Posts Tagged ‘March Madness’
Once again without feeling: Athletic cliches a team effort
Thursday, March 18th, 2004
it’s the season of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and, as they inevitably say, you can throw the records out the window. And the mathematics. Over the next three weeks, in pregame pep talks and postgame press conferences, players and coaches will repeatedly make the math-defying pledge to give 110 percent and offer up boundless other basketball banalities.
“If anybody watches 10 seconds of sports on TV or reads anything between quotation marks in the paper, it’s almost all cliches,” says Steve Rushin, who writes the weekly “Air and Space” column for Sports Illustrated. “We all know those ready-made phrases so well you can almost predict them before they come out of someone’s mouth: `It was a team effort; we gave 110 percent.’”
In 2000, Rushin wrote a column composed entirely of cliches (deliberately, he hastens to note).
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