Now that I've got my warm fuzzies out of the way (see previous post), I can return to form by giving the country of my birth the bitch-slapping it so richly deserves.

When I got back to San Francisco, I was dismayed to discover that the names of not one, but both San Francisco athletic stadiums had changed. Pacific Bell Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, had become SBC park while 3Com Park (nee Candlestick Park) had become, wait for it, Monster Park.

Monster Park? Monster freakin' park? The distinctly un-resonant "3Com Park" was bad enough.

Presumably this is from Internet job-search site Monster.com, which only goes to show that the dot-com bubble isn't really dead, it's merely been in a deathlike coma these past few years from which it is now, regrettably, beginning to stir. We can probably blame Google for this.

Now look, I don't want to retread ground beaten flat by many sportswriters both wittier and more qualified than I am. But I'm gonna, because this has to be addressed. It alarms me that the names of both stadiums could change in the space of less than two years, because it flies in the face of one of the most important things about sports: tradition. Or at least the perception of tradition.

I have no illusions about today's sports stadiums. It is unlikely that two-thousand years from now tourists from some future civilization will stroll through the remains of Candlestick Park the way they might do today at the remains of the Colosseum in Rome. If they are unfortunate enough to do so, I am sure they will think the same thing that generations of Giants and 49ers fans have: What a desolate, windswept shithole.

But that's beside the point. We flacks know that perception is all important. If you can't have real tradition in your sports you can at least have the illusion of tradition. In this era of free angency, players come and go faster than johns at a ten-dollar whorehouse. Uniforms change with the wind. Entire teams uproot and move because owners are petulant and bitchy and local fans are just an inconvenience on the way to bigger TV revenues. But one way to at least pay lip-service to tradition would be to have some consistency in the one thing liable to be constant for thirty or forty years at a shot: the venue. It's tawdry when the stadium name changes every three years. Think of Lambeau Field, Yankee Stadium, Old Trafford, Wembley Stadium or Comiskey Park. These names evoke images of classic teams and legendary players. Monster Park evokes the image of a zany corporate logo. 3Com never evoked much more than a snort of derision, and was lucky to get that much.

It's not that stadiums can't be named after corporations or businesspeople (Wrigley Field), it's just that reverence for a name, and the associated imagery and affection, develop over time. When the name changes every two or three years, and stinks of product placement, that isn't going to happen.

I hope someday I can take my kids or grandkids to Niners and Giants games and rhapsodize dreamily about Montana-to-Rice (which, in retrospect, sounds like a vegan dish), Barry Bonds' big bat and relentless choke-a-holism, the Giants vs. A's earthquake series (sigh), ramblin' Steve Young, and such. But it's gonna be hard if the nostalgic  moment goes like this (insert avuncular voice):

"Yep, I remember comin' here to ol' 3Com, uh Monster, err Google Park, ahh fuckin' Candlestick Park, gawd dammit!"
"Grandad, mom said she was going to put you in a home if you used language like that."
"Here's a ten spot. You didn't hear anything."
"Twenty or I squeal."
"Deal. C'mon, we're leaving. Let's go see a skinflick at the 3D p*rn-o-plex. I hear Dakota Fanning's latest is playing."

Yep, these are the moments of our lives.