quirky sentence structure among sports fans

February 8, 2008 8:26 AM

Why is there a disdain for the future conditional tense among people who talk about sports?

Someone can correct me if that's not what it's called, but you've all seen it and probably used it.

Example: At Yankee Stadum a foul ball came the way of Mike Wallace's box, he ducked it, and somebody behind him yelled, "Morley Safer makes that catch!"

Or: "If I'm Roger Clemens I'm going on a long vacation about now."

Why not "Morley Safer would have made that catch" or "If I were Roger Clemens I would..."?

What's weird is it seems particular to sports discussion. I'd be interested in knowing how and when it got started, and any other examples of quirky grammar that gets popularized in a particular niche group and then spreads, similar to how jargon spreads outside its specialized speakers.

posted by stupidsexyFlanders to Society & Culture (31 answers total)

Maybe it's a way to sound like a sports announcer yourself. "And the crowd, goes, wild."
posted by slyboots421 at 8:35 AM on February 8, 2008

Annoying, isn't it? I hear it in other places, as well, and it's not limited to the future tense. I hear it in man-on-the-street kinds of interviews on the news, where someone will say "If I would have known that Johnny was going to rob the store..." rather than "If I had known..." I'm pretty sure I hear it much more frequently now than I used to (and its misuse is a pet peeve of mine, so I think I would have noticed its abuse). It spreads like a cold virus.

Perhaps during live sportscasts, it seems shorter to skip the extra "would haves", so the commentators do. Or they just don't know any better.

I'll be interested to see if anyone has any actual theories or data.
posted by rtha at 8:36 AM on February 8, 2008

What you're talking about is called the subjunctive mood, and it's dying in modern American English. People just don't use it. Some, like your sports announcers, make a point of not using it.

I predict that languagehat will arrive shortly and explain why.
posted by ikkyu2 at 8:41 AM on February 8, 2008

Response by poster: hear it in man-on-the-street kinds of interviews on the news, where someone will say "If I would have known that Johnny was going to rob the store..." rather than "If I had known..."

To be clear, I'm talking about where the speaker would have said "If I know that Johnny is going to rob the store..." There's no conditional at all, it's just present tense.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:47 AM on February 8, 2008

I wonder if this is related to the pervasive use of the passive voice among play-by-play sportscasters, who are trying to describe things that are in the process of happening. You aren't talking about the same thing, but there may be a connection through style and fashion.
posted by OmieWise at 8:48 AM on February 8, 2008

I’ve always been convinced sports announcers have made up their own way of talking so they can pretend they’re not just stating the obvious.

“What Tom Brady needs to do to win this football game is he’s got to get that football down the field as far as he can. If I’m Tom Brady I’m going to have to score more points than the other team because that’s how you win football games.”
posted by bondcliff at 8:52 AM on February 8, 2008 [10 favorites]

I don't have an explanation, but I read an article once where someone referred to this as the "sports conditional" verb tense and I've liked calling it that ever since. Here's an example of someone (almost) calling it that.
posted by pasici at 8:57 AM on February 8, 2008

Man, there was a NY Times article about this VERY thing, maybe 5 years ago... I'll go try to scrounge it up.
posted by ORthey at 8:58 AM on February 8, 2008

I think OmieWise's suggestion that there is a connection through style is a good one. Sportscasting is weighty with tradition that comes from the days of radio, when broadcasters attempted to relay events as they happened, in real time.

There's also a general heinous language mess going on in TV reporting of all kinds, not just sports reporting (though it has certainly given us a lot of usage gems over the years). In the last 10 years or so, newscasters have abandoned the kind of sentence structure most of use all day long in favor of odd-sounding fragments. I recently heard a story about some fishermen who were thrown into the water when their boat capsized. One of them managed to right the boat, save the other, and call for help. That was the story. But the reporter's version consisted of bits of video accompanied with narration like: "A hero for Hampton. Bill Smith and Jim Thompson, out fishing in their small boat. Suddenly, huge waves, washing over the watercraft. Capsized! [quote from Bill about getting broadside to waves]. Thompson, struggling in the water. Smith, righting the boat, fighting the current, rescues his frightened friend."

