he journalist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) vanished in Mexico before he could add

sportswriting clichés to The Devil’s Dictionary. Too bad. I would have liked to have seen
what Bierce made of “distraction” and “glue guy,” not to mention everyone’s favorite:
“first-ballot Hall of Famer.”

“The Devil’s Dictionary of Sportswriting” is a reference guide for readers and writers
alike. When discussing sportswriters, I use the “we” pronoun because I’m as guilty as
anyone else.

adviser (n.) — a person who leads an athlete astray. The adviser may be known (Scott
Boras, say) or presumed missing (“Who’s advising Michael Vick?”). When advice is
required, a sportswriter will kindly offer it on the house: “Free advice for tennis’ top
stars.”

bust (n.) — a bad draft choice, and, later, a precious commodity for “whatever-
happened-to” features and listicles. Bleacher Report has published three versions of the
“Biggest NFL Draft Busts of All Time.”

centerpiece (n.) — the most important player in a proposed, often-fictitious trade.

Synonym: “lynchpin.”

class (n.) — one of the sportswriterly virtues. A “classy” athlete is a deferential one, both
to us and to his opponents. A “classless” coach is one who skips the postgame
handshake.

columnist (n.) — a writer who produces less copy than a blogger.

Grantland Dictionaries

Read them all here.

commit (n.) — short for “commitment.” On college sports recruiting sites, it means a
high school player who has pledged to play for a particular school. A commit who’s
wavering about his decision is said to be “soft.”

courage (n.) — in sportswriting, two kinds of athletes are courageous: those who play
hurt and those who play soon after the death of a loved one.

distraction (n.) — an impediment to winning, which may take the form of a love
interest, an entrepreneurial career, or an appearance in a country music video. A
distraction is usually diagnosed retroactively. “The Super Bowl Shuffle” might have been
the mother of all distractions, but the Bears won, so it’s the subject of a Grantland oral
history.
Draft Winds (pun) — a pun headline that has been placed atop NFL draft stories since at
least January 1990, when it appeared in the Sporting News.

durability (n.) — a football player’s knack for surviving a sport everyone agrees is too
violent.

elite (adj.) — a quality Joe Flacco achieved on February 3, 2013.

era (n.) — an arbitrary period of time. Often demarcated by the presence or absence of a
superstar: “the post-Jordan era.”

fandom (n.) — it used to be that sportswriting enforced a bogus neutrality; now, it

demands that every sportswriter, at least once in his career, write a long piece
explaining why he’s a fan of a team. Such pieces sometimes include lots of childhood
memories and references to at least one relative (who may be dead).

fantasy sports (n.) — like fandom, a subject the sportswriter once couldn’t write about
and now can’t stop writing about.

far apart (exp.) — the inevitable distance between a team and a player in a contract
negotiation. The phrase may also be used in labor talks: “Gary Bettman: Sides ‘still far
apart.'”

first-ballot Hall of Famer (n.) — there have been far more first-ballot Hall of Famers
minted in baseball columns than in actual baseball. The phrase really means “automatic
Hall of Famer.”

G.O.A.T. (slang) — short for the “greatest of all time.” It has effectively replaced the old
term “goat,” which meant “choker.” Bill Buckner was a goat; Floyd Mayweather claims
to be the “G.O.A.T.”

“great piece!” (exp.) — a compliment for a story that’s longer than 2,000 words.

green (adj.) — the color of outfield grass. It is often startlingly so. Paul Simon, pinch-
hitting as a sportswriter in 2008: “How beautiful! The emerald green grass, the old-
fashioned white facade and the dots of color that were the fans in their seats.”

glue guy (n.) — a player whose true value (or so the writer says) can’t be quantified with
stats. A sportswriter favorite.

