I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back…
I’ve got protection. I’ve got a receiver open downfield…
What the hell is this? This isn’t a football, it’s a shoe, a man’s
brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same
skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air.
I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I
understand, also, that one often has to make do with what one
has. (From “Football,” by Louis Jenkins, ©1995)
It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and millions of people across the country will be glued to their television sets for pre-game commentary and the excitement of the kick-off today. Super Bowl hype has dominated every news channel for the entire week– so it seemed to this jet-lagged traveler. The Super Bowl, despite my disinterest in football, is more of a social event for me than anything. Despite a long history of shunning football games, I’ve been drawn in, whether the talk of “deflate-gate,” the entertaining half-time shows (Okay, I admit I tuned into Bruno Mars performance a year ago) or the sheer fun from the array of creative commercials, I can’t escape the fact that most of our friends and colleagues will be gathering around the television set to watch the game together. I’ll be there too, less interested in the game than the entertainment, despite growing up in a family where football reigned supreme (my brother recently retired from a long and successful career coaching college football).
I’ll confess that, as somewhat of a tomboy in my youth, I aspired to play football. My father played during high school and never lost his love of the game. While my brother was still a toddler, I began pestering him to show me how to pass the pigskin before taking my skills to the neighborhood touch football games, played in summer evenings and autumn afternoons on our street. As much as I tried to impress my father with my talents, it wasn’t until Dick King, the reigning high school football star,who was dating a girl who lived across the street, stopped to watched one of our neighborhood games. That day I earned the praise I’d longed for. Suddenly shy but conscious of his presence, I fired the football in a perfect long pass to my buddy, Marty. “Man,” Dick King said to his girlfriend, “look at that girl pass!” I was elated.
Their jeans sparkled, cut off
way above the knee, and my
friends and I would watch them
from my porch, books of poems
lost in our laps, eyes wide as
tropical fish behind our glasses.
Their football flashed from hand
to hand, tennis shoes gripped
the asphalt, sweat’s spotlight on
their strong backs…
(From: “After School Street Football, Eighth Grade,” by Dennis Cooper, ©2008)
But my youthful football prowess was short-lived. By high school, football was reserved for boys; my father was teaching my brother, and instead, I was playing French horn in the band. Being in the high school band was synonymous with marching during half-time at every home game. Think of November, bitterly cold, and an icy brass mouthpiece banging against your lips. I won’t even describe the toy soldier looking uniforms that every band member wore, a source of perpetual embarrassment. Besides, marching music relegated the French horn to the monotony of notes played on the after beat. I grew to dislike the high school sport that caused such discomfort and boredom on Friday nights and in college, stubbornly refused all invitations to attend football games. I turned my back on the great American pastime of watching football.
But today, I’m readying myself for Super Bowl Sunday and girding myself for the onslaught of sports talk that infiltrates normal conversation. I’m struck by how often sports talk is used as a metaphor for challenge, struggle, or winning or life. Sports, like writing, has its own rhythm, pace, and language, but like so many catchy phrases, it creeps into our everyday language, and we end up almost unconsciously using “sports metaphors” to describe many experiences in our lives: ”you’re ‘way out of bounds,” “tackle the problem head on,” “being a team player,” “run with a good idea,” or “make a pass at someone.”
Like many phrases in everyday language, sports metaphors are overused, falling into the category of the clichés we seek to avoid in writing. Yet sometimes, the act of playing around with comparisons, metaphors and even clichés can offer us new insights, ways to “free” up our writing, discover new insights or simply have fun with a topic or an idea.
This week, try taking your inspiration from Super Bowl Sunday. Listen to the phrases that occur again and again in the broadcasts. Try incorporating some of those metaphors to describe a struggle or difficult life challenge like a cancer diagnosis. Use the language, the metaphors, whether from football or some other sport you prefer. Have fun. Play around with sports words and metaphors. Who knows? You might even “hit the mark!”
Enjoy the day.
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are tough things.–Robert Frost
(This week’s prompt was inspired by the hype of Super Bowl Sunday and Bonni Goldberg’s great little book, Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer’s Life, ©1996)
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