From the wonderful world of football:
Bengals coach Marvin Lewis, commenting this week on the success of kicker Randy Bullock:
“He’s morphed his body and feels confident about things.”
Yeah, having grown those extra toes gives him more range and accuracy. :eek::smack:
And after today’s Buffalo win over Rutgers, Buffalo quarterback Tyree Jackson said:
“It’s definitely a blessing, but we have to flush this behind us” 
Quote paraphrased, but you could find the exact quote in the Los Angeles Times.
From Adrian Gonzales, then playing for the Dodgers, then having a hot streak:
“Yeah, we’ve been scoring a lot of runs lately. If we can keep doing that, and keep the other teams from scoring, we’re going to win a lot of those games.”
Mike Shannon has been broadcasting St. Louis Cardinals games for nearly 50 years, but still nobody can figure out what he’s saying.
*Swing and a homerun, but it’s foul.
He was trying to hit a three run homer with the bases empty. To my knowledge, no one in the history of the game has ever done that. But it could happen someday. You never know in this world of baseball.
That hit was a crusher! You could see the shoulders and jaws of the Padres dropping to the astroturf.
Some guys can wake up in the morning and be able to bunt. Other guys are like playin’ pinochle with two decks.
They play Soup (Jeff Suppan) to hit to right and he lines it into leftfield for a basehit! All right! He threw him an offspeed and the Soup man… he threw some vegetables in there, then some chicken stock and he lined it into left.*
Phil rizzuto, former Yankees “color” man. Too many to list, but my favorite, to his long suffering broadcast partner Bill White—
Look up at the moon, White! Look, you can see Texas…
“Fußball ist wie Schach, nur ohne Würfel.”
“Soccer is like chess, only without the dice.” – German soccer player Lukas Podolski
Those all seem pretty clear to me, for off-the-cuff comments as the play is happening.
The batter hit it hard, high, and far, and initially fair, and it obvious that it was leaving the field…but then curved foul.
Presumably the team was behind by 3 runs, and the batter appeared to be swinging wildly, as if he were trying desperately to hit a home run, when what his team needed was base runners. The rest of it is, I’m guessing, just some humorous/sarcastic hyperbole. Or just running on to fill the air time. Keeping up a constant stream of commentary through a baseball game isn’t actually that easy.
The hit was both impressive - the batter crushed the ball - and came at a key point in the game and crushed the Padres’ morale. Their shoulders slumped (hyperbole - they slumped so low they hit the ground) from disappointment, and their jaws dropped open (hyperbole - they opened so far they hit the ground) from astonishment. Or some variation thereof.
Some players are so good at bunting, they make it look so natural and effortless that it’s as if they don’t need to practice, or warm up, or otherwise prepare, or even be fully awake. Other players struggle so much with bunting and seem so confused on what they’re supposed to do and how to do it, it’s like watching someone try to play a single-deck card game with two decks, who perhaps doesn’t even know enough to realize it’s a single-deck game, and/or that they actually have two decks.
An inartful pun off of Jeff Suppan’s nickname, the pitcher threw an extremely tricky pitch to Suppan, using every bit of guile and skill he could muster, combined with a defense that was also using skill and guile to anticipate where the ball would go. The pitcher and the defense literally and figuratively threw everything they could at Suppan, and he still got a hit.
“I know the Virginia players are smart because you need a 1500 SAT to get
in. I have to drop bread crumbs to get our players to and from class.” -
George Raveling, Washington State basketball coach
Regards,
Shodan
John Madden was always good for strange, barely coherent “thoughts”:
“What’s the toughest thing in a professional football game? It’s being the mother of the quarterback — toughest thing.”
“Hey, the offensive linemen are the biggest guys on the field, they’re bigger than everybody else, and that’s what makes them the biggest guys on the field.”
“Here’s a guy who when he runs, he moves faster.”
“They’ll score if they can just get into the endzone.”
“There definitely needs to be water on the sidelines for these players, but I also had some Gatorade just in case they were allergic to the water or vice versa.”
“Well, when you’re playing good football, it’s good football and if you don’t have good football, then you’re not really playing good football.”
And my personal favorite:
“Mark Brunell usually likes to soak his balls before a rainy game.”
How could I have forgotten the genius that is veteran F1 commentator Murray Walker.
Well, athletes in general are not known to be linguistically eloquent speakers, and that’s putting it mildly. LOL
Yogi Berra had nothing on Murray Walker apparently. Sheesh!
A real, live human uttered those words? :eek:
This one has a certain surrealistic wisdom to it -
Because, you know, he’s right.
From memory, Howard Cosell, doing commentary on the first Foreman-Frazier fight, noticing that Foreman was punching Frazier in the head - “the same head that was reached so often by Muhammed Ali”. If you hadn’t realized that Frazier had had the same head for some time, Howard was there for you.
Regards,
Shodan
I assume Cosell was just reminding people in a colorful way that Frazier had previously fought Ali.
I don’t see what’s so wrong with a lot of those Murray Walker quotes. At least half are funny, clever, common sports cliches, or probably make sense in context.
Joe Morgan was a hell of a second baseman but as an announcer he came up with a doozy every game. My favorite was during a Braves-Astros playoff series when, asked by the Braves had won the previous game, he said it was “the Braves scored more runs than the Astros did,” a statement that surely brings stating the obvious to new heights of the bizarre.
Back in the day a friend and I were watching a Maple Leafs game when color man Harry Neale, who I’m pretty sure was drunk at least half the time, said “the Leafs would really like to score a goal now.” Left unexplained was what the times are during a hockey game that a team doesn’t want to score a goal.
A lovely guy, very much admired and respected in the motor racing world. He knew his stuff (knows his stuff actually, he’s in his 90’s now but very much alive and kicking) but…yes…he sometimes had a very individual turn of phrase and often provided a hint of the surreal.
my favourite,
“And there’s no damage to the car. Except to the car itself.”
Oh they aren’t wrong as such, it was always more that his brain was clearly operating sometimes on another curious level in which what he said made twisted sense within the context of his own head. He was never really mocked for it and his “murrayisms” were thought of with great affection.
For many years he commentated on F1 as a duo on the BBC with ex world champ James Hunt. They were chalk and cheese but they were excellent together. Walker getting terribly excited and Hunt with the laconic cutting delivery. i.e.
I personally like Lakers’ announcer Chick Hearn when the Lakers put it out of reach:
“This game is in the refrigerator. The door’s closed, the lights are off, the eggs are cooling, the butter’s getting hard; the Jell-O is jiggling!”
And I like Pacers’ announcer Bobby “Slick” Leonard singing “Turn out the lights; the party’s over!” for the same situation.
Dave Niehaus is a local sports commentator legend (he has a statue at Safeco Field in Seattle), but one of his most famous comments came when a Mariner hit a grand slam: “Get out the rye bread and the mustard, Grandma, it’s grand salami time!”