Lance Armstrong named after Lance Rentzel

Factual Questions
1

The following post by Argent Towers in the limerick thread caught my interest:

Finding myself lacking in knowledge on the subject of Mr. Rentzel, but my interest tickled, I swiftly directed my browser to the relevant Wikipedia page to expand my horizon. There, I learned about how Mr. Rentzel in 1970 had been arrested for indecent exposure to a 10 year old girl and sacked from his team, the Dallas Cowboys. The same article also makes the claim that “cyclist Lance Armstrong was named after the wide receiver.”

A quick look at Lance Armstrong’s wiki page informs us, and other sources back this up, that the cyclist was born in 1971. At just the time, then, of this apparently sordid affair.

Well, I think to myself: “Oh come on! Bollocks.” However, several sources, including an interview with Armstrong’s mother, Linda, quoted in this article in USAToday, back up the story. According to the article:

“She named the baby Lance — after Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Lance Rentzel. ‘Yes, I know Rentzel came to a bad end [convicted in 1970 of indecent exposure], but back then he was about to start another great season,’ she says.”

I’m not American, I don’t really follow sports at all, and I wasn’t born in 1971. Therefore, my knowledge about the situation is non-existent. I have no idea to what extent Lance Rentzel is famous in the States today, if he’s a household name or just some obscure memory, and I certainly don’t know how he was perceived at the time, how big a star he was, and how big a deal this affair was. However, I am curious as to why seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong finds himself named after someone whose main claim to fame certainly *appears *to be sticking it out to prepubescent girls (well, one prepubescent girl, at any rate). For those of you who know, what was the public opinion on Mr. Rentzel at the time when Armstrong was born (September 1971)? Did people feel he was hard done by? Was he still popular and respected, especially in Dallas, where, indeed, Lance Armstrong is from? Or is the cyclist’s moniker the result of some very sick humor indeed on the part of his mother?

2

Luckily there is a post that neatly answers your question right here on these very boards. Check out the second last paragraph in this post.

3

Oh, come on. There’s gotta be more to it.

4

I take it you’ve never talked to a Texan about football. To a Texan there is Life, Death and Football. Of the three, Football is serious stuff, the other two are just fluff.

ETA according to the Wiki page LR continued to play until 1974 for the Rams, so being let go by the Cowboys was not the end of his career.

5

You could be right that there’s more to it, but if the mother says she named him after Rentzel because at the time she still thought of him as a great footballer, then she’s either correct, or lying or mistaken about her own thoughts and motivations. If it’s either of the latter (and frankly, why would you think so?), it seems unlikely there’s going to be any way to show it.

6

Hmmm. If he had been born a couple of years later, the Tour de France would have been won by “Golden Armstrong”?

7

I grew up in Los Angeles in the 60’s and 70’s and was a Rams fan (and hence my complete disinterest in American football today, save for my annual Vegas football playoffs journey in January). I certainly knew of Lance Rentzel’s indecent exposure conviction and marriage to Joey Heatherton (who is a woman, by the way), but I was somehow under the impression that all that shit went down after his Rams career.

Maybe back in the 70’s you could trade all your perv’s to L.A. because that’s where they belonged, and perhaps “indecent exposure” was looked upon less criminally in those days. It sounds as though he may have never done any jail time. Apparently he had exposed himself to two girls at a playground in in 1966 as well.

He wrote an autobiography called When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow. It sounds like he was willing to make some pretty interesting confessions:

and after the arrest in Dallas:

8

I was born in late 1970, and grew up in Dallas/Fort Worth a Cowboys fan. I still am, despite living the Los Angeles area now.

I recognized the name when I saw this thread title, and thought to myself, “Didn’t he used to play for the Cowboys? Or am I confusing him with Lance Alworth?” Until this thread, I was completely unaware of the circumstances surrounding his departure from the team.

He’s certainly not a household name now, and I don’t recall him being so any time from the mid-late 1970’s on - unlike some Cowboys players of that era (Don Meredith, Bob Lilly, etc.)

Curious tale about Armstrong’s naming, I must say.

9

Yeah, the whole time I’m reading this, I’m thinking “she must be confused and is thinking about Allworth”.

10

Very strange indeed. Looking at that Wikipedia page for Alworth, it says: “In 1971, Alworth was traded to the Dallas Cowboys, for his final two seasons (1971 and 1972)”. So Armstrong being named after Alworth *would *have made perfect sense. Could she somehow be getting them mixed up?

This is just getting increasingly weird.

11

I read When All The Laughter Died In Sorrow. (Which is where I got those limericks from.) It’s a really interesting book. Rentzel was also a professional-level pianist in addition to being a football player, and he used to play at bars and pretend to be blind to try to get more sympathy and therefore more money. He’d wear dark sunglasses and have a friend pretend to lead him around. I thought…how delightfully ethical.