THE ANNUAL TRITE TROPHY
Time again to laud the best of the worst
Come with us now with your approved Comfort Animal, be seated, face forward and put the flat end of the belt into the buckle. Breathe normally, which is good advice any time, and be prepared to face your future because there is no turning back; you have Entered The Transfer Portal.
How this despicable slice of nonsense — Entered The Transfer Portal — metastasized so ferociously into one of the most annoying sports clichés of 2019 is a tale too tedious for study, yet readers who are already Painfully Aware that they have Entered The Annual Trite Trophy column know that this longstanding Exercise In Futility is about nothing if not tedium.
When the 36th (you heard me) Trite Trophy is “awarded” here within minutes at the fabulous Post-Gazette Amphitheater high above the Todd Haley exit of Tequila Cowboy, it will be the result of a yearlong process of herding the worst clichés available, and Make
No Mistake, Entered The Transfer Portal was In The Conversation, or In The Discussion, so only Time Will Tell if this was a Missed Opportunity that leaves it On The Outside Looking In after A Disappointing Loss.
Entered The Transfer Portal merely means that some StudentAthlete put their name on a list indicating to other colleges that they’re willing to Student-Athlete elsewhere so long as Elsewhere U. has a scholarship for them. It was only meant to make things easier on NCAA compliance officers and talent-hawking coaches, but the “portal” part somehow morphed into shorthand imagery for the script of the 1986 science fiction film “The Fly,” in which an eccentric scientist develops a telepod that can transport inanimate objects to other telepods, which is fine until he decides to transport himself the second after a housefly enters the same telepod and Geena Davis ends up shooting Jeff Goldblum to death rather than have him survive as whatever the hell he’s just turned himself into.
The Transfer Portal is technically not a telepod, but the cliché is ubiquitous, essentially meaningless, and I really, really hate it, which happen to be the three prerequisites for Trite-aspirants trying to Get To The Next Level.
Speaking of hate (and don’t worry, my plan for this column is to Stick To Sports!), why have so many words that used to be common pejorative adjectives — sick, filthy, nasty, insane, silly, absurd, ridiculous — taken root as compliments in the 21st century sports lexicon? Did you see the way Pirates shortstop Cole Tucker described teammate Starling Marte’s
Walk-Off Homer in May? “That was so sick!” How about sports author J. Daniel’s tweet expressing birthday wishes to Hall of Famer George Brett, “who was simply ridiculous in 1980.” Daniel pointed that Brett hit a ridiculous .390, which I thought was pretty good, and not, as I’ve seen way too often, “absurdly good.” Are we now so resistant to learning new ways to express ourselves that we’re down to reversing the meanings of the words we know?
Also, please stop saying and writing “there’s two reasons.” There are two reasons. I hate that.
Haters Gonna Hate.
For the good of the language itself, it’s time to Pump The Brakes on saying a player is his team’s
Swiss Army Knife (he’s versatile, I Get It), onAddition By Subtraction, ostensibly the net effect of the Steelers ridding themselves of Antonio Brown, except it turned out to be Subtraction By Subtraction, on He Can Rake, which has somehow become the synonym for
He Can Hit. There’s a distinction: Even in December, I need somebody who can rake, because there’s still leaves out there, I mean, there
are still leaves out there), and on
The Face Of Adversity. You’ll note no one has ever succeeded even in The Armpit Of Adversity or The Small Intestine of Adversity.
There is still A Lot To Unpack on this Deep Dive into linguistic laziness, but first we should probably commend the Yahoo headline artist who gave us: “Deep dive yields unsettling discovery on ocean floor.” Yes, a deep dive would be necessary in that instance, as shallow dives generally don’t reach the freaking ocean floor.
Time again now for our annual abrupt change of direction, but don’t worry, it’s legal, A Football Move, whereby we halt proceeds for a Special Presentation, namely that of our Mixologist Medal, awarded annually to the person who most deftly begins one cliché only to finish another. It requires sick skills.
In the opinion of the committee (me), there was more quantity than quality in 2019, as nothing approached for hilarity Hines Ward’s infamous They’ll Have Their Hands Cut Out For Them, but It Wasn’t For Lack Of Effort.
Pirates reliever Kyle Crick was
Making A Late Bid in September when he explained his clubhouse fist fight with bullpen buddy Felipe Vazquez like this: “It got to the tipping point and it boiled over.” Had it gotten to boiling point and tipped over, maybe Crick wouldn’t have broken his finger punching Vazquez in the nose, but
Who’s To Say?
Arizona State coach Herm Edwards deserves commendation as well for his attempt at the elusive three-way cliché in announcing the firing of his offensive coordinator: “We’re headed in a different direction philosophy-wise moving forward.
