The Predicate

David Salter writing in The Australian has a great article on sports writers and their similes.

THERE'S nothing in print journalism quite so silly as pretentious sport writing.

Here's Peter Roebuck, cricket columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, describing Damien Martyn as he "threw his bat with the abandon more often seen on the decks of ocean liners as the band strikes up and the boat starts to sink". Out at the tennis his Fairfax colleague Richard Hinds found the prospect of one match "about as enticing as sticking your head in the tournament laundry bag after an extreme heat day". What a fine pair of wordsmiths.

He goes on to give more examples. Peter Reobuck's cricket articles are usually pretty banal, but his similes are apparently quite extravagant.

Hinds mused that Kim Clijsters looks at Martina Hingis's second serve "like a rottweiler looks at a T-bone steak". Roebuck countered with the equally carnivorous "as comfortable as a slab of sirloin on a vegan's table" (referring to the Sri Lankan top order). Lame phrase-making for its own sake, from laptop jockeys enchanted by their own cleverness.
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No allusion is too remote for this pair of sporting smarty-pants. Hinds: "had her back massaged more often than a IOC official in a city bidding for the Olympics", "wider than Kim Beazley's mouth at a parliamentary smorgasbord", and "the staying power of a pair of post-apocalyptic cockroaches". Roebuck: "ran between wickets like a man fleeing Lee Van Cleef", "harder to read than Finnegans Wake", and "as thin on the ground as hair on a leg spinner's head". How these soggy similes survived the sub-editor's desk is a mystery.

Read the whole article. It is quite funny. It is too bad that David Salter doesn't read Nirmal Shekhar!

- Balaji.