Like A Football Game | Using Figurative Language To Tell A Story
I am watching the TCU vs Georgia championship football game when I get a text from my friend, Jaime. “This football game is a dud,” she writes.
I know about as much about football as I do open heart surgery. This is to say, I should not attempt either, but I understand enough about numbers to know that when you see 65 on one side of the scoreboard and 3 on the other side, that things are not good.
I tell Jaime I’m bummed because TCU is the underdog, and I always root for the underdog. Once, at a Cubs’ game, I started rooting for Daryl Strawberry because the Cubs fans kept calling, “DAAARRRYYYLLLL,” and I interpreted this as bullying, so I decided my hometown be damned; I will root for Mr. Strawberry. To this day, I feel responsible for his three-home run game against the Cubs on August 5, 1985. Who knew an almost 10-year-old girl at Wrigley Field had that much power?
“Did you hear Hamlin is going back to Buffalo?” Jaime texts. I didn’t, but I am thrilled that it sounds like the 24-year-old player whose heart stopped during a football game is going to be OK.
“People are saying football is too brutal and that we should stop watching it,” she tells me.
“I think it’s not that simple,” I reply.
Jaime, who loves Michigan football more than anyone I know, whose wardrobe consists primarily of maize and blue, who has held season tickets to home games for decades, texts back, “Tell me more.”
It is our code for, “let’s have a long and winding conversation.”
Tell me more, is a sentence we stole from Kelly Corrigan’s book, Tell Me More. I was reading the book just as Jaime and I were becoming friends, and Corrigan’s essays reminded me of the way Jaime and I talk to each other, which is what I told her when I gave her the book. That was well over three years ago, and we’ve had an infinite amount of “tell me mores” since. Tonight though, she tells me to say more because I know the thought of not watching a game she loves, a game that is as much a part of her as her heartbeat is, would kill something inside her. Jaime needs a response the equivalent of a Hail Mary, which is the stuff stories are made of.
Unlike dialogue, which is used primarily to move the story forward, writers use figurative language to explore complicated, often emotional topics.
Metaphors, similes, and the like won’t necessarily provide a solid answer, but the choice to use them, and use them well, makes for better writing and in turn, allows the reader to commune with the story.
At its heart, figurative language is an act of generosity. In using them, the writer is inviting the reader in.
For example, in “Football: The Lure of the Game,” Mark Edmundson begins his essay telling us that if he’s driving and he sees a football game being played—even if it’s a pee-wee game, even if he has somewhere he needs to be—he’ll stop and watch. “I won’t stop to look at a glorious sunset or a rainbow; I won’t even always stop (to my slight shame) for a car that’s pulled over by the side of the road, hood up, steam flowing up from the engine, like vapor from a tea kettle.” Edmundson could’ve ended the sentence writing, “I won’t even stop for a car that’s pulled over by the side of the road, in need of assistance.” He would’ve gotten the point across that he only stops for football games, and we readers would’ve understood. However, he describes how a car could look, its hood could be up and steam could be flowing out of it, “like vapor from a tea kettle.” Here, he uses a simile to give us an image filled with sensory details, and we can see him taking note of the situation, saying to himself, “Yeah, but it’s not football,” and keep driving. This is not embellishment, rather, Edmundson is being vulnerable enough to tell us just how much he is lured by the game.
Edmundson goes on to tell us what it is he loves about the game, down to the uniforms of the players. He writes, “I like the colors when a play starts, as though an expressionist painting suddenly came to life.”
The choice to use metaphor here, comparing expressionist paintings to that of a football team’s uniforms, shows that Edmundson is suggesting football is a form of art.
Next time I’m at a Michigan game with Jaime, I will see the maize and blue streaming down the field differently, and I will consider art and the many forms it manifests itself in.
Edmundson writes about the different kinds of tackles there are (I had no idea), and tells us that he loves the “last-ditch tackles, when a player is about to cross the goal line with the ball and the defender makes one wild stab and catches the enemy around the ankle and tumbles him down.” We know this is not a war, and yet to play the sport (and play it well) it seems one must have the emotional and physical prowess of a soldier. Using hyperbole to equate football players to enemies gets at the mentality of the game, which is its own form of battle.
Of course, football players are not always enemies. They can “[fly] so fast [they] might as well be wearing a cape.” Here again Edmundson uses hyperbole, this time, to suggest that football players are superheroes. This comes mere lines after being called enemies, which I think is a deliberate choice to beg the reader to ask questions like: Which one is it? Can they be both? Do superheroes exist? And perhaps most haunting: What does this kind of extreme thinking do to the football players?
