It’s a worthy thing to give enough to a museum that they want to put your name on the wall.  Even better a hospital or a homeless shelter.  But in the end, these are still just buildings, and buildings eventually all fall down.  Or even worse, your name gets subdivided, like the erstwhile Rice Stadium at the University of Utah, which received a face lift prior to the Olympics, diluting the Rices’ impact and giving rise to the current Rice-Eccles Stadium.  Those poor Rices– all that money they threw in, expecting their names to stand as a monument to their largesse, only to have to share the stage with another bunch of Crimson Club patricians.  (And all this for naming rights to the home of a second-rate football team.)  Then there is the anonymous alphabet soup of building names spread across the university campuses of the world.  BYU buildings like the MARB and the Crabtree building are presumably named after someone, but the glories and achievements of these people are utterly lost to the drowsy students that walk their halls each day, as ancient and irrelevant as Ozymandias.   Buildings are okay monuments, but you can do better.

And after you’ve paid all that money, they still go and print ‘Utah’ on the field.  Instead of ‘This football game made possible by a generous donation from the Rice and Eccles Families’

Think of Heimlich. He had to invest a little more than some Founders Club donation, but with a little work and deep knowledge of the human diaphragm, he was able to attach himself to an innovative maneuver and secure his place in history.  Everyone knows Heimlich, and everyone loves his maneuver.  I’d love to have my name attached to a maneuver.  (The only guy that ever came close to that kind of success with a gambit was Ivan, of Crazy Ivan fame).

Like with so many other things, the Greeks were the best at memorializing themselves by attaching their names to things.  No theorem is as famous as the one made up by Pythagoras, nor is any theoremist as well-remembered.  And can you imagine having sole naming rights to all of geometry?  Euclid’s coup is exceptionally brazen.  You can’t own geometry.  And yet, in a sense, he does.  We should be talking about Euclidean Chutzpah.  Socrates has a method, Hippocrates his oath, and then there’s Plato, with his ideal, his solids, his Republic, and his love.  That guy was so good.

The best of them all.

Since the fall of Greece, people have had a harder time taking indelible ownership over abstract concepts.  The most seminal breakthrough of the renaissance came from Isaac Newton, who found a way to attach his name to all of physics—a discipline that had existed for centuries before him (and an obvious missed opportunity for Aristotle).  By the time Newton stuck his flag in all of physics, there was very little space left for others.  Even Einstein could find nothing on which to make his name stick (‘Einsteinian Relativity‘ just never popped).

Probably my second favorite naming rights achievement belongs to Jefferson, who is now inextricably attached to the most successful form of government in history.  Can you imagine having democracy named after you?  It’s just a phenomenal success in name-sticking.  I wish I could pay someone to buy those naming rights.

But after long contemplation, I think there’s one guy at the top of the heap- the one who found the very coolest thing to stick his name to.  I would loooove to have an argument-settling conceptual razor attached to my memory.  Occam wins.

I think I was in 7^th grade when a new family moved into the house down the street: The Allens. Remember the “One of these things is not like the other ones” song on Sesame Street? That’s what comes to mind when I think of the Allens. The immediate distinction was their obvious un-Mormonness, but we had a few non-Mormon families in the neighborhood, so that didn’t quite explain it. And I still can’t quite explain it.

I don’t know where they had lived before, but it must have been someplace like Southern California or Italy or Hawaii. I don’t say this merely because of their permanent tans, but because they were possessed of a type of cool not indigenous to Utah. And it wasn’t an establishment cool, but a very independent, working class cool.

I think the dad had a little masonry business, or something in construction. He was bald and bearded and very friendly, and he wore Magnum P.I. shorts and his birthday top. I’m sure he was aware that his hairy beer-belly, huge German Sheppard, front yard drinking, and basically everything else about them was foreign to the fair-haired LDS kids biking around, so he went out of his way to smile and wave. I appreciated that. I liked Mr. Allen. He and Mrs. Allen had an aura about them that said “I’m slaving away this summer to be able to spend the fall in Cabo/Havasupai/Key West with our laidback, leathery friends and Budweisers on our boat Monkey Business/Endless Summer/Sailor’s Delight.”

I knew things were going to get wild when their youngest son, Brian, introduced himself to everyone at school as “Bra.” That was what he insisted being called. There were a few crazy things about this. 1. Bra was obviously a potty word and this was Farmington Jr. High. 2. A bra was a girl thing and if anyone else would have asked to be called Bra he would have been labeled as a homo and picked on for the next 5 years.

Brian even insisted to the teachers that they call him Bra. That was a big deal. I clearly remember getting the fourth-hand scoop on how old Mrs. so-and-so refused to call him Bra and how he had argued that that was the name he went by and she relented! But Bra was the one guy who could pull it off. He was very big for his age (a year older than me), although not a jock, and he had this swagger that the brown brick halls of Farmington Jr. High could hardly contain. I’ve never seen that swagger since. It was in the same family as the magic James Dean had.

