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Sunday, January 02, 2005
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THE PHANTOM GOALPOST
Sports writing, UD has decided, is the great leveler. Sports writers write as badly in New York as they do in Muncie. UD thinks this is because newspaper editors equate sports writing with figurative language. Foreign policy reportage demands the dignity of abstraction, but sports writing is down to earth, baby. It’s about action-packed, you-are-there excitement. Even in the lofty New York Times, UD’s paper of record, sports writing comes at UD with a staggering offensive rush. It trips her up with a trillion metaphors and then it bashes her nut in until UD can feel her verbal skills (her SAT Verbals were high -- dramatically so juxtaposed with her NonVerbals) losing consciousness and concussing. Aw shut up, UD, you may say. You’re supposed to let this sort of writing wash over you. Instead of sitting there in your lineless bifocals trying to make sense of it, drift along. The excessive trash of the "College Coeds Gone Wild" video has been exceeded by the obscene state spending of "College Caretakers Gone Loony." Were the Gators the careless triggermen or innocent market victims? "I'm sure some will say Florida is the cause," Florida's athletic director, Jeremy Foley, said in a telephone interview, "but Florida didn't set the marketplace." Was it Notre Dame? The leprechauns were desperately pursuing Meyer with a pot of gold. Was it Louisiana State? The Tigers had established the bar with an $18.45 million deal for Nick Saban only to see him jilt them for a $22.5 million deal in the N.F.L. Was it Bob Stoops? He sends the Sooners into bake-sale mode every time he winks at another suitor. The culprit is not the obvious. On the surface, the spiraling salaries seem like a clairvoyant snapshot of the foreboding "arms race" passage authored by the deep thinkers behind the 2001 Knight Commission report. UD knows this has something to do with excessive compensation for college coaches, but for her it is mainly about a writer whose enthusiasm for metaphor has gone psychotic. Earnestly, UD attempts to take into consideration each of the writer’s figures -- the garbage, the porno, the hitmen, the lambs, the jilters, the bakers, the spirals, the clairvoyants, the photos, the philosophers -- but they bomb past her on their way to some inky elusive goalpost. |