with endless permutations of lob, volley, forehand, backhand and an assortment of verbs (powered, hit, lashed, fumbled). The contrast with the rich literature of boxing could hardly be more stark. The best tennis book is probably John McPhee’sLevels of the Game, about a match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner in 1968. But there is no tennis equivalent of Norman Mailer’s The Fight or David Remnick’s King of the World. Part of the reason for this is that while boxing seems so often to be a symbolic enactment of larger racial (Max Schmeling versus Joe Louis) or political (Ali versus anyone) issues, tennis is always and only about tennis. Hence the need for personalities.

***

I know, I know… Personality in tennis is, according Martin Amis’s devastating formulation, “an exact synonym of a seven-letter duosyllable starting with ‘a’ and ending with ‘e’ (& also featuring, in order of appearance, an ‘ss,’ an ‘h,’ an ‘o,’ & an ‘l’).” But tennis did not just become popular in the era of personalities like John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors—it became popular because of them and their effing and are-you-fucking-blinding assaults on a Wimbledon ruled by narcoleptic linesmen and retired RAF officer-umpires. Besides, Amis’s observation lays itself open to an obvious Connors-style pass: what’s wrong with being an asshole, asshole?

Certainly, the personalities brought a new and coarse intensity to the game, of which the fist pump might be seen as the gestural expression and legacy. Back in the days when Julian Barnes was moonlighting as the Observer’s television critic, he took a well-mannered stand against this addition to the repertoire of secular mudras. It must go, he insisted. Yet it has stayed and thrived. Not only that, its absence is taken as a sign of inadequacy, a lack of self-belief and willpower. The fist pump is now as integral to one’s game as killer ground strokes. For many, Tim Henman’s readiness to serve and volley could not compensate for an initial reluctance to pump his fist, and then—when he had just about incorporated it into his game—an inability to do so convincingly. By contrast, part of Andy Murray’s youthful appeal derived from the fact that he pumped that Scottish fist of his so readily and naturally (as instinctively, it now seems, as that open-mouthed, King-Learish howl to the gods of failure or the dejected slump of his now mature shoulders). Lest anyone think the fist pump is the preserve of the boys, Maria Sharapova deploys it with enough self-directed ferocity to suggest that, if push comes to shove, she will punch her own lights out.

The ubiquity of the fist pump, however, should not be taken as a symptom of the increasing loutishness of sport and society. Rafael Nadal (above left) is simultaneously the most pumped-up fist-pumper—did he get those biceps by fist-pumping?—and the most gracious and charming athlete imaginable.

If such displays of emotion are now openly encouraged, this is partly because the abusive heyday of Connors and McEnroe was followed, inevitably, by the dismal non-era of Ivan Lendl, for whom tennis was entirely about the extinction of personality (minus TS Eliot’s famous caveat that only someone with a personality can know what it means to escape from it.) Fortunately, the women’s game was thriving at this time, courtesy of Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova.

But this is not intended to be an abbreviated history of the game; it’s just a prelude to making a point—to be constructed, appropriately, in the form of a rally—whose banality might prove illuminating. Being very good at tennis is not enough to capture the imagination of the public, not even those who are very interested in tennis. Everyone remembers the silent intensity of Borg, but I have to make an effort not to forget his fellow Swede Stefan Edberg, a Trotsky-like figure who has somehow been erased—by himself—from mental snapshots of the past. Yet all players are Edberg-like in that, ultimately, they are simply very good at tennis. It’s just that some of them make you believe that this derives from, and amounts to, so much more than being good at tennis; and that they’re all good at tennis in different ways. Which brings us, inevitably, to Roger Federer.

In football, it’s often assumed that there is a tacit incompatibility between playing stylishly and winning. There are of course exceptions but, given the choice, most managers will reject the former in favour of the latter. With Federer this distinction between utility and grace, between practicality and style, was put definitively to rest. The most effective way to play, not just in terms of results but in terms of wear and tear on the body, was also the most graceful. This was exemplified by a single shot: the balletic one-handed backhand. (At the other extreme, the ugliest way to play tennis is to hit two-handed on both sides, in the “style” of the monstrously efficient Monica Seles.)

At his peak—a peak which has probably passed—Federer represented an apotheosis of tennis-ness, of all the advances in technology, fitness, training, technique and mental toughness. In the larger history of the game, this sustained interlude of weightlessness—before Federer succumbed to gravity in the form of his earthbound nemesis Nadal—enabled us to believe in the line of Dostoevsky’s, tattooed on the arm of Serbian player Janko Tipsarevic: “beauty will save the world.” Well, the world of tennis, at any rate.

Today’s baseball rosters are filled with names, not nicknames, not like the ones that used to be. The N.B.A. playoffs are equally devoid of onomastic pleasures, just cheap echoes of Magic and the Mailman, Tiny and Tree, Chief and Cornbread. The N.F.L. cannot match the treasured nicknames that evoke folk heroes like Night Train, Hacksaw and the Refrigerator.

A part of sports, somewhere near the soul, is slowly dying an unimaginative death. In an age of A-Rod and D-Wade, when nicknames rarely conjure imagery beyond a corporate logo, it can be easy to bemoan the loss of another slice of simpler times.

“There’s no substance there,” said the Hall of Fame basketball player Walt Frazier, also known as Clyde.

But sociologists and experts in onomastics, the study of names, said the diminishment of nicknames was not exclusive to famous athletes. Studies on the subject are few, but there is widespread agreement that the use of nicknames across American society has steadily slipped.

“You just have to extrapolate in places where you can gather data, like baseball players,” said Cleveland Evans, an associate professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska, who writes a regular column on names for The Omaha World-Herald. “And they are certainly less common than they used to be.”

Less certain is why. Maybe it reflects a loss of intimacy and connectedness. Maybe it is because of the changing way we name children, or how we now deflect unflattering nicknames to shape our own identities. Maybe all the good nicknames are taken.

Whatever the case, the decline is most easily gauged in sports, where nicknames have long played a role in distinguishing and at times deifying athletes. They often arrived with a nickname given by family or school friends. (Such was the case for Lawrence Peter Berra, called Yogi by a boyhood friend for his apparent similarity to a film version of a Hindu yogi.)

Those who did not have one were frequently nicknamed by their teammates or coaches. (George Herman Ruth did not become Babe until he was signed by the Baltimore Orioles.)

Sportswriters, looking for imagery or lyrical alliteration in the age before cable television, made a habit of bestowing nicknames on athletes. Rams receiver Elroy Hirsch became Crazy Legs because of a Chicago newspaper reporter; decades later, a 15-year-old basketball player named Earvin Johnson was considered Magic by a reporter in Lansing, Mich.

“When we gave them a nickname, good or bad, it meant that we cared,” said Ernest Abel, a Wayne State professor of psychology and obstetrics who has studied names and is on the executive council of the American Name Society. “You don’t give someone about whom you are indifferent a nickname. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

Doc Rivers, the coach of the N.B.A.’s Boston Celtics, was simply Glenn as a boy in Chicago. But he was a big fan of Julius Erving, known as Dr. J, and wore an Erving shirt when he arrived to play at Marquette. Al McGuire, the former Marquette coach, was there and nonchalantly called him Doc.

“I didn’t have a lot of say-so in it,” Rivers said recently.

When Rivers played for the Atlanta Hawks in the mid-1980s, his teammates included Tree Rollins, Spud Webb and Dominique Wilkins, the Human Highlight Film. Now Rivers coaches a perennial championship contender with big-name stars that is nearly devoid of memorable nicknames. Shaquille O’Neal continually nicknames himself — generally a no-no — but people still call him Shaq.

“Back then, I thought you got nicknamed from other people, and it stuck,” Rivers said. “And now it’s almost like guys or gym-shoe companies try to give you a nickname. It’s not as natural.”

One exception is Glen Davis, the soft-muscled Celtics forward. Everyone he knows — friends, coaches, his mother — has called him Big Baby since he was a big baby with a propensity for crying.

Now Davis is part of a dying legacy of great nicknames.

“That’s true,” he said. “Most people don’t even know my name. They just know Big Baby. That’s a good thing.”

There are a smattering of other present-day nicknames around the sports world, including the golfer Tiger Woods, the baseball player David (Big Papi) Ortiz and the basketball player Chris (Birdman) Andersen. The San Francisco Giants, last year’s World Series winners, featured pitcher Tim (the Freak) Lincecum and third baseman Pablo Sandoval, known as Kung Fu Panda.

But most famous athletes are now best known by their given name. The Yankees won generations of championships with men known as Babe, Iron Horse, Joltin’ Joe, Scooter, Yogi, Catfish and Mr. October. More recently, they won with players named Derek, Mariano and Andy. Alex Rodriguez — A-Rod — has what passes for a nickname these days.

The sociologist James Skipper, author of “Baseball Nicknames: A Dictionary of Origins and Meanings,” found that the use of nicknames peaked before 1920. It has since been in steady decline, dropping quickly in the 1950s.

Using a baseball encyclopedia listing all major league players from 1871 to 1968, Skipper found that 28.1 percent of players had nicknames not derived from their given names. (Lefty, Red and Doc were most popular.) No doubt the percentage has since dipped precipitously.

“The era of the colorful nickname may be over,” Skipper concluded about 30 years ago.

Chris Berman, and ESPN announcer, saw the void in the 1980s. He became well known for his creation and use of hundreds of colorful nicknames, based mostly on puns — Mike (Pepperoni) Piazza, Sammy (Say it Ain’t) Sosa and Bert (Be Home) Blyleven among them.

“I viewed it as reviving a lost art,” Berman said. “Why aren’t there nicknames now? Maybe everything is so literal. You can see everybody on the Internet, TV, YouTube, whatever it is. There’s very little left to the imagination.”

The Harlem Globetrotters, more than any other team, keep the nickname tradition alive. Every player on the roster has one.

“We want our fans to have an emotional attachment to our players, especially kids,” Kurt Schneider, the Globetrotters’ chief executive, wrote in an e-mail. “It’s more fun and easier to connect with — and emulate — Special K, Dizzy and Ant, than it is Kevin, Derick or Anthony. A nickname grants ethereal status to a player and elevates him to a platform where kids can aspire to be like them; it is a form of escapism and fantasy to want to be like Thunder or Hammer, and they are global in nature.”

In other words, the Globetrotters try to engineer a connection that generally does not exist today. Athletes are more famous and more disconnected from fans than ever, sociologists said.

“I think it represents a loss of intimacy and identification with the players,” said Ed Lawson, past president of the American Name Society. “I don’t know how you have the same level of affection when a guy makes $16 million a year.”

But nicknames rarely came from fans; they came from friends and family, teammates and reporters. None of those connections are as strong as they once were.

“With the communication age, everybody’s on the computer, the cellphones, there’s not a lot of communication,” said Frazier, who became Clyde four decades ago when his wide-brimmed hats reminded Knicks teammates of the movie “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“When we traveled, there were only three channels, and all during the day, there was nothing but soaps on,” Frazier added. “So the guys spent a lot of time together, playing cards, talking, hanging around in the same places, traveling together on the bus or whatever it might be. There was a lot of camaraderie among the players.”

George Gmelch, a professor of anthropology at the University of San Francisco and a former minor league baseball player, said the influx of international athletes could be a factor in the decline of nicknames. American players are less likely to give nicknames to Hispanic or Japanese players, he said.

He and others also suggested that nicknames were less useful, given the trend toward less-common names. After all, the N.B.A. player Joe Bryant was better known as Jellybean. His more famous son is simply Kobe.

According to the Social Security Administration, the 10 most popular baby names for boys in 1956 represented 31.1 percent of the total born. In 1986, around the time many of today’s athletes were born, the top 10 represented only 21.3 percent of the total. In 2010, the number dropped to 8.4 percent.

“Nicknames are less needed today because given names themselves are so much more varied than they used to be,” said Evans, the Bellevue psychology professor.

He also posited that nicknames are often “humorous or noncomplimentary, and we may live in a culture where people are less willing to accept names that are less complimentary.”

It is telling that few of today’s biggest stars have widely used nicknames. LeBron James is an exception, but he is better known as LeBron than as King, the lofty nickname used for commercial purposes. Michael Jordan never really had a nickname, lest those who wanted to “be like Mike” be distracted from buying Air Jordans.

“Their own names now act as brand names,” said Frank Neussel, editor of Names: A Journal of Onomastics, and a University of Louisville professor of modern language and linguistics. “Your identity is not your nickname. It’s your stats.”