I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

by Mardy Grothe

  This is a classic line in the history of sports journalism, written in 1920 by a master of the craft. Baer, who created the nickname “The Sultan of Swat” for Babe Ruth, was widely admired for his wit and ability to turn a phrase.

  If fishing is a religion, fly-fishing is high church.

  TOM BROKAW

  Fly-fishing fanatics approach their sport with religious fervor. Robert Traver (the pen name of Michigan Supreme Court Judge John D. Voelker) was the author of the 1958 novel Anatomy of a Murder and an avid fly-fisherman. He said: “Deep down I’ve always known fly fishing is to the rest of fishing what high seduction is to rape.” And more recently, American sportswriter Howell Raines wrote: “Fly-fishing is to fishing as ballet is to walking.”

  Boxing’s just show business with blood.

  FRANK BRUNO

  For those of us who are baseball fans and agnostics,

  the Hall of Fame is as close to a religious experience as we may ever get.

  BILL BRYSON

  It’s like a woman concentrating on intricate sewing.

  If she pricked her finger she’d hardly notice it and just carry on.

  JOE BUGNER

  This was Bugner’s description of how a good boxer absorbs blows from an opponent. Bugner was a British boxer who won the British and European heavyweight title in 1971. He went on to fight Muhammad Ali in 1973 and Joe Frazier in 1974, going the distance in both fights, but in each case losing on points. He had a defensive boxing style that most fans considered dull (one writer said he had “the physique of a Greek statue, but fewer moves”).

  My back swing off the first tee had put him in mind

  of an elderly woman of dubious morals trying to

  struggle out of a dress too tight around the shoulders.

  PATRICK CAMPBELL

  I call tennis the McDonald’s of sport—you go in,

  they make a quick buck out of you, and you’re out.

  PAT CASH

  To be an American and unable to play baseball

  is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.

  JOHN CHEEVER

  New Yorkers love it when you spill your guts out there.

  Spill your guts at Wimbledon and they make you stop and clean it up.

  JIMMY CONNORS

  Sports is the toy department of life.

  HOWARD COSELL

  On his favorite sport, Cosell wrote that “Boxing is drama on its grandest scale.”

  Golf is like a love affair.

  If you don’t take it seriously, it’s no fun;

  if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.

  ARNOLD DALY

  A tie is like kissing your sister.

  HUGH “DUFFY” DAUGHERTY

  In 1966, Coach Daugherty’s Michigan State University Spartans, with nine wins and no losses (and second in the national rankings) played unbeaten Notre Dame, ranked number one. Dubbed “the Game of the Century,” it ended in a 10–10 tie, and both teams shared the national championship at season’s end. Tie games have always been unsatisfying, but nobody had ever described that feeling better, making Daugherty’s quip an instant classic. In 1986, George Brett of the Kansas City Royals updated the thought: “If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing your grandmother with her teeth out.”

  Golf and sex are the only things you can enjoy without being good at them.

  JIMMY DEMARET

  Skating was the vessel into which I could pour my heart and soul.

  PEGGY FLEMING

  The triple is the most exciting play of the game.

  A triple is like meeting a woman who excites you,

  spending the evening talking and getting more excited, then taking her home.

  It drags on and on. You’re never sure how it’s going to turn out.

  GEORGE FOSTER

  Kill the body and the head will die.

  JOE FRAZIER, on his boxing strategy

  Golf balls are attracted to water as unerringly

  as the eye of a middle-aged man to a female bosom.

  MICHAEL GREEN

  A muscle is like a car.

  If you want it to run well early in the morning, you have to warm it up.

  FLORENCE GRIFFITH-JOYNER

  The most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY, on Joe Louis

  All fighters are prostitutes and all promoters are pimps.

  LARRY HOLMES

  College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education

  that bullfighting does to agriculture.

  ELBERT HUBBARD

  Like a Volvo, Borg is rugged, has a good after-sales service, and is very dull.

  CLIVE JAMES, on Björn Borg

  James wrote this in 1980, at the end of a decade in which Borg dominated the tennis world. Borg’s tennis demeanor contrasted starkly with the passionate play of Americans like Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, leading James to liken the Swedish Borg to the vehicles manufactured in his native country.

  Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course:

  the space between your ears.

  BOBBY JONES

  Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business

  of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.

  MERLE KESSLER

  A boxing match is like a cowboy movie.

  There’s got to be good guys and there’s got to be bad guys.

  And that’s what people pay for—to see the bad guys get beat.

  SONNY LISTON

  Throwing people out of a game is like learning to ride a bicycle—

  once you get the hang of it, it can be a lot of fun.

