Friday, August 21: A Horse Named Captain Chaos
Posted by Matt Terl on August 21, 2009 – 9:41 amNow that the roughest grind of training camp has let up, I have a chance to go back and use some stuff that somehow fell through the cracks over the last few weeks. This is one such item.
I don’t know much about horses. I vaguely remember one stepping on my foot once at summer camp twenty-five years ago, but other than that, they’re big, mostly-inedible animals that run in circles three times a year and sometimes inspire unsettling outpourings of emotion from the general public. (NOTE: Parts of that assessment may not be entirely correct.)
But the people who do like horses tend to like them quite a lot, and they put tremendous thought into every aspect of their horses’ lives, from housing to cleaning to naming. So when Amanda Schroeder shouted from behind the ropes at training camp that she had a horse named after Chris Cooley, I was somewhat intrigued.
“I just love [Cooley],” Schroeder told me. “He’s my favorite player.”
The horse isn’t actually named Chris Cooley, but instead goes by the nom de horse of Captain Chaos. “He’s living up to his name now,” Schroeder said. “He was not like this before I named him Captain Chaos.”
This struck me as somewhat unusual. Nowhere on the About.com Guide to Choosing A Horse Name does it suggest “name your horse after your favorite athlete,” after all. So I asked Schroeder and the people she was with what other things one might name a horse after. The girl behind Schroeder shrugged. “I named mine after a movie: Blue Steel, like Zoolander.”
That didn’t make the Captain Chaos moniker seem any less unusual to me, so I did what I always do in these circumstances: I went straight to Fred Smoot.
“Oh, I’ve had dogs named after me a lot,” Smoot said, “like when I go back to Mississippi, many people have bulldogs and I was a Mississippi State Bulldog. I’ve met many bulldogs named Smoot.”
Fair enough. But a dog seems like a kind of different thing from a horse, really. Colt Brennan had had a completely different sort of animal named after him.
“Babies,” Brennan said. I made an incoherent skeptical noise. “Oh, yeah, I get them all the time.”
Wait, really? “I swear. I remember them writing an article about it somewhere.” (I have not been able to find this article, but would love to see it.) “But I’ve gotten a bunch of cards and baby postings from fans,” Brennan continued. “Their son is either Colt or Brennan.”
Brennan also had a Colt Brennan Day in Hawai’i, but, to the best of his knowledge, no horses.
Casey Rabach was as perplexed by the horse’s name as I was. “There are so many questions that I could ask here that are not for print,” he said, and then proceeded to ask them. I told him about Fred Smoot and the bulldogs.
“He’s full of crap,” Rabach said.
I told him about Brennan and the babies.
“He’s full of crap.”
I explained that the bulldog was Smoot’s college mascot, and asked if he had ever had a badger named after him. He rolled his eyes at me. “Yeah, there’s a number of pet badgers in Wisconsin named Casey,” he said, then shook his head. “It’s kind of freaky, actually. Babies, that’s cool. Babies are cool. And badgers are freakin’ awesome. But I think a horse is freaky, you know?”
Not nearly as fazed: Chris Cooley himself.
“I think that would be the biggest animal named after me,” he said. “I think a lot of people name dogs and cats after me, and that seems kind of normal. I named my dog after Dale Earnhardt Jr., so I understand that.”
Cooley continued, “And horses have really interesting names. If you ever look at the Kentucky Derby or the Preakness, the names are outrageous. If it’s just Captain Chaos it’s actually pretty short and pretty simple.”
So, if a horse being named after you isn’t strange, I asked, what would be?
Cooley stopped to consider. “I mean, you’ve got to think of actual pets that you could have. You could have a pet pig, that would be awkward — although we almost adopted a baby pig this year. And [Todd] Yoder and I are into really small furry mammals like ferrets and chipmunks and stuff like that.”
Then it came to him: “Oh, an opossum. If someone had a pet opossum and named it Cooley I would guarantee them season tickets.”
So that was that resolved. By this point, though, I was hung up on Cooley and Yoder being “into” small animals,
“Oh, we could put together a chart,” Cooley said. “There’s a lot of calls you can make on a football field, you hear offensive linemen making all different calls. When Yoder and I coach our own team, all of the calls are going to revolve around small furry mammals.”
Tags: Casey Rabach, CaseyRabach, Chris Cooley, ChrisCooley, Colt Brennan, ColtBrennan, Fans, Fred Smoot, FredSmoot, horses
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