The rise of

hyphenated

last names in pro sports

Illustrations by Arthur Mount

I’m a big sports fan. My wife likes to joke that we’re one of the last millennial households in the country to have a cable subscription. The reason? Sports. Last winter I was watching an NFL game featuring one of the league’s most memorably named players: Ha Ha Clinton-Dix. But it wasn’t his first name that caught my attention—it was his last.

The list of players whose names arch over the numbers on the back of their jerseys goes on and on: Clinton-Dix, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Sean Reid-Foley, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis. So I wanted to investigate: Are double-barrelled last names getting more common in professional sports? And what about overall?

Turns out, hyphenated names are hard to study. Although athletes proudly wear their last names on their jerseys, most names are personal. The US Census collects last names, but to preserve the anonymity of individuals, only names appearing 100 or more times are released. So, you get names like Smith and Johnson, but never names like Smith-Johnson.

Looking at just professional sports though, there’s a clear trend, especially for the four leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL) that have been around since at least the 1950s.