Steve Christilaw: It’s cliché to point this out, but we don’t care
There are things in life that go together so well that you just can’t separate them.
To borrow a phrase from the famous philosopher Forest Gump, “Jenny and me was like peas and carrots.”
Even to someone who has always leaned more toward to the combination of peas and potatoes in a little cream sauce, the fit is obvious.
It’s the same with the relationship between sports metaphor and cliché. Except that we’re so addicted to the former that we overlook the latter.
Just think about how many sports metaphors we throw around in everyday conversation.
If something’s easy, we call it a “slam dunk.” After you’ve seen a few players misfire on a slam dunk you realize that it’s nowhere as “easy as pie” and is only about as easy as “a piece of cake.”
If something is amateurish we call it “Bush League.” Except that phrase refers to the low, low minor leagues of professional baseball. Go figure.
We love to talk about using the “full-court press,” and we even occasionally launch a “Hail Mary.”
Face it, we throw these phrases around so often that they are, in and of themselves, cliché.
But we don’t care.
And when it comes time to rally your team, you reach into your bag of metaphors and clichés and throw them around liberally.
We are generations removed now from the one that first saw Pat O’Brien in the movie “Knute Rockne: All-American” address his Notre Dame football team and deliver these lines:
“And the last thing he said to me, ‘Rock,’ he said, ‘sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper.’ ”
But we still ask our team to “Win one for the Gipper.”
It’s dumbfounding that at institutions of higher learning, universities that turn out graduates who can create marvelous algorithms and perform the kind of mathematics that can both send a rocket into space and return it to its launch pad for a soft touchdown, coaches and athletes still talk about giving “110 percent” on the playing field.
The idea, according to the classic cliché (metaphorically speaking) is to fire the team up to a point where it will run through a brick wall. Which, I suppose, is where the concept of developing hard-nosed players comes from.
But sometimes that’s just not what a team needs.
Joe Stanton and Jon Schuh take their respective Central Valley and University high school fast-pitch softball teams into a regular-season finale that combines the hoopla of a long-standing rivalry with the fire-and-brimstone passion of a season that comes down a single game.
Neither is planning to give a big rah-rah speech to his respective players before sending them out on the field to settle who wins the Greater Spokane League title this afternoon at University High.
“You have to use kind of a reverse psychology thing for a game like this,” Stanton said. “You don’t want your team to get too amped up for a game like this. You want to remind them that this is just another game on our schedule and they just need to take care of business.”
You have to use anti-cliché clichés, in other words.
“We’ve been talking for a while about how our destiny is in our own hands,” Schuh explained. “If we keep winning games we win the title.”
Man. Give a couple guys the opportunity to drop some major metaphors and look what happens. They dropped the ball.
And that’s the point.
It’s cliché to point out that you really don’t need to use sports metaphors to inspire your team. Hackneyed phrases don’t make you a better motivator.
We’re not getting rid of clichés anytime soon and piling so many into one column could easily cause a copy editor to have an acute myocardial infarction or a cerebrovascular event.
But we can start – going cold turkey is too much to ask (oops, a nonsports cliché found its way in).
Let’s just agree to give it the old college try (OK, I give up).