Ask And You Shall Receive

I was reading sports stories on my Palm Pilot (thanks to AvantGo) on the way in to work today on the train and wouldn't you know it...Michael Bradley from The Sporting News came through for me. Apparently he reads my blog (yeah I know this isn't true, but a girl can dream). He wrote an article about D'Brickashaw, which included an explanation for the name:

Ferguson's first name was going to be Montgomery until McLendon heard about it. "She thought it sounded too English," Edwin Sr. says. It was on to the second option, which came from the wildly successful novel and subsequent TV miniseries The Thorn Birds. Father Ralph de Bricassart is a central character in the saga, and Edwin admired how the priest navigated his struggle between a love for Meggie, the protagonist, and his devotion to God.

"It was very realistic, and my dad just liked it," Ferguson says of the miniseries. The Fergusons changed de Bricassart a little to make it unique and kept Montgomery as the middle name. Years later, the boy named for a fictitious priest would grow to be a man interested in world religions.

And now we know the rest of the story. :)