RIP Armen(Armon) Gilliam at age 47 and the name spelling

Armen(Armon) Gilliam, died on Tuesday in a pickup basketball game, at the age of 47 and as we were discussing in our previous post, there was the question of his first name spelling and I thought I would line it for you, since I found this interesting and you might too…..I had always called him Armon Gilliam…..from www.wikipedia.org:

Towards the end of his NBA career he(Armen[Armon] Gilliam) altered the spelling of his first name from “Armon” to “Armen” because he was tired of it continually being mispronounced. At the time, he was quoted as saying: “Most people pronounced it Ar-MON. I’ve been correcting people so long that I got tired of it. I just thought that if I put the ‘e’ in there, it would make it a lot easier to pronounce. I’m not Muslim. It’s not religious or anything like that.”

I always pronounced it Armon and that is what I called him when we had breakfast together, on that Sunday morning at the Charlotte Marriot, back in the early 90’s…….