"Flick" has a specific quality to it because it sounds very quick. Simply saying, "Flick," is an exercise in rapidity.  The name sounds over almost before it begins.  This describes Flick's fleeting fame.  His success has now passed, having flickered away.  The time where he lit the home gym up with his exploits are long gone.  In what he does now and how he looks at the world, his past successes seem like a "flick" in comparison.  In this way, onomatopoeia can be found in his name and the thematic connections within it.

Once the star of the local high school basketball team, Flick, in John Updike's poem "Ex-Basketball Player" fulfills the metaphoric meaning of his name and is stellar only for a brief "flick" of light in time.  While he was a high school student, Flick was an important figure in the community.  But, now, because he "never learned a trade, he just sells gas."  His hands, that were once like "wild birds" still can move quickly, but there is no longer any importance attached to this movement:  "It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though" that Flick now moves to change tires.

His name, which probably meant flicking a basketball so quickly into the goal--he had "three hundred ninety points"--is without meaning, as is his life spent in trivial tasks helping Berth at the garage or hanging out at Mae's luncheonette when he is not "playing" at a mockery of his game by dribbling an inner tube.  Flicks life, in short, has become a mockery of what it once was, for he cannot go beyond his glory days in high school since he hangs out at the luncheonette like a high schooler would and plays basketball with the inner tubes.