Now, Everything Is in Black and White : Sportswriters Aren’t Nearly As Colorful As They Used to Be

In the 1890s, the average American had about five years of schooling. To entice this unlettered lot into reading their newspapers, publishers began adding pages devoted exclusively to sports. Apparently comic strips, which had appeared a few years earlier, were not doing the job.

After William Randolph Hearst had started the forerunner of the modern sports section at the New York Journal in 1895, sportswriters began to fill their pages with what one historian called, “their informed, partisan prose.”

Today, sportswriters and their prose are frequently described in less delicate terms. We are thought to be arrogant, hyberbolic and irreverent by many readers. We tend to give everybody advice--often when we don’t know what we’re talking about--and, in the pursuit of drama, make outrageous use of metaphors, similes, alliteration and one-liners.

All that aside, sportswriters have left their colorful stamp on the language many Americans speak.

Their bright lexicon, in fact, is so popular that it has become almost a second language to the millions of people who find sports attractive. Sports jargon is heard today from the pulpit and in classrooms, boardrooms, the halls of Congress and the Oval Office.

Politicians play hardball. Even presidents have game plans and win elections in photo finishes. Issues often become political footballs. Men with power are heavyweights and have clout. Labor negotiators throw out ballpark figures. Kickoff dinners start all kinds of campaigns. Men may refer to a woman as a knockout. Many things come out of left field, people who can’t get to first base sometimes throw in the towel and start from scratch, and virtually all of us at times feel under par or find ourselves behind the eight ball .

Sports has a language of its own. Some of it originates with the athletes in the clubhouse and on the field, but much of it makes its way into the conversation of fans and nonfans through the prose of sportswriters who, to embellish accounts of boring events, often invent verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

By all accounts, however, sportswriters aren’t as colorful as they used to be. Today they call a game a game; it is not a fracas, tilt, skirmish or battle. Two games are no longer a bargain bill, or even a twin bill. Innings are innings and quarters are quarters, not chukkers, stanzas, frames or panels.

Baseball games are played in parks or stadiums, not at the orchard. At least they are in most newspapers.

Teams are said to win championships today. They don’t cop crowns, garner gonfalons or waltz off with diadems anymore. Donnybrooks or brouhahas are seldom mentioned. Neither are pigskins, horsehides, melons or casabas. Hoops are still around, however.

Pillows are no longer purloined, nor are sacks swiped; bases are stolen. Portsiders and southpaws have become left-handed pitchers, and circuit clouts, four-masters and four-ply wallops are mere home runs. Foul balls are foul balls, not cackle clouts or henhouse hoists.

Professional golfers play for money; they don’t swing for swag. Football players score touchdowns; they don’t run for paydirt or the promised land. Hockey players are sent to a penalty box, not a sin bin.

Boxers today are knocked out, not cold-cocked or the victims of a lowered boom or a haymaker. They are not cuties anymore; they have deceptive moves, and they almost never get on a bicycle, end up on queer street or get hit by a sucker punch. Banties are bantamweights and dreadnoughts are heavyweights. They use their fists, not their dukes. They are knocked down; they don’t kiss the canvas.

Football skull sessions and chalk talks have been replaced by team meetings.

Suicide squads and kamikaze corps are now special teams. Chain gangs no longer are summoned by the referee. Gamers seem to have disappeared, too. Today, some players simply play better in games than they do in practice. Curbstone coaches and grandstand, armchair and Monday morning quarterbacks seem to be extinct.

Nobody has been mousetrapped lately, and teams use reverses and other trick plays instead of razzle-dazzle.

Journalists today view the colorful lingo of the past as dreadful writing.

Still, “He air-mailed his tee shot into the cabbage,” has more of a ring to it than “He hit a long drive into the rough.” And, “He hit a banana ball onto the beach,” describes perfectly the act of slicing a shot into a sandtrap.

Even if you don’t understand it, “He snaked in a Dolly Parton from 40 feet,” (sank a curling, 40-foot putt over a hilly green) certainly gets your attention. If a player is in jail or lost in tiger country, you know he is not on the fairway. And is there a better way to describe a ball partly buried in sand than to call it a fried egg? Would you guess that Mr. Aerosol sprays his shots?

This account of a game between the Chicago White Stockings and Pittsburgh Pirates by Leonard Dana Washburn in 1891 is an example of what readers today are missing:

“You can write home that Grandpa won yesterday.

“And say in the postscript that (pitcher) Willie Hutchinson did it. The sweet child stood out in the middle of the big diamond of pompadour grass and slammed balls down the path that looked like the biscuits of a bride.”

And this from the pages of The Times on April 7, 1896:

“Like the evening sun which drops slowly behind the hills and fills with a burst of evanescent glory the hushed sky, James J. Corbett, the cleverest, cleanest fighter the world has ever produced, sank slowly upon his right knee beside the ropes of the arena wherein stood his only rival, and ten seconds later the air was rent with the yells of the frenzied multitude which almost breathless had waited for the instant.”

If the multitudes were not frenzied in the early days of sportswriting, they were sun-drenched, rabid or riotous.

In truth, more hacks once covered the make-believe world of sports than such craftsmen as Westbrook Pegler, Ring Lardner, John Kieran and Paul Gallico, probably because there was too much freedom in the sports department. Most editors understandably have always paid more attention to politics, business and government than games.

To ignore sports departments today, however, is to ignore the powerful realities of sports and the grip that these events have on the American public. Society is mirrored in the games people play and the social aspects of sports have long captivated scholars, if not publishers and editors. As one philosopher once said, “I turn to the front pages to read about men’s failures and the sports pages to read about their triumphs.”

Such literate fellows as Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, Walter Cronkite and James Reston apparently understood this. They started their careers as sportswriters.

There is some consolation for those who lament the loss of colorful prose on the sports pages. Some of it still gets into print. Many football writers today tell us of battles that are won in the trenches, teams that use nickel defenses and flea-flickers and quarterbacks who avoid blitzes to throw bombs or dying quails, eat the ball to kill the clock or audibilize when somebody shoots the gap.

Kicks are sometimes squibbed, punts are said to have hang time and officials are zebras. If two or three players are hurt, a team is decimated by injuries.

Baseball writers talk of nubbers, insurance runs, comebackers, scroogies, bleeders and bloopers, and of pitchers who throw flame, aspirin tables, fog and smoke. Close plays are bang-bang, and choppers that are hit off breaking balls are sometimes turned into broken-bat singles on the carpet. Outfielders make circus catches and have cannons or rifles for arms. Batters who hit with power can drive the ball into the next ZIP code.

But, alas, there are no more blue darters, daisy cutters, dipsy-dos, cans of corn, early bloomers, keystone sackers or hot-corner guardians. Texas Leaguers and the tools of ignorance have disappeared, too.

While there is little doubt that sportswriters have enriched our language, there is no record that English teachers use many sports stories as examples of flawless literature.

A teacher did tell me once that the easiest way to get the boys in her class to read was to give them the sports section. The danger in that is, they may read such lines as this one from a boxing writer I once knew: “Bleeding at the nose, Smith weighed 154.”