I wish I were exaggerating it, but that's pretty close. The article I linked argues that

"All this "ing-ing" and verb dropping and tense shifting in news writing is not accidental. It appears to be part and parcel of an ongoing effort to make news sound more current, more happening, more now. But the result is news that sounds more awkward, more phony, more odd. What could be stranger than the false present tense, a verb virus that seems to be spreading from newsroom to newsroom? "Payne Stewart dies in a plane crash," we're told, a full day after the accident, when the truth is that Payne Stewart died....Mark Wright, morning anchor at KSTU-TV in Salt Lake City, suspects that what's driving all this verb abuse is a desire for a "snappy, headliney" sound. But he says the cost of achieving that sound is too high: "The result is the viewer must really work to understand what the story is about."

posted by Miko at 9:03 AM on February 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

My personal theory is that it makes it easier for the sportscasters and their listeners to imagine themselves as the sports stars. Isn't that what all little boys (and their grown up counterparts) want? To be the QB, or the pitcher, or whatever? "Roger Clemens wants..." frames the experience as us watching them, but "If I'm Roger Clemens, I'm..." lets us participate. Kind of.
posted by vytae at 9:04 AM on February 8, 2008

One of the basic tenets of broadcasting is "Don't start a sentence you can't finish." It's why you don't hear a lot of complicated constructions.
posted by MarkAnd at 9:08 AM on February 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

I always figured it was the influx of coaches and ex-players in the booth taking jobs away from the professional broadcasters, who spent years learning how to quickly and effectively and correctly convey what's happening in the game. The sports professionals passed all their classes whether they studied or not, and when they retired, they found a listening public enamored of their stunted but brawny tough-talk. Who needs a pension when you can steal a seat in the broadcast booth?

Plus, guys like Dick Vitale turned the colorman role into a sound-effects gig, so no thinking person listens to anything but the play-by-play anyway.

I get the feeling it's one of those "extra words are for namby-pambies; grammar is for ballerinas" reactionary jock things that's there to help people be more stupid, and help stupid people be happy, which I guess is important.

I cringe at the loss of the subjunctive mood, but it's America, where the dreadfully shitty and stupid often carries the day.
posted by breezeway at 9:28 AM on February 8, 2008

Thanks for pointing this out. I find it hard to object to; 'Morley Safer makes that catch' seems much more forceful than 'Morely Safer would have made that catch.'
posted by jamjam at 9:31 AM on February 8, 2008

Yeah, in that case I think you can hear it as this sentence, with "always" implied:

"Morley Safer [always] makes that catch."
posted by Miko at 9:53 AM on February 8, 2008

Because the present tense is immediate, it transports you into the moment.
Instead of contemplating the event, you live it:

"I'm at the supermarket the other day, and this checkout girl doesn't recognize my portobello mushroom. So she asks the other cashier, and she's like, 'What's that?'"
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:58 AM on February 8, 2008 [4 favorites]

Wallace is 90-something. He's not catching that.

In sports broadcasting, you can editorialize. Hence that tense.
posted by Jay Reimenschneider at 10:11 AM on February 8, 2008

Well, tense has nothing to do with being able to editorialize. You can editorialize using any tense.
posted by Miko at 10:15 AM on February 8, 2008

How-to journalism books advise this kind of thing - make it snappy! Make it now! Put it in the present tense!

Personally, I have a soft spot for the random insertion of days of the week: "In an apparent lack of irony, Tuesday, Clevelander Mary Banks finds that it's not what you say, it's how you say it."
posted by tiny crocodile at 10:24 AM on February 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

Found an interesting and somewhat related article on conversational historical present alternation.
posted by flod logic at 10:43 AM on February 8, 2008

This is an excellent question. My guess is that one person did it, and it caught on and spread because it sounds active and no-nonsense, non-literary, tough. But I'd be interested to know if we know who originated it, and when. Was it like this in the 1970s? 1990s?

Is it like this in other countries than the US? In all sports, or is it especially true in US football announcing?

Related observation - the storytelling present, as in "So I'm in the supermarket the other day, and this checkout girl doesn't recognize...", has a Yiddish feeling to me.
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:11 AM on February 8, 2008

Response by poster: LobsterMitten, read flod logic's PDF, it's about exactly that construction. (But doesn't speculate as to origins)
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 11:30 AM on February 8, 2008

When one is trying to be heard and understood over the mumble and grumble of 30,000 baseball fans, "Morley Safer makes that catch" is easier to belt out -- and easier to hear -- than is "Morley Safer would have made that catch."

