Copyright TODAY
When an Ohio father obsessed with sports filled out his newborn son’s birth certificate in 2004, he took advantage of a quiet moment to slip in a middle name of his own choosing. It wasn’t traditional. It wasn’t biblical. In the words of his wife, it was “crazy.” But in time, she forgave him. After all, it turned out to fit their child better than anyone could have imagined. In the two decades since, Gideon ESPN Lampron has lived up to his sporty middle name. A talented athlete who played football and ran track in high school, Lampron is a starting linebacker for the Bowling Green State Univeristy Falcons. Most recently, he was named his conference's Defensive Player of the Week. In an interview with TODAY.com, Gideon recalls with a laugh how his mother, Jenn, was still groggy from childbirth, when his father, Marty, seized his official paperwork at the hospital. “He’s totally obsessed with sports and played everything he could growing up,” Gideon, 21, tells TODAY. “So I guess my mom was really out of it, and he just took the opportunity to sneak it in and give me the middle name ESPN.” Lampron notes that it’s pronounced just like the television network, not “Es-pin,” as some outlets have mistakenly reported. Jenn admits she wasn’t exactly thrilled when Gideon’s Social Security card arrived in the mail, and ESPN appeared there, in all caps. She and her husband had agreed on Xavier. The idea of ESPN had been dismissed immediately. Marty, 56, tells it this way: “She was sleeping, and I went ahead and wrote down ESPN,’” he recalls. “The nurse looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Then said the doctor walked in and said, ‘Your wife is going to kill you.’ And I told him, ‘She’ll get over it!’” He was right. Jenn acknowledges that while she was “pretty mad at the time,” the name ultimately suits her son. She tried putting Gideon into other activities. “I tried to get him to play guitar. I had home lessons for him,” Jenn says. “Irish dance,” Marty adds. “But none of that stuck,” she says. “He just wasn’t feeling it!” Jenn even told Gideon he could change his middle name someday, but he never did. Gideon says he started to embrace ESPN once he got into high school sports. “I added it to my social media bios and just rolled with it,” he says. Sometimes, though, it caused problems because people assumed he was being cocky or that he thought he was so good at athletics he’d given himself the name ESPN. By now, he’s used to the double takes. “When I go to bars and they check my ID, the bouncer will be like, ‘You know this has to be a real ID,’ and I'm like, ‘It is a real ID,’” Gideon says. But he doesn't mind the hassle. "I love my middle name. It really worked out. What if I had ended up a band kid!?"
