College football player's barely-believable middle name goes viral

Daily Mail​

3 hours ago

Love and passion for sports runs deep. Sometimes, it runs so deep that parents pass that onto their kids. This is one of those stories, only taken to an absurd degree.
Over the weekend, Bowling Green State University linebacker Gideon Lampron went viral on social media when some fans discovered that he had an unusual middle name.
A look at Lampron's page on Bowling Green's roster displays his name as Gideon ESPN Lampron.
No, that's not a nickname. Nor is it a familial name. Gideon's father, Marty Lampron, named his child after The Worldwide Leader in Sports.
Speaking to the Dayton Daily News, Lampron said that inspiration for Gideon's middle name came after he tried naming his first-born son after a different sports icon.
'He has a brother who's 10 years older named Gabriel,' Marty told the outlet. 'I grew up in Boston. I went for months trying to talk my wife into letting me name him Larry Bird. It didn't go well.'
So, when Gideon was born, Marty decided to get the jump on the birth certificate before his wife, Jenniffer, could change it - despite the fact that she objected to naming him ESPN (pronounced ES-PEN) in the first place.
'Then she delivers Gideon and she's out of it. The nurse comes in for me to sign the birth certificate,' Marty said.
'When I signed it, I literally printed ESPN in capital letters. She was out cold when I did it. When she woke up, I told her I did it, and she said, 'No, you didn't.' She didn't realize I did it. She wasn't happy with me.'
Gideon, a rising redshirt junior, is set to play his first snaps at the FBS level after transferring from the University of Dayton.
He put up 99 tackles, 23.5 tackles for a loss, six-and-a-half sacks, and two forced fumbles in his redshirt sophomore season.
Those numbers led to him earning First-Team FCS All-American honors last season and multiple offers from schools like Kent State, UTEP, Ball State and Eastern Michigan.