What's up with Nazi Mohammed?

Poring over sports news online during the past year, I've noticed something embarrassingly off-kilter. You see, there's a center for the Spurs whose name is Nazr Mohammed. He's been in the league since 1998, and he's a pretty reliable player. Thing is, for some reason, I kept seeing his first name misspelled as "Nazi," which, given his last name, brings up a lot of weird associations.

Last summer, Steve Kerr, Yahoo!'s basketball analyst, wrote this sentence:

I would expect Larry Brown to start Rasheed Wallace on the Spurs' superstar. Rasheed's length bothers Duncan, and putting Ben on Nazi Mohammed will allow him to do what he does best – roam and help from the weak side.

Then, this February, Kerr made the same mistake:

Nazi Mohammed and Steve Smith: Both players go from last place teams to potential championship-caliber teams (Mohammed to Spurs; Smith to Heat). As the teenage boy said in "Animal House" when a dancing girl flew into his bedroom, "Thank you God!"

Obviously these mistakes aren't intentional, and I don't think Kerr subconsciously equates Islam with National Socialism. One has to wonder, though. You'd think that after making this shorts-shittingly embarrassing faux pas once, Kerr would have learned his lesson.

Weirdly, though, this isn't a Freudian tic limited to Kerr. In an AP account of a game this March, Tim Booth wrote:

Earlier in the game, [Ray] Allen was kicked in the back by [Bruce] Bowen while the two were laying on the ground. Bowen was called for a technical, while Allen had to be restrained by Robert Swift and Nazi Mohammed.

I don't know what to make of all this except to say it's a little surprising. Everybody makes mistakes, but how do you write "Nazi" as someone's first name? Especially when his last name is Mohammed? Where is the copy desk?

One of those Strange New York Stories

I was walking slowly up the Morningside Park steps recently—it's a notoriously greuling climb, especially for black-lunged smokers like me—when I came upon an unmolested coconut sitting exactly in the middle of one of the steps. A fat, crazy-eyed bum was standing next to it, just staring at it. "I hope that ain't no bomb," he said as I passed, flashing me a gap-toothed grin. "Yeah, I hope not," I said.

Then I got the hell out of there.