In another essay on the sport, “The Necessity of Football,” Jamil Smith compares the crowd that attends NFL (and I’d throw in college) stadiums to swarms, because “swarm” conjures up something a bit more menacing than “90,000 people.” Swarm suggests action and movement, and it is not joyous movement. When bees swarm, it is because they’re threatened, scared, and/or angry. I daresay a swarm is something we don’t want to associate with, but I’ve been to a number of college football games and while I haven’t been directly a part of violence, I certainly cheered and rah-rahed when (I understood that) a tackle or a sack occurred. I’ve also gotten swept up in the emotional intensity when fans start to name call players and/or other fans. Why does the swarm mentality happen, particularly with football?
Smith says that something else is going on when we are watching a football game. He writes, “Football is a game that best emulates formal military battle—with the armor, the lineup, the charge, the man-to-man combat, and the inch by inch taking of territory often with enormous casualties.” The game itself is a metaphor, and it is a living one. Most of us know though, that we aren’t really watching a war, but if this is a metaphor, what battles are we fighting when we watch the game? Smith writes that, “we want to believe that inside that arena, everything will be alright because our men are the strongest, and our fight is the hardest.”
Growing up, Sundays meant church and the Chicago Bears. My dad, the kindest, most patient, and soft-spoken man I’ve ever met, never strayed from these two rituals. He did not insist we partake in them, but we all knew these are things that he’d be doing on Sundays. I knew, for example, never ever to ask him for help on my math homework while he was watching the Bears. This would cause an existential crisis for him because my dad would do anything for me, but he loved (loves) the Bears, loves watching them play, loves screaming at them, loves muting the TV and listening to the radio broadcasters instead, loves the food he makes to eat while he watches: pizza bagels and nachos. My dad is so totally regimented, so unbelievably hard-working and these hours watching the Bears afford him to let that other aspect of himself go, but I also think it’s his time to celebrate that part of himself.
Sometimes we need a story—and I think that football tells a story—to do that.
At least, that’s how it is for me, and since I am my father’s daughter, perhaps the female version of him, I think the battle he is facing when he watches the Bears play is one where he takes all of what he’s made of and faces it in the hope that, yes, everything will be alright. Why else would he watch the Chicago Bears religiously for decades? After all, except for that glorious 1985-1986 season, they’ve lost again and again. I think my dad watches again and again not in the hope they’ll win (though I think that’s part of it), rather, that when faced with who they are and what they can do, they choose to pick up the ball and play.
I think for my dad it’s about the willingness to face—and play—whatever game one was given. I think that’s the battle this man, who was minutes away from getting his Ph.D. in Philosophy but upon learning that my mom was pregnant with me, and realizing that there were no teaching jobs available at that time, chose to get an MBA instead, and enter the business and administration world, faces when he watches football. It is not about what he’s lost; it’s about what he has. It’s about what he’s been given.
I agree that football is brutal, but I don’t agree that is the reason to stop watching. It might be the reason to continue to watch—not to celebrate it, but to be curious about what else is going on when we watch. What is it that we are facing when we cheer on those players who put themselves in harm’s way, who risk brain damage and paralysis, who are called enemies and superheroes all in the same breath, who hope for the chance to play Division I, and the NFL?
Because when they are on the field, and the play starts, it is not just like a painting that’s come to life, it is them.
Bibliography: “The Necessity of Football,” Jamil Smith; “Football: The Lure of the Game,” Mark Edmundson
Exercise 1: The following are examples, along with definitions of types of figurative language:
Simile: compares two unlike things and uses words “like” or “as.”
Metaphor: compares two unlike things, does not use “like” or “as.”
Hyperbole: an exaggeration that is created to emphasize a point or bring out a sense of humor.
Personification: the attribution of human characteristics to non-living objects
Onomatopoeia: a language that names something or an action by imitating the sound associated with it.
Read several essays and find examples of figurative language. On index cards (or in the margins of the essays) write what kind of figurative language is being used, then why the writer chose to use it.
Example: From “The Necessity of Football,”: “[Football is] a civic religion that swallows our faith and spits out broken bones.” This is personification and metaphor (religion is the metaphor for football - “swallows” and “spits” are acts of a being, not of a sport or religion). Jamil Smith uses metaphor to show the urgency and passion with which many of us attend and devote ourselves to the sport, and he uses personification to show what that devotion can do to us.
Exercise 2: Copy down examples of figurative language in essays you read. Take note of what kind of figurative language is being used, then re-write the sentence so that it’s “straight.” That is, make it boring.
Exercise 3: Take a look at your own work in progress. Why are you struggling to finish it? Is it because the story you are telling is complicated? Are you concerned that you are going to say too much about a loved one or yourself? This could be a place where you can use figurative language. Where can you use a metaphor to tell all you need to tell without saying anything at all?
