How quickly they forget...

In the wake of Sept. 11, it seemed like the newspaper industry -- even on this board -- was determined to stop using words like "war" and "hero" in sports stories. I recall quite a few self-serving columns about it, how it was just wrong to talk about an athlete's "courage" when the real definition of courage was firefighters and cops and so forth.

And yet here we are, five years later, and war/hero/courage-type words are everywhere. The Sporting News is putting out a whole NFL book titled "Warriors," for God's sake. Sometimes, it seems like every other story I read is about Ray Lewis' courage, or how Peter Pencildick was "the hero" of Podunk Prep's win against Uptown Academy.

So what happened? Is this all OK again?

Somebody -- maybe on this very board -- once wrote, that if you need Sept. 11 or Hurricane Katrina "to put sports in perspective," you're an idiot. And I agree. But still, don't words like this blur that perspective?

I haven't written "hero" or "battle" or even "bomb" or "foe" in more than five years. How is everyone else handling this kind of thing?

 

i still adhere to not using war-like terms. for me, anyway, the "perspective" gained from 9/11 and the true heroism of that period of time will forever make me careful about the words so loosely thrown around on the sports pages.

 

I still take those references out, too. (I'm a desker, ahem.)

Football is not war; it never will be.

 

Buckweaver, the deskers are the real heroes.

 

100 percent correct.

 

Wingman deserves a purple heart after the cockblocking he endured. Blue balls is an injury too.

 

I think it's easy to overreact on both extremes.

And while I concede that football is not a "war" and no sports person is a "hero" --- at least in what he is doing on the field --- I maintain it takes a hell of a lot of courage to execute a backflip on a 4-inch balance beam with a billion people watching that will either make or break the last 12 years you have been practicing for this moment.

 

Medal of Honor to Wingman for exemplifying true courage is this battlefield.
His precisely directed missile strikes something that roadblocks our memories: Time.

 

I agree with the avoidance of war metaphors, but come on, you can use, for example, blitz and bomb in the context of a football game. There's nothing wrong with saying an outfielder has a cannon for an arm or hit a rocket over the left-field wall.

No, Kellen Winslow is not a ``soldier,'' and Bob Knight is not a ``general'' and there is much overwrought rhetoric used compar ing sports to battle. That is to be avoided. But it's OK for rifle-armed Peyton Manning to beat the blitz by throwing a 60-yard bomb for a touchdown (though, re-reading it, the rifle arm part is a cliche and I probably wouldn't use it because of that).

 

a "cannon" for an arm and a "rocket" hit over the fence are cliches, too.

 

For those who don't like "bomb" in a football contest, is "Hail Mary" all right?

 

Only if Mary doesn't get oh-fended.