Destroy Sports Clichés (volume one)

Clichés offend because they are a meaningless expression of habit, rather than an exercise of free will.  The word itself originated with the letterpress.  French and onomatopoeic, it echoes the “click” of type fitting into place, ready to mindlessly reprint without variation.  

 

We encounter cliché more often in sportswriting than in any other form of nonfiction.  Do sports attract users of clichés, or do sports create them?  Who is to blame for this moronic inferno?  Are rhetorical questions condescending?

 

In the war against cliché, sports writing is our Iraq:  an unwinnable morass.  For a beloved novelist such as myself, it is just a new front in the battle with the stale, the stereotypical, and the trite.

 

By identifying a bad sports cliché, I intend to mark it for death.  Mock its use until it is swept into the abyss where “throw under the bus” and “sexy draft pick” have disappeared before. 

All writing is a campaign against cliché.  Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.                                                      -- Martin Amis

 

Destroy These Clichés

Generational Talent:   they must be trying to express “once-in-a-generation,” right?  But that’s not what this phrase means.  A “generational talent” is one skilled at creating things, as in “my roommate Tom had a generational talent for toilet clogs.”  

 

Anyway, the problem is not solved even if we allow that lazy phrase to mean “once-in-a-generation.” A human generation is about twenty-five years, so at best “generational” is humorless hyperbole.  Every draft reveals a dozen new generational talents.  Where are we going to put them all? 

 

We must destroy this cliché.

 

 

Chunk Play:  Gross!  I cannot believe people are still allowed to write this, or say it on tv.  You can’t dial up Mohammed on an etch-a-sketch without risking a beheading, but I have to endure professional sportsjacks blurting out “chunk play” upon my holy Sunday?

 

One time in college, I made a chunk play on the bathmat, because in the dark I was certain I was standing over the toilet.

 

We must flush this cliché.

 

 

GOAT:  An acronym, the last vestige of the dullard.  

 

Calling someone a goat means they are held at fault for losing the game.  It derives from scapegoat, wherein savages would blame their failures on some poor goat and sacrifice it to appease their idiotic superstitions. 

 

Using GOAT as “greatest of all time” creates an entirely unnecessary confusion of meaning.  

 

We must slaughter this cliché.

 

 

It is what it is:  Certainly the official cliché of 2020, infecting every hot sports take.  This is the dumbest possible sentiment, expressed in the least sincere way possible.

 

 

Away with these tautologies, these malapropisms, this misuse, this laziness. 

 

We must stop all the clichés.