Golden Age of Sportswriting (n.) — usually the 1920s, but the phrase may refer to the
glory days of Laguerre’s Sports Illustrated, Walsh’s Inside Sports, or the Gammons-
Ryan-McDonough Boston Globe sports section. Stanley Woodward, 1949: “After
considerable research I can find no evidence to support the theory that sports writing
had any good old days. … The only thing that interests me is the modern American
sports page which, as far as I can see, owes nothing to antiquity. It didn’t even evolve. It
sprang full-fashioned from the forehead of Zeus.”

hardware (n.) — championships, in the form of trophies. If a player doesn’t yet have
hardware, he might have “scoreboard.”

heart (n.) — an elusive quality associated with a player or team. See “identity.”

identity (n.) — When a talented team plays badly, a sportswriter goes looking for
qualities it might lack. “Heart” is usually the first of these. But a team like the 2012-13
Lakers — which has a mishmash of coaches and lineups — is said to lack an “identity.”

immortal (n.) — common as a noun, i.e., “one of the immortals.” Becomes awkward
when an athlete dies — an act that would seem to establish his mortality beyond all
doubt. A 1953 obituary for Jim Thorpe proclaimed, “Immortal Athlete Passes.”

insider (n.) — a beat writer or league writer, repackaged for the digital age. These days,
there are NFL Insiders, Red Sox Insiders, and all kinds of insiders at ESPN Insider. An
insider’s job is to tweet out news a few seconds ahead of the competition.

instant analysis (n.) — analysis.

instant classic (n.) — a close game a sportswriter happened to watch live.

jonrón, un (n.) — Spanish for home run, and an occasion for the Spanish-language
sportswriters to write as floridly as their English-language counterparts. The Associated
Press described a 2011 Yankees-Tigers game as “una feria de cañonazos de cuatro
esquinas” — a carnival of four-corner cannon blasts.

kid (n.) — an honorific for a young athlete. The sportswriter needn’t be more than a
couple years older than the “kid” to use the term. It establishes that the writer, not the
player, is the adult in the room.

leadership (n.) — another virtue. It usually means the ability to talk loudly in huddles
and locker rooms, or else quietly, in the sense of “leading by example.” Sometimes a
synonym for “unselfishness”: Tom Brady showed “his well-established leadership by
reworking his contract for later years at under-market value.”

legacy (n.) — how an athlete will be viewed in a few decades, as judged by a sportswriter
whose column is due in an hour.

light (n.) — the quality and color of light is a perennial concern of the sportswriter. It
stretches from Grantland Rice’s “blue-gray October sky” to Buzz Bissinger’s glowing
stadium lights to S.L. Price’s Aliquippa, in Western Pennsylvania, where darkness
“dropped early and hard.” If you go to games, the light is indeed striking, though its
quality is nearly impossible to judge from a press box.
locker-room cancer (n.) — the opposite of “clubhouse leader.”

mature (adj.) — a mature athlete, for a sportswriter, is one who spends his every waking
hour on sports.

media critic (n.) — once, the title referred to Rudy Martzke or Phil Mushnick, but now,
thanks to Twitter, sportswriters all gripe about and/or praise the media. This
development is blamed on Internet meanies, but it probably reflects the convergence of
sportswriterdom and fandom. The two things every fan does when watching sports are
complain about the refs and complain about the announcers.

M.N.C. (slang) — college football’s “Mythical National Championship” — these days, the
BCS title.

moment, the (n.) — an important game. If an athlete crumbles, it’s said that the moment
was “too big for him.” Sometimes known as “the stage.”

Moneyball (n.) — (1) personnel management using advanced stats; (2) a book every
sportswriter thinks he could have written.

motor (n.) — the measure of an athlete’s effort. A player can have a “great motor” or
there can be “concerns about his motor.” When employed too often, we all sound like pit
men at Daytona.

off the field (n.) — a player’s existence outside of sports. Negative when employed as an
adjective: “off-the-field concerns.”

Olympics (n.) — an international grift that a sportswriter denounces from an

intercontinental hotel.

outspoken (adj.) — worth quoting. If one sportswriter gets a story out of an outspoken
player’s comments, it’s customary for another journalist to write a story claiming the
quotes represent a terrible breach of etiquette.

power rankings (n.) — power rankings have two purposes: (1) they satisfy our lifelong
desire to sort players or teams in order of greatness; (2) they make for a reliable weekly
column. The word “power” is a tip-off they’re not based on empirical evidence.

prima donna (n.) — a wide receiver with a reality show.

project (n.) — the opposite of a “sure thing.”

