Welcome to class. Today's topic is the history of sports phrases and traditions. It'll be a grab bag of sorts -- an eclectic mix of rituals and terms that have stuck with us throughout years of down-to-the-wire championship games, record-setting moments and slow-motion replays. I'll do my best to explain where these sports idioms and habits originated. We don't have a lot of time though -- er, space -- so let's get started.
"I'm going to Disney World!": We can thank Phil Simms for coining the most common post-championship victory utterance. In 1987, Simms' New York Giants were getting ready to play in Super Bowl XXI. Prior to the game, representatives of Disney World found Simms and asked him if would say these five now-famous words on camera if the Giants happened to win as part of Disney's advertising campaign. Though Simms initially declined, he eventually decided to go through with it when the Giants pulled out the victory. From that moment on, the phrase stuck and became a staple statement for all newly crowned champions. From Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1988 to Tom Brady in 2004, Disney has been free-riding on some pretty industrious advertising.
The seventh-inning stretch: There are a couple urban legends surrounding this one. The most likely story comes from Manhattan College in the late 1800s. A man named Brother Jasper of Mary was both the coach of the school's baseball team and prefect of discipline of the student body. As legend has it, he instructed the students in the stands to get up and stretch after the top half of the seventh inning because of the relentless New York heat. Tradition caught on, and he continued to do it every game. Eventually, the seventh-inning stretch made its way into the major leagues and has served as an indispensable custom at every MLB game today.
There are other rumors surrounding the seventh-inning stretch. Some believe President Taft started the tradition by accident in 1910 by standing up in the middle of the seventh after growing increasingly uncomfortable in his stadium seat. Others claim the custom was around baseball well before Brother Jasper. The best we can do is speculate about the origin of the stretch. Regardless, it makes for some pretty intriguing myths.
Seed: Ever wonder why we call the rankings in a tournament "seeds"? The etymology of this word comes from the American Lawn Tennis journal in 1898. It was noted that, in order to get the highest-ranked players to play each other in the later rounds of the tournament, their names were written on cards and placed on the grass, in a structure similar to that of a modern-day bracket. The act of scattering the cards around the grass resembled the act of seeding. The name stuck and a player ranked, say, first became known as the "No. 1 seed."
Underdog: Michael Vick could have told us how this one came to be. The phrase underdog was coined as the opposite of the "over dog" -- or the dog who won a dogfight back in the 1880s. Though the "underdog" used to mean the loser of the fight, it now means the team (or person) that is expected to lose. Funny how time can change the meaning of words ever so slightly.
Derby: I thought we should brush up on our horse-racing lingo (Foxfield is just more than a week away). The word "Derby" comes from the 12th Earl of Derby, Edward Smith-Stanley, who began the tradition of the Epsom races in Derby, England. Parliament used to halt their meetings to go watch the races, and the name "Derby" was used for all subsequent major horse races post-1875. The "Kentucky horse-race" just doesn't have the same ring to it as the "Kentucky Derby."
Steeplechase: Let's continue on the topic of racing since it seems to have so much history. This word was first recorded in 1793 when the Irish would race horses from one church steeple to another. Steeples were the most visibly apparent landmarks from a distance and thus served as a good place to start and stop a long horse race. The term "steeplechase" was coined and the rest was, well, history.
K: Used to denote strikeouts at a baseball game, the symbolic meaning of "K" goes back to the mid-1800s when a newspaper journalist by the name of Henry Chadwick created a way of keeping score of a baseball game so he would have a way of knowing what happened when he went back to write his articles. His method of score-keeping involved using the primary letter(s) of a word -- so "S" was sacrifice, "HR" was a homerun, "HBP" was hit by pitch, and so on. Since he already had "S" for sacrifice, he didn't have a letter to use for strikeouts. He decided to instead go with the letter "K" since that was the next most prominent letter in the word "struck," which was at that time more common than the word "strikeout."
Super Bowl: It's somewhat random that we call our championship football game a "bowl." The Super Bowl received its name after a debate about what to call it in the 1960s. The NFL Commissioner at the time wanted to call it "The Big One." A man named Lamar Hunt, who was the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, joked that they should call it the "Super Bowl" after he saw his kids playing with a toy called the "Super Ball." The name somehow stuck. Even the toy can now be found in Canton, Ohio at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Interestingly enough, the term "bowl" in college football originated before the term "Super Bowl." The bowls in college were so aptly named when the Rose Bowl was named because the stadium in which the games were played was shaped like a bowl. From then on, the name stuck.
Blitz: This common defensive tactic in football is short for the "Blitzkrieg" in which the German military executed an offensive against Poland at the onset of the Second World War. The quick-hitting attempt to try and catch the offense offguard is said to mirror the way in which the Germans carried out the "Blitzkrieg," which translates to "lightning war." Though it is not clear who exactly coined the term, its use in football seems to have originated in the early 1960s.
Well there you have it. A quick and dirty rundown of some of sports' most commonly used phrases and traditions. If there's one thing to learn from this, it's that everything has its roots somewhere in (sports) history. From Disney World to the "Blitzkrieg" attack, custom and usage have given us a sports vocabulary enmeshed with times past. Thanks for listening -- er, reading -- so attentively. Class dismissed.
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