Having a Ball With the Word Itself

A couple of Thanksgiving ago, the holiday motivated me to write a blog about the versatile word “thanks”. By tone and context, thanks can take on many, many connotations, positive, negative and others. You can peel through the archives for “Thanks for Nothing, and for Everything” if you like. In our little suspended sports playpen right now, the word “ball” also is a chameleon, taking on a huge variety of uses, many far removed from its status as a spherical object.

Thursday the NFL draft will start, and teams will be about the business of finding good football players. Not good players mind you. Football people relish in using the full word more than people in any other sport. Of course, those in football tend to consider their sport as far more important than others, as much a definition of life as an avocation. Football game, football player, a good football man, rarely is a sentence uttered regarding the sport where the entire word isn’t used. In fact, the time of the draft is one of the few instances that we get exceptions to this almost hard and fast linguistic rule. Just “ball” by itself seems to only come up when a quarterback is said to throw a beautiful ball, or that a player has good ball skills. Oh, sorry….a football player has good ball skills.

Maybe it’s good that they just say ball after complementing the throwing skills of a potential prospect, because saying “beautiful football” is most assuredly a phrase reserved for soccer. Imagine the horror of an NFL man traveling abroad who would have to amend his phrase every time to “American Football” in deference to the world’s most popular sport. Even the flashiest NFL teams, the Kansas City Chiefs being a fine example, are never said to be playing beautiful football, even though it would be quite apt. Doesn’t sound tough enough.

But before we explore how football uses its full term rather differently than other sports, it’s time to branch out, because ball isn’t just a round thing, it’s an expression that covers areas far and wide. It seems rather strange that a fancy gathering is tabbed as a ball, with people gathering in gowns and tuxedos and certainly not tossing anything around other than cocktails. There will certainly be a belle of the ball, or many at this particular occasion, and the goal of course is to have a ball.

If I wrote this things thirty years ago, propriety would not allow me to use the word in some of the ways that are at least halfway culturally acceptable now. I really couldn’t tell you that someone with a lot of guts has balls, or that he did something ballsy. Back then in my area of the country, an inappropriate use of the word was as a synonym for having sex. I don’t much hear that in that context much anymore. Ahem, I guess we should move on.

Before you might say that someone had balls, you might just add a couple of words and say that they were a ball of fire. You could throw the sphere up on a rhetorical crane and create a wrecking ball. That might get us back toward sports, likely where we belong in this pejorative discussion. A wrecking ball certainly seems more like a footballish term, but it works for most sports.

But the references to ball in most other sports are far less often attached to the name of the sport itself. Except of course in how the object is used directly. The more marginal the sport away from the major ones, the more that you just can’t use its simplest form. Golf ball, tennis ball, volley ball, etc. you almost never hear them stand alone without the sport attached. Maybe except in golf if you run out of balls. It would seem that a lack of balls to begin with, and I don’t mean the dimpled kind, might have led to that issue. But with the individuals involved, there doesn’t seem to be an insistence that they need to be referred to like football players are.

A fine baseball player is just called a ballplayer, maybe the fact that baseball predated football as the most popular sport created the dynamic of having to state the full word for gridiron participants, I don’t know. Basketball has certainly shortened up for a heavy duty compliment by saying that someone is a “baller”. Occasionally people in other sports try to co-opt the phrase, but it rings hollow. Baller has a certain badass playground connotation, and it fits like a glove for that sport. It might be the best sports compliment there is.

Football does have something very cool on their side. Its ball isn’t even round, and it’s versatile, designed rather perfectly for the main tenets of the game. It can be thrown nicely, kicked effectively, and carried snugly. It also pretty much never varies in appearance. Nice and brown, and for quite a while now not even besmirched by stripes. The only variance was when night football was being introduced, they trotted out a white football for a bit. Looks pretty funny in old films.

The sphere is as versatile as the word. Slick and sturdy when it’s a pool ball, fluffy, and now pretty much always yellow-ish, in tennis, dimpled and shiny in golf, cleverly adjustable when it’s a baseball, though we are not supposed to talk about the fact that through its history baseball has clearly tinkered with it when they felt that fans might want to dig the long ball.

I think that in the arena of sports the word itself is perfect because there is always the feeling that you are just a hairsbreadth away from saying something slightly dirty, but in a fun way. That fits in with sports just right, a perfect hotspot for sophomoristic humor, because the real nature of sports is extending our youth, the top purveyors of each activity that involves balls being able to do just that, entertain us all, and be paid handsomely to do it.

Every time I write about words, I am channeling an inner George Carlin, and falling a grand distance behind his ear for, and use of, the language. He certainly has said more funny things about balls than I could every dream to. But I know I have very bit as much fun as he did doing it.

And, well, it kind of takes some balls to try.