  RON LUCIANO, on being a baseball umpire

  Many baseball fans look upon an umpire as a sort of necessary evil

  to the luxury of baseball, like the odor that follows an automobile.

  CHRISTY MATHEWSON

  Baseball is a game, yes. It is also a business.

  But what it most truly is, is disguised combat.

  For all its gentility, its almost leisurely pace, baseball is violence under wraps.

  WILLIE MAYS

  A pool player in a tuxedo is like whipped cream on a hot dog.

  MINNESOTA FATS (Rudolf Wanderone)

  Bobby admits he has “a temper problem”—

  which is like Jeffrey Dahmer saying that he suffers from an eating disorder.

  LANCE MORROW, on Bobby Knight

  Dahmer, of course, was the American serial killer who became infamous in the early 1990s for the gruesome way he dismembered and cannibalized his victims. This observation from Morrow appeared in a 2000 Time magazine article. Knight, at the time the head basketball coach at Indiana University, was notorious for his courtside eruptions. After formally investigating Knight’s “pattern of inappropriate behavior,” the school suspended the volatile coach for three games and fined him $30,000. It was the first step on the way out for Knight, who went on to become the head basketball coach at Texas Tech.

  Most riders beat horses as if they were guards in slave-labor camps.

  Shoe treated them as if he were asking them to dance.

  JIM MURRAY, on jockey Willie Shoemaker

  Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity,

  all the more trenchant for its being lost.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  This is from Oates’s 1987 book On Boxing. As a child she was introduced by her father to “the sweet science” (an increasingly controversial metaphor). A lifelong fan, she also wrote that “Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.”

  I’m like the Pythagorean theorem.

  Not too many people know the answer to my game.

  SHAQUILLE O’NEAL, in a rare example of metaphorical boasting

  What other people may find in poetry, I find in the flight of a good drive.

  ARNOLD PALMER

  Golf is a puzzle without an answer.


  GARY PLAYER

  The basketball is a tool that the Black man has now,

  same as maybe once he had a plow.

  WILLIS REED

  Luck is the residue of design.

  BRANCH RICKEY

  Rickey is best known for signing Jackie Robinson to a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945, but he also contributed some famous quotations—like this classic metaphor on luck and the immortal “Baseball is a game of inches.”

  Baseball is like a poker game.

  Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing;

  nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.

  JACKIE ROBINSON

  What they call a baseball “glove”

  bears as much resemblance to a human hand

  as snowshoes bear to a man’s feet.

  It’s not a glove; it’s a leather basket.

  ANDY ROONEY

  I threw the kitchen sink at him, but he went to the bathroom and got his tub.

  ANDY RODDICK, on Roger Federer

  This was Roddick’s assessment after losing to Federer in the Wimbledon Finals in 2004.

  Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant,

  and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  Roosevelt wrote this in a 1903 letter to his son Ted. The thought was preceded by these words: “I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one’s existence. I don’t want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism; and I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life.”

  Hating the New York Yankees is as American as apple pie,

  unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax.

  MIKE ROYKO

  Making love is like hitting a baseball;

  you just gotta relax and concentrate.

  SUSAN SARANDON

  These words were delivered by Sarandon in the opening narration of the 1988 film Bull Durham (screenplay by Ron Shelton). Sarandon plays Annie Savoy, a sexy baseball fan who each year selects a minor league player as a lover and then puts the athlete through her own version of a player development project.

  Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge.

  One is the quick jolt; the other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill.

  VIN SCULLY

  Statistics are used by baseball fans

  in much the same way that a drunk leans against a street lamp;

  it’s there more for support than enlightenment.

  VIN SCULLY

  This analogy was inspired by a famous remark from the nineteenth-century Scottish writer Andrew Lang, who said of a contemporary: “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.” On the same subject, an anonymous wag once said, “Baseball is an island of activity amidst a sea of statistics.” And CBS newsman Harry Reasoner agreed, once observing: “Statistics are to baseball what a flaky crust is to Mom’s apple pie.”

  Bridge is a sport of the mind.

  OMAR SHARIF

  Trying to sneak a fastball past Henry Aaron

  was like trying to sneak the sun past a rooster.

  CURT SIMMONS

  It was like watching an autopsy performed on a live person.

  SYLVESTER STALLONE

  This was Stallone’s graphic assessment of the 1980 Larry Holmes–Muhammad Ali heavyweight championship fight, when the aging Ali, at age thirty-eight, was no match for his youthful opponent. It was a vicious beating—stopped after ten rounds—and some analysts wondered how Ali had even survived the fight.

  Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics

  that it can never be fully learnt.

