Yesterday I happened upon this article in the New York Times about Dutch passion for baseball, which is the equivalent of American passion for soccer, with a few die-hards but largely overlooked by much more popular sports. They have a league there based from the traditional soccer clubs, and Johan Cruyff, considered the best Dutch footballer of all time, actually started at Ajax as a catcher. And Holland produces their share of major leaguers, including Marlins starter Rick Vanden Hurk aka Henricus van Den Hurk, to go along with those from Aruba and the Antilles in the Carribean (Sidney Ponson and Andruw Jones among them). But this quote just made me lose it:
Her husband was a rabid Mets fan, she said, so when the boys were born the older, now 20, was named for Darryl Strawberry and the younger, now 17, for Dwight Gooden.
I could understand this if you just watched the Mets, but now these names are just jokes to me. Any baseball fan hears what their namesake is and will continually reference cocaine and crack for about an hour. This dedication of first born children would be the equivalent of someone in China naming their daughter Lindsay because they liked Mean Girls so much, but I guess that's how globalization works: non-Americans see our celebrities high off their asses, assume its because they are so likable that they see them on TV, and want to pay tribute to them. Just wait for the generation of Germans whose first and middle names are "David Hasselhoff" that will hear their name chanted in Miami by a bunch of old Jews...
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