Random Thoughts (n.) — a new name for the old “Notes” column.

ran out of time (exp.) — a long-lived phrase originally credited to Vince Lombardi, who
once said something like, “We didn’t lose the game, we just ran out of time.” In
December, Troy Aikman used a version when Adrian Peterson failed to break the NFL’s
single-season rushing record. Like a lot of Lombardisms, the phrase has traveled outside
sports. JFK conspiracist Jim Garrison wrote of his investigators, “They never stopped
fighting to bring out the truth. They only ran out of time.”

says all the right things (exp.) — a compliment to an athlete who says nothing worth
printing. Thus, for the writer, it’s a compliment against interest. “Since [Johnny]
Manziel began to talk, he has been saying all the right things.”

scout’s take (n.) — a genre frequently used by Sports Illustrated in which an anonymous
pro talent evaluator breaks down a player’s game. Terrifying for the sportswriter, the
scout’s take is often pithier and better-written than his own.

scrappy (adj.) — small and hardworking. Tommy Craggs, 2009: “‘scrappy’ serves as an
implicit rebuke to the super-sized stars of the so-called Steroid Era, in much the same
way it once carved out a fatuous distinction between white ballplayers and black and
Latino ballplayers.” At times, the opposite of “flashy.”

sex (n.) — Robert Lipsyte, 1975: “In the minds of most sportswriters, money and women
are the termites of athletes’ souls.”

sexy (adj.) — interesting-looking: “a sexy matchup.”

source close to the process, a (n.) — the most anonymous tipster in sportswriting. A
“source close to the process” could be a player, a general manager, an agent, or a pool
boy. A writer in search of an equally vague term might try “a source familiar with the
team’s thinking.”

stathead (n.) — “a mechanic with numbers,” in the words of Bill James. Statheads are
also known as sabermetricians, numbers guys, or stats geeks. Murray Chass calls them
“new-age stats guys,” which sounds like Nate Silver has become a shaman and moved to
Sedona.

story line (n.) — every game, from Pop Warner to the Super Bowl, has a “story line” —
essentially, a theme that’s larger than the game itself. But lately, it has become trendy to
use the S-word explicitly — i.e., “Top 10 Super Bowl Storylines.” Talking about story
lines offers the writer a meta-defense for writing the same piece everyone else is. When
Peter King writes, “Okay, we’ve gotten the obvious storylines out of the way,” it means
he has done his duty and is getting to the good stuff.

Strat-O-Matic (n.) — archaic. A dice game referenced by sportswriters who grew up

before Madden.

swirl (v.) — the movement of trade rumors: “Tim Tebow trade rumors swirl.” Swirling
trade rumors can “die down” (passively) or be “shot down” (actively, maybe by a source
close to the process). A player ignoring trade rumors is said to be “tuning them out.”
take (n.) — (1) an opinion; (2) recruiting-ese for a high schooler who’s worthy of a
scholarship — i.e., “That kid’s a take.” Appropriately thievish, since the recruit will be
conscripted to play for free.

tank (v.) — to lose games on purpose in order to get a better draft pick. The older, more
fragrant term was “dump.”

television (n.) — Leonard Shecter, 1969: “Television is like some gentle, mindless robot
carrying sports tenderly in its arms to the top of the mountain and then over the cliff.”

trade demand (n.) — when an athlete asks for a trade in private, it’s a “request.” When
he asks in public, it gets elevated to a “demand.”

trade rumor (n.) — something a general manager likes to see in print.

turn heel (v.) — from pro wrestling: to become a villain suddenly or unexpectedly. “On
July 8, 2010, LeBron James turned heel.”

unselfishness (n.) — the greatest of sportswriterly virtues. Our fascination with

unselfishness proceeds from two assumptions: (1) athletes are inherently selfish; and (2)
unselfishness, when reluctantly embraced, will always help a team win. Pete Axthelm,
1970: “Self-sacrifice must be learned, often through laborious practice and occasionally
through suffering.”

upside (n.) — constant air quotes haven’t stopped “upside” from replacing “potential” in
draft stories. Fittingly, the term is common in financial journalism: “Stephen Mandel’s
high upside potential picks” is about actual stocks, not Geno Smith’s stock.

window (n.) — the time period during which a team can win a title. “Has Patriots’ Super
Bowl window closed?” ESPN (and everyone else) asked back in January. Championship
windows make for better columns when they’re closing rather than opening.

winner (n.) — a player who collects hardware, often despite a confounding lack of
natural talent. When a sportswriter says, “He’s just a winner,” he has given up trying to
figure out what makes the athlete win.