On a hungover Sunday, if I’m accompanying my coffee with a podcast, the talkers will be American; but if a flip on a game, I hope they will be British.
British football broadcasters use animated yet distinctly non-flamboyant metaphors: an unfortunate player who shoots wide after beating the last defender has “flubbed his lines,” a center back who fails to mark a goal-scoring opponent on the far post on a corner kick has “lost the plot.”
They also use words and phrases that capture the essence of happenings on the pitch, whether a cutting through ball, a head-knocking collision, or a rude exchange between players, in an effortless and profound way that I want to believe is characteristic of people living where English has been spoken for more than a thousand years. I’ll explain what I mean: consider the Shakespeare line “once more into the breach.” Today “breach” means something like, to penetrate an erstwhile highly resilient barrier or container. But when Hal uses it as a noun, you’re not confused. The word evokes feelings of pressure and confrontation and crisis, conveying a description of the space of battle he is about to jump into more succinctly but profoundly than a long description of the scene using technically descriptive words. British football commentators use little phrases that Americans would never use, but resonate with an original, subconscious level of language understanding.
With deft metaphor and turns of phrase, they can pack more feeling into fewer words and at lower volume. They accent and texturize the game’s inborn drama, like a tart salad next to a rich bearnaise.
At best, American commentators have voices and catchphrases that are not obnoxious, but at worst, they constantly refer back to the spiritual underpinning of American sports: an informal belief system wherein toughness, and love of your mother, and fanatical, happiness-defying self-belief and work habits that somehow leave space for respect for colleagues. The heaven in this belief system is the sublime and transcendent apex of modern achievement, which is to be a champion above all others. I’m sure there were prophets of this faith before Vince Lombardi, but he was one of its preeminent evangelists. From fieldside broadcast pulpits at American stadiums, this message is preached, thumped on like a Bible or a psalter, by men who, and I’m being petty, probably don’t have many other ways of measuring self-worth.
And yet: on podcasts, British circumspection, (a word whose meaning I sort of know but can’t define beyond the fact that it makes me think of a gray-haired professor wearing spectacles, who rarely smiles and stands really straight and is a nice guy, but who nobody really knows), no longer carried up by the winds of the game, sounds polite, constrained, withheld. And without the elite athletic drama and roaring crowds, Americans’ louder voices and attitudes are entertaining. To be unconcerned of sounding wrong, or discomfiting, provides drama. When there’s nothing to watch, and just people talking in my ear, I’d rather have the unjustified self-confidence that fuels big adjectives and risky, yet thoughtful, takes.