Decoding the Jargon

Welcome to another installment of the sports terminology translation station.

Since Rosetta Stone hasn’t yet developed a ‘sports watchers to non sports watchers’ educational explanation software yet, the time has come to translate common sports terminology for those who don’t speak fluent ESPNeese.  

Sadly there aren’t enough inches in this column to break down every single sports term and its immediate meaning. Instead the focus here will be to breakdown the backhanded complements of sports that share the airwaves with Michael and Kelly.

The first term that deserves decoding is the term ‘glue guy.’ Usually this term comes up primarily in basketball, although baseball and hockey see this term in their word banks occasionally. The player’s relevance to the team is usually brought up when Skip Bayless or Stephen A. Smith are in the middle of debating who the better team is.

What a ‘glue guy will’ most commonly be defined as is a mediocre player whose primary function is to be a catalyst to improve team chemistry. In the NBA guys like Derrick Fisher of the Oklahoma City Thunder would be a good example.

Back in Fisher’s heyday with the Los Angles Lakers from 2000-2004 he averaged roughly eleven points per game and his signature moment was a falling away ‘there-is-no-possible-way-this-shot-should-go-in-but-why-the-hell-not’ three pointer in the 2004 playoffs.

Nowadays Fisher is a backup guard who will occasionally hit a three point shot; that is if he has enough space to read “War and Peace” before a defender gets to him.

Talking heads and journalists will reward the ‘glue guy’ term to a good teammate who can’t produce on the court anymore in order to get good quotes from him after the game. Everyone who follows Fisher knows that he hasn’t averaged more than ten points per game since 2008 and hasn’t been a reliable defender since 2005.

Yet because Fisher is a nice guy who serves as an important catalyst for team chemistry, nobody is going to outright say Fisher sucks. Instead they give him the backhanded complement of being a ‘glue guy.’

Synonyms for glue guy include ‘hustle player’, ‘hard worker’, or any player description that includes the word grit. 

Now the sports terminology translation station will break down what it means to ‘turn back the hands of time.’ This phrase will make appearances from football to hockey and every sport in between.

When a player ‘turns back the hands of time’ he or she is an older player who is statistically producing similarly to when they were in their prime. Anyone who has watched ESPN in the last two weeks has heard this term applied to Kobe Bryant after two historically great (40 plus points and 12 plus assists) games in a row.

Although the black mamba deserves the praise, there is a bit of bile in pundits saying Kobe turning back the hands of time.

For one thing that phrase is a not so subtle reminder that Bryant has played in the NBA for 17 seasons and is 34 years of age. Kobe being an experienced NBA player is not necessarily a bad thing because certain players do get better with age; like a fine vino.

Still nobody likes to be reminded that they are not as young as they once were and Bryant probably doesn’t want to be reminded that the last championship he won was in 2009-2010. He is still a good player who happens to be up there in years.

While there are no synonyms for the phrase ‘turning back the hands of time’ although there is probably one daylight savings time joke in there somewhere.

Another term to break down depicts the constant breaking down of athletes’ bodies.

When a player frequently gets hurt over the course of their career they are plagued with the dreadful ‘injury prone label.’ This term is also not sport specific and has more people fit the bill than in a casting call for Les Miserable.

Perhaps one of the most drastic cases of an ‘injury prone’ player would be former Boston Red Sox outfielder and vanilla ice cream substitute J.D. Drew.

Over the course of his career, the infamous Drew missed roughly 96 games per year during a five year span in Boston. The injuries ranged from a strained lower back to sore knees to ouchies that saw Drew out of the Red Sox lineup a total of 606 regular season games with the Red Sox.

Drew missed so much time due to injury that the fan base of Red Sox nation not only questioned the severity of Drew’s injuries, but also assigned him the dubious (but hilarious) nickname of “Nancy Drew.”

Synonyms for injury prone include ‘just can’t seem to stay healthy,’ ‘injury plagued,’ ‘soft,’ ‘frail’ or in the most extreme circumstances ‘quitter.’

While ‘injury prone’ is by far the most condescending term that the translation station has defined perhaps the most loaded term would be ‘trade bait.’

Players who are ‘trade bait’ are athletes that a franchise is looking to get rid of in return for other players, draft picks, cash, or some combination of the three.