  IZAAK WALTON

  This comes from The Compleat Angler, a 1653 treatise on fishing that was interspersed with maxims, verse, and reflections on life. Walton had only a few years of schooling, but after apprenticing with a London ironmonger, he acquired a small shop of his own and began to prosper. With more leisure, he read widely and began to associate with men of learning, including John Donne, who became his friend and fishing companion. His famous book also contained this analogy: “As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.”

  My golf swing is like ironing a shirt. You get one side smoothed out,

  turn it over and there is a big wrinkle on the other side.

  You iron that side, turn it over and there’s another wrinkle.

  TOM WATSON

  Baseball is like church. Many attend, but few understand.

  WES WESTRUM

  Ernie Harwell, a veteran sportscaster, offered a related observation: “Opening day…is to baseball what Easter is to church. The faithful come out, but a lot of once-a-year attendees are there too.” And in a 2004 column, respected baseball scholar John Thorn continued the church analogy when he wrote: “At a ballgame, as in a place of worship, no one is alone in the crowd.”

  Super Bowl Sunday is to the compulsive gambler

  what New Year’s Eve is to the alcoholic.

  ARNIE WEXLER

  When he said this in 1994, Wexler was executive director of New Jersey’s Council on Compulsive Gambling.

  It has been said that baseball is to the United States

  what revolutions are to Latin America,

  a safety valve for letting off steam.

  GEORGE WILL

  Football combines the two worst features of modern American life.

  It’s violence punctuated by committee meetings.

  GEORGE WILL

  Will has offered several variations of this remark over the years, but the first came in his Newsweek column in 1976. It’s possible that he was inspired by a somewhat similar comment Winston Churchill made when he attended his first American football game: “Actually, it is somewhat like rugby. But why do they have to have all those committee meetings?”

  Stealing bases is like jumping out of a car

  that’s going twenty miles per hour.

  WILLIE WILSON

  Running is the greatest metaphor for life,

  because you get out of it what you put into it.

  OPRAH WINFREY

  chapter 15

  Writing Is the Manual Labor of the Mind

  Writers are commonly called wordsmiths, but it might be more accurate to call them ideasmiths, for they live in a world of ideas as much as of words. In 1890, French writer Paul Bourget expressed the importance of ideas in an analogy:

  Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.

  For many creative people, ideas are like a flash flood, arriving without advance warning and carrying everything along with it. It can be a frenzied process, and there is always the danger that the torrent will engulf a writer, who is trying to put the key elements of the idea into words before it exits the mind. This may have been what F. Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he once wrote in a letter to his daughter:

  All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

  At one time or another, all writers have tried to describe the process of transforming ideas into words on a page. But nobody has ever captured the drama better than Honoré de Balzac:

  Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army

  to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages.

  Memories charge in, bright flags on high;

  the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop;

  the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges;

  flashes of wit pop up like sharpshooters;

  forms and shapes and characters rear up;

  the paper is spread with ink.

  Many writers subscribe to the theory that ideas come with the charge of an explosive. In an 1857 letter to a friend, Henry David Thoreau wrote:

  New ideas come into this world somew
hat like falling meteors,

  with a flash and an explosion,

  and perhaps somebody’s castle-roof perforated.

  And in his 1902 classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote:

  An idea, to be suggestive, must come

  to the individual with the force of revelation.

  While some ideas arrive with the power of a thunderbolt, others announce themselves in a soft whisper, barely able to be heard. Still others resemble a seed that must be nurtured before it germinates. This more subtle and tender process was described by Ernest Hemingway in a 1929 conversation with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald:

  When I have an idea, I turn down the flame,

  as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go.

  Then it explodes and that is my idea.

  In yet another variation, ideas sometimes multiply rapidly:

  Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them,

  and pretty soon you have a dozen.

  JOHN STEINBECK

  And sometimes they need to be coaxed before they give up their secrets:

  An idea, like a ghost…must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

  CHARLES DICKENS

  While some writers struggle with the problem of too many ideas, others despair over having too few. In a 1752 letter to a friend, Horace Walpole put it this way:

  Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.

  Every writer has experienced a literary drought—most commonly called a writer’s block—and almost all have tried to describe it. But few descriptions of the phenomenon can rival a passage that appears on the very first page of William Styron’s 1979 novel, Sophie’s Choice. The words come from Stingo, the protagonist, who has recently lost his job as a manuscript reader at McGraw-Hill. It is 1947, and Stingo, two years out of the military, has moved from Virginia to New York to pursue a writing career. Now, living in a Brooklyn rooming house, he is out of work, almost out of money, and in the middle of serious dry spell—a condition he describes masterfully: