But Andrew didn't manage to channel the worst aspects of Ernest Hemingway in quite the way that Hartford Courant (Motto: "Still A Newspaper") columnist Jeff Jacobs did. His column about the game, and the physical play of DeJuan Blair is hilarious:
He was the one who did the manhandling. No, that's not fair. What DeJuan Blair did Monday night was show he was a man in what is supposed to be the man's league of college basketball. Blair was a man, the man, in every way at the XL Center in No. 4 Pittsburgh's 76-68 victory over No. 1 UConn.
I love the paragraph so much. In one paragraph, we have five uses of the word "man." Basketball is a MAN'S GAME.
I don't know why it tickles me so much, but it really, really does. Jeff Jacobs is a Manly Curmudgeon!
My theory is that this a crazy overreaction to the pants-pulling Leitch at Deadspin did a few years back. The sentence from Will that probably started Jeff Jacobs becoming a badass MAN? Probably this one: "...we have a feeling that Jacobs was the kind of guy who always took his ball and went home when he was a kid."
I should mention that Leitch's post was about a bizarre Jacobs' column in which he complains about the way UConn coach Jim Calhoun has been mean to him at press conferences. With that in mind, it makes this sentence from the column I mentioned above make a bit more historical sense: "So at the risk of Jim Calhoun calling my sports editor and suggesting I cover the Williams sisters and Rafael Nadal, there's no way I'm straying far from doing anything but giving Pittsburgh, and especially Blair, major, major props."
2 comments:
I take offense that you drag Ernest Hemingway into the discussion of bad writing. Weren't you an English major?
The idea that Hem wrote about macho men strangling lions with short sentences is only perpetrated by people who've not read him.
Poo!
Chill out man!
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