The Tremendous Upside of April Sports
April. It's a perfect storm for sports fans: the Final Four, Opening Day and the NFL draft.
In other words, when you talk about April, you talk about Cinderellas in the Big Dance, gamers giving 110 percent between the lines and undersized linebackers with tremendous upside. Whose motor is always running. And whose stock is on the rise.
Sports cliches, like April showers, deluge us each spring.
In just a matter of days, we've seen them spewed in familiar forms. There's the humble athlete ("I'm just taking it one day at a time," declared Clemson star C.J. Spiller before the NFL draft); the brooding coach ("All year, we had played to win. We never played not to lose," Kentucky coach John Calipari said after being knocked out by West Virginia); and the typecasting media (Butler is relishing its role as "plucky" underdog, ESPN assured us).
As CBSSports.com's Mike Freeman points out, another time-honored sports euphemism reemerged during the NCAA tourney: the white athlete stereotype. Saint Mary's, Cornell and Northern Iowa, teams made up of mostly white players, were branded "gutty" and "scrappy" and "savvy" by the press. Translation: they are Caucasian overachievers who aren't very good athletes.
Trite exaggerations are nothing new in the broadcast booth. Is a divisional matchup in week three of the NFL season really "a must-win game"? Sports pundits also pose as psychiatrists ("Vonn is thinking too much on the slope"), optometrists ("Jeter is really seeing the ball well") and scientists ("this team just has chemistry.")
They've also been known to invent new terms ("this team has stick-to-it-iveness" and "they simply got outphysicaled.")
But a more subtle lexicon is spreading - the rarely noticed filler words and phrases disgorged by broadcasters who can't stop talking.
Take, for example, the recent explosion of "you talk about ..." You talk about a guy who's mentally tough, you talk about overcoming adversity, you talk about a fullback who hits the hole with authority... Actually, no, I never talk about a fullback who hits the hole with authority or anything else you say I talk about.
Three other subtle broadcast fallbacks: "tremendous" (the go-to hyperbole adjective), "certainly" (the default adverb) and "factor" (the gratuitous add-on noun).
"Certainly, when you talk about a guy like C.J. Spiller, you have to talk about his tremendous athleticism and the experience factor."
I'm not sure if Mel Kiper has actually said that, but he probably will on draft day.
Kiper is hardly the only one. Go to any sports blog or message board and you'll see the same vocabulary. (A Google search of "upside NFL draft" brings up 143,000 results).
Which is probably a good thing. The avalanche of hackneyed expressions may be annoying but they provide a lingual comfort zone for Joe Sports Fan. The teenager in Minnesota and the retiree in Miami may have nothing in common but they both know what a "grinder" is.
Which brings us to... boom! ... John Madden, the Titan of Trite. When Madden retired last year, he declared: "I'm a grinder. You just grind and get through it and when it's all over, you think about it."
You talk about a guy who takes things one day at a time.
