Invisible Fist

(The earliest draft of this never-published piece was written several years, ago, but most of 2025, I’ve pondered what I with pent-up energy that  grows with each encounter with a news headline, )

I’ve noticed that nearly all promotional, motivational  and political content, that is based  on sports metaphors, is….offensive. 

That is, they refer to things like home runs, touchdowns, knockout punches, or other terms that are about scoring points.

Rarely do you hear defense-oriented phrases about catching a fly ball at the outfield wall before it leaves the park, stopping a running back  short of  the goal line, or dodging a haymaker in the boxing ring. 

However, sports teams, businesses and constituents  are reliant on defense as well as offense. You play more defense in your work and life  than you probably realize.

Why haven’t defensive sports metaphors permeated the vocabulary of business and political  clichés? 

A few of my college friends have been using one for decades. We frequently played pickup  basketball a few blocks from our  apartment building. On the court’s  western edge, the concrete was bordered by a 6-ft fence. In the wooded area behind that there was a small trickle of flowing water.

Depot Avenue Courts, Gainesville, Florida

Whenever a player attempted a shot, somebody on defense  would issue this call to action:

“Knock that shit in the creek.”

During a game, if a player blocked a shot with authority, their teammates would shout, “He knocked that shit in the creek!”

If a player dribbled toward the basket, a defender would yell, “C’mon, bring it this way and I’ll knock that shit in the creek!”

In the years since my friends and I have constantly used variation of that phrase to describe our responses to (depending on our professions): a business challenge, a news interview, or a dissertation defense…

As you write a response to a request-for-proposal, or field challenging question from an audience, or draft a letter to your US Representative or Senator, you are not in a position for a metaphorical slam dunk, though visualize knocking that shit in the creek.

(I wrote this originally wrote a draft of this post in February of 2025, several weeks before Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour floor speech).

You know who would hate  DEI? Former US Representative and Senator, Strom Thurmond.

Thurmond was so incensed by President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order integrating the US military, that he ran for president as a member of the segregationist Dixiecrats party.  You can see Confederate flags in photos of the party convention and campaign rallies. Thurmond won 39 electoral votes in the 1948 election.

Later, he held the Senate floor for over 24 hours in his filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

A few years later he fought against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then the  Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Oh, and a he had  a Black daughter. At age 23, he got his parents’ housekeeper pregnant.

SHE WAS 15.

Governments, corporations, and other organizations are going to do what they will do with their laws and corporate policies, etc. and I have pretty close to  zero control over that.

Though I like to think there would be contexts where I’d ask  “What Would Strom Thurmond Do?” that I would strive to do something diametrically opposed to that.

I realize I am late to the party, but here is my obligatory David Lynch-related post.

I think that Blue Velvet is the only one of his films that I’d seen, so I’m not as knowledgeable about him as many people are. Though his work intersected with my work in the 20th century.

In 1991, I had a walk-on (uncredited) role in the Human Genome Project when a DC-area temp agency assigned me to Craig Venter’s NIH lab.

A protein chemist–who also oversaw the health and well-being of all the lab’s computers– tasked me with finding clip art that matched the names of the Macs that controlled the sequencers.

The computers were named for characters and landmarks in the “Twin Peaks” series. I didn’t recognize any of the names because I’d only seen a few minutes of the show.

After some inquiry (“Who is Dale?”) I was able to find icons browsing Apple’s Hypercard stacks (showing my age, I know.)

Occasionally, one of the scientists would pour themselves a cuppa joe near my desk and comment “Damn good coffee.” I had no idea that was a Twin Peaks reference until just a few years ago.