On the surface that doesn’t sound so bad because ‘trade bait’ implies that the player openly being shopped has value. However, the notion that a player is expendable decreases his overall value to the team and therefore some could have a lower opinion of his or her production.

Before the NBA trade deadline this year Los Angeles Clipper guard Eric Bledsoe was mentioned in more rumors than Kris Humphries and his wife.

Bledsoe put up good numbers for his team off the bench for the Clips (21 minutes, nine points, three rebounds, and three assists per game) was a player with the potential to get better (age 23) and was a part of the deepest team in the NBA.

So the Clippers tried to dangle Bledsoe as trade bait in order to lure that final piece to make a championship run this season. Bledsoe ultimately didn’t get traded and now his value has depreciated because of the Clips openly willing to bargain for Bledsoe.

The biggest reason that being acknowledged as trade bait is partially condescending is because it can hurt the psyche of a player. If a player has to hear that his or her name is being discussed in trade rumors then it automatically becomes a distraction to the team.

Instead of worrying about winning, trade bait players like Bledsoe have to answer questions about how they are dealing with the rumors of their impending departure. 

The free trial in ESPNeese is now over. Hopefully now the language of sports is a bit easier to translate. 

Out of Bounds

Dennis Rodman has more or less the same credibility when it comes to foreign diplomacy as an inmate in Sing Sing.

This is a man who put on a wedding dress just to promote his book back in 1996. Rodman had an MTV show in which he interviewed guests from the comfort of his bed. Rodman has been to rehab, driving whilst intoxicated, and multiple domestic violence incidents.

Yet all of that outward lunacy pales in comparison to Rodman’s recent visit to North Korea for the purposes of ‘basketball diplomacy.’ Over the weekend the madman of the midway met with the madman of east Asia, Kim Jong Un, and said “As a person to person, he (Un) is my friend.”

To be fair one has to put Rodman’s words in proper context. Many will misinterpret Rodman’s one on one meeting with Un as Rodman accepting Un’s rule of his people. In reality, Rodman’s one on one interaction was just a fan admiring a great basketball player.

Even though that fan is a ruler of a country and Un treated the hall of famer better than any of the citizens he is in charge of.

It does not take John Kerry to tell you that as a ruler of a country Un has been far from exemplary. An article by BBCnews.com said that 3.5 million people have starved to death in North Korea since 1995. And the U.S. is still technically fighting the Korean war because a peace treaty was never signed after the 1953 truce ‘ended’ the Korean War.

It is hard to figure out which is scarier, the fact that Rodman wants Obama and Un to talk about basketball or that Rodman probably got closer to Un than anyone in U.S. intelligence in the last half century or so.

Seriously in a CNN.com article reported that former Assistant Secretary of State Stephen Ganyard told ABC News, "There is nobody at the CIA who could tell you more personally about Kim Jong Un than Dennis Rodman, and that in itself is scary.”

It’s terrifying actually. Nobody can take this meeting seriously because of the man who supposedly bonded with Un. Rodman gets his sanity questioned on a daily basis, and he is supposed to be the man who leads the U.S. to peace negotiations with an enemy government?

That is simply not going to happen. Not every international sports story will be Invictus. If Un wanted to bring the citizens of North Korea together and better his nation through some form of basketball diplomacy he’d have to actually feed his people first.

While the principal of being the bigger nation and talking to your enemy may be noble there are people in this world in which reason fails to reach them; and Un is one of those people incapable of reasoning.

And Rodman very well may be a person incapable of fully grasping reason himself.

Although sports reporters from Chicago to San Antonio swear that Rodman has a good heart most of them will not refute Rodman’s questionable sanity. If there is an athlete in the world who is to unify people for a cause it is most certainly not a man who is regarded as one of the dirtiest players in NBA history.

Though Rodman has been making a fool out of himself for his entire professional life it was inconceivable to think belittling diplomacy was in his arsenal. Dennis Rodman having an affair with Madonna, sure that’s possible. A professional athlete making an a-hole out of himself happens every day.

But to pretend that there was any kind of good that came out of two insane man vying for the President of the United States to talk with them about basketball is just plain dangerous.

Now that Rodman has had his moment back in the spotlight the men in the white coats can put him back in his straight jacket.