Bra had an instant crew of flunkies right when he showed up. It was like 6 or 7 guys from the stoner and skater orbits saw him walk through the door and thought “Yep, there’s the one I’ve been waiting for. That’s my new leader,” and then walked over to him to see what was next. I tried not to be too in awe of Bra, because I thought I was sort of cool too, and this was my home turf. But looking back now, I see that he was Johnny Depp and I was Don from Napoleon Dynamite.

And if you were impressed with Bra, you were in for a ride, because he was really the radness-runt of the family. The oldest of the three kids was Jake. Jake was about the most handsome, friendly, confident, curly-haired Greek god you ever met as a kid. He was probably 6 years older than me. One of the nicest things that has ever happened to me was when Jake asked me to play on the competition roller hockey team he coached (I wasn’t always 7’3’’). He had seen my moves around the neighborhood. I refused. That seems so weird to me now. I could have spent all this quality time with my hero, and the league was in Ogden so we would have all that driving time together. But I turned him down, I think because I was intimidated and nervous. To top it all off, Jake had taken an old Chevy Bronco, spent countless hours customizing and fixing it up, and ended up with the most boss 4×4 south of Layton. It had a gorgeous yellow body, huge 36 or 37 inch tires (your family suburban probably has 30 inch tires), wench, roll cage, the works. Jake was the man.

Jake’s sister of similar age (maybe they were twins) was his equal in every respect. Except she wasn’t nice, which added to her allure. She was beautiful, very tan, had rich, long dark hair, and looked like something of a hippie queen. I assume there were at least a few exchanges between Compton Bench moms about this new immodest, car-washing threat to the neighborhood. From the 3-second glances I caught of her while whooshing by their house on two, four, or eight wheels, I could tell that she thought she was way too good for this Podunk Pleasantville she was stuck in. And she was right. She belonged in Hollywood or Paris or touring with the Grateful Dead as head groupie. I never exchanged a word with her.

I can’t remember when or where they moved, but my later memories of the neighborhood find them not living there anymore. To me the Allens represent my curiosity throughout my life about what it would be like to be someone else. I didn’t necessarily want to be an Allen. But I wondered what it would be like to live a totally different life. I still wonder that.

I’m a pretty tall guy, measuring a little over 6’2.  I’m also a pretty big guy, weighing in at don’t worry about it.  Weight is just a made-up number that doesn’t mean anything. Big Scale interests don’t want you to know this, but scales can be off by as many as 150 pounds.

Anyway, I’m a big guy, tall and . . . broad.  And to be a big guy, you have to be both: being tall but not broad doesn’t cut it, and neither does being broad but not tall.  I actually haven’t always been a big guy.  I was pretty short throughout junior high and high school, not getting my growth spurt until college.  I haven’t always been broad, either, although that transformation is a story for another day.  In any case, the fact that I’ve attained big guy status later in life has enabled me to see the difference between how people feel about big guys versus how they feel about normal-sized guys.  And I’m happy to report that people loooove big guys.

“I’ve created a multimillion dollar career based on the fact that people love big guys, and they especially like big guys who talk really fast.”

I once had a job where my old boss was replaced by a new one from Latin America.  In the first meeting my team had with him, he turned to me, ignoring the ten other people present, and said, “Hello, beeeg guy!!”  In college I dated a girl for a while whose grandparents we visited fairly often.  Every time I entered their home her grandfather would remark to her grandmother, “Why, look at that big hunk of meat!  He must be, what, 6’4?  6’5?  Say, how tall are you, son?  What do you weigh?”  I’m constantly getting extra peanuts on flights because the stewardess knows that a big guy needs (and deserves) more peanuts than a regular guy.  And so on.  I could tell you ten other stories like these, where someone instantly took a shine to me or did me a favor just because I’m a big guy.

So why do people love big guys?  Maybe one reason is because big guys come with a ready-made nickname.  I can’t go to the bank, buy a hot dog, or walk past a homeless man without being called, “big guy.”  People just absolutely love to call me “big guy,” or in the case of African-Americans, “big man.”  To be honest, though, I don’t think that the average person’s love for big guys can be entirely attributed to the nickname factor.  Although one should never underestimate just how much people love to give and receive nicknames; I’m certain that most of the missteps of the second Bush Administration can be traced back to a few individuals’ desire to receive a nickname from W.

Adviser 1:  “He just called me Short Stop!!!  I’m not going to tell him Iraq is a bad idea.  You do it.”

Adviser 2:  “Iraq?  I stopped listening after he called me Brain Train!!!”

“What’s my exit strategy in Iraq?  You believe this guy?  That’s what I’m gonna call you from now on, ‘Exit Strategy.’  I like you, Exit Strategy.  Exit Strategy, you wanna go see the White House bowling alley?  Condi, go show Exit Strategy the bowling alley.  OK now, we’ll see you later.”

No, I actually think it’s clear why people love big guys:  normal-sized guys can’t be trusted.  They’re too shifty, always up to no good.  They’re either looking to lighten your wallet or sneak off with your wife, or both.  But not big guys. Big guys are generally too slow-moving for crime and intrigue, and they have the strength to carry you if you become injured, and you know they will because a big man never leaves a comrade behind. And I never have.