I was, apparently, named after a football player.

For all I know, this story is apocryphal. I could, if I wanted to, completely validate or debunk it by actually talking to the one person who is still alive who had a say in my name, but it’s more fun to go with this one.

My Dad was a huge football fan. He played in high school, and told me he had been offered a college scholarship to play in Seattle but changed his mind after visiting the campus and seeing how big the players were at the college level in comparison to the folks he was used to getting hit by.

If I’m being completely honest he likely threw in something about the fact that they were “big and black,” which wasn’t at all the norm in Pullman, Washington where he grew up. My memories of my father and the type of person he was are disjointed because he left us when I was very young and we had periods without contact that lasted years. He died in 1999 when I was 27, and he and I had just really formed a somewhat normal relationship when that happened. His views on race are one of the things that I tend to look back on with rose-tinted glasses and make a lot of excuses for at times because, well, I miss him and want to have positive memories of my Father. But I digress…

So anyway…my Dad was, apparently, a big fan of Mike “Mad Dog” Curtis. Curtis was a linebacker for the Baltimore Colts when they won Super Bowl V in 1971 (the year before I was born). If you search around on the internet you’ll find references to Curtis that range from him being “no-nonsense” to “a mean son-of-a-bitch” and everything in between. He is one of those “old school” Defensive players who made it a regular habit to try and destroy pretty much anyone they came into contact with, most famously in Curtis’ case a fan who rushed on the field in a game against the Miami Dolphins in December of 1971 (less than a year before I was born…you see where this is going??).

Mike “Mad Dog” Curtis was a mean, though-hitting, sadistic football player who my father idolized, so he decided to name me after him. I’m sure, ostensibly, he said he was naming me after his brother, Michael Thomas McGreevy, but the fact is that “Curtis” is not any kind of familial name I’m aware of in either his tree or my Mother’s, so I’m pretty sure he had “Mad Dog” on his mind when he finally had “his boy.”

Turns out he got a sensitive theater kid who cries at really emotional commercials. Sorry about that, pops.

An interesting side note to this story…When Curtis died in 2020 at the age of 77, he lived here in St. Petersburg, Florida. It’s far fetched, but I wonder sometimes if he ever saw my professional name in the papers (Michael C. McGreevy) here locally and pieced together the connection. It’s highly unlikely, but it’s an interesting thing to think that the man who I was named after passed away in the town I grew up in and still live in today.