Our runners-up in the category are Dallas Stars center Tyler Seguin on a scoring drought “I haven’t been finding the back of the score sheet,” and former Pirates outfielder Corey Dickerson’s answer to whether he’d sign a contract extension, “That’s not in my ballpark to bring to the table.” But our winner is Steelers linebacker Vince Williams, who in outlining his professional approach to our own Gerry Dulac, included the phrase “keep the ship tight, circle the wagons.”
Wait, are the wagons in the water, or . . . ?
I Can’t Even.
Now before we Get Too Far Out Over Our Skiis, or worse,
Go Down That Rabbit Hole, know that we are very close to announcing our finalists for the 2019 Trite Trophy and our 36th champ, but first a few dishonorable mentions for utterances I just could not ignore this year.
Pirates play-by-play guy Joe Block must have set the record for earliest use of If The Playoffs Started Today, coming as it did on May 21, when he said that if the playoffs started that day, the Pirates would have been in a wildcard game.
May 21.
On the day the playoffs actually started, the Pirates were in last place, 22 games out.
Braves manager Brian Snitker told a national TV audience during the playoffs that pitcher Dallas Keuchel gets in a jam, “He has no heartbeat.”
Slow heartbeats are what you’re looking for in that situation, but no heartbeat May Lead To Serious Side Effects Including Death. But Hey I’m Not A Doctor.
No doctor would spend 36 years trying to Raise The Bar when it comes to language with the net effect having been to Lower The Bar, which is really not related to our willingness to Close The Bar. Nearly four decades after beginning our quest to expose feckless constructions on the sportscape, descriptions of an athlete’s lower body in 2019 only got more grotesque. It was during the Ohio State-Michigan game in November that color man Joel Klatt observed of Buckeyes quarterback Justin Fields, “His legs are so important.”
Well I guess so, particularly if he wants to Stick His Foot In The Ground or Buy Time With His Feet, a process by which I imagine someone taking bills out of their wallet with their toes. You Have Got To Be Kidding Me.
To A Man, the Trite Committee (again, me) is aware that At The Current Pace, this show could run into the 11 o’clock news, so Clearly, it’s time to Go Hurry Up, Get The Ball Out Fast, put on our Big Boy Pants and play Big Boy Football (although a lot of big boys now are wearing their football pants above the knee, which looks like little boy football), lift our Compete Level to maybe make a Combat Catch in Four Down Territory, Go Up Top with An Absolute Laser ,be thankful we’ve shrewdly calculated our Load Management despite a Small Sample Size, Lean In, and Stretch The Field Vertically.
At The End Of The Day, we hope to be The Team Nobody Wants To Play (the opposite of the Cincinnati Bengals, the team everybody wants to play).
We acknowledge a Crooked Number of former Trite winners in our live audience tonight — Dial Up A Blitz, Manage The Game, Take A Shot Down The Field, RPO, Gut Check, Crunch Time, and many others including the greatest living cliché, Red Zone, who grew from Humble Beginnings to its own official stat and TV channel (the only one with a real, honest-to God, test pattern everyday of the year. Test pattern. Google It.)
Also, Don’t Sleep On the Archie Griffin of the Trite, It Is What It Is, our only two-time winner, and it had another Career Year, though not in its Walk Year.
So now Turn Off Your Electronic Devices be cause it’s time for the Gender Reveal of our final ists and the moment about which people will one day say “And The
Rest Is History, ” even though it’s closer to pure trivia, as in 99 percent of the usages of And The Rest is History.
Our third runner-up in 2019 is That Being Said, once a modest linguistic crutch that exploded to a pandemic with in the speaking culture. Some commentators seemed to spend more time point ing out what had been said than actually saying anything. That Being Said ...
Our second runner-up is The Line To Make and its conjoined twin The Line To Gain, both of which translate, In The Over whelming Majority Of Cases, to “a first down.” It’s heartbreak ing to see one of our hallowed Trite winners, Shy Of The First Down, being refitted into Shy Of The Line To Gain.
Our first runner-up is Check All The Boxes. What boxes? What checks? What baloney. I think it means he, she, they, or it qualified for something. In extreme cases, They Had Their Ticket Punched.
And the winner of the 2019 Trite Trophy dishonoring the worst cliché of the year: Not His First Rodeo.
For sheer nonsense, few clichés can approach Not His First Rodeo, mostly because it is used all but exclusively in situations that have nothing to do with a rodeo. Viciously overused to connote an experienced rather than a callow athlete or coach, Not His First Rodeo was used everywhere this year including by Tom Selleck, who starts his latest reverse mortgage hawking pitch with “This is not my first rodeo.”
This sentence can almost always be followed by, “In fact, this is not a rodeo at all.”
Even the one person we found who claimed this was his first rodeo was, in fact, just another cliché-slinger.
“At my age, I’d like to be able to say this ain’t my first rodeo,” said Dave Wofford, a North Carolina county commission candidate. “but this is my first rodeo. I’ve never run for office.”
I gotta start covering that rodeo circuit. If it’s a sport, it’s probably laced with undiscovered clichés. Oh joy.