This explanation, however, says nothing about sportscasters and their verbal tics.
posted by notyou at 11:46 AM on February 8, 2008

Aside from the real developments in sports commentary, I think it's important to note the demographics of sports broadcast audiences. The lowest common denominator for comprehension is pretty low.
posted by rhizome at 12:41 PM on February 8, 2008

As another example of quirky grammar used mostly among a certain group, how about the "I says" thing? Not only is it an example of the using the present to narrate like in the sports examples, but the verb ending also doesn't agree. As far as I know, it seems to be limited to people who are probably 50+, but has spread outside as somewhat of a joke or caricature.
posted by flod logic at 12:54 PM on February 8, 2008

I wonder if this is related to the pervasive use of the passive voice among play-by-play sportscasters, who are trying to describe things that are in the process of happening.

Alton Brown does this on Iron Chef America and it drives me nuts (I'm driven nuts by it?). "The secret ingredient is being used by..." "On the challenger's side, prawns are being grilled, potatoes are being fried and... OH MY, the ice cream machine is being used by Chef Smith."

The passive voice is being abused by Alton.
posted by jewishbuddha at 2:16 PM on February 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

As implied in earlier posts about broadcasting and journalism in general, the original post could apply to the now omnipresent political pundit types just as much as sports types.
posted by TheSecretDecoderRing at 3:47 PM on February 8, 2008

flod logic's article is interesting, but doesn't address the question here. The article is on the historical present tense, which is a pretty old construction - dating back at least to Virgil, as I recall, and no doubt earlier. But that relates simply to events that actually happened in the past. The quirk is that in relating those events in a story, the narrator switches to the present tense, which can convey a greater sense of immediacy.

The question here is about using the present tense to refer to events that did not happen, but could have in some alternative universe. So it's like a combination of present tense with the subjunctive mood, I think (as ikkyu2 noted), instead of using the indicative mood.

I'm not even sure it's accurate to say that this construction represents the death of the subjective mood. I think it may more accurate to say that, in this instance, the subjunctive mood is definitely still in effect, but that fact is conveyed by implication rather than made explicit through the use of words like "could" and "would."

In fact, I don't really understand the argument that this is some kind of dumbing down of language - since you could just as well argue the opposite. Often if something (like, I don't know, a poem, a movie, a work of art, or any text) requires more imagination/input to be supplied by the audience, instead of making things more explicit, that kind of move is praised as being more sophisticated/advanced. Or maybe more precisely, the audience is entitled to praise for engaging with something that makes greater demands of them. Why isn't that true here as well?

I mean, it's fine to be annoyed by this unusual way of talking - maybe it's jargon, and we think jargon is bad - but I think you have to base your condemnation solely on aesthetic grounds.

Anyway, dang, as ORthey said, I could swear I read some article on this precise thing a few years ago - maybe a Safire piece? I will investigate.
posted by chinston at 11:45 AM on February 27, 2008

Here's a N.Y. Times piece from 1988 on the so-called "sports present." Note that it's Safire's column, but written by a movie critic while Safire was on vacation.
posted by chinston at 11:50 AM on February 27, 2008

...the audience is entitled to praise for engaging with something that makes greater demands of them. Why isn't that true here as well?

Language is a bit different in that things that strike the ear (or eye) as nonstandard jerk your brain into a different gear, as it were. You have to stop processing content smoothly, notice the difference, parse the difference into something that makes sense, and only then go back to the processing of content. Normally we prefer the process of communication to be efficient and as transparent as possible, so we don't have to notice ourselves listening or reading. When we are slowed down by something unusual or nonstandard, we've got to go into a lower gear for a while in order to get the message, which slows comprehension of the event or message itself.
posted by Miko at 11:58 AM on February 27, 2008

Well, yeah, I think you're right in general - that in ordinary communication, there's a premium on immediate intelligibility. But in this case, it doesn't seem like people are expressing frustration with not understanding sports broadcasts because of this odd phrasing - I mean, that doesn't seem like the root of the problem. (And I say this as someone who does often find it annoying.)

I also find the "snappy" newspeak annoying that is lambasted in the article you linked to, Miko. But again, I can't say that I actually fail to understand (or slowed in my understanding of) what the reporter is trying to communicate. I admit it looks terrible if printed on the page - but I'm not sure that the rules we use for written text can be automatically, or just as profitably, applied to text that is meant to be spoken out loud over images and video.

Anyway, that article reminded me of the hilariously elliptical telegrams from Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop - um, though sadly I cannot find any on the internet.
posted by chinston at 12:32 PM on February 27, 2008

It's not so much that you fail to understand as that your brain feels a bump in the road, which is somewhat unpleasant.
posted by Miko at 1:38 PM on February 27, 2008